Forget Yemen and Somalia. Scotland is the next front in the Global War on Terror, or is it overseas contingency operations? The Wall Street Journal reported today:
“Scotland’s government has rebuffed a U.S. Senate committee request to send two Scottish officials to testify next week at a hearing that will explore the country’s release last summer of the convicted Lockerbie bomber.
Neither Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill nor Scottish Prison Service health director Andrew Fraser will attend the hearing, a Scottish government spokesman said Thursday, noting that Scotland had already provided comprehensive written information to the Senate.
The Senate request comes amid renewed allegations that oil company BP PLC, may have influenced Scotland’s decision to release the convicted bomber.
The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has invited BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward, BP Special Adviser Mark Allen and former U.K. Justice Secretary Jack Straw to testify. A spokesman for BP said Thursday that the company had received the invitations but had yet to respond. Mr. Straw couldn’t be reached immediately for comment.
The Senate intends to explore Scotland’s decision last summer to release former Libyan security agent Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans, when it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.
The inquiry will look at ‘allegations surrounding the decision to release al-Megrahi, and in particular, whether a $900 million oil exploration deal between BP and Libya directly or indirectly influenced the decision to release al-Megrahi,’ hearing chair Senator Robert Menendez (D., NJ) wrote in the invitations.”
That B-1 bombers might soon be levelling strategic targets to include the distilleries at Famous Grouse, Langavulin, Jura, and Laphraoig is not to be borne lightly by Americans who believe in preserving constitutional liberties. The American Conservative should call for the raising of volunteer regiments to defend the right of every US citizen to eat haggis and drink scotch whisky without any interference from the lickspittles in the United States Senate. We will call on Mel Gibson to lead us and our banners will read “Remember the Whisky Rebellion, God and our Right!”
A friend of mine lost a relative in the Lockerbie bombing.
If this is your attempt at humor, you missed the mark.
I suspect if you rounded up all the chorus of those AGAINST the inception of the Iraq war under Bush, you’d find a lot of them currently railing against Scotland.
While satirizing this as if appealing to the antiwar.com folks, I think we can see it for what it might actually be: Congressional Theater designed to bleed pressure from the umpteen thousand page Financial Takeover bill.
@Thomas C. Schiro – “We hereby stake out life, because so many of our friends died in the middle of it, and nobody except us particularly sensitive ones can understand how that feels, so everybody else just shut up.” Geez, that’s so lib. Get a life.
Remember how Galloway tore Coleman a new one a couple of years back on the Iraq war?The Senate ought to be damn glad they will not be facing another Scotsman.
TomT, I don’t quite understand your whack at me.
The entire point of my response to Philip Giraldi’s article was his misplaced humor defending BP’s lobbying effort to get Scotland to release an American-murdering terrorist to go home to die peacefuly in his sleep.
What if BP did lobby for him to go home so they’d get the oil deal?
Al-Megrahi did not let my friend’s relative have a peaceful death, and I can’t believe Mr. Giraldi/The American Conservative would have the morbid audacity to poke fun at a situation like this.
The real shame is in the British government’s kicking the blame for the release back down to the Scots, who, almost certainly were dealing with BP at London’s behest. I hope the new LibDem/Tory government is better than one it succeeds, but they’re cowards for sure if they don’t absolve the Scots and place the blame in London.
I’m not sure it matters what I think, but in my opinion, the first post doesn’t go too far. Nobody’s cracking jokes about the dead, just about the way the living are carrying on.
“I don’t quite understand your whack at me.”
“his misplaced humor defending”
“I can’t believe Mr. Giraldi/The American Conservative would have the morbid audacity to poke fun…”
=================================
If Mr Giraldi comes to the funeral of your friend, and makes catcalls during services, then I’m right there with you.
In the meantime…
This whole nonsense about “this subject is SO SACRED that it belongs to US and not YOU…”. The libs use that. Affirmative-action race-baiters use that.
Can we talk about healthcare? …”WHAT??? You don’t care about POOR PEOPLE and DYING BABIES?”
“Oh, I know how you feel.” “NO NO, NOBODY CAN KNOW HOW WE FEEL!!!” “But wait, if you say I can’t know how you feel, then who the hell gave you the right to arbitrate what I can and can’t know…???”
I object to the cheap “we own this subject” and “your opinions must conform to our guidelines”.
Why is that important to me? Because that is one of the primary tools of the rabidly anti-war folks (if you disagree with us, then you must like dying babies” and “only WE can have sarcasm and satire about war subjects…”). As opposed to “let’s have a rational dialog based on the merits…”
Here in Scotland we know this guy was innocent and for us what is more problematic was the complete subversion of the highest legal system we have to convict him on embarassingly simplistic Gulf war 1 exigency cia provided evidence ‘provided’ months later along with the million $ payoff to the ‘maltese falsecon’ – I expect you may know of those issues – but I understand most US victim families have real difficulty hearing it. Media and research from many different European countries has concensus on this – or at least had all those years ago.
Its widely understood in society and the Police investigators that it was Iran commissioned after the USS Vincennes tragedy – furthermore the main reason Megrahi was freed was to prevent his appeal being heard which was set to nail the cia evidence as bogus – thus exposing the UK/Scots legal system and state apparatus as utterly subservient to whatever the current US needs happen to be.
This site is used to a high standard of debate and before anyone starts waving their shrouds at this post let me say I live close to Lockerbie under the flightpath some few seconds further on. My parents were passing by on the motorway (200 yards away) at the time and saw the explosion and people died here in Scotland.
Most people here know justice was not done nor seen to be done as the Libyans didnt do it and therefore an innocent man was in rotting in jail. Clearly other issues re US Moscow Embassy advance warnings and DEA/Contragate type matters etc. also scupper the ( what to me was the wickedness ) of the perverted court proceedings.
Judging by earlier comments readers wont like it but even if none of what I say is true and BP were at the back of it – blood and Big oil mix so easily – having suckered the western world etc into the war on terror and oil/control wars – etc.
re blood and oil:
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/1903/ella_cantarow_big_oil_makes_wa/
Im with the author on this one – no amount of emoting will change the truth that Mr Megrahi and Libya had zip to do with it and Syria needed to be taken off the hook at the time of the first Gulf war
@Thomas Schiro, I had attempted a longer comment, but they deleted it, wherein I list some of the propagandist’s tools, to include sarcasm and satire, and the method you used, to try to “guilt” people into silence.
@TomT – I definitely wouldn’t try to guilt anyone into silence, it’s just that I don’t like using humor on subjects so blatantly black/white. If BP lobbied for this murderers release to get an oil deal, it wouldn’t be beneath them.
Maybe I’m just mad because I live in Louisiana and am seeing first-hand the greed of BP float into Barataria bay.
“it’s just that I don’t like using humor on subjects so blatantly black/white.”
Then I apologize, and I invite you to continue to not use a sense of humor, if that is what you wish. My initial misunderstanding was when I thought you were trying to get Mr Giraldi to do something about YOUR feelings, and were trying to limit his ability to make his points, like some clueless lib.