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Lockerbie fall-out: the pressure mounts on Brown

Politicians, lawyers and newspaper commentators on both sides of the Atlantic attack the ‘duplicitous’ Prime Minister

BY JACK BREMER

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

The revelation that Gordon Brown did not want Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, to die in a Scottish jail has alienated opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. There are claims that the 'special relationship' between the US and Britain is doomed.

After refusing since August 20 to state publicly whether he agreed or disagreed with the Scottish decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds, Brown said in a statement yesterday: "I respect the right of the Scottish ministers to make the decision, and the decision." According to a Guardian report last night, Downing Street acknowledged that these remarks were an endorsement of Megrahi's early release.

THE AMERICANS:
Britain is accused of reneging on a "cast-iron" promise given to the US and the UN in 1998 ahead of Megrahi's trial that, if found guilty, he would serve out his life sentence in jail. Spokesmen for both the US Justice Department and the State Department insist they were given this assurance.

♦ David Rivkin, a former Justice Department official, said Brown had shown "no interest" in keeping the promise. "This will damage US relations with Britain for years to come," he said. "This is the kind of duplicitous behaviour that most people here do not expect from Britain. I really can't think about a more duplicitous act by Britain vis-a-vis the United States in the post-war period."

♦ Larry Korb, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress think-tank, denied the special relationship was dead but acknowledged that the fallout was serious. "The feeling in the US is disappointment that our oldest ally and one we rely on would be a party to this," he said.

THE LAWYERS:
♦ Professor Robert Black QC, the lawyer who advised the British government on setting up the jury-less trial in the Netherlands which convicted Megrahi in 2001, told the Daily Mail today that the undertaking to jail Megrahi for life was "absolutely concrete, and was the entire basis on which both the British and the US governments referred the matter of the Lockerbie trial to the UN Security Council.

"You don't get much more binding an undertaking than that. UN Security Council resolutions are binding in international law on all member states," said Black. "The Foreign Office, when it said in its letters to the Scottish government that no binding commitment had been given to the US, was telling a bare-faced lie."

♦ Black's intervention follows yesterday's article by the distinguished liberal QC Geoffrey Robertson, who argued that "there can be no forgiveness for perpetrators of a crime such as the Lockerbie bombing", and that it is "part of the punishment that they shall die in some form of custody".

THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT:
By 73 to 50 votes, the Scottish Parliament approved a motion on Wednesday stating that justice secretary Kenny MacAskill had mishandled Megrahi's request to return to Libya.

♦ Iain Gray, Labour's leader at Holyrood, said: "The Scottish Parliament has made clear its opposition to both the decision to release Megrahi to Libya and the woeful handling of the decision and announcement".

WESTMINSTER:
♦ Conservative leader David Cameron stepped up his attacks on Brown following Foreign Secretary David Miliband's appearance on the Todayprogramme on Wednesday morning when he admitted that neither he nor Brown had wanted Megrahi to die in a Scottish jail.

"At the same time, we know the Government was giving assurances to the United States that Mr Megrahi would spend his full sentence in a Scottish prison. So that is double-dealing," said Cameron.

"But almost more serious is the double-dealing with the British public, where on the one hand Gordon Brown has completely refused to give his opinion on the release of this mass murderer, but on the other hand was content for the Libyans to be told that he shouldn't die in prison."

♦ Former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, interviewed on BBC Radio 2 on Wednesday, said: "It does not feel right to me that someone who has been convicted for an extremely serious offence be able to return, in a way in which his victims were not able to, back to Libya."

THE BRITISH PRESS:
Commentators on both sides of the political aisle have concentrated on Brown's refusal to state whether he believes it was right or wrong of the Scots to release Megrahi.

♦ Michael White of the Guardian says in an article headlined 'Brown's costly lack of courage': "As Whitehall clearly wants to bring Libya in from the cold and normalise relations with its oil wells, it could hardly condemn Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill's decision, but it saw no reason to offer advice, let alone throw him a lifeline. No love lost between Labour and the Nats.

"Typical Brown calculation, typical Brown caution, typical indecision. What No 10 failed to anticipate, not for the first time, was that saying nothing would upset people too."

♦ James Slack writes in the Daily Mail: "What is truly astonishing is that while the Prime Minister refuses to voice his thoughts on a matter causing great harm to Britain's relationship with its closest political ally, his flunkies are briefing his enthusiasm to take part in an open, transparent, Presidential-style general election debate.

"The irony could not be greater. He is open when he thinks it might suit his desperate electoral predicament. Prone to a despotic silence when it does not."

THE AMERICAN PRESS:
♦ In an editorial titled 'Brown the betrayer', the New York Daily Newscalled Brown a "sellout Prime Minister" who had "given grounds to believe that today¹s British are a cowardly, unprincipled, amoral and duplicitous lot. Because he is all of those."

It concluded: "As for the 'special relationship' between the US and Britain, the alliance built on the resolve of World War II and carried on through Thatcher and Blair, through Iraq and Afghanistan, it is, in a word, gone."

IN BROWN'S DEFENCE:
♦ Gordon Brown said on Wednesday: "There was no conspiracy, no cover-up, no double dealing... no private assurances by me to Col Gaddafi. This was a decision for the Scottish Government."

♦ A Foreign Office spokesman said the Government had always made clear to the US that it "could not bind the hands of future governments, including future devolved administrations" over the fate of the Lockerbie bomber.