Former Ambassador Craig Murray has thrown himself back into the blogging ring after some self-doubt.

He has a long post about the Lockerbie/Megrahi business, which covers the ground with the volleys of adjectives and adverbs one has come to expect:

The Tories have shown their blood-baying, American bum-sucking true colours. New Labour have been caught in their usual horrible hypocrisy, attempting to capitalise on anti-SNP right wing media reaction, while having been deliberately paving the way for the release for years…

Syria was responsible for the Lockerbie bomb. But in the first Iraq war, we needed Syria’s support, while Libya remained a supporter of Iraq. Lockerbie was a bar to our new alliance with Damascus, so extremely conveniently, and with perfect timing, it was discovered that actually it was the Libyans!! Anyone who believes that fake intelligence started with Iraqi WMD is an idiot…

Al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber. The scandal is not that trade deals and the realpolitik of relationship normalisation led to his release. The scandal is that trade deals and the realpolitik of relationship normalisation were what led the Libyans to hand him over in the first place – very much in the way their ancestors had given hostages to Imperial Rome.

Not sure I follow all that.

But what caught my professional eye was this amazing passage:

It haunts me that I had a chance to read the intelligence reports which, I was told by a shocked FCO colleague in Aviation and Maritime Department where I then worked, showed that the new anti-Libyan narrative was false. I say in self-defence that at the time I was literally working day and night, sleeping on a camp bed. I was organising the Embargo Surveillance Centre and I was convinced that a watertight full physical embargo could remove the need to invade Iraq.

I was impatient of the interruption. I listened to my colleague only distractedly and did not want to go through the rigmarole of signing for and transporting the reports I hadn’t got time to look at then. Events overtook me, and I never did see them.

Wha-a-a-at?

Craig had the chance as a self-proclaimed FCO High-Flier to see intelligence reports ‘showing’ something or other to the effect that Libya was not responsible for Lockerbie – and he did nothing about them (and did not even read them) because he was too busy/tired?

Various points of interest here:

  • Craig firmly believes these reports now, without even having read them then.
  • Elsewhere in his oeuvre Craig denounces  many intelligence reports as ‘dross’, all too often obtained by torture. What if these reports had been obtained by torture or were somehow linked to torture? Would he have believed them any the less, if their subject-matter was so far-reaching?
  • Had such reports been credible but probably or even possibly extracted by torture, would it have been right to rely on them to drop the case against Libya?
  • What if anything made these reports seemingly so believable?

As for whether Libya was responsible for Lockerbie, I think that Col Gadhafi is made of stern stuff. He would not have coughed up so much LIbyan compensation for victims of the atrocity without a pretty damn clear case laid out before him?

FCO Quirk Note: I used to work in the predecessor of the FCO Aviation and Maritime Department which Craig mentions. In my day it was called Maritime, Aviation and Environment Department (MAED). But then Environment went elsewhere in a shuffle of responsibilities.

It would have provoked unseemly titters to call the new smaller department MAD. So they went for AMD instead.