Transcript
Speaker: The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and M Denteth.
Speaker: Hello, it's the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison in Xuhai, China. They adopt MR Extenteth. I can hear birds in the background. Sounds like springtime in China.
Speaker: Well, it's meant to be springtime in... Well, actually, no, sorry. It's meant to be awesome in China, but it's incredibly hot. In fact, hotter than some days in summer. So I think climate change is doing a bit of a number on the Guangdong at the moment.
Speaker: Well, it does do that. But but and and enough about the weather. You made a game, an actual game, a real game, a physical game. You can touch with your fingers. Which has a a physical iteration, instantiation. It exists in a physical sense, like most things exist in physical senses, apart from the abstract ideas, but we're going well off the off whatever I'm thinking about right now. So, yes, i have made a card game. It's called Prestige with an exclamation mark. With an exclamation mark, that's important. It is available to print and well it's available to print for free on itch.io. So you go to itch.io and you look up Prestige with an exclamation mark. You will find Prestige there. It's downloadable for free. You can flick me a few dollars if you so desire.
Speaker: But otherwise, it is a free game that you can print out and play to your heart's content. There is going to be... a print-on-demand version of the game coming out from Game Crafters in ah few weeks' time. Although, i say a few weeks' time. If you order it from them, it be printed until mid-November, if not early December at the earliest.
Speaker: It will be... quite expensive because the economies of scale don't really work for one-off printings of games. I have printed out some copies locally in China, which I'll be giving to friends, family, and putting square quote influencers at some point. So Josh, you will receive a complimentary gratis copy of Prestige when I see you next back home in New Zealand.
Speaker: it because I'm influential? Yes. think I'm going influence people. Yes, that's true. You change hearts and minds, Josh. You change hearts and minds.
Speaker: Yes. yeah Actually, to be honest, I didn't know that you could put printable games up on itch.io, but of course you can. That makes perfect sense. i have You can go to monkeyfluids.itch.io and you can see the games that I've made, but they're electronic games, not none no none of this tangible, tangible, touchable stuff for me. Another thing about itch, though, by the way,
Speaker: If you go to itch.io, it'll take you to the homepage. And the homepage is good, and it shows a bunch of free a bunch of the top games and ones that are being promoted and stuff like that. There's also a button you click on to go browse. If you click browse, that takes you to the screen where they show you, here are all the games that people are actually are actually playing and downloading the most, and they are...
Speaker: all pornography. It's a little bit disturbing how you click this one button and suddenly you're in a world of porn because itch.io does not censor and since you know obviously it flags adult content but um there's a lot of it and people like it as I discovered when I last went to itch.io and clicked on the browse button to see what's going on on itch.
Speaker: Yes, I believe that was part and parcel of why itch had a problem with visa payments last year, and the year before last, when there was concerted effort by the reinvigorated, reinstantiated Gamergate crowd to crack down on woke people.
Speaker: I put that in quote marks by basically denying pe people pornographic games and then making the implication that pornographic games are indicative of a woke mindset. Therefore, if we get rid of the pornography, we get rid of wokeness, which probably is backfiring on some of those people who are at work because I have a feeling a lot of them incels who require pornography for sweet release.
Speaker: yeah So anyway, I'm just just saying, just just so you know, don't get a surprise, but if you know if you just go to itch.io and search for prestige, then you'll be fine. You'll avoid all the pornography. unless you i but no No judgment, you know, just saying. that that ah There's also there's a lot of it there. Make of that what you will. anyway Anyway, the point is, M has a game. It's not pornographic. I hope that's not a deal breaker.
Speaker: itch.io and download it and play it, you fools. How do know it's porn? pornographic, Josh. You haven't played it. That's true, I haven't actually. It could be ripe. I mean, it doesn't have any pornographic elements in it, but it could have done. Everything I've seen is just text. I suppose it could be saucy text. You made an assumption. I have. You know what an assumption makes of a person?
Speaker: It makes, yeah, that's vaguely pornographic what it makes. I'm not going to go into that. And maybe we should we should get on. with We're recording, we've had a few hitches today, it should be said. Our regular recording method just has not worked for some reason. We're doing it via Zoom, which so so there may be a difference in quality this time around. We'll just have to see. But it also means we're running a little bit behind schedule, so we should crack into the main episode, which To be fair, it's going to be fairly fairly sort of weighty and depressing, so we're getting the we're getting the funny games and pornography hijinks out of the way right now.
Speaker: Well, shall we in? Yep, we're going to draw a line. Drawing a line under the games and pornography, serious discussion begins now.
Speaker: Because what we have been looking at or more accurately listening to over the past couple of weeks has been Lockerbie, a six-part miniseries about the Lockerbie disaster presented by Miles Bonner as part of BBC's Intrigue podcast series. So this is a longer series that has a number of stories. and so this six-part series ran from July to August this year. was there They then followed it up with a 9-11 series. Have you listened to that? I have not listened that. I have not, in part because, i mean, it seems a weird thing to say for someone who specializes in conspiracy theory theory. I'm kind of over nine eleven
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I kind of felt the same. But definitely we both listened all the way to it all six episodes of Lockerbie. You can go and listen to it yourself. The the podcast series is called Intrigue. There's six episodes. They're only half an hour long. It's it's a fairly short listen. And and it it gets fairly conspiratorial.
Speaker: But tom before we get into the podcast itself, we should probably give a bit of background on the Lockerbie disaster for those those those too young to remember. I mean, I assume Lockerbie, I was 12 when it happened, so I possibly wasn't that aware of it at the time. but but but it's it's like I did not need to be told what the the meaning of Lockerbie. was very well aware that it was a ah horrible year disaster, bombing, terrorist attack and so on. What's what's what's your relationship to Lockerbie?
