ANOTHER "GESTURE" GONE BAD – AT 7:07 P.M. ET:  We report a great deal about Britain here, and we often quote British journalists.  Britain does things that are wonderful – the Brits are always with us in the end – and terrible. 

Go back to the U.K. of the late 30s, and into 1941, and you'll see the same pattern.  Britain fought alone, and valiantly, against Nazi Germany until the United States joined the war, but a chunk of its "elite" was pro-Nazi.  Fortunately, the good guys prevailed.

You may recall that, last year, the Brits released the Libyan Lockerbie bomber – the man convicted of helping to bring down PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people.   They did so on "humanitarian" grounds after it was determined he would die soon of cancer.  And the upshot?  From The Telegraph:

The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is living with his family in a luxury villa in Libya six months after he was released from jail on compassionate grounds because he had less than three months to live.

Maybe there was a mistake in the calendar.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, no longer receives hospital treatment after ending the course of chemotherapy that he had been given after returning to his homeland last August.

Professor Karol Sikora, the London-based doctor who examined Megrahi and predicted he would be dead by last October, admitted this weekend that the fact the bomber is still alive might be "difficult" for the families of the 270 victims of the attack.

Yeah, I would think so.

Most did not want Megrahi released and they suspected he would live longer than the predicted three months.

The Sunday Telegraph revealed last September that the Libyan government had paid for the medical evidence which helped Megrahi, 57, to be released. The Libyans had encouraged doctors to say he had only three months to live.

The life expectancy of Megrahi was crucial because, under Scottish rules, prisoners can be freed on compassionate grounds only if they are considered to have this amount of time, or less, to live.

COMMENT:  Great Britain has lucrative contracts with Libya.  And what are the feelings of 270 families, most of them American, compared to that?

Sickening.

February 22, 2010