It always surprises me how poorly headlines can reflect the facts they purport to digest. I guess it shouldn’t, though. That’s not always their purpose. In yesterday’s Telegraph, for example, I saw the reader-seizing headline…
Lockerbie bomber: my role in attack has been exaggerated
The Independent plumped for…
My role was exaggerated, says Lockerbie bomber
The implication is that Megrahi admitted to a role in the attack but not as large a one as has been claimed. In its editorial the Scotsman ran with this…
…what he apparently said was the West “exaggerated” his involvement – if so, hardly the ringing denial some of his apologists would have hoped for or expected. As has long been suspected, it seems to confirm his involvement at the very least as part of a team rather than a mastermind.
This, however, is the quote we’re given to support this theory…
The West exaggerated my name.
This sounds ambiguous but the idea that it’s an admission of guilt is premised on a huge assumption. It asserts that he’s been made to seem like somebody he’s not – that, alone, isn’t an admission of anything; it’s merely a denial. The fact that he’s consistently maintained his innocence leads me to feel that if he’d own up to the crime he’d do it less vaguely. (And, besides, if he was complicit I doubt he’d have had a minor role – obviously I don’t know how the man’s brain works but then he could have surely owned up and received a shorter sentence.)
This quote may be relevant…
In a few months from now, you will see new facts that will be announced.
This might be a reference to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission report, which cast doubt on Megrahi’s prosecution and was set to be released last month.
I’m still drawing no conclusion as to what transpired in December 1988. Clearly, though, I’m a minority there.
October 8, 2011 at 2:23 pm
That’ll be a translation presumably – of course convenient mistranslations are a staple of this kind of bullshit, and would explain how he could appear to come out with nonsense like “they exaggerated my name”.
October 8, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Probably old news by now though: http://www.firmmagazine.com/news/2605/Lost_in_translation%3A_Megrahi
October 8, 2011 at 4:42 pm
Yeah, I saw that on Prof. Black’s blog. Wasn’t sure where he’d got the Arabic translation, though.
One think that’s frustrating them, I’d guess, is their failure to get hold of confessions from Gaddafi’s comrades. Even the rebels seem to suggesting that Megrahi was stitched up.
November 2, 2011 at 12:58 am
[...] Dissecting their propaganda and that of the media is a futile task. You think you’re dealing with subtle misinformation and then The Sun prints “THAT’S FOR LOCKERBIE” across a photo of Gaddafi’s [...]
January 24, 2012 at 12:25 pm
[...] These guys have had months to pore over the documents Gaddafi and his cronies left behind, as well as to interrogate old employees of the regime, and this is all the evidence they’ve managed to compile? Vague conjecture any sod could have dreamed up in a moment? As I’ve said on many an occasion, and will say until the facts have been revealed, Gaddafi could have been the architect and Megrahi the executioner of the crime. Yet the evidence for these claims has yet to be produced. And it’s eerie how people continually ignore this, even as the facts they’re reporting demonstrate it. [...]