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21st August 2009, 04:31 AM | #81 |
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Twin,
Originally Posted by bill smith
Tell BS for me that his rabbit hole goes deeper. Much deeper. UK Prostate Cancer Mortality stats: http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/can...ate/mortality/ In 2007, there were 10,239 prostate cancer deaths. The conspiracy broadens. All those UK docs... And don't they have socialized medicine? So, isn't EVERYONE under 24/7 care? Bill appears to think that being a mass murderer entitles you to BETTER care than the, uh, "contributing" members of society. Now, I wouldn't consider advocating worse care for prisoners than for the general public. But in this putz's case, it's really tempting ... tk |
21st August 2009, 04:58 AM | #82 |
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You may believe that the Greater Glasgow Health Board figures on prostate cancer detection are poor. I think I mentioned that in an earlier post. However, there is no realistic doubt that Megrahi has terminal prostate cancer. Thus this seems a pretty irrelevant point to focus on as regards the alleged stitch-up and cover-up.
Rolfe. |
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21st August 2009, 05:35 AM | #83 |
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I'm just flabberghasted at some of the silly things that make some people go, "Hmmmmmm".
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21st August 2009, 06:13 AM | #84 |
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There's so much about this affair to go hmmmmm about, even though that isn't one of them. It's very difficult to distinguish the genuine anomalies and questionable actions from the barnacle-like CT accretion that tends to grow on to any affair like this over the years.
It really needs someone like Gravy to do a detailed examination of which claims actually have evidence supporting them, and I don't think that's ever been done. Much more diffcult when the main events happened pre-internet I suppose. I keep hearing isolated factoids, like a babygro that was allegedly recovered intact but shredded later, and a policewoman being told not to report that she'd found a CIA badge in the wreckage, and a suitcase full of powder that was handed to the authorities but never referred to again, and I don't know how much of this is Chinese whispers and how much based on fact. Much speculation surrounds the document that the defence team have been trying to get the prosecution to disclose, which has repeatedly been refused on the grounds that it contains material that might damage our relationship with a foreign power. Despite the court ordering it to be produced, I don't think that ever happened. I don't think it's being ridiculous to speculate that Megrahi may have been pressurised to withdraw his appeal (as the price of getting the compassionate release) in order to prevent that document having to be handed over. Rolfe. |
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21st August 2009, 06:16 AM | #85 |
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21st August 2009, 06:20 AM | #86 |
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This is from memory, so Rolfe may have better info, but the CT isn't that the CIA did the whole thing as a false flag operation, but that the perpetrators were not Libyan but Syrian/Palestinian/Iranian, and that there were CIA agents on the plane, and on the ground soon after the crash and that the US government did not wish this to be known.
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21st August 2009, 06:22 AM | #87 |
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I don't think that was the claim. I'm struggling a bit here, but there's a part of the story that involves a CIA-sponsored drug-running operation which was using that flight, and the bomb was able to be smuggled on board because the bombers managed to hack the drug-smuggling operation. I think that bit is probably barnacle. Rolfe. |
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21st August 2009, 06:33 AM | #88 |
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You can buy a PDF of the report from the Eye website.
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21st August 2009, 06:35 AM | #89 |
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21st August 2009, 06:46 AM | #90 |
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I've heard the story about "CIA got to the wreckage before anybody else", but that has to be complete baloney. First, the wreckage was scattered across a couple of hundred square miles of extremely rural countryside; second, it happened on the longest night of the year, when there wouldn't have been any daylight to see anything by before about 9.30 am. The locals were already out with torches, searching for survivors, long before then. Any CIA agents around would have been reduced to "Hey bub, did you see any wreckage come down anywhere around here? Um, you think there might be something up in those hills? Oh, right...."
And that would have been after they managed the 6-hour journey up from London... |
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21st August 2009, 06:53 AM | #91 |
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I don't know if this has been posted before, but I found this blog on the Lockerbie case written by a professor of Scots law who was involved in setting up the original trial at Camp Zeist.
