The Attorney General Lord Goldsmith retires tommorow, with the Prime Minister whose illegal invasion of Iraq he helped justify to cabinet. Hopefully one day he will face trial at the ICC for that murderously false advice. The full title of the post is for Attorney General for England and Wales. As Scot's law is different the equivalent post here is Lord Advocate for Scotland. The Lord Advocate for Scotland was not consulted on Iraq

It is rumoured that the replacement Attorney General for England and Wales will be former Lord Advocate for Scotland Colin Boyd. Apart from the oddity of having a Scottish lawyer adjudicating on English & Welsh law, this would be an interesting appointment for several reasons.

Colin Boyd was controversially made a Labour peer while still supposedly an independent legal adviser. The then Labour First Minister of Scotland Jack McConnell was questioned by police investigating the Labour 'cash for peerages' corruption scandal.

Colin Boyd as Solictor General was responsible for prosecuting the Scottish detective constable Shirlie McKie. McKie was acquitted and the fingerprint evidence used to prosecute her was rejected at trial. She was subsequently awarded £750,000 compensation on condition of abiding by a gagging order. The later official investigation found that 'cover-up and criminality' had taken place in the Scottish Criminal Record Office. SCRO fingerprint staff were sacked, again with compensation and gagging orders, but Boyd ordered them not to be prosecuted. It was widely reported that he chose not to prosecute them to avoid embarrassing the Scottish legal system at a time when the 'Libyan bomber' Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was appealling his sentence for the Lockerbie bombing.

PanAm flight 103 was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie four days before Christmas in 1988. In 1991 Megrahi was indicted by Scottish and US judges. In 1999 Megrahi and his codefendant were arrested after being handed over by Libya. Libya didn't think Megrahi would receive a fair trial in Scotland or the US so Professor Robert Black, a legal academic educated in Lockerbie designed a special trial under UN auspices. In 2001 a panel of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands convicted al-Megrahi of the worst terrorist atrocity in British history. It was a sham trial. A UN observer Dr Hans Köchler described it as a "spectacular miscarriage of justice".

The 'architect of the trial' Professor Black says it was "the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years. I have written about this and nobody is interested. Every lawyer who has read the judgment says 'this is nonsense'. It is nonsense. It really distresses me; I won't let it go. I feel a measure of responsibility for having suggested this form of procedure and having played a part in persuading the Libyans to agree to it. And then this happens. My concern is not about his guilt or innocence, although I do believe him to be innocent. My concern is that on the evidence led at Zeist, he ought never to have been convicted. If they had been tried by an ordinary Scottish jury of 15, who were given standard instructions about how they must approach the evidence, standard instructions about reasonable doubt and what must happen if there is a reasonable doubt about the evidence, no Scottish jury could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led at the trial."

Colin Boyd led the prosecution against al-Megrahi and so had a vested interest to keep him falsely imprisoned as he has for eight years. He covered up criminality at the SCRO simply to hide this fact. He is personally responsible covering up the CIA/FBI tampering of evidence and with the SCRO tampering of evidence.

The presiding Judge was the then Lord Advocate for Scotland, conservative peer Lord (Peter) Fraser of Carmyllie. One of the key witnesses was a Maltese shopkeeper called Gauci who failed to identify Megrahi - only to identify him six months later. Most of his evidence shifted over time. Lord Fraser said much later “Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say he was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy, I don’t think he was deliberately lying but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer”. Still, he accepted his testimony and convicted Megrahi.

Now, a senior Scottish police officer has come forward to testify that evidence at the crash scene was tampered with by US security services. The bomb was supposedly wrapped in an article of baby-clothing that was charred and torn at the trial but which was reportedly recovered intact at the scene. The timer for the bomb was supposedly produced by Mebo of Switzerland. Edwin Bollier of Mebo said he had exported timers to Switzerland but of an identifiably different type to the fragment produced in court. The fragment produced as being found at the crash scene was actually one given to the FBI to test debris from explosions. This evidence was given in court but ignored.

Now, the case has broken in the mainstream media. If Colin Boyd does become Attorney General tommorow it will be remarkable timing. The day after he takes office, there will be an announcement from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission that the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi will be ruled as unsafe and a fresh appeal granted.

The implications are wide. Libya paid billions in pounds of compensation and endured years of sanctions for a crime that they didn't commit. Criminal activity at the heart of the SCRO was covered up for political reasons - and ALL convictions in Scotland that were obtained using fingerprint evidence should be quashed without delay. The Scottish justice system will be seen to be corrupt and subject to political control from Westminster and from Washington. The US will be seen to have faked the highest-profile terrorist trial in history.

I've posted about this before and have been told by discouraging anonymous posters that this is 'non-news' and shouldn't be talked about. I think this is proof if proof were needed that our security services take an active interest in Indymedia posts.

My own involvement has been minimal but this case has cut across my life. The day after the bombing I had to drive past Lockerbie on the M74. The road was jammed full and drivers were slowing to a crawl to 'rubberneck', presumably heading to gawp at the devastion, but there was no visible signs of damage from the motorway. Years later, I was employed in the Netherlands during the trial on unrelated business and put in a hotel that most of the lawyers and witnesses used. I spent two months listening to drunken bar tales of the days events - and everyone except for the US relatives claimed the trial was a farce. Later, I became a peace activist and I intimated on IndyMedia that I was investigating the trial for myself. At that point I was approached by a regular here who i believe to be MI5. After that had attended a few peace activities I suggested they accompany me to a prison-visit to Megrahi, but was told that they couldn't as they 'had a friend on the Libyan desk'. You would not believe the ongoing abuse he has caused me, but, well it is better than Greenock prison and the racist abuse Megrahi - nd his family - have suffered in Scotland.

We live in a police state, which is really just a criminal state with uniforms. So who was responsible for Lockerbie and what were their motives ? Well, the official story was Libya in response for a huge US bombing raid on Tripoli launched from English airbases.

The fall-back official story will be that it was Iran as a response for the USS Vincenses shooting down an Iranian civil airliner, flight 655.

An unreported link is that one of the victims was the UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson was due to take control of Namibia from apartheid South Africa, thus allowing SA to maintain control in Namibia. This is unreported because apartheid South Africa was an unoffical ally of the US/UK governments at the time.

However, from my personal involvement, and from witnessing the subsequent security-service activity, I do not believe any of these 'conspiracy theories'. I believe that the Lockerbie atrocity was a 'false-flag' operation conducted by either the US or UK governments. I don't know why, I don't know which government, and neither am I interested in that detail as they seem indistinguishable to me at this point.

I admit I have speculated here on three points: the next Attorney General, the appeal of Megrahi, and the true identity of the Lockerbie bombers. What I have not speculated on is the innocence al-Megrahi or the culpability of Colin Boyd.