Lemon Tree

“Whenever I hear about, read, see, watch things concerning Israel, I almost always feel conflicted. I think many people in the West, though certainly not only in the West, relate to this confliction: in most this is emotionally reflected.



“Reflections. Ruminations? Emotions, gut feelings, abdomen begot omen—augurs and ogres; divination: the divine divines the divine or the fear of God--ha, subject verb object (syntactic variables of the hermeneutics of language) and the genitive of an emotional state of mind (the alterable sociology of the language of hermeneutics)--the classics versus the Abrahamic faiths. Reason contra emotion? I‘d argue the scientific method against what exactly? Two inverse, Bronze Age approaches to interpreting the world.



“Phenomenology, reflections. Are not words a hallucinogen? Exhilaration—economic power, religious authority, power politics, all of it; money, sex and booze, an orgy evident in the celebrity cult; hierarchy, hierophants and glyphs--followed without a hangover? Economic cycles and political backswings, panem et circenses, fortune and good sports: prisons we build for our selves--space intended because that is our species, a collective language of images, among others—are, at best a constant delirium of graphemes. And at worse?

“A reflection, in mathematics, is a map transforming an object into its mirror image. Is outside the self subject to uncertainty? Which would you prefer: a Cartesian map of the world or a view from the moon? Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Don’t we know that we don't know?”


“Veneration, enervation—black and white, and the gray of a concrete: Israel.”

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(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D78iCym4O4o&feature=PlayList&p=D73F27DCCE516CBE&index=11)
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On Greene and Le Carré, Fact and Fiction as well as Terrorism & Counter Terrorism I.

Below two articles that touch upon the politics of expediency in regards to Terrorism & Counter Terrorism. There remains much to be said about the matter; I'll return to the subject matter sometime soon and replace these few lines with a few personal reflections. In the meantime I link to and reproduce two articles under fair use.




From the LRB (London Review of Books), dated/retrieved September 24, 2009

The Framing of al-Megrahi
Gareth Peirce

It is, of course, now all about oil. Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi's original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process.

The devastation caused by the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, at the cost of 270 lives, deserved an investigation of utter integrity. Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights demands no less. Where there has been a death any inquiry must be independent, effective and subject to public scrutiny, to provide the basis for an attribution of responsibility and to initiate criminal proceedings where appropriate. But, in the absence of this, a number of the bereaved Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators, asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was being presented at al-Megrahi's trial and make up their own minds whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in fact a three-card trick put together for political ends.

Perhaps the result could have been different if there had been an entirely Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available information, without interference or manipulation from outside. Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of the local police.

Each aspect of every criminal investigation in Britain has to meet certain essential standards; where they are not met, these parts of the investigation should not in principle become the basis of a prosecution. There must be precise notes made of each physical exhibit found and by whom; its movements must be tracked; each time an exhibit is inspected, a record must be kept. The rationale is obvious: without a precise record, interference, contamination or simple mistakes could jeopardise a prosecutor's reliance on evidence that should be tangible and therefore potentially more convincing. For that reason, a crime scene must be sealed off until searches are complete.

Those engineering the destruction of a transatlantic airliner in mid-flight might have believed that it would be likely to happen over the sea. Instead, Pan Am 103 was destroyed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and its fall-out was scattered over an area too huge to cordon off. The first and most desperate searches were for the passengers: could any have survived? Volunteers included a police surgeon from Yorkshire who had driven to the site as soon as he heard the news; together with the local police, he and others searched non-stop for 24 hours. They found bodies, none showing any sign of life; the doctor labelled each of the bodies he found, more than 50 of them, noting the place of discovery. Once it was clear there were no survivors, a search for evidence of the cause of the explosion would begin.

Extraordinarily, however, distinct from the Dumfries and Galloway police, scores of men, some wearing no insignia, some the insignia of the FBI and Pan Am (it was noted at the time that many of these men were clearly not Pan Am staff), invaded the area. Lockerbie residents reported seeing unmarked helicopters hovering overhead, carrying men with rifles whose telescopic sights were pointing directly at them. And when, much later, items of baggage came to be married up with the passengers they had accompanied, there were disturbing signs of interference. The suitcase belonging to Major McKee (a CIA operative flying back to the US to report on his concern that the couriering of drugs was being officially condoned as a way to entrap users and dealers in the US) was found to have had a hole cut in its side after the explosion, while the clothes in the suitcase were shown on subsequent analysis to bear no trace of explosives. A second suitcase, opened by a Scottish farmer, contained packets of white powder which a local police officer told him was undoubtedly heroin; no heroin was ever recorded as having been discovered. All but two of the labels that Dr Fieldhouse attached to the bodies he found were removed and have never been found.

Although the crime was the most hideous Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated; in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were pointing towards the solution.

In the weeks before the bombing in December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly easy to buy a ticket.

All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were set. The advantage of barometric timers is that they aren't activated until the plane is airborne - the bomb won't go off on the ground if the plane is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes would elapse before the air pressure dropped enough as the plane gained height to activate a barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found.

Forensic scientists believed that the radio had been in a suitcase in which there were clothes whose label was traced to a shop in Malta. A search of the house of a man affiliated to the group that manufactured the Toshiba bombs produced clothes bought in Malta; it was established too that he had travelled to Malta before the bombing. And the owner of the Maltese shop from which the clothes were thought to have been purchased identified to his brother, without prompting, a newspaper photograph of that man as the person who had bought the clothes found in the suitcase with the bomb inside.

