There is an old saying that no good deed goes unpunished. In the past few days, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has certainly made sure of that with the “compassionate” release of the only convicted Lockerbie airline bomber, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi. From the beginning, questions were raised about the terminal nature of the convict’s cancer, and whether justice required his continued imprisonment regardless of his terminal illness. Many families of the crash victims expressed outrage; Scottish officials said many of the victims’ family members supported the release. Initially, the Scottish and British authorities played a delicate game of diplomacy, unwilling either to assume responsibility for the release or to blame responsibility for the release to the other. The United States had its own delicate balancing act, expressing “behind the scenes” disapproval of the release, followed by pressure for a subdued transfer, escalating to FBI Director Robert Mueller publicly chastising the Scottish justice secretary for “making a mockery of the rule of law.”
At the center of the circus was once again the crafty ringmaster Qaddafi, profusely thanking everyone from the Scottish authorities to the Queen of England and Prince Andrew so no one could escape his gratitude for arranging the release. After months of being courted for lucrative business contracts, Libya awarded Great Britain a $900 million oil contract including BP. Clearly in this case, timing is everything.
Justice is an elusive concept, but never more so than when countries extolling its virtues against minions have short memories when dealing with the minions’ deep-pocketed mastermind. The conviction of al-Megrahi was based on identification of his photo by a Maltese shopkeeper as the purchaser of a Babygro jumper and a piece of luggage checked through Malta with no accompanying passenger. As Allan Gerson, who spent eight years representing some families of the victims noted in his book, “The Price of Terror,” Qaddafi himself has come quite close on several occasions to acknowledging Libya’s(and inevitably his own)responsibility for the bombing. The larger significance of the Lockerbie trial was the isolation it imposed on Libya and Qaddafi for the tragic loss of life. The $2.7 billion dollars in compensation Libya was forced to pay to the families in recognition of that crime and Libya’s abandonment of its covert nuclear weapons program were accomplishments, but justice will never be served if the scales appear to be held up by any country’s purse strings.