Tit For Tat

The day the Pan Am flight was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie still lives on in my memory. It shook the world to its core and struck at the very heart of the free world that such a callous, cowardly atrocity could be enacted above our sovereign territory and so brutally.

It was a mere appetiser in terrorist atrocity terms when compared to 9/11 and to some extent Britain had been numbed to sensational acts of violence after years of IRA campaigns but Lockerbie was defining moment - and for many the connection to Libya was one that damned that nation, if not forever, then for a long time.

The flight was bound to the USA and it was an American airline and so many of the 270 victims were US citizens and so this hit both countries with an equal intensity. In Ireland, we had long differentiated the fact that the Government and the vast majority of citizens had distanced themselves from the extremists within the IRA and its sister organisations - they were rogues, dissidents, terrorists. What made Libya different was that the rogue behaviour went right to the top - to its Dictator, Col. Gadaffi.

It came as a huge surprise to most people in the UK and the US, I am sure, who were old enough to remember the old Libya and you didn't have to be that old to remember that President Clinton regularly dropped bombs on Libya, when in the aftermath of 9/11 that Libya was hurriedly, without warning or question, welcomed back into our protective net. Gadaffi had apparently denounced terrorism and that was good enough for anyone. As if the British Government has no memory or conscience about those whose lives were so cowardly taken that terrible night above Lockerbie, they started feeding on Libya's prizes almost immediately.

As soon as Tony Blair could get his fresh face there, Brown since and Straw at the helm, it seems, we, Britain, have been negotiating with the former rogue state, happy to sell the legacy of those who died over Lockerbie for some oil. A 'Prisoner Transfer' deal was struck, and to the annoyance of the Scottish Justice System, who had found Megrahi guilty of the crime and sentenced him to life in prison as the crime was deemed to have been committed on Scottish soil although the bomb may have exploded over England, the Lockerbie bomber's 'transfer' was added into the agreement.

OK, so technically he was recently released on compassionate grounds - he was dying. But what are the families and friends of the Lockerbie victims going to think? For most of us, a life sentence meant that you end your life in prison. What about the feelings of average Scottish people or British generally? What about the feelings of the Americans? Cut it whatever way you want, that bomb exploded above Britain and a British judicial system convicted and then released the bomber - in the eyes of Americans, not the Scottish alone. If the Americans had had their way, Megrahi, would have been tried in a US court and either be dead now or long forgotten in a US jail where his chances of survival would have been slim long before his fatal illness struck. In particular, the man at the FBI who led the whole investigation to find Megrahi was infuriated.

In an apparent tit for tat move, President Obama, is welcoming Government officials from Japan and China prior to the forthcoming G20 talks in Pittsburgh. But all he has afforded the 'Special Relationship' so far is a chat by the coffee machine and he has rebuffed attempts to have some showpiece talks. Just about every US citizen would have been reviled to have witnessed the scenes when Megrahi returned home, a national hero of a former rogue state having been convicted of killing 270 people, and more reviled to have seen a Scottish flag waving in thanks. It will not be lost on US officials and citizens that Gordon Brown is himself a Scot.

The whole sorry saga of Britain's frenzy to get oil deals and sell out justice for the 270 people who died at Lockerbie is a disgusting indictment on modern politics. I condemn the Americans for their own part in suddenly allowing Gadaffi back into the mainstream with no caveats but Britain just could not wait. To us, it wasn't about forgiving terrorism, it was about trade and big money - and we all know how our 'Champagne Socialists' feel about big money these days.

In many instances, I believe our Government has blood on its hands for lots of other reasons. In the case of the Lockerbie bomber, I think it has behaved shamefully and is a disgrace to all people who remember the Lockerbie bombing and the cold-blooded shooting of PC Yvonne Fletcher on the streets of London and then watched her killer just walk away under diplomatic protection.

The matter has been conveniently and expertly brushed under the carpet as per usual in this country. But to their credit, the Americans have not forgotten and it looks like Britain has gone down a notch or too in the pecking order of world politics as Obama deliberately avoids directly meeting Gordon Brown and his flunkies.

