The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland has attacked the US over the release of the Lockerbie bomber.
Cardinal Keith O’Brien said the Scottish government was right to free Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi last year on compassionate grounds.
US lawmakers want Scots politicians to explain their decision to a committee, but the cardinal said ministers should not go “crawling like lapdogs”.
I agree that Scottish ministers should not have to answer to U.S. committee. I would hold the same if the situation was reversed and the Scottish members demanded U.S. officials explain their actions before them.
As to the rest of the lecture about U.S. justice system I wish Kendall had a big Bronx razberry icon complete with sound effect.
One has to dig for it, but the full story of the “medical experts” who supplied the fallacious pretext under which this murderer was released is even more infuriating than the comments of this Cardinal. In fact, none of the urologists or oncologists who had actually examined him was asked to certify that he had “only three months to live.” The contract prison GP, one Dr. Fraser, supplied the estimate and then, conveniently, was transferred and is not available to be questioned. Of course, comparing clinical outcomes between the NHS and the US system is difficult, but the median survival for prostatic cancer that has metastasized to bone is 19 months or more in most of the developed world. That said, one could actually argue that releasing a patient in that condition from a fully-funded and reasonably modern medical system (the NHS) to the tender mercies of the Libyan health care system is less “compassionate” than retaining him. In any event, it’s becoming blindingly obvious that his release was done for the most venal of purposes and at least one physician allowed his profession to be used as a cover. Cardinal Obrien’s attack on the US because of our death penalty and the effrontery of our demanding his government answer some basic questions is so weak on its substance as to cast doubt on his command of simple logic. Of course, when one’s case is as weak is his, there’s little left to do but pound on the table. One would have expected better from a Cardinal, even a Scots one.
This just seems a hugely misjudged intervention.
1. The tone is extraordinarily aggressive (“crawling”, “lapdogs”, “culture of vengeance”).
2.The vastly drawn cultural contrast which verges IMO on a base anti-Americanism rests entirely on a critique of the death penalty. It is, of course, completely disconnected from the specifics of the release of al-Megrahi and the sovereign rights of the Scottish government. One might see it almost as a piece of argumentative misdirection.
3. It’s hard to see what is the point of the intervention. The Scottish Government doesn’t need the Cardinal’s support. The Catholic church is critical of the use of the death penalty (without I think prohibiting it’s use) but this is completely unrelated to the specifics of the al-Megrahi case.
4. I should say I think it imprudent of the US committee to request the Scottish officials to answer their questions, since it opens US government officers (up and including the President) to being questioned in the same way by foreign powers. Better for it to be dealt with as the relation of one government to another.
Finally, given the Cardinal’s evident concern for the taking of human life, it is very sad that he is not more concerned with those completely innocent human beings whose lives were ended in the terrorist attack or those innocent families who grieve the loss of their loved ones and long for nothing more than justice to be done.
So what does God’s justice call for against the taker of a human life? Or is the idea of justice an outdated concept?
Of course, compassion was a pretext for al-Megrahi’s release. I’m sure that the murderer of hundreds of innocent persons could have received compassionate care in Scotish custody. His release is a grave injustice and the Cardinal’s words are shameful.
The article doesn’t identify the US lawmakers, but I assume that their purpose is not to criticize the Scots so much as to find out exactly what the role of the Obama administration was in the release.