I’ll start with the #Rainman stuff first - travel by air and rail should be the safest means of getting around, but the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, which should otherwise be known for delicious Mature Cheddar Cheese, has the macabre history of being the site of horrific train and plane crashes. Except of course that, whoever was to blame, the downing of Pan Am flight 103 was no accident. In terms of terrorism top trumps, the image of the ‘Maid of the Seas’ cockpit nose cone turned on its side is perhaps second only to the horrors of 9/11.
So why is Scotland’s nationalist First Minister so proud to release the man convicted for this atrocity? What I really dislike about this debacle is the notion that he was released because there were a lot of people who thought he was innocent.
That just isn’t the way justice should work - the principle of innocent until proven guilty works the other way round, namely that a convicted man should remain as such until there is a body of evidence presented to a court to prove otherwise.
Instead, we have got a complete muddying of the waters between innocence v. guilt and compassion v. justice. Throw in the whole question of Peter Mandelson’s deals regarding Libyan oil and the inevitable flag waving return to Tripoli, on a flight numbered 103 just to rub it all in, and we really have made a complete laughing stock of both British and Scottish justice.
Considering all this, it really is a great shame that it should be seen as a symbol of Scottish pride to let this man free, especially when the Scottish legal system has so much to be proud of, not least the concept of a Not Proven verdict.
Much as though I really don’t like bringing any more attention to terrorist attacks on transport networks than is necessary, I really do think that it is just a tad rich for Americans to be calling for boycotts of Scotland and the UK because of Al Megrahi ’s release - as if such a boycott would bring the man back to prison. There are still many questions which need answering, perhaps most importantly from Gordon Brown with respect to where he stands on this issue, but I can think of two words to say in response to American boycott calls - Guantanamo and Bay.
