As Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi returns to a hero's welcome in Libya, Statfor look at the evidence for his guilt.
Libya: A Hero's Welcome
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
August 26, 2009
...
Like Osama bin Laden’s initial denial of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, al-Megrahi’s claims of innocence have served as ready fuel for conspiracy theorists, who claim he was framed by the U.S. and British governments. However, any conspiracy to frame al-Megrahi and his Libyan masters would have to be very wide ranging and, by necessity, reach much further than just London and Washington. For example, anyone considering such a conspiracy must also account for the fact that in 1999 a French court convicted six Libyans in absentia for the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772. The six included Abdullah al-Sanussi, Gadhafi’s brother-in-law and head of the ESO.
Getting two or more governments to cooperate on some sort of grand conspiracy to frame the Libyans and exonerate the Iranians and Syrians is hard to fathom. Such cooperation would have to involve enough people that, sooner or later, someone would spill the beans — especially considering that the Pan Am 103 saga played out over multiple U.S. administrations. As seen by the current stir over CIA interrogation programs, administrations love to make political hay by revealing the cover-ups of previous administrations. Surely, if there had been a secret ploy by the Reagan or Bush administrations to frame the Libyans, the Clinton or Obama administration would have outed it. The same principle applies to the United Kingdom, where Margaret Thatcher’s government oversaw the beginning of the Pan Am 103 investigation and Labour governments after 1997 would have had the incentive to reveal information to the contrary.
While the U.S. and British governments work closely together on a number of intelligence projects, they are frequently at odds on counterterrorism policy and foreign relations. From our personal experience, we believe that it would be very difficult to get multiple U.S. and British administrations from different political parties to work in perfect harmony to further this sort of conspiracy. Due to the UTA investigation and trial, the conspiracy would have to somehow involve the French government. While the Americans working with the British is one thing, the very idea of the Americans, British and French working in perfect harmony on any sort of project — much less a grand secret conspiracy to frame the Libyans — is simply unimaginable. It is much easier to believe that the Libyans were guilty, especially in light of the litany of other terror attacks they committed or sponsored during that era.
Had the IED in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103 exploded over the open ocean, it is very unlikely that the clothing from Malta and the fragment of the MEBO timer would have ever been recovered — think of the difficulty the French have had in locating the black box from Air France 447 in June of this year. In such a scenario, the evidence linking al-Megrahi and the Libyan government to the Pan Am bombing might never have been discovered and plausible deniability could have been maintained indefinitely.
The evidence recovered in Scotland and al-Megrahi’s eventual conviction put a dent in that deniability, but the true authors of the attack — al-Megrahi’s superiors — were never formally charged. Without al-Megrahi’s cooperation, there was no evidence to prove who ordered him to undertake the attack, though it is logical to conclude that the ESO would never undertake such a significant attack without Gadhafi’s approval.
Now that al-Megrahi has returned to Libya and is in Libyan safekeeping, there is no chance that any death-bed confession he may give will ever make it to the West. His denials will be his final words and the ambiguity and doubt those denials cast will be his legacy. In the shadowy world of clandestine operations, this is the ideal behavior for someone caught committing an operational act. He has shielded his superiors and his government to the end. From the perspective of the ESO, and Moammar Gadhafi, al-Megrahi is indeed a hero.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
NHS and alternative health care systems
(Note: am having to start a new thread because of bloody Blogger comment length restrictions. I'm musing on moving our blog to Wordpress for that reason. But anyway, here's the older NHS thread).
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NHS and alternative health care systems
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Tim Harford's fascinating book The Undercover Economist was on health care systems. Astute readers, such as the ImpDec audience, will probably be unsurprised to learn that both Britain's NHS and America's bizarre public/private health care systems are extremely poorly designed and wasteful. After a discussion as to the characteristics of systems likely to do better, Singapore was held up as an example of how to do it.