http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/20...1_archive.html |
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21st August 2009, 06:58 AM | #92 |
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Something like that. The Official Theory is that Lockerbie was Libyan revenge for the US bombings of Tripoli and Benghasi in 1986 in which Gadaffi's step-daughter was killed (and which are believed to have been an attempt to assassinate Gadaffi himself). One argument against this is that Margaret Thatcher apparently didn't believe that Libya was responsible for Lockerbie, stating in her memoires that these bombings were so successful that Libya was never able to retaliate. The CT version is that Lockerbie was actually Iranian revenge for the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf on 3rd July 1988, which killed 248 Iranians on their way to Mecca on a pilgrimage. That incident was due to a US naval captain mistaking the scheduled passenger flight for an attacking military aircraft. Subsequently the US tried to blame Iran for what happened, and the US captain was later awarded the Legion of Merit Medal. Iran was reportedly livid about this, and publicly vowing revenge. However, the CT goes on to claim that Iran then contracted-out the actual carrying-out of the revenge, by some accounts offering a reward for doing the deed. Palestinian terrorists are the most popular choice for this role, however Syria has also been fingered. Some versions even turn back towards Libya, suggesting that Libya might have been only too happy to do Iran's dirty work for it. The CT tends to suggest there has been a deliberate misdirection effort on the part of the USA (the CIA) to turn attention away from all this and towards Libya alone. The motive generally being that the CIA were up to something else they don't want revealed (that alleged drug-running operation?), however the other possibility is that the USA wanted Iran onside at the time of the First Gulf War in the early 1990s, so they really, really didn't want to have to deal with the revelation that Iran was behind Lockerbie. Having said that, the official line is that they simply didn't find the evidence they needed to incriminate the Palestinians. They did, however, find enough to make them go after Megrahi and Fhimah. As I said, a lot of the CT stuff is barnacle, but the bare bones of the thing are certainly given credence by many people not normally dosposed to CT promotion. The SCCRC report certainly dismisses some aspects, but even there, it's impossible to say whether this is because they've definitely been discounted, or simply that they didn't find sufficient evidence. And yes, Sophia is right. The only CIA agents present immediately after the flight crashed were the dead ones who were on the plane. Rolfe. |
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21st August 2009, 06:58 AM | #93 |
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In one of the comments under the most recent blog entry there is this:
Quote:
Anyone know what flavour of CT he is referrring to here? |
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21st August 2009, 07:02 AM | #94 |
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21st August 2009, 07:05 AM | #95 |
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As I said, this is from memory, but the CT wasn't 'CIA miraculously appear 5 minutes after plane crash', more that while the police were searching the next day or so other people without clear identification were seen ambling about taking away suitcases and not being stopped by the D&G plods. Personally I think this is nonsense, but it's not as far fetched as gtcs version, which is all I was trying to counter.
The main CT I think is plausible is that the organisations being blamed for it were the ones that it was politically convenient for the UK/US government to blame, not necessarily the ones that the evidence pointed to. |
21st August 2009, 07:06 AM | #96 |
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21st August 2009, 07:18 AM | #97 |
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And this article mentions an alternative suspect - Abo Talb of the "Syria-based Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, which worked closely with another Syria-backed terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC)." (splitters)
http://links.org.au/node/809 |
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21st August 2009, 07:26 AM | #98 |
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One little bit from the Rollo book struck me as interesting. Rollo reports that Martin Cadman, the father of one of the victims, said the following....
Quote:
Just one more snippet that can no longer be reliably pegged as fact or barnacle. Rolfe. |
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21st August 2009, 07:58 AM | #99 |
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21st August 2009, 08:08 AM | #100 |
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21st August 2009, 08:20 AM | #101 |
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Ok, I got sucked into this thing and I've downloaded the Private Eye special. I realise that may not be regarded as a completely reliable source by everyone here, but it's by Paul Foot who I have a fair bit of time for. It's long so it will take me a while to read, but I'll post any interesting bits later on.
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21st August 2009, 08:21 AM | #102 |
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The role of Thomas Thurman - FBI forensics, though allegedly unqualified - in the examination of timer fragments for both PanAm 103 and UTA 722 is interesting.
Also strange that the Lockerbie timer fragment was never tested for explosives residue. |
21st August 2009, 08:22 AM | #103 |
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I'd forgotten about that one. I suppose it's peripheral, but the complexity of the detonation timing seems unnecessary. If you know you're going to get the bomb on the plane, then just set the timer to go off as late as possible before the plane will get to the other side of the Atlantic, assuming that it's up to time (or as far ahead of time as might realistically happen). Then, if it's late (which let's face it is more likely), it will still probably have cleared land when it detonates. I'm not sure how big a window that is, but I'd have thought it was big enough. In any event, all that messing around with pressure sensors doesn't seem to have conferred any advantage, because the delay on the tarmac at Heathrow still led to a detonation over land, regardless. I've just got one idea, which would depend on the bag being put on board on Malta. Suppose you don't know for sure which connecting flight the bag will be transferred to at Frankfurt. Then, the pressure sensor would make sense. It would confirm that the bag was actually on the plane which would cross the Atlantic, and that the journey had begun. Someone said, well in that case why not start the timer on the third takeoff (from Heathrow) rather than the second one (from Frankfurt). Doing that would pretty much guarantee that the desired point in the journey would be hit. My guess on that one would be that perhaps that was one complication too far, and in fact the terrorists didn't care all that much whether the plane landed on British soil or not. I don't know if this has ever been discussed in relation to any of the prevalent theories. Rolfe. |
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21st August 2009, 09:26 AM | #104 |
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Interesting tidbit from this writeup:
Quote:
The PFLP-GC is indeed the most popularly fingered terrorist group who'd been the gun-for-hire for Iran. The German police rounded up some of their guys in the Frankfurt area, and found a cache with similar radio/cassette players, some 3 weeks before Lockerbie, plus PanAm timetables; and found some more of their equipment later, signifying that the first raid hadn't deprived them of all their stuff. From the description of their MO they seem a much more plausible suspect. |
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21st August 2009, 10:10 AM | #105 |
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The story is that they simply couldn't find the evidence to pin it on the Palestinians.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8211596.stm
Quote:
Whether that means they didn't do it, or they simply covered their tracks too well, I don't suppose we'll ever know. Rolfe. |
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21st August 2009, 02:27 PM | #106 |
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By that time, single-chip digital alarm clock ICs which needed only power, a timebase, a seven-segment LED display and a few pushbutton switches to make a fully-functional alarm clock could be found in the ads in the back of Popular Electronics.
