As so often with declarations of international morality, there is a good deal of cant thrown in about the Scottish decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds. Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, a former criminal defence lawyer, made a brave and principled decision explicitly not on political or diplomatic grounds, but in accordance with what he clearly argued were the interests of justice. But that was too much for the US Attorney General who responded: “There is simply no justification for releasing this convicted terrorist whose actions took the lives of 270 individuals, including 189 Americans”. What punishment then, one might ask, has America exacted against the US commander of the warship which without provocation in the Persian Gulf in 1988 fired on and destroyed an Iranian civil airliner killing 290 innocent Iranian and other passengers not long before the Lockerbie bombing? Were those innocent lives lost any less precious than the American ones? If the US captain had been captured (admittedly a pretty inconceivable event) and been convicted – not of terrorism, but of gross irresponsibility leading to mass killing – wouldn’t the US Government have approved of his release if he had just 3 months to live from terminal cancer?

As with others who live in glasshouses, America should be careful not to throw stones. What about the tens of thousands of non-combatant men, women and children killed by the US as collateral damage in Iraq, or the repeated bombings of weddings and other mistaken targets in Afghanistan, or the continued killings of hundreds of innocent people targeted by drones over the Pakistann North-West Frontier province? What remorse is shown, what price is paid in expiation for this violence? Justice is not the prerogative of the most powerful, it is the right of all who are aggrieved by unprovoked killing.
Then there is the attitude of the British Government. David Miliband rightly says that it was exclusively a decision for the Scottish Executive, and that the UK Government did not seek to intervene. It is significant however that when Gadaffi decided to give up his pursuit of nuclear weapons, some very large concessions were offered to BP and others. It was speculated at the time that the real interest of the West was the extensive undeveloped Libyan oilfields, and that the abandonment of nuclear weapons was the price to be paid for legitimacy in the international development of this prize. If this was so (which was of course srongly denied), then the release of Al-Megrahi will have done no harm in fostering these oil markets further, to the benefit of both parties.
MacAskill’s decision raises two other important issues. One is that Scotland actually faced down strong pressure from the US, including a public demand from Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State, not to release Al Megrahi. The contrast between this principled rejection of the US appeal and the UK Government’s supine subservience in granting the US demand for Gary McKinnon’s extradition is all too stark.
Secondly, the release brings down the curtain on the long-standing doubts about whether the Libyans were ever responsible for the atrocity in the first place. Jim Swire, the resourceful investigator who lost a daughter on flight 103, didn’t believe that Al Megrahi was the culprit. Suspicions initially centred on the Iranians having suborned either the Syrians or the Palestinian Jibril group to carry out the bombing, but the Reagan Administration soon insisted that Libya was responsible. The US had had a decade of rumbling hostilities with Libya in the 1980s, including aerial dogfights over the Gulf of Sirte and culminating in the assassination attempt on Gadaffi via the F16 bombing of his headquarters in Tripoli which killed his daughter. The Americans certainly had a motive for inculpating the Libyan regime.

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