Good on Obama, good on America. We deserve it.

Oil And Terrorism Don't Mix

You don’t have to be a chemist to realise that a solution of oil and terrorism doesn’t mix. But politicians are would-be alchemists and in their eyes the two are intertwined, particularly when the goal is vast financial gain.

I don’t know about you but I have watched the whole saga of the Lockerbie Bomber’s release and the subsequent series of revelations totally aghast yet knowing that I should not be surprised. The whole genre of the current Government has been based on spin, deception, double dealing, incompetence, cronyism and sleaze and yet we still seem to accept it all well within our stride. In fact, it some ways it would still not surprise me much if Gordon Brown not only survives his own leadership battle but actually wins the next election – it is that perverse.

You see, we could have all bet our shirts that there was some sort of deal involved in letting a mass murderer go that involved oil and money. It is just so unpleasant how people try to lie about it, try to make it sound as if it is good for us all and that everyone was acting in a straightforward way.

But what came as a huge surprise to me, given the appalling history we have with Libya – the Yvonne Fletcher shooting, the Lockerbie Bomb, the IRA semtex and training grounds - is that Libya has been so welcomed back into the international mainstream and the speed at which the reconciliation has occurred, let alone its totality. For any minister to think that the public would swallow Gadaffi’s new bonhomie as being a good reason to forgive the nation for the atrocities we have all been told they perpetrated enough to show a jot of compassion - dead, alive or nearly dead - to a man who was convicted of blowing 270 innocent people out of the sky and onto the rooftops of Lockerbie is verging on the insane.

But Straw, Brown, Milliband and, no doubt, Mandelson seem to think that ‘All is fair in love and terrorism’.

Now we have the equal farce of the pursuit of compensation for the victims of IRA bombs which contained Libyan semtex. I had to admit, I had no idea that such compensation was being asked for and I was a little surprised. Not least, such claims cannot be viewed in isolation. I mean if IRA victims are to be compensated by rogue states who sell raw materials willingly, then where does it stop? Do Loyalist victims have similar claims? Moreover, do suppliers of money like the US, where Noraid was the front for the influx of considerable sums of money to purchase such weapons for the IRA, also have to be stood up and be counted? The question then extends to what people would like to think is the ‘ethical weapons trade’. Should we pursue all those manufacturers of weapons who allow their products to end up in the hands of terrorists and insurgents? I don’t know.

What I do know is that we have the idiotic sight of Gordon Brown openly telling relatives of the victims of IRA bombs that it was not in our interests to pursue claims for compensation from Libya in one sentence, then to say that he actually did support it in another and now for him to say support, yes, but directly against Libya, no. And then he has the complete chin to say that there are no background deals going on – maybe he is right, perhaps it is so obvious that there are deals but that he can deny that they are background or underhand as they are real and right in our faces.

I have been disillusioned with this Government for a long while and never, ever trusted them on an economic policy that I knew was flawed although even in my wildest nightmares could I have even guessed what havoc and cost it would cause. But while I am pro-free trade, I have a strong social conscience and it’s why, I think, a lot of people got sucked in by Tony Blair and his spin-merchants. The messages appealed to our sense of personal wealth status while answering our concerns on the social things around us. While the dream seemed real, the reality has been the opposite and pretty hurtful for a great deal of people. There has always been a lack of trust of the integrity of several individuals in the Government, not least Blair himself. But the one guy we all thought was too straight, sombre, cerebral and downright boring to be crooked was Gordon Brown. Full of his own economic importance, and incompetent at that, yes - crooked, no.

Well the whole affair over the Lockerbie Bomber and the subsequent shenanigans has changed all that. Brown is just as crooked as the rest of his sleazy ministers and he finally has proved that the Government is absolutely morally bankrupt.

