industryterm:crash site

  • Saudi-led coalition reportedly shoots down its own drone
    https://defence-blog.com/news/saudi-led-coalition-reportedly-shoots-down-its-own-drone.html

    The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said that coalition air defense forces shot down a drone over Seiyun city.

    Colonel Turki al-Maliki, Arab Coalition spokesman, said that at 10:50 p.m. local time on Sunday, the Saudi Royal Air Defense System spotted the drone moving in the direction of a populated area in the Asir region.

    The drone was shot down before reaching its target and so far nobody had been reported injured by falling debris from the unmanned aerial vehicle, he said.

    According to a news report of the Saudi Press Agency, an Arab coalition air defense forces intercepted a Houthi drone aimed toward Saudi Arabia’s southern region of Asir.

    Some source reported that drone was shot down from the Patriot air defense system, that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were deployed in the controlled territories in Yemen as early as 2015.

    However, when was released the first images from the crash site, it turned out that the coalition air defense shot down one of the Saudi Arabian CH-4B armed reconnaissance medium-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle.

  • Pan Am Flight 103 : Robert Mueller’s 30-Year Search for Justice | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/robert-muellers-search-for-justice-for-pan-am-103

    Cet article décrit le rôle de Robert Mueller dans l’enquête historique qui a permis de dissimuler ou de justifier la plupart des batailles de la guerre non déclarée des États Unis contre l’OLP et les pays arabes qui soutenaient la lutte pour un état palestinien.

    Aux États-Unis, en Allemagne et en France le grand public ignore les actes de guerre commis par les États Unis dans cette guerre. Vu dans ce contexte on ne peut que classer le récit de cet article dans la catégorie idéologie et propagande même si les intentions et faits qu’on y apprend sont bien documentés et plausibles.

    Cette perspective transforme le contenu de cet article d’une variation sur un thème connu dans un reportage sur l’état d’âme des dirigeants étatsuniens moins fanatiques que l’équipe du président actuel.

    THIRTY YEARS AGO last Friday, on the darkest day of the year, 31,000 feet above one of the most remote parts of Europe, America suffered its first major terror attack.

    TEN YEARS AGO last Friday, then FBI director Robert Mueller bundled himself in his tan trench coat against the cold December air in Washington, his scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. Sitting on a small stage at Arlington National Cemetery, he scanned the faces arrayed before him—the victims he’d come to know over years, relatives and friends of husbands and wives who would never grow old, college students who would never graduate, business travelers and flight attendants who would never come home.

    Burned into Mueller’s memory were the small items those victims had left behind, items that he’d seen on the shelves of a small wooden warehouse outside Lockerbie, Scotland, a visit he would never forget: A teenager’s single white sneaker, an unworn Syracuse University sweatshirt, the wrapped Christmas gifts that would never be opened, a lonely teddy bear.

    A decade before the attacks of 9/11—attacks that came during Mueller’s second week as FBI director, and that awoke the rest of America to the threats of terrorism—the bombing of Pan Am 103 had impressed upon Mueller a new global threat.

    It had taught him the complexity of responding to international terror attacks, how unprepared the government was to respond to the needs of victims’ families, and how on the global stage justice would always be intertwined with geopolitics. In the intervening years, he had never lost sight of the Lockerbie bombing—known to the FBI by the codename Scotbom—and he had watched the orphaned children from the bombing grow up over the years.

    Nearby in the cemetery stood a memorial cairn made of pink sandstone—a single brick representing each of the victims, the stone mined from a Scottish quarry that the doomed flight passed over just seconds before the bomb ripped its baggage hold apart. The crowd that day had gathered near the cairn in the cold to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing.

    For a man with an affinity for speaking in prose, not poetry, a man whose staff was accustomed to orders given in crisp sentences as if they were Marines on the battlefield or under cross-examination from a prosecutor in a courtroom, Mueller’s remarks that day soared in a way unlike almost any other speech he’d deliver.

    “There are those who say that time heals all wounds. But you know that not to be true. At its best, time may dull the deepest wounds; it cannot make them disappear,” Mueller told the assembled mourners. “Yet out of the darkness of this day comes a ray of light. The light of unity, of friendship, and of comfort from those who once were strangers and who are now bonded together by a terrible moment in time. The light of shared memories that bring smiles instead of sadness. And the light of hope for better days to come.”

    He talked of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and of inspiration drawn from Lockerbie’s town crest, with its simple motto, “Forward.” He spoke of what was then a two-decade-long quest for justice, of how on windswept Scottish mores and frigid lochs a generation of FBI agents, investigators, and prosecutors had redoubled their dedication to fighting terrorism.

    Mueller closed with a promise: “Today, as we stand here together on this, the darkest of days, we renew that bond. We remember the light these individuals brought to each of you here today. We renew our efforts to bring justice down on those who seek to harm us. We renew our efforts to keep our people safe, and to rid the world of terrorism. We will continue to move forward. But we will never forget.”

    Hand bells tolled for each of the victims as their names were read aloud, 270 names, 270 sets of bells.

    The investigation, though, was not yet closed. Mueller, although he didn’t know it then, wasn’t done with Pan Am 103. Just months after that speech, the case would test his innate sense of justice and morality in a way that few other cases in his career ever have.

    ROBERT S. MUELLER III had returned from a combat tour in Vietnam in the late 1960s and eventually headed to law school at the University of Virginia, part of a path that he hoped would lead him to being an FBI agent. Unable after graduation to get a job in government, he entered private practice in San Francisco, where he found he loved being a lawyer—just not a defense attorney.

    Then—as his wife Ann, a teacher, recounted to me years ago—one morning at their small home, while the two of them made the bed, Mueller complained, “Don’t I deserve to be doing something that makes me happy?” He finally landed a job as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco and stood, for the first time, in court and announced, “Good morning your Honor, I am Robert Mueller appearing on behalf of the United States of America.” It is a moment that young prosecutors often practice beforehand, and for Mueller those words carried enormous weight. He had found the thing that made him happy.