Speaker: So I don't recall the event itself. What I recall is when the Libyans did and didn't take responsibility for the Lockerbie disaster and all of the discussions about Muammar Gaddafi and his potential role in...
Speaker: being kind of the causative feature or causative force of the Lockerbie disaster. So I remember that was when I found out about Libya and Gaddafi was when it was alleged and then apparently, as we'll see in the podcast, proven in court that they were responsible for the disaster. So that's quite some time after the event.
Speaker: And yes, it is one of those things, it was kind of background noise when we were growing up in the late 80s and early 90s. Yes, I mean, if you're if you're our age, you must have heard of Lockerbie, but it's far enough in the past that i could I could imagine that people younger than us might not have heard of it, or at least people younger than us who don't live in Britain, who don't live in the United Kingdom, might not have heard of it. But...
Speaker: So just a quick rundown. The Lockerbie disaster is to this day the worst terrorist attack to have happened in the United Kingdom at around 7pm on the 21st of December 1988. Pan Flight 103 having left Heathrow Airport from London on the way to New York.
Speaker: broke up in midair and crashed into the Scottish town of Lockerbie. All 259 passengers and crew on board died, as did 11 people in Lockerbie itself, because the the plane the plane didn't explode in midair. It broke apart in midair.
Speaker: And the middle section of the plane containing, like, the wings and the fuel tanks, that apparently landed like ah like like a bomb. it You know, it was a massive explosion and fires, and it landed in the middle of this town.
Speaker: So, yeah, 11 people on the ground died also. Of the 259 dead, 190 of them were American citizens. So despite happening over the United Kingdom, America was very heavily involved in the investigations.
Speaker: And once investigations began, it quickly became clear that this was no accident. They they were able to show fairly early on that a bomb had gone off in the hold of the airplane, which blew us a blew a hole in the side of the plane, caused to break into pieces and crash into the ground.
Speaker: Now, initially, people suspected a Palestinian terrorist group, and in particular, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, which is known by the the barely less cumbersome abbreviation PFLPGC.
Speaker: But in 1991, after three years of investigation, authorities identified two members of the Libyan intelligence services being behind it. They were Lamin Khalifa Fima and Abdul Bassett al-Maghrahi.
Speaker: Now, as you say, at the time Libya was ruled by momar Gaddafi, he would eventually be ousted and killed after a civil war, but that wasn't until 2011. So he'd be in charge for a long, long time ah um after this.
Speaker: Now, that was 1991. They first named these two people as as people who they believed were responsible, but it wasn't until 1999 that After some very long and long wrangling and negotiations, Gaddafi actually allowed them to be extradited to the Netherlands where they would be tried. And this was sort of this was part of the wrangling of each. So I'm just OK.
Speaker: How about if the trial takes place on neutral ground? Not not in Scotland. If we if we do this in the Netherlands, suggesting that it would be more likely they'll get a fair trial there or what have you. So the trial took place on an ex-US army base in the Netherlands. And I i wasn't quite sure about exactly how this worked. So the the trial was governed by Scottish law, not Dutch law.
Speaker: Some people had sort of said that the army base kind of became Scottish territory for the duration of the trial. I'm not sure if they're speaking metaphorically or if it literally The the you know laws were written so that it was actually part of Scotland for the duration of the trial, but nevertheless, it was Scottish law.
Speaker: The name of the base is Camp Zeist. That's a name that has some associations. There's going to be entire sidebar about a film that does not exist. That does not exist. Or at least a cut of a film that does exist.
Speaker: So for anyone who knows anything about Highlander films, the original theatrical cut of Highlander 2, a film that many people claim was never made, features a movie from the planet Zeist.
Speaker: And it's very bad. Which then turns into, in the director's cut, to not exist because the immortals come from the distant past of Earth. So, yeah, we could do a whole Highlander 2 thing. We're not going to. but we're not going to. But it's lurking in the back of our minds every moment where we want a bit of release from this rather dark and depressing tale.
Speaker: Indeed. So, at Camp Zeist, FEMA was acquitted, al-Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland, making him the only person to ever be found guilty for the disaster so far. We'll get to that. Done, done, done right there. he He's always maintained his innocence, as indeed Libya and Gaddafi always insisted that Libya had nothing to do with it.
Speaker: the final The final sort of instance in that saga was that in 2009, Al-Maghrahi, who by that point was dying of prostate cancer, was released to Libya on compassionate grounds, where he eventually died in 2012. And as you can imagine, there was a fair bit of controversy about that. and I think it was sort of, you know, you had one side saying, what are we doing showing him compassion when he showed no compassion for the 270 people he murdered? And then the other side being said, no, that's That's because we're better than him. We're showing compassion because we're good people and he's a bad person and this proves that we're better than him sort of thing. But also I think there was a little bit, I gather he they thought he only had a few months to live, but then he ended up living the year quite happily for another three years. So I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah. and a but actually this out He always maintained his innocence. He did. And had been appealing his conviction. He made several appeals against his conviction. One of the conditions of his release was that he abandoned his most recent appeal. So he was always trying to appeal to say, no, I'm innocent of this particular crime.
Speaker: A condition of his release on compassionate grounds was that essentially had to abandon that appeal and thus by inference take responsibility for the action.
Speaker: And it is interesting. it's It's one of those cases where what's the official theory and what's the conspiracy theory can differ from where you are. Because in Libya, I believe, he was sort of greeted as a hero, not in a hooray, we love you because you killed a bunch of Americans way, but in a hooray, this man who was who was unjustly convicted of a crime he didn't commit is finally free. So in Libya, it was always, i think, the official version was that, you know, no we we we and El Magrahi had nothing to do with it. He was framed.
Speaker: But anyway, because only these two Libyans were ever identified out of what must have been you know a large, sophisticated operation, there were always conspiracy theories suggesting that someone else was really behind the bombing and that that Libya and or al-Megrahi were just convenient scapegoats. And this is kind of where the BBC podcast comes in.
