Let me summarize what I think we know.
1. SlimVirgin is Linda Mack who studied philosophy at King's College, lost a close friend on PanAm 103, and worked for Pierre Salinger at ABC News, London from about 1989-1991 on the PanAm 103 investigation.
2. She pursued various PanAm 103 conspiracy theories, but once the two Libyans were indicted, she seemed to steer the investigation in the direction of the government's case against Libya, according to John K. Cooley, who along with Pierre Salinger, was responsible for hiring her at ABC.
3. Pierre Salinger interviewed the two Libyans in Tripoli, and believed, along with quite a few independent investigators, that they were either completely innocent, or only peripherally involved, perhaps unwittingly.
4. Syria's support in the Gulf War was important to the West. The leading theory until such time that the finger was pointed at Libya, was that Syria was involved, perhaps with Iran bankrolling them, in retaliation for the Iranian airliner that the U.S. shot down.
5. Scotland Yard raided ABC and made off with videotapes and documents. ABC fought in court, and after an expensive battle, lost the case.
6. Salinger came to believe that Linda Mack was working for MI5, and had been all along. He locked her out of her office.
7. Michael S. Morris, a former BOSS (South Africa) agent who investigated PanAm 103, has named Linda Mack as an "agent."
8. For at least two or three years after this, Linda Mack worked on the case as a freelancer. She started a petition drive against Allan Francovich's film, The Maltese Double-Cross: Lockerbie. This film promoted a conspiracy theory that was at odds with the government's case against Libya.
9. Linda Mack next shows up in Canada in 2002, registering the domain slimvirgin.com, using the name S. McEwan and a PO box in Swalwell, Alberta, Canada. Patrick Byrne, who knew Linda Mack at Cambridge, says she was half Canadian, and she switched on an English accent suddenly one day at Cambridge, and continued to use it from that point forward.
10. The email address on the slimvirgin.com domain registration was slimvirgin1@yahoo.com. The email address for Linda Mack on the alumni list at King's College, Cambridge was also slimvirgin1@yahoo.com. This mailing list was purged of Linda Mack's name several months ago. Similarly, the domain registration became a private registration within the last year.
11. One "Sarah McEwan, Canada" wrote comments or sent a letter to telegraph.co.uk in Britain in support of animal rights in 2004.
12. SlimVirgin signs her name as "Sarah" on the Wikipedia mailing list.
13. Daniel Brandt emailed slimvirgin AT gmail.com in late October, 2005, using a pseudonym, and asked if she would be interested in selling the slimvirgin.com domain. Twice she denied that she was the owner of that domain.
14. SlimVirgin's IP address geolocates to Shaw Communications in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, but the accuracy of this is disputed and she could be living in either Alberta or Saskatchewan.
15. SlimVirgin indicated a very early interest in the PanAm 103 article when she started editing Wikipedia sometime on or before November 5, 2004. At least one edit that was oversighted suggests inside knowledge of the Pierre Salinger investigation.
16. Jimmy Wales has admitted that articles have been oversighted to protect the identity of SlimVirgin and others.
17. Today almost no one with knowledge about the investigation, including Robert Baer, the CIA official who was close to the CIA's investigation at the time, pretends that the Libyans were guilty.
18. SlimVirgin has made a http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Pan_Am_Flight_103&diff=prev&oldid=15150972 suggesting that the Libyan in prison is not guilty.
19. After Daniel Brandt emailed John K. Cooley in Athens, Greece to ask about Linda Mack, she called Cooley to ask him not to talk to Brandt. She had read on Wikipedia Review that Brandt had located Cooley, and was hoping to hear from him. But Brandt had already received Cooley's response shortly before Linda Mack made this call.
20. Various articles that are politically significant, in addition to the PanAm 103 articles, suffer from excessive ownership by SlimVirgin in that they are seriously skewed in directions that she has promoted and protected. These include articles about Lyndon LaRouche. Moreover, several months before SlimVirgin started the stub on Daniel Brandt, she declared that Brandt was an unreliable source on the topic of one Chip Berlet.
Archive of that SlimVirgin diff:
Webcite'd http://www.webcitation.org/5QmKAhGNJ (be patient, you might not see it immediately) just in case it mysteriously *ahem* disappears.
Very interesting, thanks Mr Brandt. Sounds like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel.
That denial blog is particularly stupid, given that just moments later it was all proven false, and given that if he had looked properly he would have found that it was mostly proven false before he'd even written it. It just reeks of ignorance. That's not a cover up, its stupidity.
A NameBase entry for Linda Mack can be found at: http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb01?Na=mack%2C+linda.
This was indexed in NameBase shortly after the book was published in 1993. This book was never published in the U.S. due to legal threats. You have to understand that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Coleman's version of the circumstances that allowed the bomb to be placed on PanAm 103 was information that Western governments had to suppress. Michael T. Hurley, who has recently written his own book, was the DEA attaché in Cyprus, and he has a motive for disputing Coleman's version of events. PanAm airlines, on the other end, may have had a motive to push the story, because it would tend to get them off the hook for damages from baggage-handling negligence lawsuits by the families. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Juval_Aviv&diff=134382545&oldid=134378708, a New York City investigator, pursued this DEA angle, which even made it into a Time Magazine cover story on 1992-04-27. Nevertheless, it was suppressed in due course. Coleman and Juval Aviv both ended up as targets for apparent legal harassment.
