Like Tom Sheilds, this week I have had cause to feel proud of being Scottish. I am not a Nationalist, never have been and am certainly no fan of our First Minister or his Party, however the way that they have handled the bullyboy rhetoric from Secretary of State Clinton and the US Senate and complete lack of support from the Bullingdon Boy, I felt a pang of pride.
If I believed that Kenny MacAskill had freed al-Megrahi for any other reason other than compassionate grounds then I would feel different. If he and the SNP administration had bowed to pressure from either the UK government or a particular oil company then I would indeed be furious. But if the US think that Mr Salmond would do the bidding of Gordon Brown/Tony Blair and the UK government, they really don't know the man well and need to get some advisors who actually know how their allies operate let alone their enemies throughout the world.
Irrespective of whether you think that al-Megrahi was guilty or not, personally I'm with the likes of Dr Jim Swire and think that the Libyan had absolutely nothing to do with the bombing and was a scapegoat, what right does the US have in telling another nation how their law should be carried out and to summon their public figures to testify to a Senate hearing which has absolutely no power in Scotland. Neither the Scots or anyone else questioned the American judgement to award combat ribbons to the crew of the USS Vincennes
or the Navy Commendation Medal or later the Legion of Merit to the Air Warfare Coordinator of said ship after they had shot down an Iranian passenger jet killing 290 people. An act which some say the Lockerbie bombing was in reprisal to. Maybe we should have done so.
So this weekend I feel a little proud to be a citizen of a nation that allows a terminally ill man out of prison, home to his family to die. Rather than to be part of a nation that murders it own people regularly by lethal injection, some of whom are mentally handicapped and more of whom have been convicted by dubious means.
KLF - America No More
4 comments:
Well said mate.
Great post, drew.
Wish I could be proud to be Scottish too
Now, that it has been said, who did Lockerbie?
I believe one's can't say that the alternatives that the CIA was toying with using did it. That was the PPSF or the PFLP GC in the form of Mr Talb or Mr Nidal respectively. And there is no evidence whatsoever against them.
Step forward, thenn the CIA and Pasdaran, owned by the US and Iran respectively.
The 103 atrocity was deliberately carried out by the CIA and Pasdaran to give Iran its revenge for the downing of IR-655
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