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| Britain |
| Scotland's shame |
| 2009-08-21 |
"Four hundred parents lost a child, 46 parents lost their only child, 65 women were widowed, 11 men lost their wives, 140 [people] lost a parent, seven lost both parents." Abdel Baset al-Megrahi flew home Thursday to his wife and children in Libya. Scotland's justice secretary, Kenny Mac-Askill, freed al-Megrahi only eight years into his life sentence for murdering 270 people, 189 of them Americans. A flag-waving crowd greeted al-Megrahi when his Afriqiyah Airways jetliner landed at Tripoli. More warm welcomes may follow: When an al-Megrahi co-defendant was acquitted in 2001, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi sacrificed a camel in his honor. MacAskill's stated excuse for freeing al-Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, is compassion. That, regrettably, was a gift al-Megrahi's victims didn't receive two decades ago. Pan American Flight 103, a Boeing 747 christened Clipper Maid of the Seas, was cruising at 31,000 feet on its Frankfurt-London- New York route. Detonation of a bomb concealed in a cassette player sent tornado-force winds roaring through the fuselage. A Scottish air traffic controller watched from Prestwick Airport below as the plane's image on his screen disintegrated into dozens of bright green squares. Debris would scatter over 845 square miles -- but most of the 259 passengers and crew survived the 46.5 seconds until impact. A large section of the fuselage, including the plane's wings and 200,000 pounds of aviation fuel, screamed at more than 500 m.p.h. into the market town of Lockerbie. The resulting fireball vaporized several homes -- plus most of the 11 victims on the ground -- then turned to burn cars passing on a motorway. MacAskill's self-praising paean to his own mercy -- "In Scotland, we are a people who pride ourselves on our humanity ..." -- mocked victims in the air and on the ground. Mocked what we know of those 46.5 seconds as living people and scorched plane parts rained down. From a Newsweek reconstruction based on testimony at al-Megrahi's trial and interviews in Scotland: No one had more reason to remember the night of Dec. 21, 1988, than Steven Flannigan. Christmas was only four days away, so Steve, then 14, had slipped next door with a present for his 10-year-old sister, Joanne. It was a new bike, and he wanted to set it up for her. Steve was in the neighbor's garage when one of the jet engines and a chunk of wing from Pan Am Flight 103 slammed into his house on Sherwood Crescent in the Scottish village of Lockerbie. He ran out to see an orange fireball where his three-bedroom home had just been. Where Joanne and his parents, Katherine, 41, and Thomas, 43, had just been.... Nearly 21 years later, we're not sure which is more feckless -- Gaddafi's lobbying to secure the release of al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, or Scotland's surrender in the name of kindness. Gaddafi has tried to please his critics since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, aggravated tensions between the West and regimes that tolerated terrorism. He dismantled his nuclear program, confessed his government's responsibility for Lockerbie and paid compensation to victims' survivors. None of which justifies MacAskill's decision to overrule a crucial provision of al-Megrahi's sentencing back in 2001: that the bomber serve at least 27 years in prison for Britain's deadliest terror attack. We find no footnote saying that sentence meant 27 years unless the convict is dying, in which case eight will do just fine. People serving life sentences do tend to die in prison. Al-Megrahi? He'll die with his family. On Thursday, President Barack Obama called MacAskill's invocation of a Scottish compassion statute "a mistake." Obama might have added that appeasement doesn't deter terrorists and their enablers. It reminds them that many of their enemies are weak. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #4 cookie reset |
| Posted by: ryuge 2009-08-21 23:30 |
| #3 No Answer "Whatever the good lord has provided him with" |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2009-08-21 22:44 |
| #2 This answers the age old question: "What's under a Scotman's kilt?" Answer: Nothing. |
| Posted by: regular joe 2009-08-21 17:23 |
| #1 He'll die with his family I suspect that Lybian medicine will make another miracle and he will live, at the very least, until January 2013. |
| Posted by: JFM 2009-08-21 11:16 |