Federal Judiciary

Britain's Disgrace -- By: The Editors

By The Editors

The release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is worse than a crime, it is a mistake, from any and every point of view. The terrorist who brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland is now back in his native Libya, happily ensconced with his admiring family in a most luxurious villa and treated as a national hero. Alleged to be terminally ill, he has been freed from life imprisonment ostensibly on grounds of compassion -- he who showed no compassion to his victims. Many in the Arab and Muslim world can only conclude that if you kill 270 Westerners the rewards are greater than any price you might have to pay. Megrahi?s release clearly establishes that something more powerful than the law courts and justice is at work.

And what might that something be? Big money, of course, and the politics that go with it. Muammar Qaddafi, the dictator of Libya for the past 40 years and a man with a long record of sponsoring terror, has stated that the real issue here has always been trade. Megrahi was his agent, and if the British wanted the oil-and-gas contracts now available in Libya they had to release him. Qaddafi?s smarmy playboy son is quite as open about it. For the past two years, evidently, British ministers have been putting in place the agreements and the bureaucratic machinery to allow Qaddafi to blackmail them.

Particularly dishonest is the way the British government is pretending that Scotland alone has been responsible for handling the Megrahi affair. Devolution allows the Scots and their new parliament in Edinburgh to deal only with domestic issues. Foreign policy remains the exclusive preserve of the Westminster parliament. This smokescreen of evaded responsibility has ended up doing real damage to the British character and to Britain?s global influence. Many in Britain have resented the help given in the past by Irish-Americans to the IRA, and have criticized the handling of jihadist terrorists at Guantanamo and elsewhere. The release of Megrahi cuts the ground from under their feet and challenges the supposed transatlantic ?special relationship.?

There is still worse. Megrahi had lost a first appeal against his sentence. However, a few people sincerely believe that there has been a miscarriage of justice, and Iran and its Palestinian hirelings were the real bombers of Pan Am 103. Megrahi?s lawyers claim to have fresh evidence that justified a second appeal. While this appeal was pending he could not be released, and pressure was therefore applied successfully on his lawyers to withdraw the second appeal. More than murky, this is a kick in the teeth of everyone who lost a family member at Lockerbie. Megrahi is almost certainly the perpetrator of this mass murder, but he might just be a fall guy, and the element of doubt remains to haunt those left to grieve. So much for compassion today.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on August 28, 2009 (boomark / email).