    His family remembers that time in San Francisco as some of their happiest years; the Muellers’ two daughters were young, they loved the Bay Area—and have returned there on annual vacations almost every year since relocating to the East Coast—and Mueller found himself at home as a prosecutor.

    On Friday nights, their routine was that Ann and the two girls would pick Mueller up at Harrington’s Bar & Grill, the city’s oldest Irish pub, not far from the Ferry Building in the Financial District, where he hung out each week with a group of prosecutors, defense attorneys, cops, and agents. (One Christmas, his daughter Cynthia gave him a model of the bar made out of Popsicle sticks.) He balanced that family time against weekends and trainings with the Marines Corps Reserves, where he served for more than a decade, until 1980, eventually rising to be a captain.

    Over the next 15 years, he rose through the ranks of the San Francisco US attorney’s office—an office he would return to lead during the Clinton administration—and then decamped to Massachusetts to work for US attorney William Weld in the 1980s. There, too, he shined and eventually became acting US attorney when Weld departed at the end of the Reagan administration. “You cannot get the words straight arrow out of your head,” Weld told me, speaking of Mueller a decade ago. “The agencies loved him because he knew his stuff. He didn’t try to be elegant or fancy, he just put the cards on the table.”

    In 1989, an old high school classmate, Robert Ross, who was chief of staff to then attorney general Richard Thornburgh, asked Mueller to come down to Washington to help advise Thornburgh. The offer intrigued Mueller. Ann protested the move—their younger daughter Melissa wanted to finish high school in Massachusetts. Ann told her husband, “We can’t possibly do this.” He replied, his eyes twinkling, “You’re right, it’s a terrible time. Well, why don’t we just go down and look at a few houses?” As she told me, “When he wants to do something, he just revisits it again and again.”

    For his first two years at so-called Main Justice in Washington, working under President George H.W. Bush, the family commuted back and forth from Boston to Washington, alternating weekends in each city, to allow Melissa to finish school.

    Washington gave Mueller his first exposure to national politics and cases with geopolitical implications; in September 1990, President Bush nominated him to be assistant attorney general, overseeing the Justice Department’s entire criminal division, which at that time handled all the nation’s terrorism cases as well. Mueller would oversee the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, mob boss John Gotti, and the controversial investigation into a vast money laundering scheme run through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals

    None of his cases in Washington, though, would affect him as much as the bombing of Pan Am 103.

    THE TIME ON the clocks in Lockerbie, Scotland, read 7:04 pm, on December 21, 1988, when the first emergency call came into the local fire brigade, reporting what sounded like a massive boiler explosion. It was technically early evening, but it had been dark for hours already; that far north, on the shortest day of the year, daylight barely stretched to eight hours.

    Soon it became clear something much worse than a boiler explosion had unfolded: Fiery debris pounded the landscape, plunging from the sky and killing 11 Lockerbie residents. As Mike Carnahan told a local TV reporter, “The whole sky was lit up with flames. It was actually raining, liquid fire. You could see several houses on the skyline with the roofs totally off and all you could see was flaming timbers.”

    At 8:45 pm, a farmer found in his field the cockpit of Pan Am 103, a Boeing 747 known as Clipper Maid of the Seas, lying on its side, 15 of its crew dead inside, just some of the 259 passengers and crew killed when a bomb had exploded inside the plane’s cargo hold. The scheduled London to New York flight never even made it out of the UK.

    It had taken just three seconds for the plane to disintegrate in the air, though the wreckage took three long minutes to fall the five miles from the sky to the earth; court testimony later would examine how passengers had still been alive as they fell. Nearly 200 of the passengers were American, including 35 students from Syracuse University returning home from a semester abroad. The attack horrified America, which until then had seen terror touch its shores only occasionally as a hijacking went awry; while the US had weathered the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, attacks almost never targeted civilians.

    The Pan Am 103 bombing seemed squarely aimed at the US, hitting one of its most iconic brands. Pan Am then represented America’s global reach in a way few companies did; the world’s most powerful airline shuttled 19 million passengers a year to more than 160 countries and had ferried the Beatles to their US tour and James Bond around the globe on his cinematic missions. In a moment of hubris a generation before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the airline had even opened a “waiting list” for the first tourists to travel to outer space. Its New York headquarters, the Pan Am building, was the world’s largest commercial building and its terminal at JFK Airport the biggest in the world.

    The investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103 began immediately, as police and investigators streamed north from London by the hundreds; chief constable John Boyd, the head of the local police, arrived at the Lockerbie police station by 8:15 pm, and within an hour the first victim had been brought in: A farmer arrived in town with the body of a baby girl who had fallen from the sky. He’d carefully placed her in the front seat of his pickup truck.

    An FBI agent posted in London had raced north too, with the US ambassador, aboard a special US Air Force flight, and at 2 am, when Boyd convened his first senior leadership meeting, he announced, “The FBI is here, and they are fully operational.” By that point, FBI explosives experts were already en route to Scotland aboard an FAA plane; agents would install special secure communications equipment in Lockerbie and remain on site for months.

    Although it quickly became clear that a bomb had targeted Pan Am 103—wreckage showed signs of an explosion and tested positive for PETN and RDX, two key ingredients of the explosive Semtex—the investigation proceeded with frustrating slowness. Pan Am’s records were incomplete, and it took days to even determine the full list of passengers. At the same time, it was the largest crime scene ever investigated—a fact that remains true today.

    Investigators walked 845 square miles, an area 12 times the size of Washington, DC, and searched so thoroughly that they recovered more than 70 packages of airline crackers and ultimately could reconstruct about 85 percent of the fuselage. (Today, the wreckage remains in an English scrapyard.) Constable Boyd, at his first press conference, told the media, “This is a mammoth inquiry.”