But the man who bought the clothes was not al-Megrahi, nor was he Libyan. The group making Toshiba radio cassette bombs had no connection at all with Libya. Neither the man nor the group was ever prosecuted for involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. The fact that the explosion took place exactly when one would have expected it to if a Toshiba cassette bomb had been used was ignored: the bomb had not, the prosecution contended at al-Megrahi's trial, been triggered by a barometric switch in this way. The Lockerbie device, it claimed, was different from the devices made by the group. The difference was that it was a Toshiba cassette radio with one speaker rather than two. From a logically compelling case that seemed to point clearly in one direction the prosecution switched tack, but not at the beginning: not, in fact, until two years after the bombing, when the politics of the Middle East shifted and new allies had to be found quickly if the flow of cheap oil were to continue.

It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent. Over many decades several common factors have been identified, and the majority of them are present, centre stage, in this case: achieving the co-operation of witnesses by means of a combination of inducements and fear of the alternative (the tried and tested method of obtaining evidence for the prosecution on which many US cases rely); the provision of factual information by scientists where there is no proper basis for it (a recurrent theme in UK convictions as well as in the US); reliance on 'identification' evidence which is no such thing. Add to that the political will to achieve a prosecution, and the rest is easy. Fabrication demands outright dishonesty, but it isn't always necessary, or necessary in every aspect of an investigation: the momentum of suspicion, and a blinkered determination to focus on a particular thesis and ignore evidence pointing to the contrary, is a certain route to achieving the desired end. Al-Megrahi is reported as saying that he has evidence, which will be revealed on his death, that will prove his innocence. But it is clear even from the evidence that can be looked at today that his conviction was extremely disturbing.

For the first two years there was no mention at all of Libya. The investigation originally seemed to have clear evidence of a motive (tit for tat retaliation); evidence of the existence of a bomb intended to destroy airliners in mid-flight contained in the same brand of cassette radio discovered on the plane; and evidence implicating a Palestinian splinter group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, which was prepared at the time to hire itself out to regimes that were known to be state sponsors of terrorism; Syria was one (somewhat earlier, Libya had been another), so was Iran.

Behind every crime there is of course a motive. For the initial prime suspect, Iran, the motive was brutally clear. In July 1988 a US battleship, the Vincennes, shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in the Persian Gulf, with 290 passengers, many of them pilgrims en route to Mecca. There were no survivors. By chance a television crew was on the Vincennes when the attack took place and images of triumph at the carnage were immediately beamed around the world. When it became clear, as it did straight away, that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship's commander and crew were awarded high military honours.

Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged 'in blood-splattered skies'. At the same time, US Air Force Command issued a warning to its civilian contractors: 'We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion - mass casualties.' Warnings became more specific: 'We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack . . . due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place throughout Europe.' Within days, US intelligence was convinced that Iran meant business; and the CIA in due course acknowledged that it had intelligence that Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC, had met government officials in Iran and offered his services.

Such a partnership would indeed have been ominous, since the activities of the PFLP-GC had since 1970 included planting bombs on planes - bombs built into transistor radios and detonated by a barometric pressure switch. It was in this context that the flood of warnings immediately preceding the disaster had obvious significance for the subsequent investigation. One of them read: 'team of Palestinians not associated with PLO intends to attack US targets in Europe. Time frame is present. Targets specified are Pan Am Airlines and US military bases.' Five weeks before this warning, a PFLP-GC cell had been arrested in Germany. The PFLP-GC was precisely a 'team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO'. Jibril's right-hand man, Haffez Dalkamoni, was arrested in Frankfurt with a known bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat, as they visited electrical shops in the city. In the boot of Dalkamoni's car was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay switch and a barometric switch. Later US intelligence officials confirmed that members of the group had been monitoring Pan Am's facilities at Frankfurt airport. Dalkamoni admitted he had supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He said that a second Toshiba containing similar pressure switches had been built. Although Dalkamoni was prosecuted in Germany, Khreesat was inexplicably released; it only later became clear that he had been acting throughout as an undercover agent for Jordanian intelligence, which is extraordinarily close to the CIA (the CIA played a central role in its creation). On Dalkamoni's account, other bombs made by Khreesat were at large somewhere, including the one built into a second Toshiba player.

On 9 November 1988 Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs. Heathrow Airport issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was 'imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette players and other electrical equipment, staff are to be extra vigilant'. Over the next three weeks the airport received more information, including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities. (A document giving information and advice was drawn up by the UK's principal aviation security adviser on 19 December, but there were problems obtaining colour photographs and delays in the Christmas post and most airlines did not receive it until the new year, weeks after the disaster.)

In March 1989, less than three months after the downing of Flight 103, the then secretary of state for transport, Paul Channon, had lunch with some journalists. He talked, indiscreetly, of the brilliant detective work undertaken by the smallest police force in the country. Arrests, he told the journalists, were imminent. Although such conversations are customarily regarded as not for attribution, the next morning's newspapers revealed that a cabinet minister had stated that those responsible for the Lockerbie bombing had been identified and would soon be arrested.

At precisely the same time, however, the US president, George Bush Senior, was reported by the Washington Post as having spoken to Margaret Thatcher about Lockerbie, advising her to keep Lockerbie 'low-key', to avoid prejudicing negotiations with Syrian and Iranian-backed groups holding Western hostages in Lebanon. There were no arrests; Channon left the cabinet; and political interest in the case and desire to identify who was responsible for the disaster disappeared. The victims' families demanded evidence that a proper inquiry was being conducted and in September 1989 Channon's successor, Cecil Parkinson, met the newly formed UK Families Flight 103. He promised them a full judicial inquiry. Thatcher countermanded this promise, and he returned to the relatives with an admission of total failure. 'Low-key' meant no judicial inquiry, no prosecution, and instead a Fatal Accident Inquiry with no powers to subpoena which declined to investigate how the bomb got on the plane for fear of interfering with police inquiries.