Speaker: And they they say at the start that it was prompted now, obviously they were doing a nine eleven miniseries because of the 25th anniversary of 9-11, but the reason they were talking about Lockerbie in the year 2026 is that another man is about to go on trial for it, a man called Abu Aguila Basood, who's now in his 70s, and I believe serving time already for other crimes in Libya,
Speaker: He apparently was a bomb maker for the ah Libyan intelligence and is accused of being the man who made the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103. Apparently he initially confessed to this, but the videotape of his confession has been lost and he now says his confession is coerced, so it's going to trial. It's been one of those things he was meant to go on trial last year, but then there's delays and delays and new evidence and all that business.
Speaker: So as far as I'm aware, the trial hasn't begun yet, but it's coming up very soon. So that's the background to the podcast. Should we talk a little bit about that? There are a few sort of key bits of evidence that tend to come up a lot. Do you think it would be good to introduce them now or as we go through it? Yes, I think it would be useful to talk about what the official theory claims about what happened over Lockerbie at that time.
Speaker: Because an awful lot of the discussion about both the official theory and the rival conspiracy theory, and both are examples of conspiracy theories, but one has kind of official imprinture due to what the court have said, all is about what kind of bomb it was and the people who procured and then traveled with the bomb. Because there's a lot of discussion which goes either way, which, depending on what type of bomb you think it is lends weight to one particular hypothesis over the other.
Speaker: Yes. So fairly early on, it I gather, the investigation determined that the suitcase containing the bomb had come from a flight from Malta. So flight 103 was Frankfurt to New York, stopping over in Heathrow. at Heathrow, luggage from this other flight from Malta was was was added um onto to the flight there.
Speaker: And they did, i i don't know how these things work exactly, but apparently it's but it's all a about tracing the explosive residue and testing all the debris for residue and whatever has the greatest concentrations of residue or closest to the bomb. And the greatest of all would be from the suit you know the remains of the suitcase and stuff that the bomb was actually in.
Speaker: So they were able to identify the suitcase and its contents and found bits to the bomb as well, I think. And in particular, there was there was clothing that they matched to the suitcase that had contained the bomb, which was made and sold in Malta.
Speaker: And they were able to show that Almagrahi had been in Malta earlier in December of 1988. And then there was a particular story about had a shopkeeper. they They found a shop where these items were sold. They talked to the shopkeeper and he said, oh, yeah, i remember that guy coming in in December because it was very strange because he just bought a whole lot of stuff um almost at random. which seemed a bit odd. The shopkeeper points out he's not buying clothes appropriate to the season. he just seemed be buying clothes that would fill a suitcase.
Speaker: Yeah, the implication being that all he wanted was to be able to fill up a suitcase so it wouldn't wouldn't attract suspicion and just have a bomb rattling around on it. Probably, however, is that a lot of people, including officials, are a little bit worried about the reliability of the shopkeeper.
Speaker: Partially because his story was always slightly vague, and also because in each retelling the story changed, sometimes slightly, sometimes significantly.
Speaker: Yeah, there were questions around exactly what the date was and matching that to when Al-Megrahi was and things like that. least At least going by the the BBC podcast, it sounded like this was the biggest piece of evidence against Al-Megrahi, or at least it's the one they talked about the the most.
Speaker: um They also talked about the bomb a little bit. Apparently the ah eventual finding was the bomb used Semtex explosives, and just then had used a long timer, like an 11-hour timer or something, which had sort of been calculated that by the time it had been set and then gone and then got on the onto the plane at Heathrow and then the plane had got up in the air. By the time it went off, the plane would be in the air having left Heathrow.
Speaker: Again, in the same way that they thought originally Palestine was the most likely thing and then changed to Libya, originally they thought that a barometric timer was the most likely timer that had been used. You can get ones that go off of air pressure, so that' that means the bomb won't go off until the plane reaches a certain altitude and the air pressure drops to a certain amount.
Speaker: And i actually, that that lost me a little bit in the podcast. I don't know about you. it sort of they they They brought the timer up a few times, but they never really seemed to go anywhere with it. Did you get... Well, one thing they, in one of the latter episodes, they talk about how the initial theory was it was a Palestinian bomb, and the Palestinian bomb makers were known for using barometric timers. But when they tested the remains of the bomb, and they only had minute fragments of the actual bomb device itself, they found that the fragments indicated that it was Semtex timer instead.
Speaker: So that seems to be the kind of where the theory pivots from. If it's not Palestine, it must be someone else. Who else is engaging in bombing attacks and use bombs of the Semtex type? And that's where the Libyan connection comes in.
Speaker: Right. Now, it's worth pointing out that all of the evidence against McGrath was circumstantial evidence, but where we've talked about evidence plenty of times in the past, and circumstantial evidence certainly can be good enough to convict someone, and it was good enough enough for the three judges in his trial, plus the judges in his appeals.
Speaker: So that's... That kind of sets that up, the evidence that's going to be talked about a bit. So the podcast itself, it spends the first couple of episodes giving an overview of the disaster and and and talking to some of the people who investigated it, setting out the official theory that we've just talked about now. It was done by Libya, by Libyan intelligence.
Speaker: I believe it's it's it's a little bit up in the air as to whether or not it came from the top whether Gaddafi himself ordered the bombing be carried out or if it was someone below there there you know you'll find people who say oh yeah he he ordered it himself and others who say the order didn't come directly from him.
Speaker: But there wasn't most of us was Well there's a potential motive. yeah So no matter whether it was Gaddafi or someone serving Gaddafi the motive they talk about is the death of Gaddafi's daughter in 1986. Yes.
