US and UK locked in standoff over Senate's Lockerbie investigation

[CHIMO]

Source: The Guardian

Britain and the US were locked in a standoff over Lockerbie last night after a Scottish minister flatly turned down a request to appear before a Senate committee and Jack Straw expressed unease about attending.

Days after David Cameron tried to ease transatlantic tensions by announcing a Whitehall review of the Lockerbie papers, Straw said it would be "highly unusual" to expect a British MP to answer in Washington for decisions made in London.

There were reports, too, last night that Tony Blair had been asked to appear before the Senate foreign relations committee in Washington, but a spokesman for the former prime minister said: "We have not received anything at all."

The reports were later denied by a committee spokesman. Frank Lowenstein, staff director of the committee, said: "Let me state unequivocally that prime minister Blair will not be asked to testify before the committee at the upcoming hearing on the Megrahi affair, and the Committee has no intention of ever asking him to testify on this issue."



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/23/uk-us-lockerbie-senate-jack-straw

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The special relationship ended after the first world war. The UK could not offer anything more. They haven't realised that yet!

[metapunditedgy]

1. K&R. Corporo-political transparency is one of the most important issues of the day. n/t

[defendandprotect]

2. K&R --

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. From this side of the Atlantic...

the row over Megrahi looks like nothing so much as rather unseemly American dick-swinging. In the first place, the release (on compassionate medical grounds as Megrahi was diagnosed with cancer and not given a good prognosis) was undertaken by the devolved Scottish government in Edinburgh, not in Whitehall; in the second place, even if it had been undertaken by the UK government at the time and not in Scotland it's not the place of the US to dictate to other countries how they should make decisions related to administration of criminal justice; and in the third place, there's some serious question about the prosecution case against Megrahi (who had been in the process of preparing an appeal on the basis of new evidence prior to his release).

[metapunditedgy]

4. The US Senate may be concerned about the role British Petroleum played in the affair.

BP has been in the news lately, over here.

[Nihil]

5. The Senate are a grandstanding bunch of wankers. (n/t)

[Stella_Artois]

6. It isn't called British Petroleum

And it does most of its business outside of the UK.

In fact i understand that more Americans work for BP than British, so much so that it is effectively Anglo-American since its takeover of Amoco in 1998. It still does have its HQ in the UK though, but that may not last for ever.

Anyway, the Scottish government say that the the decision was theirs and they had no discussions with BP. They've said that in a written response to the committee. They don't need to pay for flights over in order to say the same thing face to face.

[Lightning Count]

8. And Tony Hayward just had a strong Brooklyn accent. nt

[Stella_Artois]

17. And the chairman has a strong Swedish one

But its 29,000 American employees have American ones.

Its only natural for you to blame the foreigner though.

[dipsydoodle]

7. Only idiots call BP

British Petroleum. Please don't join them

[metapunditedgy]

10. Well this is an unexpected kerfuffle.

Quoth wikipedia: "The name "BP" derives from the initials of one of the company's former legal names, British Petroleum."

And "Before January 1999 the company was registered as the British Petroleum Company PLC. In January 1999 following a merger the company took on the Amoco name.<124> They retained the name BP Amoco, until April 2000.<125> The transition to the BP PLC name was managed by BPs advertising agency: Ogilvy & Mather and PR Consultants: Ogilvy PR. The change of name culminated in BPs new logo and re-branding, in the first quarter of 2001."

Google "british petroleum"... the first hit is bp.com.

So what's the big deal? What if I don't like the re-branding campaign?

[dipsydoodle]

11. It was rebranded

when they merged with Amoco as you mentioned above.

Don't really bother me what you call it other than it shows ignorance calling it British Petroleum.

Do you still call Dole Corp The United Fruit Co. ?

[metapunditedgy]

13. Given the OP, I was just pointing out where the term "BP" comes from.

Seems relevant to me.

Rebranding is often an attempt to hide past transgressions. (Intrasweep, Xeon, Nutrasweet, etc.) I don't think it's "ignorance" to point that out.

[dipsydoodle]

9. How Megrahi and Libya were framed for Lockerbie

Amid all the bellowing about the release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in 1988, all current commentary ignores the hippo in the room - which is the powerful evidence that Megrahi was innocent, framed by the US and British security services and originally found guilty because Scottish judges had their arms brutally twisted by Westminster. The conviction was one of the great judicial scandals of the 20th Century.