    On Christmas Eve, a searcher found a piece of a luggage pallet with signs of obvious scorching, which would indicate the bomb had been in the luggage compartment below the passenger cabin. The evidence was rushed to a special British military lab—one originally created to investigate the Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and kill King James I in 1605.

    When the explosive tests came back a day later, the British government called the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for combating terrorism, L. Paul Bremer III (who would go on to be President George W. Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion of Iraq), and officially delivered the news that everyone had anticipated: Pan Am 103 had been downed by a bomb.

    Meanwhile, FBI agents fanned out across the country. In New York, special agent Neil Herman—who would later lead the FBI’s counterterrorism office in New York in the run up to 9/11—was tasked with interviewing some of the victims’ families; many of the Syracuse students on board had been from the New York region. One of the mothers he interviewed hadn’t heard from the government in the 10 days since the attack. “It really struck me how ill-equipped we were to deal with this,” Herman told me, years later. “Multiply her by 270 victims and families.” The bombing underscored that the FBI and the US government had a lot to learn in responding and aiding victims in a terror attack.

    INVESTIGATORS MOVED TOWARD piecing together how a bomb could have been placed on board; years before the 9/11 attack, they discounted the idea of a suicide bomber aboard—there had never been a suicide attack on civil aviation at that point—and so focused on one of two theories: The possibility of a “mule,” an innocent passenger duped into carrying a bomb aboard, or an “inside man,” a trusted airport or airline employee who had smuggled the fatal cargo aboard. The initial suspect list stretched to 1,200 names.

    Yet even reconstructing what was on board took an eternity: Evidence pointed to a Japanese manufactured Toshiba cassette recorder as the likely delivery device for the bomb, and then, by the end of January, investigators located pieces of the suitcase that had held the bomb. After determining that it was a Samsonite bag, police and the FBI flew to the company’s headquarters in the United States and narrowed the search further: The bag, they found, was a System 4 Silhouette 4000 model, color “antique-copper,” a case and color made for only three years, 1985 to 1988, and sold only in the Middle East. There were a total of 3,500 such suitcases in circulation.

    By late spring, investigators had identified 14 pieces of luggage inside the target cargo container, known as AVE4041; each bore tell-tale signs of the explosion. Through careful retracing of how luggage moved through the London airport, investigators determined that the bags on the container’s bottom row came from passengers transferring in London. The bags on the second and third row of AVE4041 had been the last bags loaded onto the leg of the flight that began in Frankfurt, before the plane took off for London. None of the baggage had been X-rayed or matched with passengers on board.

    The British lab traced clothing fragments from the wreckage that bore signs of the explosion and thus likely originated in the bomb-carrying suitcase. It was an odd mix: Two herring-bone skirts, men’s pajamas, tartan trousers, and so on. The most promising fragment was a blue infant’s onesie that, after fiber analysis, was conclusively determined to have been inside the explosive case, and had a label saying “Malta Trading Company.” In March, two detectives took off for Malta, where the manufacturer told them that 500 such articles of clothing had been made and most sent to Ireland, while the rest went locally to Maltese outlets and others to continental Europe.

    As they dug deeper, they focused on bag B8849, which appeared to have come off Air Malta Flight 180—Malta to Frankfurt—on December 21, even though there was no record of one of that flight’s 47 passengers transferring to Pan Am 103.

    Investigators located the store in Malta where the suspect clothing had been sold; the British inspector later recorded in his statement, “[Store owner] Anthony Gauci interjected and stated that he could recall selling a pair of the checked trousers, size 34, and three pairs of the pajamas to a male person.” The investigators snapped to attention—after nine months did they finally have a suspect in their sights? “[Gauci] informed me that the man had also purchased the following items: one imitation Harris Tweed jacket; one woolen cardigan; one black umbrella; one blue colored ‘Baby Gro’ with a motif described by the witness as a ‘sheep’s face’ on the front; and one pair of gents’ brown herring-bone material trousers, size 36.”

    Game, set, match. Gauci had perfectly described the clothing fragments found by RARDE technicians to contain traces of explosive. The purchase, Gauci went on to explain, stood out in his mind because the customer—whom Gauci tellingly identified as speaking the “Libyan language”—had entered the store on November 23, 1988, and gathered items without seeming to care about the size, gender, or color of any of it.

    As the investigation painstakingly proceeded into 1989 and 1990, Robert Mueller arrived at Main Justice; the final objects of the Lockerbie search wouldn’t be found until the spring of 1990, just months before Mueller took over as assistant attorney general of the criminal division in September.

    The Justice Department that year was undergoing a series of leadership changes; the deputy attorney general, William Barr, became acting attorney general midyear as Richard Thornburgh stepped down to run for Senate back in his native Pennsylvania. President Bush then nominated Barr to take over as attorney general officially. (Earlier this month Barr was nominated by President Trump to become attorney general once again.)

    The bombing soon became one of the top cases on Mueller’s desk. He met regularly with Richard Marquise, the FBI special agent heading Scotbom. For Mueller, the case became personal; he met with victims’ families and toured the Lockerbie crash site and the investigation’s headquarters. He traveled repeatedly to the United Kingdom for meetings and walked the fields of Lockerbie himself. “The Scots just did a phenomenal job with the crime scene,” he told me, years ago.

    Mueller pushed the investigators forward constantly, getting involved in the investigation at a level that a high-ranking Justice Department official almost never does. Marquise turned to him in one meeting, after yet another set of directions, and sighed, “Geez, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you want to be FBI director.”

    The investigation gradually, carefully, zeroed in on Libya. Agents traced a circuit board used in the bomb to a similar device seized in Africa a couple of years earlier used by Libyan intelligence. An FBI-created database of Maltese immigration records even showed that a man using the same alias as one of those Libyan intelligence officers had departed from Malta on October 19, 1988—just two months before the bombing.

