Porky Pig

Or let's look at WW2, where they undoubtedly saved our sorry arses. In an age before inter-continental missiles they could easily have told us to f%$k off when we went begging for their help in 1941.

MacScot

They did...for about 2 years while they made money out of us by selling us arms. They only joined in when they were attacked.

ceres

Tony Blair's speciality.lol

service crew

WW2 wasn't won by the US of A as shown in the movies.
The reality is they have yet to be on the winning side in any form of conflict since being involved in WW2.They've made a mess of everything from Korea to Iraq in the name of democracy.If the hawks had their way they'd be bombing Iran all in the name of freedom.

The Royal Tony is another matter!

glynster

Undoubtedly? Can you update me on this as I seem to have missed that bit,while they were sat cowering in Pearl Harbour do you mean?

Do you recall Hiroshima?

Dear me!??!?

edinburger

Try reading some books written by historians rather than getting your facts from hollywood!

Bob

They won in Grenada

And the war, it was the Russians who made it easier on the Brits and had most impact but who else could have thrown that much fodder into the machine.

Inselaffen

The Russians made it easier for us, we made it easier for the Russians. If 2 fronts hadn't been maintained we would all be speaking German now.

without Americain assistance we would not have won the war. Without the arctic convoys the Russians would have been defeated.

954RR

Germany declared war on the USA not the other way around.
If they had not done so the yanks would have only been involved in the Pacific War.

Ethos83

Lord, what a bunch of psuedo-historians on this board. No wonder I stay away from these types of threads.

(Note: just returned from a trip to France that took in a jaunt along the D-day beaches. Quite a profound place, especially the military cemeteries. I urge all of you to make a visit someday).

The Dean

Quite so - but what is your point?

Anyway, I particularly recommend a visit here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menin_Gate

.....and while you're at it, Google "Edgar Mobbs".

Ethos83

There is no point, Mr. Dean, other than that threads arguing over historical events rarely go anywhere except to make the two opposing sides more convinced of their beliefs. That's why I never participate.

The Dean

Fine, but if you know the facts and those who have already posted clearly do not, don't you feel a sort of moral obligation to correct them?

MacScot

I note that the US Government has refused to allow the Scottish Government to publish background documents reporting US communications on the Al Megrahi release. The documents are:

a) Telephone call with US Attorney General Mr. Holder:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/925/0085865.pdf

b) Compassionate release: US Government View.
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/925/0085864.pdf

So much for openness and transparency. What do they have to hide? The truth?

deemi786

This is a very interesting read.

Lockerbie: Megrahi was framed

3 Sept 2009

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the suppression of facts behind the furore over the "compassionate" release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber, Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. He writes that Megrahi was "in effect blackmailed by the governments of Scotland and England" so that it would not be revealed in his appeal that he had been framed for a crime he did not commit.

The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown’s “repulsion” to Barack Obama’s “outrage”, the theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. “But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?” whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. “What will you say to your constituents, then?”

Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he “pays” for his “heinous crime”: the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose “compassion” allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to “face justice from a higher power”. Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as “a babbling brook of bullshit”. Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi’s release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of “strategic interests”.

“The endgame came down to damage limitation,” said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, “because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi’s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.” New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft – he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shopowner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognise him in the courtroom.

The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, “discovered” in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi’s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was “transferred” through two airports undetected to Flight 103.

A “key secret witness” at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a “protected witness”. The defence exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans’ conviction, up to $4m as a reward.

Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in “neutral” Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a “mass of conflicting evidence” and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page “opinion”, wrote Foot, “is a remarkable document that claims an honoured place in the history of British miscarriages of justice”. (Lockerbie – the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from the Private Eye website for £5).

Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt cancelled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the “architect” of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr on 11 January 1990, she agreed to “low-key” the disaster after their intelligence services had reported “beyond doubt” that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer”.

Peversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran’s support as he built a “coalition” to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. “Like lazy and overfed fish,” wrote Foot, “the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and op en warmongering against Libya.” The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US defence intelligence agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be centrepiece of Megrahi’s defence.

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case for appeal. “The commission is of the view,” said its chairman, Dr Graham Forbes, “that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”

The words “miscarriage of justice” are missing entirely from the current furore, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that “higher power”. What a disgrace.