As political players grow old, they reminisce and sometimes they forget what they are meant to have said or not said. Five years later Parkinson took part in a television programme about another horrific disaster, the sinking of the Marchioness, in which he confirmed that it was Thatcher who had blocked a judicial inquiry. He remembered discussing with the Lockerbie relatives whether, 'because the security services were involved', a High Court judge could look into the security aspects and report privately to him: 'Because when you get into the Lockerbie business - how did we find out certain information, how did we know this, how did we know that? - you would have had to recall not only our own intelligence sources but information we were receiving from overseas. Therefore that had to be a closed area.' This suggested the real block.

Nevertheless, investigators had clearly remained confident that despite government diffidence a prosecution would soon be brought. Late in 1989 an imminent arrest once again seemed tantalisingly on the cards. The Sunday Times (known to enjoy detailed briefings from the police and security services) reported that the 'net was closing' on the Lockerbie suspects and stated categorically that the bombing had been carried out by the German PFLP-GC cell led by Dalkamoni under orders from Ahmad Jibril and with a bomb made by Khreesat. What was new was the suggestion that the bomb had first been put on a plane not in Frankfurt but in Malta. Clothes made in Malta, the report added, had been found in the suitcase in which police believed the bomb had been planted. A member of Dalkamoni's cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate offences in Sweden, had, it revealed, visited Malta. He was the man identified by the shop owner: the man who had clothes bought in Malta in his possession. The Sunday Times articles went on to predict that Abu Talb would be extradited at any moment to stand trial for the bombing.

The suggestion that the bomb was placed on a plane from Malta was made in an attempt to link the discovery of the Maltese clothes with the already existing evidence of the German group. As no passengers transferred from Air Malta to Pan Am 103A in Frankfurt, the feeder flight for Pan Am 103, it would have had to be an unaccompanied bag from Malta that carried the bomb. Two documents were said to have been discovered: a list of the stages followed by Frankfurt airport's automated baggage system which related to Pan Am 103, and a handwritten worksheet from one of the several stations from which baggage came into the system. As this was official information, it must have been given lock, stock and barrel by investigators to the journalist in question.

A fundamental objection to the last part of the new thesis was blindingly clear: if the intended target was an American aircraft, why risk a premature explosion triggered by the barometric switch by putting the suitcase on an Air Malta flight? The scientific underpinning necessary to support a counter-proposition was established during 1989 and 1990 and rested on two 'discoveries': a fragment of an entirely different type of timer in the remnant of a shirt collar and the matching of that fragment with the manufacturer's prototype. This timer, it was argued, could, once set, keep a barometric switch from detonating for days. It was in the development of this proposition that every safeguard fundamental to a criminal investigation came to be jettisoned.

That Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran, was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit.

Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein's invading army.

The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he 'developed the policy towards Libya' which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi's house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the investigation's approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated.

Years of protracted negotiations were to take place before the Libyan government agreed to release the two men to stand trial in a 'neutral country'. It was not until May 2000 that the two Libyan Airlines officials who had run the airline's office in Malta finally went on trial - in a purpose-built court outside Utrecht created from a mothballed air-force base - under Scots law, albeit before three judges rather than a jury. What did Gaddafi expect when he agreed to the extradition of the two men? That they would in due course be exonerated because they were innocent but that he would meanwhile reap the diplomatic benefit by having delivered them? The idea of their individual responsibility was anyway peculiar: as agents of a state where not a mouse squeaks without the say-so of Gaddafi, al-Megrahi and Fhimah were either ordered to do what it was said they did, in which case dealing with Gaddafi as a statesman then and now has been beyond hypocrisy - or the thesis was wrong.

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. 'I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.' This was the claim - the hard evidence - that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI's forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been 'circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence'.

Thurman had made the Libyan connection, and its plausibility relied on the accuracy of his statement that the fragment of circuit board proved that it would have been possible for the unaccompanied bag to fly from Malta without the seemingly inevitable mid-air explosion. And thus it was that a witness from Switzerland, Edwin Bollier, the manufacturer of the MEBO circuit board, was called on to provide evidence that such boards had been sold exclusively to Libya. Bollier was described by al-Megrahi's barrister in his closing speech as an 'illegitimate arms dealer with morals to match'. The evidence he was clearly intended to provide had begun to unravel even before the trial began. Sales elsewhere in the world were discovered, Thurman did not appear at the trial, and the judges commented that Bollier's evidence was 'inconsistent' and 'self-contradictory'. Other witnesses, they found, had 'openly lied to the court'. Despite all this al-Megrahi was convicted.

Bollier had been one of the most potentially dubious of many dubious witnesses for the prosecution. But Dr Köchler, the UN's observer throughout the trial, recorded that Bollier had been 'brusquely interrupted' by the presiding judge when he attempted to raise the issue of the possible manipulation of the timer fragments. Could the MEBO board, or a part of one, have been planted in such a way that it could be conveniently 'discovered'? After the trial, new evidence that would have been at the centre of al-Megrahi's now abandoned appeal made this suggestion more credible: a Swiss electronics engineer called Ulrich Lumpert, formerly employed by Bollier's firm, stated in an affidavit to Köchler that in 1989 he stole a 'non-operational' timing board from MEBO and handed it to 'a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case'. Bollier himself told Köchler that he was offered $4 million if he would connect the timer to Libya.

There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes's findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled 'cloth (charred)' by him, but then overwritten as 'debris' even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been 'found' by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive.

Even if one knew nothing of the devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions, Hayes's key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed as disgraceful. There is a basic necessity for evidential preservation in any criminal case: every inspection must be logged, chronology recorded, detail noted. But at every point in relation to this vital fragment that information was either missing or had been altered, although Hayes had made meticulous notes in respect of every single one of the hundreds of other exhibits he inspected in the Lockerbie investigation.

No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of circuit board where he found them - for instance in the vicinity of blast-damaged material - but he made no such drawings of this item, nor had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated that he had 'no idea' when the change in pagination was carried out. The inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to insert what was now page 51 of his notes.