Speaker: which is I had a quick look on Wikipedia when they were talking about this stuff just to get the details of him and his family. According to Wikipedia, ah talking about this attack in 1986, himself unharmed, two of Gaddafi's sons were injured and he claimed his adopted daughter Hannah was killed, although her existence has since been questioned, which was interesting. that's a kind of world of its own particular kind.
Speaker: invented a daughter that he could claim had been murdered, I don't know. But anyway, now it is worth mentioning that Libya has paid compensation to the Lockerbie families both pre and post-Qadhafi's downfall, but always is one of those, like, we're sorry, but we're not actually officially admitting responsibility sort of diplomatic non-apology things.
Speaker: And in particular, the post-Qadhafi Libya, when Libya still had a bunch of sanctions on it, apparently some of the compensation there was conditional on the dropping of some of these sanctions. And that has allowed, more recent times, people to say, oh, yeah, no, Libya, were completely, we weren't responsible at all. We just said we were responsible so we could get them to drop the sanctions. So still a bit of a benefit there. Yeah, the argument there being... The amount of money spent on compensation is significantly less than the advantages of not having sanctions on your economy.
Speaker: So that's the first couple of episodes of the podcast. But then episode three is where they introduce Dr. Jim Swire, his daughter Flora. As played by Colin played Colin Firth. Yeah. His daughter Flora died on Pan Am 103.
Speaker: And he was the public face of a lot of the campaigning around Lockerbie. He was sort of headed up these advocacy groups for the family members of people who died in Lockerbie. He's lobbied for an independent inquiry because obviously these were the actual inquiries are carried out by the the US and UK governments. And he's also lobbied for the exoneration of al-Megrahi because he thinks al-Megrahi innocent.
Speaker: Largely because Jim Swise doesn't accept the Libyan hypothesis. He does not. It was a Palestinian plot. Indeed. So he's a very outspoken person. He's very, very definite and very certain in his own views, to a fault at times, it seems.
Speaker: In 1990, prove a point about how lax airport security continued to be, even after Lockerbie, he carried a fake bomb, which was modeled on the kind of bomb used in Lockerbie, only with ah with a lump of marzipan instead of Centex.
Speaker: ah He carried that on two flights from London to New York, then New York to Boston, just to prove a point. And as you say, last year, Colin Firth played in the miniseries Lockerbie, A Search for Truth, which was based on the 2021 book, The Lockerbie Bombing, A Father's Search for Justice, which Jim Swire co-wrote with another author.
Speaker: So yeah, Swire believes that Iran... was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, that they used the PFLPGC to bomb the Lockerbie flight, to bomb the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, in retaliation for Iran Air Flight 655. And this, i I'd heard of this one too. This was kind of a big deal at the time, wasn't it?
Speaker: Yes, it was. So this was the flight that was shot down by U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf earlier that year, precisely the 3rd of July, 1988. And this was a case where the U.S. said, oh, um yeah we've shot down a commercial airliner, but no worries. We thought it was a fighter jet. So, you know, it was a perfectly fine thing to do. Iran was not happy with this at all.
Speaker: No, no. Yeah, they they see yeah obviously obviously they said, yeah I apologise horribly. was a horrible mistake, misidentified this plane. And again, and we when we think of of of of fighter jets shooting at another plane, we imagine like dogfights like out of Top Gun or something. But I understand in most aerial confrontations that that you can't actually see the other plane. So far it's all done by radar and stuff. horizon and this is where the term fire and forget comes from you launch your missile and let it home in on the target whilst you fly away
Speaker: a So yes, Swire thinks that iran Iran is behind it and that's the motive, of retaliation for the shooting down of of Irania 655. He thinks that al-Megrahi was framed. He thinks that the US and the UK used Libya as a convenient scapegoat, sort of a political expediency, I guess. Essentially, they didn't want to call strong Iran. Didn't want to piss off Iran. was yeah Everybody wasn't very fond of the Libyans at that time. So they were just very convenient to blame for this particular act of misbehavior.
Speaker: So Dr. Swire met with al-Mughrahi numerous times and eventually befriended him, obviously because he believes that McGrahi is not responsible for his daughter's death, that he's an innocent innocent man who's been framed. I believe went to Libya and visited him on his deathbed. Also went to Libya and met with Muammar Gaddafi in person, which... um He's got some balls on him I'll give him that.
Speaker: But, yeah, he has a... It comes across, he has quite a deep distrust of the US and the UK authorities, which is why he's not at all keen to take them at the word. Part of that, I think, is because of the Helsinki warning. Do you want to go through the... Describing some kind of syndrome there. Ah, the old Helsinki warning. But this is an interesting case of a bit of misinformation.
Speaker: that was acted upon in a way which some people think was inappropriate. So essentially, 16 days before Lockerbie, the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki got a warning that there was a plan to bomb a pam Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the U.S.,
Speaker: Now, this call is now largely considered to have been a hoax, and is just coincidentally related to what happened over Lockerbie.
Speaker: But... The UK and US authorities took this call very seriously, but only in the sense they issued warnings to embassies, and thus consular staff, without ever alerting the public. So it is the case that consular staff basically cancelled or delayed their travel at this time, but the public never found out about it.
Speaker: Except, of course, eventually the public did. Yeah, so interestingly, from what I hear, this call was was judged to be a hoax because for someone who wanted to get someone else in trouble, they apparently said, oh, that this Finnish guy is going to be carrying a bomb onto the plane, and it sounds like the caller was someone with a grudge against this person and was trying to get him picked up like some sort of, like the way that that that swatting works these days. He was sort of trying to call the authorities on this person to get him into trouble.
Speaker: But yeah, it made enough of a stink at the time. President Ronald Reagan was questioned about this. How come nobody was told about the the Helsinki warning? And he basically said, look, if if if we'd if we'd gone public with it, it would have shut down air travel just all over the place for who knows how long on the back of a on the back of an anonymous phone call.
