The liberation of Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi seems to have a lot of guilty parties behind it. Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review Online shows how wide the stink extends, but puts some blame squarely on the Obama Administration.
The release of the Lockerbie terrorist was said to be on humanitarian grounds, because Megrahi is said to be terminally ill. The action, though, was totally discretionary on Scotland's part and could have been stopped by Britain. The Obama administration did nothing meaningful to stop it from happening. Perhaps the White House and the State Department were too embarrassed to try. In June, when they made arrangements with Bermuda's prime-minister to transfer four of the Uighur detainees (trained jihadists) from Guantanamo Bay to the tiny island, they cut the British government out of the secret negotiations — even though Britain, aside from being our closest ally, is responsible for the foreign policy and national security of Bermuda, its protectorate.
McCarthy's connection between the Bermuda fiasco (embarrassing enough on its own) is plausible but no more than that.
A more stinging barb comes from Ron Liddle, writing in The (British) Spectator:
The problem with this story is that it is difficult for ordinary people with an averagely developed moral sense to discern upon whom we should turn our guns first. I've been mulling this over for a while and decided it should probably be that third party, the Americans, for that familiar stench of hypocrisy now emanating from Washington DC. One by one, American politicians have lined up to condemn Britain for having released the man convicted of having blown up Pan Am Flight 103 in the skies above the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. Some two thirds of the passengers were American citizens. The director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, called the decision to release the cancer-bedevilled al-Megrahi a 'mockery of justice'. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stuck the boot in too, calling the release 'totally inappropriate'.
What, exactly, is the hypocrisy of which Liddle speaks?
Well sure, perhaps. But at least al-Megrahi was convicted and served a portion of his sentence. In the single year before the Lockerbie bombing the IRA murdered 20 people, mainly civilians, and maimed thousands of others — 11 dead and many more injured in one single atrocity in Enniskillen in November 1987. That campaign of terror, waged against British citizens for more than 30 years, was bankrolled by donations from the USA — and in those 30 years not a single terrorist was extradited from the US to face charges here, despite our repeated requests. Both federal and local US courts refused extradition requests almost as policy, while the funding of the IRA continued without interruption and was still raking in the money even after 9/11, when the Americans suddenly decided that they ought to start proscribing certain terrorist groups. The IRA was not, for some time, one of the groups so proscribed.
Now I will admit that this business is one of those things to which I have should have paid attention, but didn't. I knew of course that the IRA has long been bankrolled from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, among other Irish American enclaves. I love Irish music and have attended a number of Celtic music fairs. At one I remember thumbing through literature at a Sinn Fein (pronounced Shin Fain) booth. Sinn Fein is the legal wing of the IRA. I have always regarded that as a scandal, but one can keep track of only so many scandals.
The fact that the U.S. has never extradited a single Irish cutthroat to Britain strikes me as a scandal on the top shelf. I know nothing about it. How many requests for extradition are we talking about? What terrorists have we shielded from British justice and what crimes did they commit?
If Liddle is right, and I don't doubt that he is, there is a lot of Scots Rot right here. The Ulster Catholics may have good reason to complain, but that does nothing to save the reputation of the IRA and its many murderous splinter groups. These are twenty four karat terrorists. We have no excuse for protecting them. It discredits everything we think we mean when we take a stand against terror.
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