    The circuit board also helped makes sense of an important aspect of the bombing: It controlled a timer, meaning that the bomb was not set off by a barometric trigger that registers altitude. This, in turn, explained why the explosive baggage had lain peacefully in the jet’s hold as it took off and landed repeatedly.

    Tiny letters on the suspect timer said “MEBO.” What was MEBO? In the days before Google, searching for something called “Mebo” required going country to country, company to company. There were no shortcuts. The FBI, MI5, and CIA were, after months of work, able to trace MEBO back to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier, adding a fifth country to the ever-expanding investigative circle.

    From Meister et Bollier, they learned that the company had provided 20 prototype timers to the Libyan government and the company helped ID their contact as a Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who looked like the sketch of the Maltese clothing shopper. Then, when the FBI looked at its database of Maltese immigration records, they found that Al Megrahi had been present in Malta the day the clothing was purchased.

    Marquise sat down with Robert Mueller and the rest of the prosecutorial team and laid out the latest evidence. Mueller’s orders were clear—he wanted specific suspects and he wanted to bring charges. As he said, “Proceed toward indictment.” Let’s get this case moving.

    IN NOVEMBER 1990, Marquise was placed in charge of all aspects of the investigation and assigned on special duty to the Washington Field Office and moved to a new Scotbom task force. The field offce was located far from the Hoover building, in a run-down neighborhood known by the thoroughly unromantic moniker of Buzzard Point.

    The Scotbom task force had been allotted three tiny windowless rooms with dark wood paneling, which were soon covered floor-to-ceiling with 747 diagrams, crime scene photographs, maps, and other clues. By the door of the office, the team kept two photographs to remind themselves of the stakes: One, a tiny baby shoe recovered from the fields of Lockerbie; the other, a picture of the American flag on the tail of Pan Am 103. This was the first major attack on the US and its civilians. Whoever was responsible couldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

    With representatives from a half-dozen countries—the US, Britain, Scotland, Sweden, Germany, France, and Malta—now sitting around the table, putting together a case that met everyone’s evidentiary standards was difficult. “We talked through everything, and everything was always done to the higher standard,” Marquise says. In the US, for instance, the legal standard for a photo array was six photos; in Scotland, though, it was 12. So every photo array in the investigation had 12 photos to ensure that the IDs could be used in a British court.

    The trail of evidence so far was pretty clear, and it all pointed toward Libya. Yet there was still much work to do prior to an indictment. A solid hunch was one thing. Having evidence that would stand up in court and under cross-examination was something else entirely.

    As the case neared an indictment, the international investigators and prosecutors found themselves focusing at their gatherings on the fine print of their respective legal code and engaging in deep, philosophical-seeming debates: “What does murder mean in your statute? Huh? I know what murder means: I kill you. Well, then you start going through the details and the standards are just a little different. It may entail five factors in one country, three in another. Was Megrahi guilty of murder? Depends on the country.”

    At every meeting, the international team danced around the question of where a prosecution would ultimately take place. “Jurisdiction was an eggshell problem,” Marquise says. “It was always there, but no one wanted to talk about it. It was always the elephant in the room.”

    Mueller tried to deflect the debate for as long as possible, arguing there was more investigation to do first. Eventually, though, he argued forcefully that the case should be tried in the US. “I recognize that Scotland has significant equities which support trial of the case in your country,” he said in one meeting. “However, the primary target of this act of terrorism was the United States. The majority of the victims were Americans, and the Pan American aircraft was targeted precisely because it was of United States registry.”

    After one meeting, where the Scots and Americans debated jurisdiction for more than two hours, the group migrated over to the Peasant, a restaurant near the Justice Department, where, in an attempt to foster good spirits, it paid for the visiting Scots. Mueller and the other American officials each had to pay for their own meals.

    Mueller was getting ready to move forward; the federal grand jury would begin work in early September. Prosecutors and other investigators were already preparing background, readying evidence, and piecing together information like the names and nationalities of all the Lockerbie victims so that they could be included in the forthcoming indictment.

    There had never been any doubt in the US that the Pan Am 103 bombing would be handled as a criminal matter, but the case was still closely monitored by the White House and the National Security Council.

    The Reagan administration had been surprised in February 1988 by the indictment on drug charges of its close ally Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, and a rule of thumb had been developed: Give the White House a heads up anytime you’re going to indict a foreign agent. “If you tag Libya with Pan Am 103, that’s fair to say it’s going to disrupt our relationship with Libya,” Mueller deadpans. So Mueller would head up to the Cabinet Room at the White House, charts and pictures in hand, to explain to President Bush and his team what Justice had in mind.

    To Mueller, the investigation underscored why such complex investigations needed a law enforcement eye. A few months after the attack, he sat through a CIA briefing pointing toward Syria as the culprit behind the attack. “That’s always struck with me as a lesson in the difference between intelligence and evidence. I always try to remember that,” he told me, back when he was FBI director. “It’s a very good object lesson about hasty action based on intelligence. What if we had gone and attacked Syria based on that initial intelligence? Then, after the attack, it came out that Libya had been behind it? What could we have done?”

    Marquise was the last witness for the federal grand jury on Friday, November 8, 1991. Only in the days leading up to that testimony had prosecutors zeroed in on Megrahi and another Libyan officer, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah; as late as the week of the testimony, they had hoped to pursue additional indictments, yet the evidence wasn’t there to get to a conviction.

    Mueller traveled to London to meet with the Peter Fraser, the lord advocate—Scotland’s top prosecutor—and they agreed to announce indictments simultaneously on November 15, 1991. Who got their hands on the suspects first, well, that was a question for later. The joint indictment, Mueller believed, would benefit both countries. “It adds credibility to both our investigations,” he says.

    That coordinated joint, multi-nation statement and indictment would become a model that the US would deploy more regularly in the years to come, as the US and other western nations have tried to coordinate cyber investigations and indictments against hackers from countries like North Korea, Russia, and Iran.