Curiously, a memorandum from Hayes's colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green circuit board: 'Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time.' No one was able to explain why there should have been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989 photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday's note continued: 'I feel that this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.' Again no one was able to explain what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality. The issue of his notes' pagination was described by Hayes as 'an unfathomable mystery'. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b), how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? The new evidence of the former MEBO employee who stole a circuit board would of course have been ripe for analysis by the Court of Appeal, which has now been discharged from considering new evidence in al-Megrahi's lately abandoned appeal.

A secondary important proposition for the Crown to consider was that the suitcase was on the second layer of a luggage container on the aircraft - which meant that it must have come from Frankfurt. Examining the largest surviving fragment of the outside case of the Toshiba device on 25 January 1989, Hayes had considered its state consistent with its having been at the base of the container. This would have contradicted the Crown's position that the device was in a suitcase that had arrived last, as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt, and so was nearer the top. By the time he gave evidence at the trial, Hayes had revised his assessment of its position. (Since the trial, evidence new to the defence but known from the start to the police has surfaced of a break-in at Heathrow in the hours before the disaster. The Fatal Accident Inquiry, which didn't have this knowledge, had made a finding in 1991 that Pan Am 103 was 'under constant guard at Heathrow'. Iran Air's hangar at Heathrow was next to Pan Am's.)

This isn't the first time we have heard of Hayes and Feraday. Among the many wrongful convictions in the 1970s for which RARDE scientists were responsible, Hayes played his part in the most notorious of all, endorsing the finding of an explosive trace that was never there, and speculating that a piece of chalk mentioned to the police by Vincent Maguire, aged 16, and a candle by Patrick Maguire, aged 13, 'fitted the description better' of a stick of gelignite wrapped in white paper. Both were convicted and imprisoned on this evidence, together with their parents and their uncle Giuseppe Conlon, who was to die in prison. All were later found to be innocent.

Although Feraday was often addressed by the prosecution as 'Dr' or 'Professor' when he gave evidence, he had no relevant academic qualifications, only a higher national certificate in physics and electronics some 30 years old. Dr Michael Scott, whose evidence has been preferred in appeals to that of Feraday, commented that 'the British government employed hundreds of people who were extraordinarily well qualified in the areas of radio communication and electronics. Alan Feraday is not qualified yet they use him. I have to ask the question why.' Feraday, like his US counterpart Thurman, has now been banned from future appearances as an expert witness, but he had already provided the key evidence in a roll-call of convictions of the innocent. A note of a pre-trial conference with counsel prosecuting Danny McNamee (who was wrongly convicted of involvement in a bombing in Hyde Park) provides a typical instance: 'F [Feraday] prepared to say it [a circuit board] purely for bombing purposes, no innocent purpose.' The implication here was that anyone who had involvement with this circuit board would have knowingly been involved in bomb construction. That, in common with many other assertions made by Feraday, was entirely false, but it resulted in McNamee's imprisonment for 11 years.

To discover that al-Megrahi's conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory. Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness's memory, as far as possible, must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described al-Megrahi as '6'0''' (he was 5'8''), '50 years old' (he was 37), and 'hefty'; said that he 'had been to the shop before and after', 'had been there only once'; that he 'saw him in a bar months later'; that he 'will sign statement even though I don't speak English'; that al-Megrahi 'was similar but not identical', 'perhaps like him but not fully like him', and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first place, that he was 'like the man in the Sunday Times' (in other words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified). But Gauci's evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of US dollars.

That a court of three experienced judges convicted on such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the guilty verdict 'incomprehensible' in view of the court's admission that Gauci's identification was 'not absolute'. We had come to believe that such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer possible. 'The guilty verdict', Köchler wrote, was 'arbitrary, even irrational' with an 'air of international power politics' present 'in the whole verdict', which was 'based on a series of highly problematic inferences'. He remarked on the withholding of 'substantial information' ('more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside the judicial framework') and on the very visible interference with the work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of the court. But most seriously, he set out his 'suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case'. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained.

Al-Megrahi's trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr Köchler recorded at its conclusion that it was 'not fair' and that it was not 'conducted in an objective manner', so that there were 'many more questions and doubts at the end than the beginning'. Since then, these doubts have not disappeared: on the contrary, the questions are graver, the doubts have grown and so has the strength of the evidence on which they are based. Köchler's observations continue to have compelling relevance; he found the respect of the court, the defence lawyers included, for the 'shrouds of secrecy' and 'national security considerations' to be 'totally incomprehensible to any rational observer'. 'Proper judicial procedure,' he continued, 'is simply impossible if political interests and intelligence services - from whichever side - succeed in interfering in the actual conduct of a court.'

The term miscarriage of justice carries with it the inference of accident, but also of death. There is a pressing need to investigate in detail how it has come about that there has been a form of death in this case - the death of justice - and who should be found responsible.

(Gareth Peirce is a defence lawyer who has represented many men and women in their appeals against wrongful convictions made on the basis of disputed scientific evidence, misidentification and police malpractice.)




From Private Eye, Issue 1245, dated September 18, 2009; retrieved September 24, 2009

LOCKERBIE LATEST

POLITICIANS on both sides of the Atlantic who have been outraged at the release of the mass-murdering "Lockerbie bomber" should take time to read the many hundreds of pages of evidence and argument in the case, expected to be released by his lawyers over the next few weeks. Even the most vociferous critic might be left in some doubt about the conviction of Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, freed from a Scottish jail to die with his family in Libya, and suspect that the Libyan was the victim of the most dreadful miscarriage of justice. The fact that the wrong man was in the dock was evident to those few independent observers who sat through the entire travesty of a trial in the Netherlands nearly 10 years ago. One of those was Dr Hans Kochler, appointed by the United Nations, who concluded: "There is not one single piece of material evidence linking [Megrahi] to the crime... the guilty verdict appears to be arbitrary, even irrational."