Give me one of those, a 32.768 kHz watch crystal and a 4017 to count how many times the alarm output has gone active and I could easily build a timer that could be set to go off at a particular time of day up to 10 days after setting- complete with a jack into which you could plug a display and setting switch assembly to set the detonation time (or to leave hooked up to the bomb for that "stupid action movie" look). Simply counting off an hour or two- with +- 1 second accuracy- after a pressure sensor detects that the plane is at cruising altitude really would have been trivial even with late-80s technology. BTW, the fuzing system for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima included a timer that started when the bomb was released and prevented detonation until it had fallen for a sufficient time to be far enough away from the airplane, a barometric sensor that also prevented detonation until the bomb had fallen to a set altitude and a radio altimeter circuit that triggered the bomb at a set height above ground level. This was all done with vacuum tubes and relays- 1940s technology. |
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21st August 2009, 03:54 PM | #107 |
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Just one more mystery I suppose. Though how would your plan be varied if you were putting the bag on in Malta, to a feeder flight, from which it would then be transferred to the transatlantic airliner (maybe you're not 100% sure which one?) at Frankfurt, and the transatlantic flight would make a stopover at Heathrow before heading out over the ocean?
I can see the desire to get the timing started from a later leg, but if they were going to do that, why not home in on the actual transatlantic leg itself, rather than starting the timer on the Frankfurt leg? Rolfe. |
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22nd August 2009, 04:23 AM | #108 |
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That puzzles me too. Ktesibios is absolutely right that that technology already existed (I only would have said 7490 instead of 4017 - I fiddled a bit with an earlier generation IC's in the begin of the 80s ).The prosecution claimed that the timer was triggered on the second leg of the journey - from Frankfurt to Heathrow - gaining height. So that means that between the pressure sensor and the timer there's a counter that counts how many times the pressure sensor has triggered before it triggers the timer into action. If you can count to 2, you can also count to 3.
Another thing that puzzles me is the timing. The plane exploded over land because it was delayed. However, the delay was only 25 minutes according to wiki. That means that even if the flight had been on schedule, it would barely have left the Scottish air, or not, falling down somewhere on the Outer Hebrides. As you said before, if you want the plane to go down over the Atlantic, you'd rather plan the detonation for just before the time it would reach North America, as planes never depart too early but frequently too late. |
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22nd August 2009, 04:31 AM | #109 |
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My google-fu by accident turned up a Daily Express article from 2007, just after Megrahi was granted his appeal.
Quote:
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22nd August 2009, 05:54 AM | #110 |
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Well, Daily Express, say no more....
Rolfe. |
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22nd August 2009, 07:13 AM | #111 |
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I hadn't realised that. I hadn't really worked out how big the window was from the Outer Hebrides to Newfoundland, and I thought the plane was an hour late. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't even make sense if the plane was intended to crash on British soil, because even though it was late, it nearly got far enough to clear habitation. In fact, once you're north of about Manchester, the chance of it hitting habitation gets relatively low, and it was very very bad luck that it actually hit an inhabited area. I wonder if the timing system actually malfunctioned? They didn't find much of it, so I'm not sure they'd have been able to tell. And I still don't follow the need for the pressure trigger. I'm guessing, but would the Outer Hebrides/Newfoundland window be about three hours? Four? How many planes are more than a couple of hours late? If you can be certain that you're going to get the bag on one particular flight, then surely there's no need for any pressure sensor at all? Just set the timer for half an hour before Newfoundland, and wait. The pressure sensor would suggest either obsessive determination that nothing should go wrong, even if the plane was several hours late - in which case, why not start the timer with the Heathrow takeoff rather than Frankfurt, or some doubt about which flight the bag would actually go on. The obsessive determination seems unlikely, given the setup, and the doubts about the flight - well, they never found out how the bag got on the plane anyway, so I suppose that's probably it. The whole thing set up ready to go, ready to enter the system at a moment's notice as soon as the opportunity came up. Alternatively, I suppose, the cassette plater or even the bag, might have been given to some innocent courier whose exact flight wasn't known. Though if the whole case was packed by the bombers, as was alleged, again that seems unlikely. I see the timer was part of the murky evidence that was set to go to appeal if Megrahi hadn't withdrawn that. I'd just like to get my head round what's known and what's possible and what's fabrication and what's wild speculation on this affair. That's why I started the thread. Given the plausible and widely-credited nature of this CT, I imagined it would have been looked at in the context of 9/11. Given the amount of skullduggery alleged to have been perpetrated by the US government in connection with the affair, I thought I'd find CTers asserting that if the NWO could do that, it could do so much more in 2001. And then I'd be able to find some debunking. But no. Looks like I have to do this the hard way, if I'm interested. Rolfe. |
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22nd August 2009, 11:36 AM | #112 |
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22nd August 2009, 12:47 PM | #113 |
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Why have they put a picture of Gadaffi with that story?