This article gives a flavour of Singapore's system:
Singapore's Health Care System: A Free Lunch You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Library of Economics and Liberty
JANUARY 13, 2008
All this is in the news because of comments from Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP, disparaging the NHS. It turns out (this is a massively underreported in the discussion) that Hannan also favours the Singaporean model. Having read his comments below, I'm firmly on his side. And I can also say, having lived in Spain and Germany, that their systems worked a damn sight better than ours, and that anyone who thinks the health care argument is between the UK and US models needs to have his head examined. Preferably after a 6 month wait, and in an MRSA infested hell-hole.
The NHS row: my final word
Daniel Hannan's blog
August 14th, 2009
...
As far as I can tell, three separate charges ae being laid against me. First, that I have insulted NHS workers. Second, that I want to impose a US-style healthcare system on Britain. Third, that I have made criticisms overseas that I wouldn’t make in Britain.
Let’s take these in order. Start with how I insulted the 1.4 million NHS workers. Here’s what I said: “I don’t want to imply that, because we have a bad system, it doesn’t contain good people. A lot of very generous, very patriotic people become doctors, even though they’re working in a system that doesn’t maximise their utility, because they have a calling to help other people.” Pretty rude, eh? I suppose I should have learned manners from the NHS’s founding spirit, Nye Bevan, who described Conservatives as “lower than vermin”.
Nor do I believe - as Peter Mandelson seems fatuously to be claiming - that Britain should adopt a US-style insurance-based system. While in the States last week, I repeatedly emphasised that I thought their set-up could be improved, that costs were too high, that litigation drove up premiums and that powers could be shifted from big insurance companies to individuals. There is a difference between saying that the US shouldn’t adopt the British model and saying that Britain should adopt the American model. Think about it for a few seconds and you’ll see that it’s quite an obvious difference.
If you want to go in for shorthand categorisation by country, the model I’ve been pushing for is one of personal healthcare accounts, a system most closely approximated in Singapore, whose people enjoy a higher level of healthcare than Britons do while paying considerably less for it. Nor can it be repeated often enough that Singapore - like every developed country - pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended. Nor will you find such a system outside the Third World: it really isn’t a British peculiarity. After ten years in the European Parliament, I have found that the only foreign admirers of the NHS are those on the serious Left. Mainstream social democrats on the Continent do not, as a rule, argue for a heathcare system funded wholly out of general taxation.
The third charge - that I should, as Labour’s Tom Watson puts it, “say it in Britain” - is the most asinine of all. I have been saying it in Britain for years. I’ve written a book all about how to shift power from bureaucracies to consumers. It’s called The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, it’s been in Amazon’s top 30 best sellers for nine months, it has become the best selling political tract in Britan and you can buy it here. In it is a lengthy chapter on healthcare which sets out how Britain compares with other countries in terms of survival rates, waiting times and so on, and proposes to replace the NHS with transferable savings acounts (which, to repeat, since some of my critics seem deliberately mulish on this point, would be met by the state for those who lacked the wherewithal).
Now you can agree or disagree with my views. But to ignore them for ten months, pick them up when they are attacked by John Prescott, and then - then - to complain that I haven’t expressed them in Britain, strikes me as a bit much. Of course, that isn’t how these rows work. Almost no one who has phoned me seems to have watched what I said in full. If they had, they would have seen that I conceded that there is majority suport for the NHS in Britain (although I believe this is partly based on the false premise that free treatment for the poor is a unique property of the British model), and that my views did not reflect those of my party leadership.
Still, I do wonder at the tone and nature of the criticism. It seems to be based on playing the man rather than the ball. My detractors say that I’m out on a limb, that I’m in the pay of the insurance companies, that I’m insulting those who have had successful treatment from the NHS. (What? How?) If supporters of the status quo were truly confident of their case, surely they would extend their logic. I mean, why shouldn’t the state allocate cars on the basis of need, with rationing by queue? Or housing? Or food? I am reminded of the debate over asylum ten years ago, or Europe ten years before that.
more...
--------------
NHS and alternative health care systems
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Tim Harford's fascinating book The Undercover Economist was on health care systems. Astute readers, such as the ImpDec audience, will probably be unsurprised to learn that both Britain's NHS and America's bizarre public/private health care systems are extremely poorly designed and wasteful. After a discussion as to the characteristics of systems likely to do better, Singapore was held up as an example of how to do it.