    To make the stunning announcement against Libya, Mueller joined FBI director William Sessions, DC US attorney Jay Stephens, and attorney general William Barr.

    “We charge that two Libyan officials, acting as operatives of the Libyan intelligence agency, along with other co-conspirators, planted and detonated the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103,” Barr said. “I have just telephoned some of the families of those murdered on Pan Am 103 to inform them and the organizations of the survivors that this indictment has been returned. Their loss has been ever present in our minds.”

    At the same time, in Scotland, investigators there were announcing the same indictments.

    At the press conference, Barr listed a long set of names to thank—the first one he singled out was Mueller’s. Then, he continued, “This investigation is by no means over. It continues unabated. We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice. We have no higher priority.”

    From there, the case would drag on for years. ABC News interviewed the two suspects in Libya later that month; both denied any responsibility for the bombing. Marquise was reassigned within six months; the other investigators moved along too.

    Mueller himself left the administration when Bill Clinton became president, spending an unhappy year in private practice before rejoining the Justice Department to work as a junior homicide prosecutor in DC under then US attorney Eric Holder; Mueller, who had led the nation’s entire criminal division was now working side by side with prosecutors just a few years out of law school, the equivalent of a three-star military general retiring and reenlisting as a second lieutenant. Clinton eventually named Mueller the US attorney in San Francisco, the office where he’d worked as a young attorney in the 1970s.

    THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of the bombing came and went without any justice. Then, in April 1999, prolonged international negotiations led to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi turning over the two suspects; the international economic sanctions imposed on Libya in the wake of the bombing were taking a toll on his country, and the leader wanted to put the incident behind him.

    The final negotiated agreement said that the two men would be tried by a Scottish court, under Scottish law, in The Hague in the Netherlands. Distinct from the international court there, the three-judge Scottish court would ensure that the men faced justice under the laws of the country where their accused crime had been committed.

    Allowing the Scots to move forward meant some concessions by the US. The big one was taking the death penalty, prohibited in Scotland, off the table. Mueller badly wanted the death penalty. Mueller, like many prosecutors and law enforcement officials, is a strong proponent of capital punishment, but he believes it should be reserved for only egregious crimes. “It has to be especially heinous, and you have to be 100 percent sure he’s guilty,” he says. This case met that criteria. “There’s never closure. If there can’t be closure, there should be justice—both for the victims as well as the society at large,” he says.

    An old US military facility, Kamp Van Zeist, was converted to an elaborate jail and courtroom in The Hague, and the Dutch formally surrendered the two Libyans to Scottish police. The trial began in May 2000. For nine months, the court heard testimony from around the world. In what many observers saw as a political verdict, Al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was found not guilty.

    With barely 24 hours notice, Marquise and victim family members raced from the United States to be in the courtroom to hear the verdict. The morning of the verdict in 2001, Mueller was just days into his tenure as acting deputy US attorney general—filling in for the start of the George W. Bush administration in the department’s No. 2 role as attorney general John Ashcroft got himself situated.

    That day, Mueller awoke early and joined with victims’ families and other officials in Washington, who watched the verdict announcement via a satellite hookup. To him, it was a chance for some closure—but the investigation would go on. As he told the media, “The United States remains vigilant in its pursuit to bring to justice any other individuals who may have been involved in the conspiracy to bring down Pan Am Flight 103.”

    The Scotbom case would leave a deep imprint on Mueller; one of his first actions as FBI director was to recruit Kathryn Turman, who had served as the liaison to the Pan Am 103 victim families during the trial, to head the FBI’s Victim Services Division, helping to elevate the role and responsibility of the FBI in dealing with crime victims.

    JUST MONTHS AFTER that 20th anniversary ceremony with Mueller at Arlington National Cemetery, in the summer of 2009, Scotland released a terminally ill Megrahi from prison after a lengthy appeals process, and sent him back to Libya. The decision was made, the Scottish minister of justice reported, on “compassionate grounds.” Few involved on the US side believed the terrorist deserved compassion. Megrahi was greeted as a hero on the tarmac in Libya—rose petals, cheering crowds. The US consensus remained that he should rot in prison.

    The idea that Megrahi could walk out of prison on “compassionate” ground made a mockery of everything that Mueller had dedicated his life to fighting and doing. Amid a series of tepid official condemnations—President Obama labeled it “highly objectionable”—Mueller fired off a letter to Scottish minister Kenny MacAskill that stood out for its raw pain, anger, and deep sorrow.

    “Over the years I have been a prosecutor, and recently as the Director of the FBI, I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors, since only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision,” Mueller began. “Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case. I do so because I am familiar with the facts, and the law, having been the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991. And I do so because I am outraged at your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of ‘compassion.’”

    That nine months after the 20th anniversary of the bombing, the only person behind bars for the bombing would walk back onto Libyan soil a free man and be greeted with rose petals left Mueller seething.

    “Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice. Indeed your action makes a mockery of the rule of law. Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world,” Mueller wrote. “You could not have spent much time with the families, certainly not as much time as others involved in the investigation and prosecution. You could not have visited the small wooden warehouse where the personal items of those who perished were gathered for identification—the single sneaker belonging to a teenager; the Syracuse sweatshirt never again to be worn by a college student returning home for the holidays; the toys in a suitcase of a businessman looking forward to spending Christmas with his wife and children.”

    For Mueller, walking the fields of Lockerbie had been walking on hallowed ground. The Scottish decision pained him especially deeply, because of the mission and dedication he and his Scottish counterparts had shared 20 years before. “If all civilized nations join together to apply the rules of law to international terrorists, certainly we will be successful in ridding the world of the scourge of terrorism,” he had written in a perhaps too hopeful private note to the Scottish Lord Advocate in 1990.

    Some 20 years later, in an era when counterterrorism would be a massive, multibillion dollar industry and a buzzword for politicians everywhere, Mueller—betrayed—concluded his letter with a decidedly un-Mueller-like plea, shouted plaintively and hopelessly across the Atlantic: “Where, I ask, is the justice?”