Flawed and glaringly contradictory evidence
Kochler's report was a damning indictment of the three Scottish trial judges who sat without a jury. The bulk of their judgment pointed to a not proven verdict - and then they convicted Megrahi anyway. As Eye readers will know, there were alterations to crucial forensic exhibits supposedly linking Libya and Megrahi to the bomb, for which police and scientists could give no proper explanation; there was a succession of flawed and glaringly contradictory evidence from key witnesses, at least two of whom were paid by the CIA; there was evidence of the striking similarity to the modus operandi of a Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist cell, operating out of Frankfurt, caught with devices equipped to bring down planes - one of which was missing. And then, of course, there was the crucial "identification" of Megrahi by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothes identified as being packed in the suitcase with the bomb. In all his statements and evidence, Gauci only ever says that Megrahi bore a "resemblance" to the man who purchased the clothes - never that he was the man. The judges performed a number of extraordinary leaps of logic to overcome these and all the other problems with the prosecution case, and it was evident to Dr Kochler even then that "foreign governments and secret governmental agencies", directly or indirectly, influenced the trial.

The break-in at Heathrow
It was supposedly a Scottish prosecution, but two US prosecutors sat alongside the prosecution team and appeared to Dr Kochler to be "supervisors" influencing what was released into open court and what was kept secret. Said Dr Kochler: "It was a consistent pattern during the whole trial. As an apparent result of political interest considerations, efforts were undertaken to withhold substantial information from the court." More evidence has since emerged - such as a break-in at Heathrow near the Pan Am bay shortly before the flight took off, which was concealed from the trial. This might have explained evidence that was given at the trial by a baggage handler who said he saw that an extra Samsonite briefcase (like the one experts said contained the bomb) had been placed on top of a baggage container destined for the flight while he had left it unattended when he went for his tea.

Governments are still influencing the case
Further evidence, which the Scottish criminal cases review commission (SCCRC) has seen, and which formed one of the six grounds that it cited pointing to the fact that the wrong man had been convicted, remains secret. Even now, 20 years down the line, the government is still claiming public interest immunity on evidence that the SCCRC said should never have been withheld. With Megrahi's agreement to drop his appeal and his resulting release, it is clear that governments are still influencing the case. If Britain's new best friend, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, and his government have been welcoming Megrahi back in a way that seems to have offended so many commentators, it is because they owe him. He was a step in their country's rehabilitation with the west. As the Eye has said ever since we predicted that the appeal would not be heard, it suits none of the administrations - the US, the UK or Libya - to have the case reopened. The forthcoming release of the papers by Tony Kelly, Megrahi's Glasgow-based solicitor, should prove that the Libyan was not responsible for the atrocity in the skies over Lockerbie. The papers will not prove, however, who was responsible, nor why the chance to bring the real bombers to justice was so evidently botched - or, worse, deliberately sabotaged. That is what the politicians should really be shouting about.

On Writing

This past Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009, while reading The Guardian, I came across an interesting page concerning writing. In essence the page consisted of two articles of sorts: a divulgence by Colm Tóibín, headlined Best thing about writing? Money, and responses by a number of writers, headlined Writing for a living: a joy or a chore? in the online edition, to Tóibín’s view. (The print edition’s headline for the second article reads "Authors Reveal Their Thoughts" [see pic], and it had only one female respondent, Joyce Carol Oates.)

Anyway, having once spent daytime as a percussionist practicing inside in the dark--first day or two rehearsing new, original numbers with a band the members of which had never had played together, then as background to the rehearsals of numbers or acts of the event, well, the best thing back then was being paid notwithstanding or perhaps because of transportation, hotel, food and all, was also included--I can relate to Tóibín. It wasn't a jam session, a get together, whip out the guitar or bongos, chickenshakes et cetera--it was work.

Personally? I feel different about writing. Anyway, after having found the on-line versions, below I link to and reproduce the articles under fair use. Any responses are welcome.


Be well and only good things to you,


DH

Best thing about writing? Money

The award-winning author Colm Toíbín has revealed that he gets no enjoyment from his acclaimed work - not even the good reviews

By Alison Flood, The Guardian, Tuesday 3 March 2009

Three hundred years ago Samuel Johnson declared that "no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money". Now the Irish novelist Colm Toíbín has admitted to feeling much the same way, despite his slew of awards and the high esteem in which he is held by the literary establishment.

In an interview with fellow novelist MJ Hyland, Toíbín said he took no enjoyment from writing his books - or from reading good reviews - and that the best thing about being a writer was financial success.

"Oh there's no pleasure. Except that I don't have to work for anyone who bullies me," he said in response to Hyland's question about how writing makes him feel.

"I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it."

Toíbín said he hadn't enjoyed writing any of his books, from his debut The South to his two Booker-shortlisted novels The Blackwater Lightship, about a young man dying of Aids who returns to his home in Ireland, and The Master, a portrait of Henry James.

"After a while [writing is] not really difficult, but it's never fun or anything. With a few of the books, especially The Heather Blazing and The Master and the new novel Brooklyn, there has been a real problem in not having a sort of breakdown as I worked on a particular passage," he said in the interview, which appeared yesterday in the second edition of the online arts journal the Manchester Review at www.themanchesterreview.co

.uk.

"I don't want to go on about this too much, but there is a passage in each of those books which I found almost impossible to write and then harder and harder to rewrite. I hope never to have to look at those passages again."

In response to Hyland's query about what the best thing was about being a writer, he replied: "The money. I never knew there would be money ... It has nothing to do with enjoyment. I like selling foreign rights, but that feeling would last no longer than 20 minutes."

The moment when he was declared winner of the International IMPAC Dublin award - worth €100,000 - for The Master must also have been a good one for the writer.

