By Michael Faulkner – September 13, 2009
The release from jail last month of
convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has caused quite a stir here
and in the United States. Understandably, many relatives of the 270 victims of
the 1988 atrocity are outraged at the decision by the Scottish executive to
free the terminally ill Libyan – supposedly on compassionate grounds. But
the White House’s reaction to his release is not so easy to defend. Neither is
Downing Street’s claim that his release was solely a matter for the Scottish
justice secretary and did not concern the Westminster government. Here we have
a tangled web that needs to be unpicked.
The Megrahi
affair has led to what some commentators have claimed is the most serious
strain for decades in Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States.
That will turn out to be greatly exaggerated, but the anger in Washington has
clearly added to Gordon Brown’s accumulating woes. The affair comes at a bad
time for the prime minister. He and his government are deeply unpopular and
face almost certain defeat in next year’s general election. His relationship
with the Scottish National Party administration in Edinburgh has never been
good and now his attempt to disassociate himself from their decision to release
Megrahi has made it worse. SNP
first minister, Alex Salmond is furious with Brown for his refusal to endorse
the decision to release Megrahi, despite the fact that his release and repatriation
was implicitly agreed months ago as part of a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA)
signed in Tripoli between the U.K. and Libya. The former pariah and abettor of
terrorism, Colonel Gaddafi, was brought in from the cold in 2007 by Tony Blair,
whose “deal in the desert” paved the way for lucrative trade agreements for
Britain, dependent on the colonel’s commitment to renounce terrorism and
weapons of mass destruction. The Libyans pointedly refused to accept that
Megrahi should be excluded from the PTA and Justice Secretary Jack Straw bowed
to their wishes in December 2007.
The
decision to release Megrahi was taken by SNP justice minister MacAskill in the
full knowledge that the British government had accepted that he would not be
allowed to die in jail. But it suits the interests of the British government to
deflect the spotlight away from Westminster onto Edinburgh. The minority SNP
administration is detested by Downing Street as Salmond and his party have
virtually destroyed Labour’s once impregnable electoral base in Scotland. So it
has suited Brown to allow Salmond to take the flak for the Megrahi affair. But
more than one can play at this game and Salmond has released online a set of
documents revealing that Brown did not wish Megrahi to die in jail. His silence
in this matter cannot be sustained for much longer, but nothing he can say will
extricate him from the mess.
This is
clearly a case of realpolitik coming into conflict with proclaimed moral
principles. Everyone knows that states do business with each other on the basis
of what their leaders perceive to be their own national interests. They loudly
proclaim their abhorrence of tyranny, torture and terrorism while conveniently
turning a blind eye to cases of any and all of these if it is considered to be
in their national interests to do so. Saudi Arabia is one obvious case of an
oil rich state whose corrupt, misogynistic, repressive regime is seldom
criticised by UK and US governments for reasons of realpolitik. Oil speaks
louder than words. There are numerous other cases – now including Libya.
Some commentators have tried to argue that Megrahi’s repatriation had nothing
to do with trade deals negotiated by British ministers for BP and Shell, but
was related only to Gaddafi’s renunciation of terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction. The arguments are not too convincing.
What about
the role of the United States in all this? Once again, it is a question of
terrorism. Megrahi was convicted of the worst terrorist attack on British soil
– the destruction of Pan Am flight 103, blown up over Scotland in
December 1988 with the loss of 270 lives, 169 of them US citizens. The bereaved
relatives cannot forget and are unlikely to forgive those responsible. But only
one person – Megrahi – was ever convicted. Despite his conviction
there is considerable doubt about his guilt, or at least about whether he was
solely responsible. An intended appeal against his conviction was dropped prior
to his release. It is widely believed that an appeal was unwelcome to the British
authorities because of what may have been revealed about the circumstances of
the attack and who else may have been involved - states other than Libya
perhaps? It has been largely forgotten that not long before the destruction of
Pan Am 103, on July 3rd 1988, an Iranian passenger airliner (IR 655)
was shot down, apparently in error, by a US guided missile cruiser over the
Straits of Hormuz, with the loss of 299 lives. There was no admission of
wrongdoing by the US and no apology. Later, all the personnel on board the
guided missile cruiser on that day were awarded combat action ribbons. Taking
his cue from John Wayne (“Never apologise – it’s a sign of weakness”),
Vice President GHW Bush said (August 15th 1988) “I will never
apologise for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”
Bush senior
may have been disinclined to apologise, but, as president he was more than
ready to pardon known terrorists – as long, that is, as their terrorist
activities were directed against “enemies” of the United States. It is
instructive to compare Washington’s outrage at the release of the man convicted
of the Lockerbie bombing with the treatment accorded to the perpetrators of an
earlier terrorist attack on an airliner. Prior to Lockerbie, the worst attack
of this kind in the Western hemisphere occurred on October 6th 1976. Cubana Flight 455, bound
from Barbados to Jamaica was blown out of the sky by a bomb concealed in the
toilet. All 73 passengers and crew – including the entire Cuban national
fencing team, were killed. The bombing was carried out by two CIA trained
terrorists, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, both of whom had links to
Miami-based anti-Castro Cuban émigrés. CIA documents released in 2005, revealed
that the agency “had concrete advanced intelligence as early as June 1976 on
plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb a Cubana airliner.”
Bosch fled
to the United States. Despite the US defence department’s view that he was one
of the most deadly terrorists working within the hemisphere, President GHW
Bush, at his son Jeb’s request, pardoned him on July 18th 1990. On
his return to Miami, Bosch was welcomed by anti-Castro émigrés as a patriot. He
lives freely in the US.
Posada Carriles, who was held for eight
years in Venezuela awaiting final sentence for the crime, fled the country and
entered the United States. He was initially held on charges of entering the
country illegally. In April 2005 a warrant was issued in Venezuela requesting
his extradition to stand trial for terrorist offences. A US immigration judge
ruled that he shouldn’t be deported. The justice department argued that Posada
should be kept in jail because he was “an admitted mastermind of terrorist
plots and attacks.” As documents
released by the National Security Archive make clear, Posada was linked not
only to the 1976 Cubana airline bombing, but also to a string of other
terrorist offences in the hemisphere. He admitted organizing a wave of hotel
bombings in Cuba in 1997 that resulted in the death of an Italian tourist and
injury to eleven others. Like Orlando Bosch, he lives freely today in the
United States and is regarded as a hero by anti-Castro Cubans in Miami.
G.W. Bush,
in launching his “war on terror” proclaimed to the world that the United States
would regard any state that harboured terrorists as complicit in terrorism. It
is instructive to consider the case of the “Miami Five”, which, unfortunately
has received too little attention in the US and British media. In 1998 Cuba
handed over to the FBI thousands of documents detailing the activities of
anti-Castro terrorist networks operating on US territory. The information had
been obtained by Cuban agents who had infiltrated the groups in Miami. One
might have expected the FBI to use the information to uncover and arrest the
terrorists. Instead they arrested five Cubans who had unearthed their
activities. They were subjected to what has been described as a show trial and
sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment – three of them to life and
two to 19 and 15 year terms. Despite a world-wide campaign for their release,
they remain in incarcerated, opponents of terrorism, victims of the “war on
terror.” 