Speaker: That wasn't enough enough justification to to to make such a fuss. But it still doesn't answer. Yeah, yeah but you warned your own people, but you didn't warn the public, did you? And so I think that it's The kind of thing which does make a person Suspicious about the actions Of the authorities Yeah, it sit the impression I got from this podcast, at least, was that played a big part in in in making Jim Swire completely untrusting of anything that the US and the yeah UK authorities and intelligence agencies had to say.
Speaker: That said, I mean, from that very first episode three, I don't know about you, I i just was not convinced by Jim Swire, just listening to him just the way he talked, the way he was... He sounded like a man who'd made up his mind and was not interested in being told different and wasn't great at like, never really talked about evidence much, at least in the podcast. It was just, you know, he he knows this is true. He's, he's, he's followed his own reasoning. He never actually says did his own research, but he kind of has that sort of tone.
Speaker: what what What did you think of him to begin with? Yeah. I mean, on one level, i agree. He does come across as someone who is not going to be shifted by any additional evidence as we're going to get into towards the end of this podcast.
Speaker: At the same time, this is someone who has been looking into the story for, well, going on almost three decades now.
Speaker: And so it might well be the case that he's strident and appears obstinate, if only because he's talking with what he takes to be a Johnny-come-lately, who is going, oh, i I want to find out more about this. Could you be wrong? And he's going, yeah, I've i've been looking at this for almost 30 years now.
Speaker: I'm fairly sure I understand the evidence and the scope of the evidence more so than a BBC journalist. So, yes, he does come across as someone who isn't willing to brook any questions, but that might be the consequence of he's been questioned a lot in the past.
Speaker: Well, yes. I mean, it's certainly no matter what, you you can all you can definitely see where he's coming from and everything that he says. He talks about Occam's Razor, but I think episode three is just called Occam's Razor because he he sort of appeals to that to say it basically just makes more sense in his mind that Iran is behind it. The Iran air flight is shot down the same year. This bombing comes about. he He just sort of thinks it is appealing to Occam's razor, sort of a much simpler, less complicated theory to ah that that that Iran was behind it than Libya getting revenge on something from two years ago through other strange means. I do actually have to question, though, whether the the way he puts it to the Iran theory is a lot simpler than the Libya theory, although he doesn't. mentioned the fact that the Iran theory comes along with a massive cover-up where the UK and the US framed Libya for it, which I think if you looked at that as well actually makes the Iran theory more more complex and less simple.
Speaker: But I mean, just everyone gets Occam's razor wrong. It's not surprising that a non-philosopher going, oh, the the I take this to be the simplest explanation turns out to be wrong about whether the explanation is any more simple or more complex than a rival explanation for the same event.
Speaker: Yes, I mean, Occam's razor for a start is is just sort of a rule of thumb. it certainly is and does it doesn't Some people say Occam's razor says, oh, the simplest solution is most likely to be right, and it's no Occam's razor. anything, Occam's razor is more of just an aesthetic preference. It's just if you've got two theories that are essentially equivalent, go for the simpler one because it it looks nicer. But anyway, anyway.
Speaker: Episode four gets into, in part, some of the reason why Jim Swire believes what he does, and it does so by looking at two different people who are both presented as people who claim to know a lot about what what went on and yet maybe do not.
Speaker: So the first of these is David Benaria. He's a man who met Dr. Swire a year after the disaster and supplied him and his pressure group with with secret information from various classified sources, and it seems this information what Swire bases a lot of his views on.
Speaker: Benaria ended up being a spokesman for Swire's advocacy group. he He fronted to the press and in many cases to talk to them about what had been going on. Apparently, he served in the IDF.
Speaker: And Jim Swire, apparently... but Let's put a pin in that. Put a pin in apparently. Swire believed he was actually Mossad. And again, he never claimed to be, but supposedly there there were enough intimations and implications and things that went on that led Swire to believe he was actually Australian intelligence agent. And so that was you know where he was getting all this secret information from.
Speaker: Now, coincidentally, Miles Bonner, the journalist doing this miniseries, had heard of David Benaria before ever started looking into Lockerbie, because there was a completely different story that he'd investigated a while ago, and David Benaria's name had come up during that. And in that case, he had been told by people involved that David Benaria is someone who doesn't actually know a damn thing and just likes to pre pretend that he does.
Speaker: So this particular story was about a group of judges in the UK who were homosexuals who were letting people get away with homosexual crimes. A conspiracy of homosexual judges, essentially.
Speaker: A conspiracy c theory which turns out to be completely unwarranted. And Benaria was a big advocate of this particular unwarranted conspiracy theory.
Speaker: Yes, so in um in this podcast, Miles Bonner talks to another journalist called David Johnston, who had met David Benaria and was far from impressed with him. He talks about, I think, when they were both at Lockerbie. David Benaria claims to be one of the first, if not the first, journalist on the scene in Lockerbie.
Speaker: um He definitely was in Lockerbie, and David Johnston met him, and they were sort of chatting talking But before they like introduced themselves, Benaria made some comment to the effect that David Johnston wasn't here.
Speaker: and David Johnston said to him, so you know David Johnston, do you? And Benaria said, oh, oh yes, yeah I do. and And Johnston was essentially, well, that's weird because I am David Johnston and I've never heard of you before in my life. ah He said it with a few more swear words, as I recall in the actual podcast.
Speaker: but yeah he So he had asked around about who Ben Aria was and found that he used to be a police informant and that he had heard no indication that he had anything to do with Mossad whatsoever. He thinks to to the extent that he did have access to to classified information, he'd been getting that from his police contacts or something.
Speaker: And so David Johnston is very much of the opinion that David Benaria is just the sort of fantasist who likes to insert himself into important events by pretending he knows more than he actually does.