In his casting of himself as a professional author, in the literary game for the money, Toíbín finds himself in good company, from Samuel Johnson to Thomas Hardy, who much preferred his poetry to his novels, seeing works including Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge as merely a way to make a living.

Charles Dickens, meanwhile, was determined to make as much money as he could with his novels, while Dostoevsky churned out his novels because he desperately needed the money.

Toíbín said he would never quit, because he has "things that will not go away - some of them are true, some slowly become imagined".

He believes that his desire to seek fame as a novelist is "essentially neurotic". He told Hyland: "I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?"

Writing for a living: a joy or a chore?

Colm Tóibín claims he does not enjoy writing very much. Do other authors share his view?

AL Kennedy
The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you're in the mood or not. I wouldn't be the first writer to point out that doing something so deeply personal does become less jolly when you have to keep on at it, day after cash-generating day. To use a not ridiculous analogy: Sex = nice thing. Sex For Cash = probably less fun, perhaps morally uncomfy and psychologically unwise. Sitting alone in a room for hours while essentially talking in your head about people you made up earlier and then writing it down for no one you know does have many aspects which are not inherently fulfilling. Then again, making something out of nothing, overturning the laws of time and space, building something for strangers just because you think they might like it and hours of absence from self – that's fantastic. And then it's over, which is even better. I'm with RLStevenson – having written – that's the good bit.

Amit Chaudhuri
Writing novels is no fun; nor is, generally speaking, reading novels. Reading people writing about novels is not always fun, either, because relatively little of this kind of writing is any good. Then there's the group of people who don't enjoy being novelists, to which I probably belong; whose lives are at once shaped and defined by, and to some extent entrapped in, the act of writing fiction. I still find it difficult to believe that I'm something called a 'novelist'; but this hasn't stopped me from dreaming, frequently, of alternative professions: second-hand bookshop owner; corporate worker; cinematographer. There are many reasons for this unease. One of them is a fundamental discomfort with narrative itself, and involves admitting to yourself that you derive your basic pleasure not from knowing what happens next, but from arrested time or eventlessness; this makes you constantly wish, as you're writing, that you were elsewhere, or it makes you work to make the novel accommodate that impulse. Another reason is the professionalisation of the vocation, so that the novelist is supposed to produce novels as naturally, automatically, and regularly as a cow gives milk. In such a constraining situation, money can certainly be a compensatory pleasure; so can that paradoxical and sly addiction, failure.

Hari Kunzru
I get great pleasure from writing, but not always, or even usually. Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline – trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak-out. Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like Sisyphus; ending sometimes comes with the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea. Along the way, there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you've nailed that particular sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane human could read without vomiting. But when you're in the zone, spinning words like plates, there's a deep sense of satisfaction and, yes, enjoyment…

John Banville
Civilisation's greatest single invention is the sentence. In it, we can say anything. That saying, however, is difficult and peculiarly painful. Whether we are writing a novel or a letter to our bank manager, we have the eerie sensation that we are not so much writing as being written, that language in its insidious way is using us as a medium of expression and not vice versa. The struggle of writing is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope to do is 'fail better', as Beckett recommends. The pleasure of writing is in the preparation, not the execution, and certainly not in the thing executed. The novelist daily at his desk eats ashes, and if occasionally he encounters a diamond he is likely to break a tooth on it. Money is necessary to pay the dentist's bills.

Will Self
I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

Joyce Carol Oates
Given that the act of writing provokes such misery, why do you do it? – here is the writer's perennial riddle. Every writer is asked this question, or its artful variants, and every writer comes up with some plausible answer, the most arresting of which would seem to have been Flannery O'Connor's: "Because I'm good at it." It's rare that a writer – a literary writer, that is, like Colm Tóibín – will acknowledge that he writes for money, since most literary writers obviously don't write for money – a prose fiction writer's hourly wage, broken down into units, would be in the modest range of the US minimum wage of the 1950s – approximately $1 per hour.

And when Colm Tóibín began writing, he could have had no idea that he'd ever be paid, or even published; obviously, the motive for the form of artful mimicry we call prose fiction goes much deeper, and is inaccessible to interviewers.

Recall that DH Lawrence warned us to trust the tale, not the teller – the teller of fictions is likely to be a liar. Darwinian evolutionary psychology suggests that none of us really knows what has made us what we are, still less why we behave so eccentrically as we do; when we are pressed to explain ourselves, we invent. In the Renaissance, poets claimed repeatedly that they wrote for posterity – to be "immortal." In religious communities, the creation of any art was for the glory of God. In a capitalist society, one is likely to claim that one writes for the same purpose that everyone else produces a product--for money.

To me, who has written for most of her adult life, in a number of genres and with wildly varying degrees of "enjoyment" and/or "misery", it's likely that writing is a conscious variant of a deep-motivated unconscious activity, like dreaming. Why do we dream? No one seems to really know, just as no one seems to really know why we crave stories, even or especially stories we know to be fiction. My experience of writing – of writing these very sentences, for instance – is invariably a blend of the initially "inspired" and the more exacting, or plodding, execution of inspiration.

Most writers find first drafts painfully difficult, like climbing a steep stairs, the end of which isn't in sight. Only just persevere! Eventually, you will get where you are gong, or so you hope. And when you get there, you will not ask why? – the relief you feel is but a brief breathing spell, before beginning again with another inspiration, another draft, another steep climb. "I always say, my motto is 'Art for my sake'" – these words of the young DH Lawrence in a letter written before the first world war are probably as reliable as any.

