The Octopus,

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the Pan Am flight 103, with the researcher Peter Biddup have done research which I was reading some two weeks ago, which led me to post Lockerbie on GLP. Not surprisingly it gained little interest. However, in reading the writings of the aforementioned, I am of the opinion, Megrahi is just one more patsy in a never ending list of usual suspects. The following is some reading which I have been doing within CIA sources, and which would lead me to assume the real reason for Megrahi's release is, the appeal is now over as this appeal could never have been allowed in any circumstance.
Dr Thomas Hayes with two of his colleagues conspired and withold evidence in the 1974 Maguire seven trial, which proved their innocence. The Maguires after fifteen years in jail were freed.

Shukri Ghanem a Libyan Prime Minister, openly admits the trial was a sham, and the 2.7 billion was just a means of moving on.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer has repeatedly stated, that the US Intelligence has grade A proof of Iranian, Syrian involvement.

The compensation paid by Libya was tied to sanctions which were removed, in three stages of payment with removal of sanctions.

On December 21, 1988, in the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, 270 lives came to an end when Pan Am flight 103 was blown out of the skies. Two hundred and fifty-nine people went to their deaths, and 11 more died on the ground. Several minutes before flight 103 took off from London's Heathrow airport, FBI Assistant Director Oliver Revell rushed out to the tarmac and took his son and daughter-in-law off the plane.
On July 3, 1988, less than six months before the Pan Am 103 bombing, the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner over the Straits of Hormuz, killing all 290 people on board. Assuming the plane was a hostile craft, the captain of the Vincennes, Will Rodgers III, gave the command to fire, the officer responsible for the fatal mistake was awarded a medal.
Under Islamic law, the crime had to be avenged. It was known at the time that the contract was out to down an American airliner. That contract, $10 million dollars was given to Ahmed Jibril. Jibril had a base of operations in Neuss, Germany, not far from Frankfurt. One of Jibril's co-horts, Marwan Abdel Razzack Khreeshat, had a specialty in building small, sophisticated bombs with timing mechanisms capable of detonating at determined altitudes. By mid-October 1988, Jibril was ready.
Khreeshat had assembled five bombs, built into Toshiba radio-cassette players. However, the German police were watching Khreesat. On October 26, Khreesat and 14 other suspects were rounded up in an operation code-named Autumn Leaves. One of the bombs was seized and four more remained at large. While in custody, Khreesat demanded to make a phone call, then refused to answer any questions, and was mysteriously released.
Two months before the bombing, Jibril and Monaer al Kassar were spotted by a Mossad agent in Paris. Jibril was hoping to use al Kassar's controlled drug shipments through Frankfort to effect the delivery of a bomb, seeing as he was so cozy with the CIA, with the movement of drugs. The problem how to protect the drug shipments while at the same time extract revenge on the Americans. Al Kassar also acted as middleman in the ransom paid by the French to obtain the release of two hostages held in Beirut. The CIA believed they could use al Kassar to help them in negotiating the release of the six American hostages then being held in Lebanon.
While a CIA team in Wiesbaden, code-named COREA, was negotiating its secret deal with al Kassar for release of the hostages and also protecting his drug route, a second team led by Major Charles McKee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Matthew Gannon, the CIA Deputy Station Chief in Beirut, had traveled to Lebanon to assess the odds for a military style rescue operation. According to reports McKee's team had, while reconnoitering for the release of the hostages, stumbled onto the first team's illegal drug operation. McKee refused to be a part of this. When he and Gannon contacted their control in Washington, they got no reply. Against orders they decided to fly home to blow the whistle.
They had communicated back to Langley the facts and names, and reported their film of the hostage locations, but the CIA did nothing. By mid-December the team became frustrated and angry and made plans to return to the U.S. with their photos and evidence to inform the government, and to publicize their findings if the government covered up.They never arrived.
That night, Pan Am flight 103 was blown out of the skies. Was the deaths of McKee, Gannon, and five others on their team a coincidence or did someone want to ensure that they didn't reveal the carefully guarded secrets. Given that the warnings received by the U.S. Government from Mossad, and a Palestinian informant Samra Mahayoun, it would seem the U.S. authorities were warned of the attack, and failed to stop it. Then was their failure deliberate ?
In fact, President Bush knew perfectly well who had bombed flight 103. Nevertheless, the government lied to the American people. In July of 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. President Bush began forming his Gulf War coalition. Syria, formerly viewed as a terrorist state, was now seen as a necessary ally.
Bush had been quietly making overtures to Syrian President Assad for years. Assad was a bitter enemy of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. In order to bring Syria into the coalition, all evidence pointing to them was dropped. And, in November of 1991. Then the Libyan theory seemed the most useful one. Libya's reason for the attack we are told, stemmed from the April, 1986 U.S. air-raid on Tripoli and Benghazi, in which over 37 civilians, including Qaddafi's infant daughter, were killed, that raid was in retaliation for the bombing of the La Belle Discotheque in Berlin a year earlier, in which two U.S. servicemen and a Turkish woman died. So Qaddafi waited two and a half years for revenge on the US with the bombing of Flight 103.
Trail of the Octopus, from Beirut to Lockerbie.