The High Price of Oil

You will notice, over this Bank Holiday Weekend, that prices at the petrol pumps are around £1.05 per litre, the highest price for fuel since October 2008. The price of oil has over doubled since that time and retailers would have us believe that they are merely passing on the rises. In fact, they will go higher as a new fuel duty increment is due to come into effect at midnight tonight, adding a few more pence per litre.

But there is a much, much higher price to oil. The weekend papers have revealed, in shocking detail thanks to leaked letters, the suspicions I voiced on my blog last week that the Lockerbie Bomber's release was part of background negotiations by the Government in exchange for oil. The papers go into much detail about Blair's visits to Tripoli on behalf of a £15bn contract for BP and Jack Straw's letters to Kenny MacAskill about how the Bomber's name could not be excluded from a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) between Britain and Libya, effectively overruling any sentence imposed by the Scottish Legal System for his crimes, as negotiations had reached a 'delicate stage'. We all know what happened next - the bottleneck was removed, the contract was signed and BP had their oil.

This left the nasty issue of Megrahi and how to repatriate him under the agreement. Technically, the Government denials are right - Megrahi's release was not part of the PTA agreed with Libya under the terms of the BP deal. He was released on compassionate grounds, so they can all stand piously - Brown, Straw and Mandelson - and say they had nothing to do with it; it was a decision by Scotland's Justice System with no pressure from the Government. Indeed, any such inference was a heinous crime in itself - the Government 'Thought Police' were going into overdrive.

Everyone was at pains to point out to aggrieved American officials that this was not a prisoner transfer but a compassionate release, even though for many of us it was the first time we had ever heard of a Prisoner Transfer Agreement.

Medical experts have lined up to question whether Megrahi was 'terminal enough' as the grounds for compassionate release should be only 3 months left to live. I think many were pretty shocked at the rather healthy looking individual being hugged by Saif Gadaffi and his father, the Dictator. I may be being a little callous here as new pictures were released over the weekend of the Bomber in hospital in Tripoli, but I cannot shake the belief that Megrahi's release came as part of the price of agreed trade between Libya and Britain. All the leaked evidence now points to the fact that Megrahi's release was part of the deal and what is actually different about his release was that Britain (with Scotland very much part of it) used Megrahi's illness as a convenient cover.

Would the public mind if he lived longer than 3 months and show a miracle rejuvenation like the other compassionate release recently, Ronnie Biggs?

Oil is a demon of a commodity. The West rode roughshod over the Middle East to get it. When these states fought back by reclaiming their territory and voice, we have systematically split the Middle east into friends, foe and people we don't care about - the latter being those who do not have oil. Iraq was amongst the biggest of the foes. After 9/11, George W Bush famously labeled Iraq the 'Axis of Evil' suggesting that the 9/11 attacks emanated from there while asserting that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and was refusing to comply with international law by handing them over. The Second Gulf war proved many things, the most poignant being that Saddam was a spent force, he did not have WMD and that 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq.

What it did achieve was to rouse just about every would-be terrorist to rally around a cause and a visible enemy.

Oil has a very high price indeed. The few extra pennies of duty we will see tomorrow morning no doubt pays for the commission required by Ministers who helped negotiate the deal with Libya, the state responsible for shooting a Policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, on a street in London and for blowing 270 people out of the air over the sleepy town of Lockerbie.

The British Government, in its infinite wisdom, went along with Libya's ruse to get us all to accept the country by telling us it was dismantling its nuclear program in return for the prize asset, oil. But there was a far greater price to pay as, somehow, Libya had all the negotiating chips in this international reconciliation process despite supposedly having a rogue capability to bomb us with nuclear devices.

No, we sat down in tents, listened to Gadaffi fart and burp and then did exactly as he wanted.

That is the price of oil. Several names in the Government will be slightly embarrassed about all this but as Jack Straw said about the leaks, they are 'academic'. You see, the clever ruse of compassionate release deflected the blame for such negotiations as the most helpful of all things made sure the Government could point its finger elsewhere - cancer. How convenient that has supplied a neat smokescreen, a disease you would be hard pushed to get consistent care for in Britain today.