Speaker: They point out that David Benaria is the name he took on once after converting to Judaism. Originally, his name was Colin Yelland, nicknamed Tiny by the police who he worked with. Apparently, he had spent a couple of years in Israel, so he may have been in the IDF. I'm not sure they never really...
Speaker: verified that or not, but it's possible he was he was that he had done that, but didn't sound like he had anything to do with Mossad. Unfortunately, none of this can be verified from the firsthand because David Ben-Aria died in 2023 and Jim Swire had fallen out. He had some sort of... a Did you pick up on that? He had this falling out Swire, something to do with the Christmas card? Yeah, due due to a Christmas card, which I think featured...
Speaker: swyers son in association with some kind of plane and that then caused some kind of rift between him and benaria actually the way that swyers tells the story indicates it was very important to someone one but it's just not evidently important to them outside of that relationship Yeah, it sounded like he made some off-color comment about it. But yeah, it's very weird. The point is they fell out, a Christmas card was involved. was a case of Benaria falling out with Swire. So Swire did something which caused Benaria to get very annoyed and angry at Swire. And so it's Benaria who disappears from the story, as opposed to Swire becoming disenchanted with Benaria.
Speaker: So that's the first of the two people who claims to have secret information, but who people think maybe does not know much at all. The other person introduced in this episode is a man called Abdul Majid Jiaka.
Speaker: He was an informant for the CIA. He had the codename Puzzle Peace, and he also supplied intelligence that was actually used in the trial, I believe. Now, he worked in Malta, apparently worked for Libyan intelligence in Malta.
Speaker: He claimed to have seen both FEMA and Al-Megrahi carrying a suitcase at the airport in Malta. But during the trial, during the original trial of FEMA and Al-Megrahi, he was was basically discredited. They brought on his most recent CIA handler, and this handler was of the opinion that, that like they said about Benaria, Giaka didn't actually know nearly as much as he claimed and and had just been giving false information to the cio a CIA for money.
Speaker: He thought, yeah, Jiaka, he did seem to be involved in maybe an intelligence. He probably knew FEMA and El Megrahi, but he wasn't in and in a position to actually know anything about this bombing plot at all.
Speaker: and but the And the implication being that he just sort of gave them the names of a couple of of intelligence people who he knew. And so his um his his his information wasn't nearly that reliable.
Speaker: ah But then... In that same episode, Miles Bonner gets his hands on some redacted CIA cables that had been written about Giaka by his most recent and his previous handlers going back to his earliest history with the CIA.
Speaker: And according to these cables, it certainly sounded like... A, Giaka was definitely working for the ESO in Malta, though that's the Libyan intelligence, and that he did seem to know what he was talking about. There were apparently cables from before the Lockerbie bombing where he had talked about Al-Megrahi and Fima and Masood, the guy who's about to go on trial for bomb making, and their visits to Malta in October and December of 1988. He mentions there's one of the cables from October 88. The CIA asks him about a weapons cache that they believed...
Speaker: the ESO had in Malta and he says oh yeah he was aware that they had a case of Semtex in Malta so as Bono goes through the cables it certainly sounds like Giaca was indeed on the money and did not deserve to be discredited the way he was but he do mention that these cables would have been available during Al-Megrahi's trial and yet still the judges apparently didn't put any weight on his testimony, even though they still relied on other stuff to convict Al McGrath, although possibly that may be why FEMA was acquitted. I'm not i not quite sure on that point. No, it wasn't quite clear from the... Well, it's not quite because we don't know what the reasoning of the judges were. It does seem they put an awful lot of weight on the handler who says, oh, Jiaka is unreliable.
Speaker: And that may have swayed them to go, oh, well, these cables can't be reliable testimony. Whilst if you maybe ignore that handler and go, well, the other handlers don't make the same reliability judgment, then suddenly those cables might have had more weight.
Speaker: So, episode four was kind of a big one there, where he goes to the through these two people. Episode five, things get more interesting when he starts to look at the Senussi files. These are a bunch of secret Libyan files named after Abdullah Senussi, who was the former head of intelligence in Libya, was in fact Muammar Gaddafi's brother-in-law. And he's a guy who al-Megrahi and FEMA and Masood and Chiaka all would have worked for, but given that he was the head of that agency. Now, these files were not available during al-Megrahi's trial. These are things that only came to light after Gaddafi's downfall, after the civil war in 2011. Once Gaddafi was out and and then his regime was out, then A, a bunch of files got destroyed, but b files that didn't get destroyed ended up finding their way out of Libya um and into the West. And Bonner talks to a French journalist who had got a hold of these files and had been investigating them for several years and believed that they were genuine.
Speaker: And if they are... These files show that al-Megrahi and FEMA and Masood were all involved in plans to bomb a civilian flight. They don't specifically identify flight Pan Am 103, but they say there was, you know, we we, the Libyan intelligence agency, are planning to bomb a civilian flight, and these guys are involved in these plans. And they certainly, as he as he reads through them, they do appear to corroborate all of Jiaka's information.
Speaker: So if if they're genuine, they do seem to be quite strong evidence for the idea that Libya was indeed behind the Lockerbie bombing and not Iran. In episode five, Bonner goes and shows them to it was Al-Megrahi's, it was his former defense lawyer, wasn't it, from the trial? was, yes, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: And he he says, oh you yeah know, this if if they're genuine, then yes, this is this is interesting. Although he had a few questions, he sort of showed them to people he knew who had some experience with Libyan intelligence. And they said there were a few things about them that was a little bit odd. Apparently, they were all handwritten, whereas you would expect at least some of them to be typed. their name Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, his his main objection to them was the fact that they were all just a little bit too perfect, these documents. A, the fact that after after Gaddafi's regime falls, a whole lot of people in intelligence are destroying all the information they can, so all the horrible things they do don't come to light. And yet one of the things that survived all of this was it were documents that show exactly what you would want to show if you're trying to prove that Libya was behind it. He sort of found they were They might be genuine, but they have that ring of being a little bit too perfect to them. Yeah, this is the notion that Booting and Taylor talk about with fortuitous data, data which just conveniently confirms an official theory. And sometimes fortuitous data is fortuitous in the sense that it's been created or manipulated to confirm a hypothesis. And sometimes it's fortunate data. It's just very lucky this data has survived. And working out whether it's fortuitous or fortunate kind of requires you to make a judgment as to, there people out there who would be willing to create so-called evidence to support an official theory? Or is this literally very lucky that it survived?