Geoff Dyer
When I was young, I thought that the fun part of writing would be the "creative" bit, making stuff up and inventing things. The older I've got, the less fun this has become. I dread it. The part I enjoy is the re-writing. Increasingly, I enjoy the dullest, most clerical stages of the process. Having said that, there always comes a point, after I've amassed enough material and can start knocking it into shape, when I begin looking forward to working on something. Basically it gets easier and easier each day until the last five or six months are a real pleasure and I can spend long and happy days doing it. I always hope I can carry over that momentum from the end of one book to the beginning of another but, unfortunately, it's strictly non-transferable. So I then spend a year or so doing nothing until that becomes even more intolerable than doing something.

Ronan Bennett
I am not a tortured writer. Sometimes the writing does not go well and I can feel frustrated and disappointed with myself. Sometimes I do not feel like writing and sometimes I lose faith in what I'm writing. But I take a pretty robust view about all this because I tend to believe it will come good eventually. I'm not sure I would describe as pleasurable the actual process of writing, even when it's going well, but when I know in my bones that I've written a good book, like The Catastrophist or Havoc, In Its Third Year, I do certainly feel on a high. Good reviews please me, but nothing like as much as meeting readers who tell me they were moved or provoked by one of my books. To enjoy a certain level of public regard, the support of publishers and to be financially rewarded – if this is not a pleasure it's at least a rare privilege.

Julie Myerson
Writing gives me such enormous pleasure, and I'm a much happier (and therefore nicer) person when I'm doing it. There's a place in my head that I go to when I write and it's so rich and unexpected – and scary sometimes – but never ever dull. I first went there when I was seven and I wrote a poem which startled me a bit because it felt like someone else had written it. The adrenaline rush that gave me was incredible and I wanted more. These days, maybe because I can now access that place quite easily, writing feels like something I simply could not live without. It is a joyous thing. I feel very lucky to be paid to do it, but even if I'd never been published, I think I'd still be writing. I love being read, but the person I'm really always writing for is me.

The Global Recession--Three News Items to Remember

February 19, 2009

Below are three articles, all dated mid- or post mid-September 2008, worth recalling as the global depression becomes an increasing reality five months after their intial publication. They are of significant historic interest, and I reproduce them here, with all relevant links, under fair use.

The first article, entitled Lehman folds with record $613 billion debt and dated Monday, September 15, 2008, briefly outlines the demise of Lehman Brothers. The second article, entitled Ex-Finance Ministers Offer U.S. Economic Advice, first aired on NPR's Planet Money on Morning Edition, September 15, 2008. (Interestingly, the article did not generate a single comment!) The third article, entitled A systemic crisis demands systemic solutions, was penned by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, and was published by the Financial times a week after the aforementioned, on Monday, September 22, 2008.


Lehman folds with record $613 billion debt
By Sam Mamudi, MarketWatch


Last update: 10:11 a.m. EDT Sept. 15, 2008

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Lehman Brothers Holdings is closing its doors with more than $600 billion of debt -- the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history.


Lehman (LEH: 0.04, +0.00, +6.1%) has total debts of $613 billion against total assets of $639 billion, according to a filing prepared Sunday.

The previous largest bankruptcy was that of WorldCom Inc. in July 2002, which had $104 billion of assets.

The Chapter 11 Petition filing with the Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York shows that Lehman has more than 100,000 creditors and more than $150 billion in outstanding bond debt.

"In the judgment of the Board, it is desirable and in the best interests of the Company, its creditors, employees, and other interested parties that a petition be filed by the Company seeking relief under the provisions of chapter 11 of [the bankruptcy code]," said the filing, effectively ending Lehman's 158-year existence.

The filing also names Lehman's three largest stockholders: AXA (AXA: 12.70, -1.40, -9.9%) , ClearBridge Advisors and FMR, parent of Fidelity Investments. Axa holds 7.3% of outstanding common stock, while ClearBridge holds 6.3% and FMR holds 5.9%. As of 8.45 a.m., shares of Lehman were down to 33 cents in pre-market trading; the stock closed just below $13 on Monday September 8.

The largest listed claimants of Lehman's debt were Citigroup Inc. (C: 2.64, -0.27, -9.3%) and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (BK: 24.02, +0.33, +1.4%) , which were the indentured trustees of about $138 billion of Lehman's senior notes.

That exposure is not directly with the banks -- as indentured trustees they were the agents for the Lehman bonds.

Bank of New York was also listed as the second- and third-largest creditor, with separate claims of $12 billion of subordinated debt and $5 billion of junior subordinated debt -- again, in its role as indentured trustee.

The next largest creditors are Japanese banks Aozora and Mizuho Corporate Bank, a unit of Mizuho Financial Group Inc. (MFG: 4.12, -0.07, -1.7%) .

New York corporate law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges is handling the bankruptcy.



Ex-Finance Ministers Offer U.S. Economic Advice
by David Kestenbaum


Morning Edition, September 15, 2008 · When the U.S. Treasury stepped in to save Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this month, the public got a reminder of just how interconnected the economies of the world have become. What began as a problem in the U.S. mortgage market, with people borrowing too much to buy houses here, ended up threatening to drag down the entire global economy.

With the news of the Fannie and Freddie bailout still unfolding, former finance ministers from around the world met last week to discuss global economic stability. Some of them had a polite suggestion for the U.S., namely that a little international advice might have helped stave off the crisis.

The ministers met at the University of Virginia, beneath the grand dome where Thomas Jefferson once kept his library. They were cordial, but also frank. Maybe the U.S. should get a financial checkup, they suggested, from the International Monetary Fund.

"Now I think the time has come," said Yashwant Sinha, former finance minister of India. "After the crisis here ... the U.S. should accept some monitoring by the IMF." Sinha thinks an IMF review might have sounded an additional warning about America's still-unfolding mortgage crisis.

It's worth noting that the IMF is the world agency that countries turn to when they're in serious trouble, as Argentina has done during its recent flirtation with the brink. The IMF functions as a kind of global loan shark. Nations get money, but with a lot of strings attached. The IMF also doles out advice. A bunch of experts come to your country and conduct interviews. They look at your books and write a report.