The letters prove otherwise. The unhealthy relationship between Gadaffi's son and Peter Mandelson is another to be behold with splendour while the obsequious entourage of background negotiators made sure a British company gets the ability to continue to find enough oil so we can be taxed heavily on it.

Drinks all round - the Government could not have hoped for a better result.

The High Price of A Free Holiday

Oh, Peter. You are so obvious but that's why everyone loves you so much.

Yes, it is old Lord Mandelson again up to his old tricks. After a lovely, free, holiday on a yacht moored in Corfu (yes another expensive yacht near Corfu) courtesy of David Geffen, co-owner of Dreamworks who has a major axe to grind on pirate copies of media being downloaded on the web, Peter has personally intervened to beef up the new laws governing downloads in the new Digital Britain initiative.

Once again, the war on piracy has been taken to the consumer not to those who put the content on the web who actually stole it in the first place. Those characters are much harder to chase as they are slippery, elusive and getting as rich as David Geffen - so maybe someday they will have expensive yachts and free holidays to dole out. Consumers? No, they are weak, puny and easy to catch, particularly as the new legislation governing security allows the Government to question the ISPs who provide our internet services for records of every movement, word and message we send. Welcome to Digital Britain - who knows, maybe blogs like this will be illegal soon as I mention a Politician's name.

In Sweden, a whole Political Party has sprung up ostensibly to tackle the download issue but has leapt to prominence by gaining an MEP seat when it tackled the issue of excessive security laws. It will be a direct consequence of laws, supposedly intended to safeguard us from terrorist attacks, that allow Governments to monitor everything we do on the web, that will be able to find out who has wantonly downloaded music, software, films etc and violated copyright so that they can be fined.

Yes, that's right - fined.

It's all about money. But then again, you don't have to follow Peter Mandelson far to find money. He met Gadaffi's son twice this year, once on that very yacht, and guess what? Yes, the Lockerbie Bomber is freed to a hero's reception in Tripoli and we get more trade with Libya - just wait and see.

This isn't rocket science, you know. It isn't even subtle. This is rich people scratching a power-hungry Minister's back, who is unelected, who correspondingly does their bidding in Government - accountable to no one.

Once again, Welcome to Digital Britain.

Can It Look Any Better?

Well, frankly, it cannot look any worse. Or maybe it can?

I am talking of the clamour by Scottish Ministers to try to justify the decision to release the Lockerbie Bomber. It doesn't matter how you read the statements or how they try to make the USA's position weaker by saying they were offered a choice and indicated compassionate release was preferable which does not seem to fit in with the Director of the FBI's recollection.

Then again, everybody is distancing themselves from the Scottish decision. Col Gadaffi praised his 'good friend, Gordon Brown' while Peter Mandelson dismissed suggestions of a deal, 'offensive'. He should know.

You see Gadaffi's son is now recanting, via spokespeople, that he actually said that the Bomber's release was on the negotiating table when it came to trade. It is very interesting as Gadaffi's son and Mandelson met while in Corfu recently as Mandy took the sun on David Geffen's yacht.

William Hague has called on the Government to clarify its role in the release of the Bomber, since Gordon Brown is now known to have written to Col Gadaffi beforehand to plead for restraint on the welcoming committee that the Bomber would receive on his release. This is a very clear sign that the Government was fully aware of the release and knew what the Libyans would do. It was almost as if Brown was reminding Libya of the terms of the deal and it really indicates that Brown knew much more about it than he would like us to think.

They say there is no smoke without fire. Follow the trail. Mandelson has a history of intervening on behalf of rich friends he meets in exotic locations, particularly on swanky yachts. If nothing more should come of this, someone ought take Mandelson aside and remind him that the Blair era of freebie holidays with dodgy characters like Silvio Berlusconi or Gadaffi's son are over.

It has been the Hallmark of a Government that is increasingly looking corrupt and bankrupt of decent values.