When Western governments used to do highly illegal operations, one of the biggest worries from the outset would always be: what if the press gets hold of this? Scrutiny from journalists for a long time was always the chief worry of the architects of dirty wars, cooperating with terror groups and paying the bad guys.
But since 9/11, the deep state has shifted its views towards media, no longer fearful of its opprobrium. The Twin Towers attack showed us all how the American government could create a so-called independent enquiry and present a narrative so fanciful and absurd that, if it weren’t for the thousands who died that day, would be comical. 9/11 was a turning point. It allowed the powers that be to rush through new laws which stripped away people’s rights while pushing the new relationship with media to the limit.
What is the new relationship? It is simply that as the internet took off around 2000, media giants realised that their business model of selling newspapers, based on independent journalism which held the state to account, was doomed. The new model to replace it would be to disinvest in journalism as we know it and replace it with a poorer cousin which not only moved it closer to the deep state – in particular the security services – but made it a content junkie for what the CIA, MI5 and Mossad could feed it. The result today is that if you really want to understand a subject and want to do deep research on it, it is highly unlikely you would go to mainstream media. And yet media giants continue to play an important role in shaping our lives and manufacturing a consent which still has the desired effect: keeping the elites in power. We have never seen a period since the invention of newspapers in the 17th century where there is a greater divide between the truth and the perceived truth – and whereby the latter is winning hands down.
Just observe how Western journalists report on Ukraine, for example, or don’t report on it. Invariably, there is a heavy Western slant, of course, as they all fall over themselves to win brownie points from the security services themselves, but it is more often than not what is left out which is just as important as the biased narrative itself. A number of Russian victories on the battlefield recently have simply not even made it to the pages of serious highbrow British newspapers. In particular, it’s worth noting that the Russian forces’ blockade of Odessa, making Ukraine now landlocked, seems to be not even newsworthy. This comes about when the political elite allow the security services and journalists to together create an entirely false narrative which works because everyone wants it to be real. People start believing their own BS, and so a blinkered vision takes over which simply refuses to process the news that Odessa port is now no longer functioning and no ships are getting in or leaving. Fake news!
But when those same storytellers get together and re-write history by presenting to the public new documentation which has arrived under extremely dubious circumstances, then those countries can hardly call themselves democracies any more. Under such a farcical arrangement, justice can never be served – or even seen to be served.
The Lockerbie case, where a U.S. airliner fell from the sky over a sleepy Scottish town, killing all on board and 11 on the ground due to a bomb being placed on board, is a good example of how far the deep state can twist and corrupt judicial process as a means to an end. Bluntly, the Americans, after almost 40 years, want to frame the Libyans for the act of terrorism, as it helps them cover up a darker, more macabre role that they themselves played in the bombing. And yet, despite initially planting evidence in the original case in the Netherlands which neatly framed two Libyan intelligence officers, there has been no hue and cry about their tawdry handling of the case, which should be a scandal. Now it’s much worse. In recent days we have heard reports of new evidence which the Americans claimed to have found – such as accounts of the chief culprit’s own activities in Malta at that time, Semtex explosives believed to be in his office, and fanciful accounts of timers having an eleven-hour duration. All of this so far has come from new documentation which readers should be very cynical about.
But just very recently, an account from a former Mossad agent who was employed by Pan Am’s insurance company to investigate what really happened has thrown a light on why the Americans are so determined, after all this time, to keep the Libyan case alive. In a recent podcast interview, former Mossad assassin Juval Aviv explains how the CIA, from 1987, were allowing Hezbollah in Beirut to use Pan Am to send their own narcotics to the U.S. and collect revenue from them. Reagan allowed this in exchange for keeping seven U.S./UK hostages alive. These weekly flights, usually from Beirut to Cyprus, then to London, then to the U.S., were run by CIA officers and were very lucrative for the Lebanese group.
To this day, media hardly touch on the point of these so-called ‘controlled flights’. Aviv’s three-month investigation in 1989 uncovered all the details, and because Pan Am was a client of his as an investigator, he came to the conclusion quite quickly that the Damascus-based Palestinian group which specialised in downing planes was the culprit, via its chief drug supplier from the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon.
What might have been in his initial report which caused him and his work to be marginalised was the bombshell revelation, also made in the podcast, that it was the Americans themselves who brought down the plane – which explains why, to this day, the Americans are going to extraordinary lengths to feed media with disinformation.
Aviv claims that the CIA knew about the bomb and allowed it to get on the plane so that it would kill three rogue officers who were also on the flight, planning to blow the whistle on the drug-running operation to Congress when they got back. Perhaps even more shocking is his claim that over 40 U.S. government workers were ordered off the flight shortly before it departed, and that the drug money made in the U.S. actually went towards buying arms for the Contras. In short, the CIA discovered the bomb plot and allowed it to go ahead so that their operations could not face the embarrassing ignominy which eventually happened to Reagan through the Contra scandal that followed. But besides all this, we have the most recent “evidence” which is being passed off as legitimate: a Libyan security agent’s testimony – secured through torture – being given the green light by a U.S. judge. Nearly 40 years later, the statute of limitations against those accused is not replicated towards U.S. prosecutors, it would seem, who are able to produce fake documents and blood-soaked sworn testimonies which put the Libyans in the frame. If you’ve ever wondered why Hollywood won’t make the movie of Lockerbie, it’s because Americans wouldn’t believe the real story.
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As an old Scots lawyer, who has followed this case since soon after the disaster, I can say that this ties in with everything we’ve learned over the years. Twenty five years after the trial, our prosecution system has gone from bad to worse, and we still have people working at high levels who betrayed their professional principles under CIA pressure. Most recently, the kidnap of Masud by a gang of armed men, his sale to middle men and their resale to American operatives, who then flew him from Libya, all totally illegally, is a further blot, declared perfectly fine by the then Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, now soon to take her place on the Scottish Supreme Court.