Labour's help in Lockerbie bomber case was profoundly wrong, says Cameron (UK Prime Minister)

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

David Cameron today rounded on the last Labour government for failing to give a full picture of its game plan to do everything possible to help the Libyan government secure the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber.

He was speaking after the release of a report, prepared by the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, and ordered by Cameron, showing ministers in the Brown administration worked hard to aid his release without improperly directly pressing the Scottish executive to release him from a Scottish jail. The report was accompanied by 120 sometimes-censored Whitehall papers leading up to the controversial release of Megrahi on compassionate grounds in August 2009.

Cameron told MPs it was "profoundly wrong" for the British government to "facilitate" an appeal by the Libyans to the Scottish government in the case of Megrahi, who was convicted of murdering 270 people.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/07/labour-lockerbie-bomber-cameron

[virgogal]

1. I knew one of those 270 people-a delightful girl, a 19 year old neighbor.

Letting that guy go home annoyed the hell out of me.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. Here we go again...

with this BS. It seems pretty clear that Megrahi was a patsy framed and set up to take the fall for the bombing and if his planned appeal had been allowed to go ahead this could have caused some embarrassment for the Scottish justice system and the UK authorities who cooperated with the CIA in the frameup.

Megrahi was framed

By John Pilger


The trial of the “Lockerbie bomber” was worse than a travesty of justice. Evidence that never came to court proves his innocence

The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown's "repulsion" to Barack Obama's "outrage", the theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. "But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?" whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. "What will you say to your constituents, then?"

Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he "pays" for his "heinous crime": the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose "compassion" allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to "face justice from a higher power". Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as "a babbling brook of bullshit". Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi's release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of "strategic interests".

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/09/pilger-megrahi-justice

[LeftishBrit]

3. What is really profoundly wrong...

is that the main people responsible for the atrocity were almost certainly never brought to trial. Megrahi was probably just a minor figure; but he was the one they could catch.

[T_i_B]

4. Ah, this political football again

The release of Al-Megrahi was used by Labour as a way of scoring points off the SNP, who took the blame for it at the time. Now the Tories are useing this as a way of bashing Labour.