So then Megrahi was freed, went home to Libya and got a heroes welcome, in the process providing us with yet another opportunity to witness how much political news is route, ritualised scripts. Was anybody surprised that the White House condemned the release? That the then director of the FBI as well as the American leader of the Lockerbie investigation were not best pleased? And of course the family and friends of those who died in the bombing are angry and upset, though interestingly there seems to be somewhat of a mid-Atlantic split in their attitudes, with the British survivors being more inclined to be merciful, if only because they’re more sceptical about Megrahi’s guilt. For the Americans this was all a bit of a bombshell of course, having missed much of the buildup towards the release and only hearing about it days or even hours beforehand.
All these responses could’ve been taken as read, none of them was “news” in any real sense of the word, but they still ate up hours of news time. As did the protests coming from Westminster about the way the Libyans treated Megrahi –did Gordon Brown really think either Gadaffi or the Libyan people believe in Megrahi’s guilt? Might as well expect the pilots involved in the 1986 US terror bombing of Tripoli to be made honorary citizens….
More interesting, the even more indignant and outraged squeels following Gadaffi’s thanks to Brown and the queen. Dropped Brown right in it, he did. Everybody knew or suspected that Megrahi’s freedom had been prepared from Westminster as much as Edinburgh, for example by having signed a prisoner exchange treaty with Libya a while back, that all the diplomatic spadework had been done from London,, but nobody mentioned it until Gadaffi. What a world we live in when it’s the “madman dictator” who tells the truth rather than the “democratically elected statesman”.
Because the truth is that Megrahi was just one concession given to Gadaffi for being a good boy and that all attempts to leave all responsibility soley to the Scots are just toytown Machiavellianism. Sure, the SNP is in the doghouse at the moment, but this will inevitably boomerang back to Westminster.
Meanwhile, why is it so hard to understand that Scotland has no control over the Libyan reception of Megrahi, that the Scottish justice system has no obligation to take into account the feelings of the US government on this matter, that the Libyans do not believe in Megrahi’s guilt, or that the feelings of his victims do not have or should have anything to do with granting his appeal for compassion?