In practical terms, it's not a big deal. But symbolically, what Sinha is suggesting would carry a lot of weight. Sinha says the U.S. has a history of giving advice to other countries about how to run their economies. It hasn't always been so good about listening. But he thinks it needs to get better.

"The U.S. economy is the largest in the world," he says. "Anything that happens in the U.S. or to the U.S. economy has worldwide repercussions, so many countries ... suffer for no fault of their own."

The U.S. Treasury says America has now agreed to get a stability assessment from the IMF. The announcement didn't get much attention, but officials at the IMF expect to start examining U.S. finances in the next couple months.

Rodrigo de Rato, a former finance minister of Spain and former head of the IMF, says lots of countries have been through the assessment — not just poor ones. De Rato rattles off a quick list, including Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and India. The idea, he says, is to search for weak spots in the economy. The IMF looks at how investors manage risks in the market. Unhealthy risks helped bring down institutions like Lehman Brothers just this past weekend.

An IMF review now is only fair, de Rato argues. "It will allow a discussion of issues that maybe are politically sensitive and give a sense of evenhandedness in the world," he says.

At least one American at the conference, former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow, didn't place much faith in the process. "IMF has no particular expertise," Snow says. "Does anybody think that if we had 15 more Ph.D.s at the IMF, we'd have stopped this process? We'd have caught it? Hah."

Still, participants at the conference pointed to a shift in America's role in the global economy. They seemed frustrated that Wall Street has stumbled into crisis. As one person put it, "I think even my 6-year-old daughter knows that you don't lend money to people who can't pay you back."



A systemic crisis demands systemic solutions
By Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Published: September 22 2008 19:32 | Last updated: September 22 2008 19:32


These are exceptional times. Exceptional for what has happened to financial markets and for what has not happened, at least not yet, to the broader economy – the onset of a severe recession. Perhaps it was the absence of the latter that lulled too many into viewing the bursting of the housing bubble merely as a correction, the defaults in US subprime mortgages just as misfortune and the failure of important financial institutions as collateral damage.

Six months ago, when the International Monetary Fund estimated more than $1,000bn (€691bn, £546bn) in financial sector losses and predicted a sharp slowdown in the global economy, we were criticised for being too pessimistic. But with much of the losses yet to be realised, and with the financial crisis now acute, it has become clear that nothing short of a systemic solution – comprehensive in tackling the immediate fallout and comprehensive in addressing the root causes – will permit the broader economy, in the US and globally, to function with any semblance of normality.

For the near-term, such an approach must include three elements: liquidity provision; purchase of distressed assets; and capital injections into financial institutions.

First, central banks must prevent runs on banks and financial institutions. They can do so by reassuring depositors that bank deposits are safe and by providing liquidity to financial institutions against good collateral. This was the first line of defence and central banks have probably done by now most of what they could do.

Second, treasuries must remove the reason runs come in the first place: the presence of distressed assets on the balance sheets of financial institutions. An effective way is to set up a government agency to buy these assets and hold them until they mature and can be safely resold. A key issue will be the price at which these assets are acquired: high enough to induce financial institutions to sell, but also low enough for the state to have a chance of making a return and keeping its own long-term finances in order. There are also other, potentially less costly, alternatives. Early this year, the IMF proposed a solution based on longer-term swaps of mortgage securities for government bonds – which cleans up bank balance sheets but leaves the long-term risk with banks, not the taxpayer.

Third, the financial system must be recapitalised – at this point, probably with public support. At the core of this crisis is the fact that the financial system has too little capital. Even as the system shrinks and bad assets are removed, many institutions will still lack sufficient capital safely to extend fresh credit to the economy. It is possible for the state to provide capital to banks in ways that do not imply nationalisation. For example, many IMF members in the past have matched private capital injections with preferential shares and forms of capital that left ownership control in private hands.

I welcome the bold steps being taken in the US and look forward to their effective implementation. Other advanced economies should also be preparing comprehensive contingency plans, not least because of the complexity of dealing with the failure of institutions with extensive cross-border linkages. To the extent that comprehensive approaches are put in place, I am confident that financial systems that had grown too large relative to the economy will stabilise at a more appropriate level. But what about the long-term challenges?

An obvious one is the fiscal cost. The upfront cost in terms of public debt is high but the ultimate cost to taxpayers need not be. International experience shows that, done correctly, the government can expect to recover most of its initial investment. But if fiscal costs turn out large, substantial fiscal adjustment may be required to underpin long-term stability of public finances.

There is a deeper structural issue to be resolved. This crisis is the result of regulatory failure to guard against excessive risk-taking in the financial system, especially in the US. We must ensure it does not happen again. Work has started to rebuild the architecture and the leading industrialised countries have already put forward recommendations for better prudential regulation, accounting rules and transparency. The role of credit rating agencies will also need to be rethought, with greater public scrutiny. In a globalised world, these efforts will have to be broad-based if they are to be effective.

Finally, how might the financial shock play out in the rest of the world? European economies are already slowing markedly and, with further hits to bank capital, this process will continue into next year. Emerging-market countries have been resilient, although there are those who argue that the wheels will fly off these fast-growing economies as capital flows dry up and commodity prices recede. Of course, we should be careful not to treat emerging markets as a block. Some will be helped by falling commodity prices and cooling demand, while others have built strong buffers of higher reserves, lower debt and credible monetary policy frameworks that they can draw on.

Vigilance, objectivity and collaboration – on a global scale – will be needed to deal with the challenges ahead. It is my hope that when finance ministers and central bank governors convene in Washington next month for our annual meetings, it will be possible to have global dialogue, so that all countries can draw lessons from the recent turn of events for the architecture of the international financial system..

The writer is managing director of the International Monetary Fund