Speaker: So episode five is going through the Snussey Files. Episode six, the final episode of this miniseries wraps everything up. And in this, Bonner goes and talks about Snussey Files, goes back to Jim Swire to talk to him about them, figuring, you know, like I've got this information. It could be, you know, could be a bit of a bombshell. It wasn't available to begin with. Especially given it might change your view on your good now dead friend, Al McGrath.
Speaker: So he says you know he says to Jim Swire, look, I've read these files supposedly from Libyan intelligence. If they're genuine, it does seem to be pretty strong evidence that that Libya and Al-Megrahi were behind it. And Jim Swire basically instantly says, well, you can't trust anything. If if if the CIA has touched it in any at any time, you can't trust anything from them and just... basically writes them off immediately. It's interesting that he doesn't apply the same reasoning to the intelligence that supports his own views and the fact that Benaria, who he believes is Mossad, he doesn't worry that that they're trying to feed him false information, but he does immediately assume that anything from American intelligence agencies are bad. And indeed, it was actually back in episode four that
Speaker: At one point, Bonner, having talked to various people about David Benaria and the fact that he may may not have had Mossad connections, he says to Jim Swire back then, hey, you know, look, aren't you worried that if he is Mossad, maybe Mossad's trying to point you in the wrong direction? And Swire just instantly changes the subject. I think that's when the whole falling out Christmas card thing comes up.
Speaker: which is little bit weird. e And Bonner does sort of mention he has a habit of of changing the subject any time you bring up something that wouldn't be convenient to him. but So at the end of the day, Jim Swire is not convinced, is is not in any way convinced to change his own opinion.
Speaker: And um that's that's kind of where it finishes. um So now the only thing to do is is just wait and see how Masood's trial turn out and whether or not the Sanussi files play any part in the trial, if if they're properly authenticated, if they're found to be genuine, and if they're taken to to prove Libya's involvement. But for that, we will just have to wait.
Speaker: We will. The reason why well the reason why i was looking into this is because, Em, you said, hey, this is ah you you had already listened to it and said this is something we should talk about.
Speaker: What was your interest in it from the start? So, yeah, it was one of those things. I started listening to it going, this might be worth our talking about on the podcast. And then when we get to episode four and the Benaria stuff, that was when I went, oh, this is something interesting here. Because...
Speaker: Benaria appears to be an unreliable source. As soon as you find out that he was also involved in an unwarranted conspiracy theory about homosexual judges and the fact that he appears to insert himself into stories, you end up going, all right, so what is it about this particular character and their role as a source of evidence for this particular conspiracy theory about what really happened over Lockerbie? And this is kind of fascinating because on one level you'd go, well, look, David Benaria has a history of being a police informant, of fabricating or at least being part of producing evidence for an unwarranted conspiracy theory, and that then goes, well, you should probably doubt everything else he's going to say.
Speaker: On the other hand, as Bono points out, Benaria does actually supply Swire and his group with accurate information that was classified. So Benaria basically allows leaks to get through of official information which had been classified to the advocacy group.
Speaker: And Bonner doesn't really make much of this. He simply goes, well, look, it might just be the case that disgruntled police officers officers are passing information along to an informant because they're disturbed by how the case is being laundered in the press or by the government. So he takes the most obvious hypothesis here, is that Benari is simply using contacts in the police to release information.
Speaker: But because Benaria has this kind of mysterious background, it turns out maybe he cried wolf in the past, but actually he's a reliable source when it comes to this particular situation.
Speaker: And trying to work out where you're meant to sit on the cried wolf falsely, cried wolf correctly, of course requires making a lot of judgment as to whether you think Benaria's past activity kind of invalidates everything he said subsequently, or whether you go, well, it's it's telling in one sense, but it's a different theory, and thus we have to look at the context of where he's getting the evidence from in this particular case.
Speaker: And of course, this then becomes really messy because on one hand, Jim Swire is right. The CIA, if there was a cover-up of who was really responsible for the Lockerbie disaster, then he's ripe to doubt any evidence that ends up supporting the Libyan connection.
Speaker: In that particular case, you'd end up going, well, look, the Seleucyphiles seem rather fortuitous in a pretty bad way. very conveniently, they arrive just before someone else is being put on trial, they seem to support the hypothesis that al-Mughrahi was responsible, and that Musud is also going to be responsible as well, and this seems slightly suspicious, because where were these files before, and also, why do they not look like standard Libyan intelligence files?
Speaker: And so there's a really interesting question here as to is Swire right to doubt the official theory and is he right to believe what appears to be on the face of it an unreliable source? And I think it just gets you into the really, really messy part of a conspiracy theory which is alleging a cover-up by someone, one whether that's a cover-up of who really did it or a cover-up of some other particular kind. it just It just seems like a really nice case study into the messiness of trying to work out whether you should believe a politically contentious conspiracy theory.
Speaker: Yes, yeah you've got your evidence and you've got your sources and it's not 100% clear what's a good source and what's good evidence. And is this evidence bad just because it's coming from a bad source or is it bad on its own merits? And yeah, it does get very murky.