    #USA #Libye #impérialisme #terrorisme #histoire #CIA #idéologie #propagande

  • Detailed images of Schiaparelli and its descent hardware on Mars / ExoMars / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA
    http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/ExoMars/Detailed_images_of_Schiaparelli_and_its_descent_hardware_on_Mars

    A high-resolution image taken by a NASA Mars orbiter this week reveals further details of the area where the ExoMars Schiaparelli module ended up following its descent on 19 October.
    […]
    The high-resolution images show a central dark spot, 2.4 m across, consistent with the crater made by a 300 kg object impacting at a few hundred km/h.

    The crater is predicted to be about 50 cm deep and more detail may be visible in future images.

    The asymmetric surrounding dark markings are more difficult to interpret. In the case of a meteoroid hitting the surface at 40 000­–80 000 km/h, asymmetric debris surrounding a crater would typically point to a low incoming angle, with debris thrown out in the direction of travel.

    But Schiaparelli was travelling considerably slower and, according to the normal timeline, should have been descending almost vertically after slowing down during its entry into the atmosphere from the west.

    It is possible the hydrazine propellant tanks in the module exploded preferentially in one direction upon impact, throwing debris from the planet’s surface in the direction of the blast, but more analysis is needed to explore this idea further

    An additional long dark arc is seen to the upper right of the dark patch but is currently unexplained. It may also be linked to the impact and possible explosion.

    Finally, there are a few white dots in the image close to the impact site, too small to be properly resolved in this image. These may or may not be related to the impact – they could just be ‘noise’. Further imaging may help identify their origin.

  • Ukraine helicopter ’may have been human smuggling’ - BBC News
    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34812405

    A Ukrainian helicopter has crashed in Slovakia, killing six people, Slovak officials say.
    They say the Mi-2 turbine-powered helicopter went down near Slovakia’s border with Ukraine, the eastern frontier of the European Union.
    Reports in Slovak media say the pilot may have been flying dangerously low in foggy weather to avoid being detected.
    Slovak and Ukrainian officials say the helicopter may have been involved in smuggling people across the border.
    Slovak Interior Minister Robert Kalinak was quoted by the novyny.sk website as saying illegal migrants could have been on board the helicopter.
    Ukraine’s border guard later said in a statement (in Ukrainian) that two Ukrainian nationals and four people from south-eastern Asia were on board.
    It said the helicopter was likely used to transport illegal migrants.
    Local officials say they found the bodies at the crash site near the village of Stretavka in Michalovce district on Friday.

  • Possible BUK missile parts found at MH17 crash site - CBS News
    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/possible-buk-missile-parts-found-at-malaysia-airlines-flight-17-ukraine-cra

    Dutch prosecutors have said for the first time that they have found possible parts of a BUK missile system at the site in eastern Ukraine where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was brought down last year, killing all 298 people on board.

    In a joint statement with the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) on Tuesday, prosecutors said the parts “are of particular interest to the criminal investigation as they can possibly provide more information about who was involved in the crash of MH17.

    They are examining several parts of the possible BUK missile system that could be linked to the downing of the plane, and they will enlist the help of international experts to establish if there is a connection.

    Prosecutors have previously said they are treating a missile strike as the most likely scenario for the downing of Flight MH17, which crashed over territory held by pro-Russian rebels in July 2014 while en route from Amsterdam to Malaysia, but Tuesday’s announcement was the first time they had described possible physical evidence of a missile.

    However, they cautioned that the conclusion cannot yet be drawn “that there is a causal connection between the discovered parts and the crash of flight MH17,” the statement said.

  • Dutch Experts Visits #MH17 Ukraine Crash Site
    http://www.rferl.org/content/dutch-experts-visit-mh17-ukraine-crash-site/26912046.html

    Dutch experts have returned to Ukraine to probe the crash site of a passenger jet, including visiting a location previously considered unsafe because of fighting with pro-Russian separatists.

    The Dutch Justice Ministry said on March 20 that a 12-person team consisting of defense and police officers would remain in the area until March 28.

  • More proof that a Russian BUK missile shot down passenger plane MH17 - Business Insider
    http://uk.businessinsider.com/r-fragment-from-mh17-crash-site-supports-missile-theory-dutch-tv


    A Dutch journalist holds a small fragment from the MH17 crash site.
    Screen grab from RtlNieuws

    A metal fragment from the crash site of the downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 matches a Russian surface-to-air BUK rocket, reports Dutch broadcaster RTLNieuws on Thursday. 
    (…)
    The fragment was recovered by a Dutch journalist near the area where the plane flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17th, killing all 298 passengers and crew.

    Dutch broadcaster RTLNieuws said it had had the shrapnel tested by international forensic experts, including defense analysts IHS Jane’s in London, who said it matched the explosive charge of a Buk a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile system.

  • MH17 Wreckage Being Removed From Rebel-Controlled Eastern Ukraine
    http://www.ibtimes.com/mh17-wreckage-being-removed-rebel-controlled-eastern-ukraine-1724428

    The wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is being collected and removed from the crash site in rebel-held Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

    In a statement, the Dutch Safety Board, which is investigating the cause of the crash, said that the wreckage will be transported to the Netherlands, where investigators intend to reconstruct a section of the aircraft.

    Alexander Kostrubitsky, the head of the emergency services in the rebel-held areas of the Donetsk region, told the Associated Press that the operation could take around 10 days. The debris is being sawn into smaller pieces to facilitate its transportation, Kostrubitsky said.

    L’article est illustré d’une photo légendée par la dépêche Reuters.