The original Lockerbie trial took place in 2000, in Zeist, Holland. It was presided over by three Scottish judges who travelled to the Netherlands courthouse, convicting Megrahi and acquitting his colleague, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah.

In a trenchant early criticism of the verdict, Hans Koechler, a distinguished Austrian philosopher appointed as one of five international observers at the trial by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, issued a well-merited denunciation of the judges' bizarre conclusion.

"In my opinion," Koechler said, "there seemed to be considerable political influence on the judges and the verdict." Koechler queried the active involvement of senior US Justice Department officials as part of the Scotch prosecution team "in a supervisory role".

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/66187,news-comment,news-p...

[dipsydoodle]

12. Jack Straw has refused to go too.

Former UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw has also declined an invitation to attend the hearing.
>
Mr Straw announced he would not be attending the hearing after saying he could not answer the central question about why the Scottish government decided to release Megrahi.

In a letter to the US Senate foreign relations committee explaining why he would not give evidence next Thursday, Mr Straw said he had "absolutely nothing to do with the decision" to release Megrahi.

He added: "I saw no papers about it, and was not consulted about it. Indeed I was on holiday at the time and only learnt about it from an item on the BBC News website.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-10739764

Interesting that Tony BLiar who may the only person with knowledge of the subject isn't being asked.

[luxoid]

14. Accountability

From this side of the pond(UK) this is seen correctly as a matter of accountability.Our politicians are accountable to the British electorate,not the US senate.There is no constitutional device for accounting for a decision made in London in Washington,nor should there be.I didn't realise that the 'special relationship'(now there's a misnomer) meant our elected representatives are not accountable to us but to the US senate!One suspects that were they to attend they would no doubt give as good account of themselves as Galloway did.

[metapunditedgy]

15. I don't think the US Senate is claiming authority over British politicians.

But they're certainly free to call for investigation, and maybe the issue will motivate the "British electorate" to demand some answers as well.

I realize it's all speculative at this point, but it really sounds like a very dirty deal if true. The kind of filth that needs to be addressed by voters. Very ugly corporate politics.

[luxoid]

16. Filth!

Yes i think they are certainly entitled to ask for an inquiry given that US citizens were murdered along with Brits over Lockerbie.I think at the time Straw awas rather brazen in his admission that business dealings were a part of the deal with Lybia,and that is not exactly kosher,it does sound like a dirty deal,but as far as accountability goes they are accountable only to the UK electorate.
The Uk electorate unfortunately has this issue as just about the last thing on its mind given the savage nature of the cuts in the welafre state we are facing,IE the NHS is basically going to be privatised,the unemployment benefits reduced via housing benefit in order to pay for the current crisis in capitalism and those are just for starters.
Just for the record I think Megrahi is innocent,but that is not the point,it doesn't make the deal clean.
Here is link to Jack Straw's comments at the time of Megrahi's release
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/6140801/Jack-Straw-admits-Lockerbie-bombers-release-was-linked-to-oil.html

[JohnyCanuck]

18. Too bad Maggie Thatcher is suffering from Alzheimer's

so they couldn't call her as a witness at any new inquiry, but at least Poppy Bush is still alive and kicking and supposedly with his mental faculties more or less intact. (Although he is reportedly still trying desperately to remember where he was on Nov 22, 1963.)

Megrahi was Framed
by John Pilger

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as "a babbling brook of bullsh*t." Such eloquence summarizes the circus of Megrahi’s release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of "strategic interests."

snip

Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt canceled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the "architect" of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr. on 11 January 1990, she agreed to "low-key" the disaster (emphasis added /JC) after their intelligence services had reported "beyond doubt" that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr. "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23425.htm

[Raggz]

19. (The Guardian) Obama backed Lockerbie bomber release

Barack Obama is under growing pressure to release a letter that reveals the US grudgingly supported freeing the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds.

The letter was sent to Scottish ministers by a senior diplomat at the US embassy in London last August, eight days before Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released from prison because he was dying from inoperable prostate cancer.

Obama's administration has refused to allow publication of the letter, in which the US says allowing Megrahi to live at home in Scotland would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya under the prisoner transfer deal brokered by former prime minister Tony Blair in 2007.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/25/barack-obama-megrahi-release-lockerbie