Speaker: And we certainly don't have enough information to be able to make the kind of judgments to say what's true and what isn't. Certainly, i mean, it seemed fairly clear from the podcast that Miles Bonner did not have any any time for David Benaria and it sounded like he was quite convinced by what he read in those CIA cables and what he read in the Senussi files. But of course, he admits that, you know, that they do need to be authenticated. if if they're genuine, then they seem to be very good evidence. But we can't be certain that they're genuine at this time.
Speaker: So, yeah, apart from being a very interesting of tragic story, but it is, as you say, an interesting interesting case study and in the way evidence and things like that works in conspiracy theories.
Speaker: Indeed. Now, another podcast, and we won't cover this on this podcast, but another podcast that's probably worth listening to, which has just come out, is the BBC History podcast on the Hitler Diaries.
Speaker: Now, the Hitler Diaries aren't strictly conspiratorial, so for people who don't know what the Hitler Diaries were, many decades ago, someone claimed they'd found all 30 volumes of Adolf Hitler's diaries covering the war and the end of Hitler's life. These diaries turned out to not just be fake, but astoundingly bad fakes.
Speaker: But for a very short period of time, a lot of people in the English-speaking world believed they were real. And so this podcast basically goes into who was behind the faking of the Hitler diaries, and why did...
Speaker: At least some respected historians in the UK end up believing they were authentic, even though they looked quite obviously fabric fabricated.
Speaker: The BBC History podcast is usually very short. Each episode is only about 15 minutes in length, and that's 15 minutes in length with advertising overseas. So it's the same podcast series that did the Lord Lucan series that we looked at recently.
Speaker: earlier this year late last year time doesn't mean anything to me anymore but yes it if you are interested in finding out more about how intelligent people can be apparently conned by obvious forgeries the hitler dahari story on the bbc history podcast is well worth a listen Well, there you go. But for now, i think that's that's this episode done and dusted.
Speaker: We, of course, need to go and record a bonus episode for our beloved patrons. What do we have today? looks like It looks like a whole lot of local news by local IMU New Zealand news. It is yes. We're going to be looking at Winston Peters, engaging a bit of the old copy-paste from the US.
Speaker: We're going to touch upon a theory which I really thought had actually been dismissed over a decade ago, whether the Chinese discovered Aotoroa New Zealand first, and then we'll probably talk about a book that neither of us have read, Nicky Hager's latest work, Dirty Work.
Speaker: So... If you want to hear about that and you're a patron, good news. It's going to be in the bonus episode. It'll be winging your way very shortly. Hey, you might have listened to it before you listened to this main episode. That's the kind of topsy-turvy world we live in. from it we can't stop you.
Speaker: From beauty abusing chronology, even though we'd like to. No, one day, God willing, we will force you to listen to the things. We will have the capability to force you to listen to things in the proper order, but we just the technology just doesn't exist at this time.
Speaker: so if if Also, if you um if you want to become a patron so that we can force you to listen to our bonus episodes at the right time, just go to Betrayon.com and look for the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. be Sign yourself up.
Speaker: It's quite simple. And hello and welcome to our new patron, Zed. I'm feeling you're there responsible for, if not the Lockerbie disaster itself, some of the consequences of what happened after Lockerbie. You know what you did.
Speaker: you do. Actually, i maybe they're responsible for the the Lockerbie fiction. I i almost for some i wasn't going to... Zed. Zed. Zeist.
Speaker: Ah, whatever it goes. Highlander 2. Oh, that's even worse. i was I was tossing up whether to mention one of the main things I remember hearing about Lockerbie about was that A.J. Quinnell, the man who wrote the book Man on Fire, which has been adapted a couple of times most recently with Denzel Washington, act action film about this this guy, he's sort of a Jack Reacher type, remorseless killing machine, who then...
Speaker: guards a little girl and the little girl gets kidnapped and warring rampage revenge sort of thing. He wrote a sequel to that called The Perfect Kill where his man Creasy, I think the guy's name is, um is motivated to go on another vengeance mission after his wife and child die in the Lockerbie bombing. And so this came out only a few years after Lockerbie, I think, and people thought, dude, come on, that's a little bit, that's a bit rough tying your fictional character who A, in your previous book, found happiness with a new wife and everything, and then you decide to A, write a sequel where the happy family gets offed immediately so he can go back to being a killing machine, and the fact that you choose the method to do that is to tie it into a real-life tragedy. People thought that was in a little bit poor taste. I have read that book.
Speaker: It's a book. It's an interesting book to read. I can't remember the name of the film. It's a Hayden Christensen film about a father-son dynamic that doesn't work particularly well. And over the course of the film, they kind of reconcile, and then they both go to work, and the final shot is at the end of the cause, and it tells you the date is September the 11th, and people are going... Yes, that weird-ass film. That's just inappropriate.
Speaker: It added nothing to the story, yes, yeah other than being a twist ending in poor taste. But rather than having a twist ending in poor taste, let's have a proper ending to this podcast in perfectly good taste, which I will do through but the tried and tested and entirely conventional method of saying goodbye.
Speaker: And I'll point out that we've been talking about the Lockerbie podcast and we've been talking about Miles Bonner and at no point have we done a have done a piss poor Scottish accent because I have to say, Miles Bonner's accent is absolutely lovely. Fantastic. Yes, yes. Very good Scottish accent. yeah and Genuine, obviously. he's He's not putting one on and we shouldn't.
Speaker: But anyway, give it a listen. Goodbye. chow
Speaker: The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy features Josh Addison and Associate Professor M.R. Extentis. Our producers are a mysterious cabal of conspirators known as Tom, Philip, and another who is so mysterious that they remain anonymous.
Speaker: You can contact us electronically via podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or join our Patreon and get access to our Discord server. Or don't, I'm not your mum.
Speaker: And remember, actually, I am your mum.
