Word: scotlande
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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...
...that compassion alone dictated the Libyan's release, the documents suggest a process every bit as murky as conspiracy theorists might have imagined. While the British government made a public show of neutrality on the issue, saying any change in al-Megrahi's status was a matter for Scotland, it turns out that a British minister once gave assurances to Libya that neither Prime Minister Gordon Brown nor his Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, "would want Mr. Megrahi to pass away in prison." This revelation, embedded in one of the newly released minutes of a meeting between Scottish and Libyan officials...
...what I meant by 'national interests,' " Justice Secretary Jack Straw wrote in February 2008, during an exchange of letters about al-Megrahi with Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond. "Developing a strong relationship with Libya, and helping it to reintegrate into the international community, is good for the U.K." He added, "Libya is one of only two countries to have ever voluntarily and transparently dismantled its weapons of mass destruction program. Having sponsored terrorist attacks in the past, it is now an important partner in the fight against terrorism." (Read "Lockerbie Bomber Returns to Cheers in Libya...
...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 than as part of a prisoner-transfer agreement that had been drawn up against their...
...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 and the opposition of the United States to his transfer to Libya." U.S. Attorney General...