David Cameron: My Predecessor Was An Active Party In The Deal To Release The Lockerbie Bomber

The Prime Minister came armed with a report from Cabinet Secretary O'Donnell which admitted Labour did "all it could" to make this happen. (video at the Telegraph link)

The report not only confirmed the “slop-out” claim—it included the text of formerly secret documents which described the discussion of a deal—but also came to the same conclusion that V.F. did—that overall, in Sir Gus’s words, the previous U.K. Labour government “did all it could” to secure Megrahi’s release, and that this was a “policy” derived from a strong “underlying desire.” That underlying desire, not mentioned by Cameron, was to appease Libya and thereby ease the path for British commercial interests.

While Cameron is careful to say it was a Scottish Government decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, he pushes home the "complicity" point, reading from the Cabinet Secretary's report that the British Government was a) actively involved in "facilitating an appeal", "facilitating contact", and a "game-plan", and b) that these facts were insufficiently explained in previous accounts to Parliament.

The "slop-out" claim refers to a quid pro quo, an allegation the report aims at Scottish First Minister Salmond, saying he suggested "a change to British law in order to stem the flood of expensive legal actions which Scotland was then facing from former prisoners who had been forced to use “slop-out” buckets instead of toilets in their cells.", was a way of making it easier to release Megrahi.

Salmond claims that's a bunch of crap (see what I did there?), and that Megrahi was released on purely humanitarian grounds because he was dying of cancer.

For a long time. It's a slow, slow moving cancer. If I have to have cancer, I want this one.

Purple Avenger explained this to me because I am not as smart as he is: "The Brits were sucking the Colonel's dick over some oil/trade deal. This was the Quid Pro for the Colonel's Quo. Of course, they got played like a Steinway if they really believed this clown was actually sick and dying. I suspect they actually knew what was going on though and decided to go along with the fiction so they could execute their realpolitik deal."

He knows more about Brits than I do, I can't even understand them when they talk except the "yeah?" at the end of every sentence.

via Slublog

posted by Dave In Texas at 10:05 PM

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