Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA life sentence prisoner and chief researcher on the Belfast project, defended the archive and blamed Boston College for failing to make clear to him and the interviewees that there was a legal treaty that allowed the British state to seize academic material from the United States.
A Washington Post article published on Wednesday revealed vague details of a police document that quoted a prisoner who had been placed in the same police van as Gray – though in a separate compartment – as saying Gray had been "trying to injure himself".
He never saw combat and spent most of his military service as a guard in prisoner-of-war camps.
They would then order the prisoner to fetch it.
In plain English, he was likely to be "mentally retarded" and fall into the very category of prisoner who the supreme court had just declared must not be executed.
However the papers do repeatedly show the British government formally saying it is for the Scottish executive to decide if Megrahi should be released on compassionate grounds, or under the prisoner transfer agreement signed by the British with the Libyans.
The prisoner deal clearly meant Megrahi would be eligible for transfer back to Tripoli.
The original confusion about the law stems from the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, which scrapped the need for a minister to automatically review a whole-life sentence after a prisoner had served 25 years.
A prisoner in Georgia who has been diagnosed as intellectually disabled by all medical experts who have examined him will be put to death on Monday unless the US supreme court acts to enforce its own constitutional ban on executing "mentally retarded" individuals.
The latter is a delirious surrealist fantasy involving a murderous child, a dreamy girl who might be his mother, a pirate who keeps her prisoner on a rocky island, incestuous relationships, a castration and a rape.
Jozef Paczynski, a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz who became the personal barber to camp commander Rudolf Höss, has died.