This article gives a flavour of Singapore's system:
Singapore's Health Care System: A Free Lunch You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Library of Economics and Liberty
JANUARY 13, 2008
All this is in the news because of comments from Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP, disparaging the NHS. It turns out (this is a massively underreported in the discussion) that Hannan also favours the Singaporean model. Having read his comments below, I'm firmly on his side. And I can also say, having lived in Spain and Germany, that their systems worked a damn sight better than ours, and that anyone who thinks the health care argument is between the UK and US models needs to have his head examined. Preferably after a 6 month wait, and in an MRSA infested hell-hole.
The NHS row: my final word
Daniel Hannan's blog
August 14th, 2009
...
As far as I can tell, three separate charges ae being laid against me. First, that I have insulted NHS workers. Second, that I want to impose a US-style healthcare system on Britain. Third, that I have made criticisms overseas that I wouldn’t make in Britain.
Let’s take these in order. Start with how I insulted the 1.4 million NHS workers. Here’s what I said: “I don’t want to imply that, because we have a bad system, it doesn’t contain good people. A lot of very generous, very patriotic people become doctors, even though they’re working in a system that doesn’t maximise their utility, because they have a calling to help other people.” Pretty rude, eh? I suppose I should have learned manners from the NHS’s founding spirit, Nye Bevan, who described Conservatives as “lower than vermin”.
Nor do I believe - as Peter Mandelson seems fatuously to be claiming - that Britain should adopt a US-style insurance-based system. While in the States last week, I repeatedly emphasised that I thought their set-up could be improved, that costs were too high, that litigation drove up premiums and that powers could be shifted from big insurance companies to individuals. There is a difference between saying that the US shouldn’t adopt the British model and saying that Britain should adopt the American model. Think about it for a few seconds and you’ll see that it’s quite an obvious difference.
If you want to go in for shorthand categorisation by country, the model I’ve been pushing for is one of personal healthcare accounts, a system most closely approximated in Singapore, whose people enjoy a higher level of healthcare than Britons do while paying considerably less for it. Nor can it be repeated often enough that Singapore - like every developed country - pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended. Nor will you find such a system outside the Third World: it really isn’t a British peculiarity. After ten years in the European Parliament, I have found that the only foreign admirers of the NHS are those on the serious Left. Mainstream social democrats on the Continent do not, as a rule, argue for a heathcare system funded wholly out of general taxation.
The third charge - that I should, as Labour’s Tom Watson puts it, “say it in Britain” - is the most asinine of all. I have been saying it in Britain for years. I’ve written a book all about how to shift power from bureaucracies to consumers. It’s called The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, it’s been in Amazon’s top 30 best sellers for nine months, it has become the best selling political tract in Britan and you can buy it here. In it is a lengthy chapter on healthcare which sets out how Britain compares with other countries in terms of survival rates, waiting times and so on, and proposes to replace the NHS with transferable savings acounts (which, to repeat, since some of my critics seem deliberately mulish on this point, would be met by the state for those who lacked the wherewithal).
Now you can agree or disagree with my views. But to ignore them for ten months, pick them up when they are attacked by John Prescott, and then - then - to complain that I haven’t expressed them in Britain, strikes me as a bit much. Of course, that isn’t how these rows work. Almost no one who has phoned me seems to have watched what I said in full. If they had, they would have seen that I conceded that there is majority suport for the NHS in Britain (although I believe this is partly based on the false premise that free treatment for the poor is a unique property of the British model), and that my views did not reflect those of my party leadership.
Still, I do wonder at the tone and nature of the criticism. It seems to be based on playing the man rather than the ball. My detractors say that I’m out on a limb, that I’m in the pay of the insurance companies, that I’m insulting those who have had successful treatment from the NHS. (What? How?) If supporters of the status quo were truly confident of their case, surely they would extend their logic. I mean, why shouldn’t the state allocate cars on the basis of need, with rationing by queue? Or housing? Or food? I am reminded of the debate over asylum ten years ago, or Europe ten years before that.
more...
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