Word: al-megrahi
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Compassion, says the Oxford English Dictionary, means "suffering together." There has been plenty of that among politicians in London and Washington since Scotland's Justice Minister freed Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" Aug. 20, citing doctors' reports that he was dying of prostate cancer. Al-Megrahi, the sole person jailed for the deaths of 270 people in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, had served just eight years of a 27-year sentence. After all their grieving, the victims' loved ones had to watch al-Megrahi land in Tripoli, Libya...
...Britain asked for something else as well? The finger-pointing began even before al-Megrahi was released. Scotland may have had jurisdiction over the case, but British opposition politicians blamed Gordon Brown's government for its handling of the case. Victims' families and lawyers say they suspect that officials, eager to help British companies win multibillion-dollar energy and defense contracts, cut a backroom deal in exchange for al-Megrahi's freedom...
Beleaguered Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill insisted he alone freed al-Megrahi, but suspicions are likely to linger--especially given the West's careful wooing of Gaddafi since international sanctions ended in 2004. Within hours of a visit to Libya by then Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2007, Britain's BP inked a $900 million oil-and-gas-exploration deal. More recently, in July, Prime Minister Gordon Brown met Gaddafi during the G-8 summit in Italy. And a week before al-Megrahi's release, John McCain led a group of fellow Senators in trade talks with Gaddafi, tweeting...
...Libya repeatedly warned Britain of "catastrophic effects" for their relationship if al-Megrahi died in jail - the alarmist phrase also emerges in the minutes of the March 2009 Glasgow meeting. Ministers in Westminster duly conveyed these threats to Edinburgh. Labour and the Scottish Nationalists are fierce opponents. "The British government have a better relationship with [Libyan leader Colonel Muammar] Gaddafi than they do with Scotland," says Ed Owen, a former special adviser to Straw. But Scottish politicians could not ignore the overlap between Scottish and U.K. interests. Instead, they devised a plan to release al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, rather...
...Owen believes "the British government became so deeply embedded in the negotiations [to solve the al-Megrahi problem] that they lost sight of the likely domestic political response and the wider diplomatic context," including the predictable anger of the U.S. A Sept. 1 letter written by Richard LeBaron, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London, to authorities in Scotland withholds consent for Washington's "government-to-government" correspondence to be made public but reiterates "the United States Government's consistent and long-standing view that Mr. Megrahi should serve out his prison sentence in Scotland...