    Local workers carry wreckage from the downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 at the site of the plane crash near the village of Hrabove (Grabovo) in Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine November 16, 2014. Local emergency services have begun collecting parts of the wreckage from its crash site in the middle of the conflict zone, Dutch air accident investigators said on Sunday. Dutch inspectors had hoped to collect the parts themselves, following the downing of the flight on July 17 that killed 298 people, two thirds of them Dutch citizens. But they remain concerned about the safety of their staff in the rebel-held conflict zone, and so have decided to work with local services following an initial focus on finding human remains and belongings. REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

    L’article de Reuters, lui, est totalement incompréhensible.

    Il commence par la reprise du texte ci-dessus (la dépêche) en 3 paragraphes puis enchaine en mélangeant absolument tout : la responsabilité de l’attaque, l’action de la délégation néerlandaise,… On finit par ne plus savoir si ce sont les services ukrainiens ou les locaux de la DPR qui ramassent les morceaux de l’épave.
    (je ne reprends que ce qui concerne la délégation)

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/16/us-ukraine-crisis-mh-idUSKCN0J00AA20141116

    The Dutch Safety Board said it had commissioned Ukraine’s State Emergency Service to collect parts of the wreckage from the crash site on its behalf.

    The air safety inspectorate intends to reconstruct parts of the airliner in the Netherlands in order to ascertain the cause of the crash.

    “The crash area is large, so we do not intend to recover all the wreckage,” said Safety Board spokesman Wim van der Weegen. “We’ve got a specific number of items we would like to recover.”

  • OSCE sees no obstacles for Dutch experts’ work at Malaysian Boeing crash site
    http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/osce-sees-no-obstacles-for-dutch-experts-work-at-malaysian-boeing-crash-si

    Monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have not observed any danger to Dutch experts working at the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine, Deputy Chief Monitor of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Alexander Hug, told reporters on Nov. 14.

    Les enquêteurs sont de nouveau sur le site depuis le mardi 11 novembre.

    Accident investigators return to MH17 crash site - DutchNews.nl
    http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2014/11/accident-investigators-return-to-mh17-crash-site.php

    A team of between 10 and 15 Dutch accident investigators returned on Tuesday to the site of the MH17 Malaysia Airlines crash in eastern Ukraine, according to broadcasters Nos and RTL.

    The investigators will continue searching the crash site and recovering the remains of the Boeing aircraft which came down in July killing all 298 people on board.

    However, the safety research institute told news site nu.nl that they will only confirm the news later on Tuesday if the work actually goes ahead.

    Pour l’instant, les difficultés (non précisées) rencontrées par la nouvelle équipe provenaient des « Ukrainiens ».

    MH17 investigation team in Ukraine, unable to recover wreckage - DutchNews.nl
    http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2014/11/mh17-investigation-team-in-ukraine-unable-to-recover-wreckage.php

    A team of accident investigators has arrived at the site of the MH17 plane crash in eastern Ukraine but will not be able to start recovery of the wreckage of the plane.

    Broadcaster Nos reported earlier on Tuesday that the team of 10 to 15 investigators was on its way from Donetsk in order to begin clearing the wreckage, but is now reporting that there is disagreement between the Dutch and the Ukrainians. What is causing the disagreement is unclear, Nos says.

    According to Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, head of the Dutch mission, there is no agreement between the investigators and the Ukrainians at the moment.

  • Dutch Experts Arrive in Donetsk to Remove #MH17 Wreckage: DPR Deputy Prime Minister | World | RIA Novosti
    http://en.ria.ru/world/20141104/195115943/Dutch-Experts-Arrive-in-Donetsk-to-Remove-MH17-Wreckage.html

    A team of Dutch experts has arrived in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, to conduct preparations for removing the wreckage of the Malaysian Boeing flight MH17 which has crashed on July 17, Donetsk Deputy Prime Minister told RIA Novosti Tuesday.
    Three Dutch experts have arrived to remove the wreckage of Boeing, which still remains near the town of Torez. The first consultation with the representatives of our Emergencies Ministry, Ministry of Transport and police was held today. The experts also visited the crash site,” Andrei Purgin, who also takes part in the talks, said, adding that the reasons of the crash are not being discussed.
    Purgin added that currently the experts are inventorying and measuring the wreckage to find out what kind of transport is needed to take them away from the crash site. They will also determine the route. “Likely [they will take the wreckage] to Netherlands via Kharkov,” Purgin said.
    According to Purgin, Malaysia passed on the right to conduct operations with the plane’s fragments to the Dutch side even though the aircraft belonged to Malaysia. “They got offended at Kiev, because Ukraine kept the Malaysian experts in a hotel for three weeks telling them how dangerous it is to come here,” suggested Purgin. He estimates that the MH17 wreckage will be removed from the crash site “in two or three weeks.”

  • Russia Submits Questions on #MH17 Crash to UN Security Council | World | RIA Novosti
    http://en.ria.ru/world/20140929/193439431/Russia-Submits-Questions-on-MH17-Crash-to-UN-Security-Council.html

    Russia submitted to the United Nation’s Security Council a list of questions that it demands to clarify during the investigation of the Malaysian MH17 flight crash in southeastern Ukraine, the letter released on the UN’s website on Monday said.
    According to the letter dated 19 September 2014, the first priority is to “lay out the pieces of the aircraft structure and analyze the damage to the pieces and possible causes of that damage,” which is a “customary and mandatory” part of the investigation.
    Another urgent issues, listed in the letter, include searching for projectiles at the crash site, conducting post-mortem examination of the flight’s crew and passengers, “including for the purpose of detecting any projectiles and other foreign objects or substances,” and examining data from Ukrainian ground radar.
    Russia also insists on examining the communication between the crew, captured by on-board microphones, as well as examining the communication between air traffic controllers at the Dnipropetrovsk Air Traffic Control Center and Kiev’s military authorities. The data from the countries and organizations involved in the investigation concerning the radar situation in the region, including the United States, NATO and Russia should also be requested and studied.

  • L’offensive ukrainienne se poursuit.

