Lockerbie and the historical world of compassion

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, convicted by a Scottish court of the muder of 270 people on Pan Am flight 103, was last week released on compassionate grounds. He is terminally ill with prostate cancer.

Seems simple enough. Under Section 30 of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 a prisoner may be released if they are terminally ill and likely to have less than three months to live. Principle is adhered to, mercy serves the interests of justice, justice serves the interests of the state and we have demonstrated once again that all are equal before the law. Even foreign murderers.

Nice. Dispassionate. Objective. Without the shoot first of a lynch mob and the anti-intellectualism of moral outrage.

Except there was moral outrage, with domestic and international protest keen to demonstrate its irrelevance. Read for domestic and international, opponents of the Scottish National Party and America. Their protest has been loud but crucially has no available legal challenge. Unlike Megrahi.

Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary who made the decision, got a pretty hard time. He’s not a hard man but he stood firm and this is politics so what else could he expect. He made the decision on his own as a minister and a lawyer, and he made the decision with the law unequivocally on his side. To those that protest, as Megrahi might point out, you can invade a country but it is much more difficult to invade a principle. Though you can drag a principle along with you when you undertake an invasion, aka holy war, just war, or the-principle-of-capitalism-and-you-have-the-oil war. Megrahi might also point out that though he dropped his appeal had he gone ahead with it he would have had at least a reasonable chance of being cleared of guilt.

I’m drifting, my apologies. I shall haul myself back.

Amongst the more considered arguments against the Justice Secretary, the main charge laid against him seems to be that he was right in law, right in principle, but wrong in everything else. I have difficulty understanding, however, what everything else is.

Does everything else include, for example, decency and common sense. Neither of which are principles, neither of which can be jailed or released, and neither of which behave with much decency or common sense. The actions of Hilary Clinton spring to mind.

Maybe everything else includes time, there generally being less of it than we realise. Time for the families of those murdered. Time for Megrahi’s appeal to be heard and possibly, though improbably, for the truth to out. Time for penitence and suffering and retribution. Time for history to judge.

The problem for history is the problem of politics, an abstraction with a tenuous experience of life, that can neither be solved nor left behind. Politics and history are simultaneous equations whose graphs never cross for the simple reason that there is nothing within them that is necessarily true. 1 + 1 may equal 2 for the woman on the street but in the corridors of power and the past 1 + 1 generally equals 3: there is always either a sufficiently large value of 1 or a sufficiently small value of 3.

Not that principles or the law fares much better. As I understand it 23 terminally ill prisoners have been released in Scotland in the last 16 years. Two things: have there only been 23 terminally ill prisoners in the last 16 years, and how long before death were they released. Not three months, I’d bet my sub prime on that, and my second mortgage that more than a few have died in jail. The last few pennies I’d bet on one of the motivating factors for those that were released being the bureaucratic nightmare of someone dying in jail. I suppose that’s one form of compassion, the administrators having compassion for themselves.

In effect the rule of law and the principle which underpin it are, in Western democratic form, a species of bureaucratic humanism. Was it really compassion that led to Megrahi’s release, or a deal struck to secure British interests in Libyan oil, or neither or both. In some ways it doesn’t matter, in the way that Iran Air Flight 655 doesn’t matter. Its all part of the bureaucratic administration of the interests of the state, the political appropriation of values, and the history in the moment that makes the same mistakes it keeps trying to forget.

Megrahi may be a murderer, William C. Rogers unequivocally is. Captain of the USS Vincennes, he found it inexplicably difficult too distinguish between a civilian airliner broadcasting itself as such and ascending a civilian flight path, and an F14 fighter descending to attack.

In the end Megrahi and Rogers both shape shift in the realm of politics, and both are footnotes in history. In another ten years we’ll barely be able to find them.

My question is, what does compassion mean when 560 people die. Not at the moment of their death but afterwards, when all the hatred is done. The law doesn’t hate Megrahi, but then it never loved those that were killed. Compassion is a quality not a principle. As a quality it shows us something about ourselves, as a principle it is a currency that every day is traded in.

But then when the interests of a country are at stake who wouldn’t trade in their compassion, either for the political mileage or failing that a new car.