The NameBase citation is from Goddard, Donald with Coleman, Lester K., Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie -- Inside the DIA, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1993. 326 pages.
Lester Coleman began as a reporter, became an agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Middle East (he's fluent in Arabic), and ended as an exile in Sweden after trumped-up passport charges were filed against him in Chicago. The problem was that Coleman, without fully realizing it, had inside information about Drug Enforcement Administration operations in the Middle East, and specifically about DEA arrangements for controlled-delivery baggage handling out of the Frankfurt airport. In other words, what he knew put an different spin on the Lockerbie tragedy, and suggested a degree of U.S. intelligence complicity with the bombing of Pan Am 103. This book is well-written, perhaps because principal author Donald Goddard spent eight years as an editor at the New York Times.
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/gifs/coleman.gif from the book that mentions Linda Mack. It's inside of a quotation from Coleman. It's not much, but it does mention another person, David Mills, as someone who might have something to say about Linda Mack, assuming that he can be located. I haven't tried to find him, but perhaps it's time to make an effort.
Mills appears British:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22david+mills%22+%22pan+am+103%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Perhaps contacting him immediately is in order before Linda can get to him.
Thank you.
Additionally, I'd like to draw peoples attention to http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=12450 where Daniel Brandt recounts his interview with Dr. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/forum/1147090.stm, representative of UK Lockerbie (Pan Am) families.
I should also point out that "SlimVirgin" http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pan_Am_Flight_103&diff=19060327&oldid=19060156 on a question made by the British MP Tam Dalyell regarding an alleged payment or bribe made to Toni Gauci. This is now a http://www.guardian.co.uk/Lockerbie/Story/0,,2182343,00.html in the second appeal of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi.
The title of the thread should be: What Daniel Brandt Believes To Be True.
In the past, I've discovered some of his beliefs to be inaccurate.
(And if I'm wrong about that, then here I am spouting an inaccurate belief of my own.)
The information has been located and researched by many, many others in addition to Mr. Brandt. Brandt is only the one who summarized it. While this is not an "official WR pronouncement" (there really isn't such a thing, except maybe from Somey), it represents the work of many people, not just Daniel Brandt.
There is a standing offer to remove entirely from the site any claim that is refuted by documentary evidence, provided by Linda Mack SlimVirgin, to the contrary.
Frankly, the pinning of the topic prevents the 2nd, 5th, and 20th threads being started on those topics by people new to the subject, and as SlimVirgin seems to generate enemies at a pretty rapid clip, except when under an ArbCom cloud, those people are always coming forth.
I don't see any reason to change it.
Broadly speaking, I think the case has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and I don't really think it's partisan to have it up there. As far as I know, there hasn't been a serious challenge to the accuracy of the basic outline of events.
I think it makes sense to leave the thread pinned, not because it is an Official Wikipedia Review Position, but because a lot of the new traffic we get here has been of people abused by "SlimVirgin" who wondered, "Who is this *****?!?"
Any particular reason you bring this up now, Proabivouac?
Yeah, if was intended as a sort of FAQ default topic it may be time to take it down (until a fresh SV drama starts up).
I'm not that interested in this aspect of WR, but I suggest that one long section in respect of who (cares who) SV might be is better than having a new one created each time - and it is a subject that will keep turning up.
Guys,
WHAT were you smoking?
I do not *know* SV, she is too manipulative and guarded for that...
But I know what she is NOT.
I have private email dialogues with SV where she maneouvers and crosses all acceptable boundaries to get at any personal dirt she could use for or against me (as it suited her, foolishly assuming I hadn't noticed for some odd reason) while totally ignoring some serious potential for the kind of stuff that WOULD be of use to Jason Bourne, or Mata Hari or whoever you think she is this week.
SV...Sarah, is just like the rest, a big fish in a very small pond, defining herself, and her life, in terms of her power and influence on Wikipedia, because that is, pretty much, all she has got...
But you guys have her built up into this glamourous pre-raphaelite cross between James Bond and Kathy from Wuthering Heights...and if she isn't getting one hell of a kick out of that, she bloomin' well SHOULD be! I would (in fact, if it was me I would start dressing the part too - wonder what the goth romantic field operative is wearing this season?)
Apart from which, WHAT ON EARTH would the CIA need to plant a full time, experienced, field operative with a brief to get as much control as possible, on Wikipedia for?
Anything they would ever need to do could be done by a couple of interns with watchlists and specific briefs.
The former is "how-to-ensure-everybody-realises-the-CIA-is-interfering-even-without-the-long-black-veil 101" the latter would hardly be noticed if they kept varying IPs, kept it small and subtle and didn't get into locking horns over edits.
Back to the point...
Whatever you are smoking...can I have some?
Your block expires in a little more than two weeks.