Rolfe. |
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22nd August 2009, 12:58 PM | #114 |
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22nd August 2009, 01:07 PM | #115 |
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22nd August 2009, 01:51 PM | #116 |
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Good point. That woman was only tenuously connected to reality a lot of the time. It's still a bit of a howler though. It's been suggested the spooks who were vetting the book missed it.
Rolfe. |
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23rd August 2009, 02:53 AM | #117 |
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I can't believe the temerity of the American Right, complaining about this release. McAskill is a perfect place to ask pointed questions about Guantanamo; torture; rendition; failure to acknowledge international law and all the other stuff Americans are doing.
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23rd August 2009, 09:05 AM | #118 |
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Well, it seems like a logical response from a country that kidnaps terrorist suspects and keeps them locked up in questionable conditions, to object when another country behaves differently....
Well, that's really for the Politics thread. Rolfe. |
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23rd August 2009, 09:27 AM | #119 |
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Back on the CT, the main question coming uppermost in my mind is whether there has ever been an actual conspiracy, even if we assume Megrahi is innocent.
Some fairly heavy circumstantial evidence pointed to the Palestinians. (Working for money on behalf of Iran, as I most often encounter it, though others say Syria.) However, no actual evidence was presented to incriminate the Palestinian group, and the focus of investigation shifted to Libya. There have been suggestions that evidence of Palestinian involvement was deliberately suppressed, allegedly to prevent the chain leading to Iran, because Bush senior wanted Iran onside at the time one the first Gulf War which was happening at that time. And that Libya was a much more convenient scapegoat. However, I've mentioned the Barry George case in this context before. Jill Dando's murderer left virtually no clues at all. It was an extraordinarily slick operation. There were suspicions relating to some sort of Serbian reprisal for her support of Kosovo (or something like that), but no evidence was found. Police then turned to George, who was a complete inadequate who had been nearby and had been acting strangely. And they fitted him up, basically by massively exaggerating the significance of things which had nothing to do with the murder. The motive for this was simply that they felt they had to get someone for this high profile murder, and George was the best they could come up with. It took two appeals before he was released. And then there was the Damilola Taylor murder. The first set of accused were again essentially fitted up by police desperate to get a conviction. The evidence was rightly thrown out by the jury, because the alibi was sound. That didn't stop the red-top press screaming for their blood, and asserting that the acquittal was a disgrace. Fortunately a re-examine of the forensics turned up the real culprits. I wonder if the "conspiracy" here might be as simple as these. The real bombers (possibly the Palestinians) covered their tracks extremely well, and investigators were getting nowhere trying to construct a case. Meanwhile there were 270 dead people, and a lot of heavy public pressure to pin it on someone. Oh, here's these Libyan guys who were there or thereabouts at the right time.... Then the system goes into action, and the USA offers $4 million to one witness if they give evidence that leads to a conviction, and $2 million to another (and $1 million to his brother). So then that second witness, who is "an apple short of a picnic" anyway, somehow manages to decide that the person he saw wasn't over 6 feet tall and in his fifties after all, but was Megrahi (5' 8" and 36), and actually it was definitely 7th December, because that's the date that will get me untold wealth.... And there you are. Not clean, but not anything out of the ordinary Rolfe. |
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23rd August 2009, 09:28 AM | #120 |
Scholar
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 117
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I’m not sure if this is the right forum or thread to post this, but one of the most annoying things I find about CT people is the disservice they do when cases like this come up.
Lockerbie is a tragedy with so many unanswered questions surrounding it and the subsequent trial. Anyone investigating them is labelled a CT and get tarred with the same brush as those with outlandish ideas of faked moon landings, UFO conspiracies or Obama’s birth certificate. One of the most nagging questions I have about Lockerbie is in regards to the break in at the Pan-Am loading area in Heathrow airport on the morning of the bombing. |
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