Megrahi release: US press reaction
Updated on 21 August 2009
How the American media sees the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.
Massachusetts residents know well the cost of the Lockerbie tragedy, notes a Boston Globe editorial on "Scotland's misplaced sympathy for an unforgivable criminal"
"The plane's 258 passengers included about two dozen people from New England, many of them college students returning from a semester in England organized through Syracuse University. The grief was like a lightning bolt aimed at local towns."
The paper criticises the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill's statement that Megrahi has had a sentence "imposed by a higher power".
"MacAskill's statement, which is distasteful in equating cancer with a criminal judgment, also reeks of an untoward certainty, as if MacAskill himself, more than the court or the cancer or the law, is assuming the role of higher power.
"There may be honorable intentions behind this decision, but MacAskill's sympathies would be better directed to the victims' families, who have almost uniformly opposed Megrahi's release" the paper says.
"Scotland's shame" is the headline of an editorial in the Chicago Tribune.
"We're not sure which is more feckless," says the paper, "Gaddafi's lobbying to secure the release of al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, or Scotland's surrender in the name of kindness."
The piece notes Gaddafi's attempts to please critics in the wake of September 11th terrorism - he has dismantled his nuclear program, confessed his government's responsibility for Lockerbie and paid compensation to victims' survivors. But this does not justify MacAskill's decision to overrule Megrahi's punishment.
"We find no footnote saying that sentence meant 27 years unless the convict is dying, in which case eight will do just fine. People serving life sentences do tend to die in prison. Al-Megrahi? He'll die with his family.
It concludes that President Obama, who called MacAskill's invocation of a Scottish compassion statute a "mistake", might have added that "appeasement doesn't deter terrorists and their enablers. It reminds them that many of their enemies are weak."
The LA Times criticises the Obama administration for failing to condemn Megrahi's release more strongly.
Although it would be "naïve to pretend that foreign policy considerations never affect the administration of justice", the paper sees no such diplomatic justification for Megrahi's release.
"In reacting to Megrahi's release, relatives of the victims used words such as 'disgusting' and 'outrage'. The Obama administration should have been equally, and openly, appalled."
At the Washington Post's religion-focused blog, Under God, David Waters asks where the balance between justice and mercy lies.
"The prophet Micah instructed us to 'love mercy'," he writes. "That doesn't mean we have to like it, but does it mean we should apply it in cases like this? Do mass murderers deserve mercy?"
Attitudes to Megrahi's release reveal the US-British divide on justice, says Ben Quinn, London-based correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.
He reports on the "heated" opposition to Megrahi's release in the US, and the comparative sympathy in at least some parts of Britain.
"In many cases, where the American attitude toward a convict is 'let him rot' the British one is to ask if the prisoner hasn't suffered enough."