    Ukraine claims more territory as fight intensifies with rebels | Reuters
    http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/07/28/uk-ukraine-crisis-idUKKBN0FX12820140728

    Ukraine said on Monday its troops had wrested more territory from pro-Russian rebels, advancing towards the site where Malaysian flight MH17 was brought down, which international investigators said they could not reach because of the fighting.

    Ukrainian officials said troops had recaptured two rebel-held towns near the crash site and were trying to take the village of Snezhnoye, near where Kiev and Washington say rebels fired the surface-to-air missile that shot down the airliner with loss of all 298 on board.
    (…)
    A spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, Andriy Lysenko, said Kiev was trying to close in on the crash site and force the rebels out of the area but was not conducting military operations in the immediate vicinity.

    He said Ukrainian troops were now in the towns of Torez and Shakhtarsk, both formerly held by the rebels, while fighting was in progress for Snezhnoye and Pervomaisk. The towns are all located in rolling countryside near the wheat and sunflower fields filled with debris from the downed airliner.

    Government troops were also readying an assault on Gorlovka, a rebel stronghold north of the provincial capital Donetsk.

    The Ukrainian military is conducting an active assault on regions under temporary control of Russian mercenaries,” Lysenko told a news conference in Kiev.

  • MH17: why the culprits may never be caught - Telegraph
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10993020/MH17-why-the-culprits-may-never-be-caught.html

    The Telegraph’s own inquiries suggest the missile – an SA-11 from a Buk mobile rocket launcher – was possibly fired from a cornfield about 12 miles to the south of the epicentre of the crash site. Scorch marks in the soil indicate where the rocket’s propulsion system may have set fire to the crops.
    The location of the site tallies with a surveillance photograph, released by Ukraine’s intelligence service, showing a signature trail of smoke emanating from beyond a hill in rebel-held eastern Ukraine. The Telegraph’s investigation corroborates analysis by Ukraine at War, a pro-Kiev English-language blog, showing that the smoke trail appears to originate from the direction of the cornfield which was purportedly left by the SA-11 missile after its launch.
    The photograph appears to have been taken from a high-rise apartment block overlooking the area.
    (…)
    It will be almost impossible to say who pushed the button,” said Reed Foster, head of the armed forces capabilities team at the intelligence and security analysts IHS Jane’s Defence. “The evidence at the crash site will not tell you if it was a Ukraine or Russian operator of the Buk launcher.
    It is very easy for the Russians to maintain plausible deniability. The launch site needs to be found and treated like a crime scene. There will be telltale signs of chemical residue where the rocket motor has ignited the flora and fauna. But even once you have identified the site it is still difficult to know who the persons were at that location.” Debris from the crash scene will at some stage be removed and analysed. Photographs taken of Boeing 777 debris shows the metal skin perforated with a number of similar sized holes. The evidence is consistent with a ground-to-air missile attack from a Buk-launched SA-11 missile, said Mr Foster.
    Shrapnel from the missile is likely to be scattered at the crash site, stretching over about eight square miles.
    Vital evidence such as the missile casing and rocket motor, containing factory serial numbers, could have been removed by now by the rebel militia who control the area.
    Even if the casing and motor is found, Russian-made SA-11 missiles are in possession of both sides in the conflict.

    Les premières indications des “boites noires” confirment un impact de missile.

    Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 black box findings consistent with blast - CBS News
    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia-airlines-flight-17-black-box-findings-consistent-with-blast

    Unreleased data from a black box retrieved from the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in Ukraine show findings consistent with the plane’s fuselage being hit multiple times by shrapnel from a missile explosion.

    It did what it was designed to do,” a European air safety official told CBS News, “bring down airplanes.

    The official described the finding as “massive explosive decompression.

  • Le Wall Street Journal sur les lieux du crash. Un peu d’humanité…

    After Flight 17 Crash, Agony, Debris and Heartbreak in Ukraine Villages - WSJ
    http://online.wsj.com/articles/after-flight-17-crash-agony-debris-and-heartbreak-in-ukraine-villages-14


    Natalya Voloshina, mayor of Petropavlivka, Ukraine, outside the local village hall. The residents of Petropavlivka remain deeply distressed by what they saw when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed nearby on July 17. Paul Sonne for The Wall Street Journal

    Then the plane crashed. The cabin’s second-row overhead compartment is in a tree across from the village hall—and suitcases and clothes are in backyards and gardens of square-windowed cottages.

    Villagers dashed into their basements, fearing a bomb attack. Residents in a nearby village ran for the church, certain that the world was coming to an end. A colleague of Ms. Voloshina screamed after being nearly hit by the plane’s cargo hold. Days later, the 43-year-old mayor found the bottom half of a man’s body in the shrubs next to her office. She has barely slept since then.
    (…)
    Officials in Kiev are largely cut off due to the war. Regional authorities and police are in disarray because of the rebel takeover, while foreign officials have been slow-moving or incommunicado. There is no money. The Dutch-led team that will investigate the crash hasn’t reached the scene.

    We asked what to do, how we should act, but no one said anything,” says Ms. Voloshina, a former mathematics teacher who grew up in Petropavlivka. She put on a formal purple dress and stood near the crash site this week, wringing her hands while trying to project an image of control.

    She says she would have found volunteers to cordon off parts of the crash site, packaged passenger belongings in a specified way or gathered the plane’s debris in one place. Without expertise, she is afraid of doing something wrong, she says.
    (…)
    Mayors of the three villages waited for word about whether they could move the human remains. No orders came. For days, separatists controlling the area fought with Kiev over who should probe the crash site. International monitors showed up but also gave no instructions. European and American officials refused to talk to the rebels directly and didn’t call the mayors at all.

    There should have been a command from Kiev or someone about what to do,” says the exhausted Mr. Miroshnichenko, sitting under a pair of birch trees outside Rozsypne’s village hall. He recalls being forced to bury friend after friend who died in coal mines where he worked for 25 years.

    In mines, you don’t remove a body until they investigate it,” he says.

    Ça change des délires de certains…