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Responsibility to Protest


After Lockerbie - The Spokesman 106
Edited by Ken Coates

"There has seldom been such unanimity in the British political class as has come about in the last half of August 2009 with the release of the Libyan prisoner, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, on compassionate grounds. This was announced by the Scottish Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill, after medical reports forecast that the Libyan was at death’s door, having advanced prostate cancer which probably gave him a maximum life expectancy of three months.

Megrahi had been sentenced by three Scottish Judges to life imprisonment, following a highly contentious trial in which the Scottish Courts sat in an American airbase in The Netherlands to hear the case of the Lockerbie bomb. A Pan American passenger jet had been blown up on the 21st December 1988, while flying over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie en route for the United States. The evidence showed that a bomb had been secreted in passenger luggage. It had exploded in mid-air, killing all 259 passengers. A giant fireball fell across the town, killing eleven more people on its way. This was a huge disaster, the largest in British aviation history. Who could have conceived such an atrocity? The intelligence agencies of the world were not at a loss for an explanation. But they were flummoxed by the problem of how to present what they knew, or indeed, whether to present it."


Ken Coates
From his Editorial



‘If there is any chance of the truth coming out, it will be through the persistent efforts of civil society. The Russell Foundation is doing a great service to all those who do not accept the establishment's "manufacture of consent".’
Hans Köchler



Contents:
Lockerbie and the Law - Robert Black

Unfair Trial - Hans Köchler

Lockerbie – the Cover-up - Marcello Mega

The Crime of Lockerbie - Tam Dalyell

****

The Party of Criminal War - John Pilger

Responsibility to Protest - Noam Chomsky

Pirate’s Charter - Tony Blair

Benign Whitewash - Ken Coates

****

Kidnapped on Diego Garcia - Reprieve

A New World at The Globe - Ann Talbot, Trevor Griffiths


Reviews:

Bruce Kent, Michael Barratt Brown, Christopher Gifford,
Graham Hallett, Tony Simpson, Henry McCubbin


AVAILABLE NOW FROM SPOKESMAN BOOKS for £6 plus postage.

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