blonde poker forum

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8213210.stm


He should have been in a scottish prison cell until the devil comes to collect him.


Those scenes are sickening.

Every cloud has a silver lining. The SNP will never be voted in again :)

MikkyT?

what price this thread gets locked?

I'm more annoyed at the way the UK & American governments took the piss out of the Scottish judicial system with the original trial. Study the whole thing and see if you still think this bloke is guilty.

u have to be joking

Ss there's now an empty prison cell in Scotland.

If anyone's wondering where it is, I believe it's the one besides Doonray power station and a Nokia mast.

I think he was probably in the medical wing of the prison so this is bollox, what a waste of a post, get your facts right

ive reported it to the mods for being so crap

I didn't want Kev to know he was getting medical attention.

It might set him off again.

looooooooooooool

Is there anyone (outside of America) that believes that he's guilty? I think it suited everybody fine that he had to drop his appeal to be able to be released on compasionate grounds.

Though that's beside the general point of course. I reckon that someone who only has about three months to live and is no threat to anyone should be released so they can live the last few months of their lives at home, seems like the right thing to do to me.

I always thought that compassion was absolute and applied to everybody.

I hope that politicians remember this case when they missuse compassion when arguing for something they want.

+1

The USA seems pretty keen on locking up as many people as possible for 200 years + , including some for crimes that don't really warrant it (3 strikes, stuff like that).

Not sure if I like the 'we wouldn't normally release someone like you in these circumstances but there's a good chance your conviction was unsound so off you go' scenario :) :)  
You have to respect the process, even if it's shit lol

lol too at the USA demanding he spend the rest of his cancer-fuelled pain in a little cold cell. Compare this to the nice big Australian mansion being occupied by the guy they paid several million $ to, to act as the only substantial witness against Megrahi. Farce!

fuck you :)

This.

He didn't do it - Libya simply admitted responsibility to get trade sanctions lifted. The $2.7bn they paid in compensation was dwarfed by the money they could make once they could start selling oil again.

MacAskill: 'However, Mr Al - Megrahi now faces a sentence imposed by a Higher Power. It is one that no court in any jurisdiction in any land could revoke'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8212153.stm

I look forward to the day where we can sentence these evil scum to Hell or Pancreatic Cancer.

Sigh.

The Lord Works In Strange Ways HM Prison Greenock

lolz yeah sickening when his family and campaigners for his right to die at home celebrate at his return home after all those years in prison.

;tightend;

You do realise that in terms of judicial process there is no difference between this and Ronnie Biggs.

Ronnie Biggs definitely did it.

im saying nothing on this ,they class people as racist to often on here.

Your racist imo........ :P

i just think it is shocking that he was let go and the irony of it was he was flown out on a 747 just like what he blew up.

Death in his cell imo.

they let ronnie biggs and the kray twin out on compasionate medical grounds but this bloke should of rotted the difference in what these people did was imense.

I agree - out of respect to the victims they should have made him go back to Libya by train and boat.

Perhaps got him to the train station in a rickshaw or maybe on a skateboard.

strap him to a rocket and launch him back.

Just to move the debate on.  What is the purpose of putting someone in prison?

Rehabilitation of the offender  (bit late for that now)
Deterrent to others  (can't see the deterrent being lessened in this instance)
Prevention of the offender recommitting (can't see him blowing up any planes before he dies)

So the only other reason I can think of is punishment.  I can only see this as the reason people want him to die in prison, some sort of revenge for what he did (or didn't do). 

isn't that the same thing?

Nope. 

Rehabilitation is to ensure the offender doesn't commit a further crime after they're released.  The prevention element is the fact that while they're incarcerated they cannot commit a crime.

Well seeing as this man was pretty much a scapegoat for it and has 2-3 months left to live I dont think its a biggie to get pissed about.

Ignoring just for a moment the fact that this man would have received better cancer treatment in Scotland than Libya, and ignoring the possibility that he might actually be innocent anyway and also ignoring the ridiculous state of affairs that devolution has left a decision with such far reaching ramifications to a man with a surname synonymous with getting things wrong who was clearly out of his depth here judging by how much he seemed to enjoy the attention (25 minutes to deliver a speech which should have taken 5 minutes and what the fuck is a "higher power") - what pisses me off is how these diplomatic political footballs are so keenly kicked about by so many professional politicians who's only real skill is in buck passing.  Brings me out in an awful rash to imagine how much Alex Salmond is enjoying all this.

The US Government and our Government are so keen for us to be behind the "War on terror" but they treat the victims of terror with complete indifference.  The families of those 270 victims will now never know who was really to blame for this, no closure.  Thatcher let the assassin of PC Yvonne Fletcher slip away, and I'd have far more sympathy with the US's noises at the moment if they hadn't armed the IRA for 25 years and their Government hadn't armed the Taliban in Afghanistan who are now shooting at them and us with their own weapons. Even after 9/11 George Bush snr was helping all his Saudi mates out of the country who could have given evidence.

POTY

Do you think the US would welcome someone home like that if they bombed a place in Lbya and ckilled 270 people?  I would hope not.  The Scottish government is indeed compassionate...I've never heard someone be freed on grounds of compassion. wow.

read the thread - why do u think ronnie biggs is out of jail?

Anyhow u english should be glad that he was freed under Scottish law and not shipped back to Libya under the UK prisoner repatriation agreement which would have happened otherwise. 

a lot more likely to happen once they put him on a plane than if he was still in a cell though

Is that the repatriation exchange agreement that Kenny MacAskill criticised while actually in the process of repatriating the guy himself?  And the one Alex Salmond criticised a couple of years because he felt that Megrahi should not be sent home by Westminster instead he should be sent home by Scotland's judicial process so we can play at being a proper Government and piss Gordon Brown off he should serve his full term in a Scottish prison?

Looks like we're really going to stick it to Libya on this one.  Prince Andrew might not visit.  In your face Gaddafi.

Lol at anyone believing this is purely on compassionate grounds. It's a political decision with an attempted cloaking under the compassionate banner.

As has been noted on previous posts, it was hardly the most convincing of convictions, which until a day or so before his release was still under appeal. If some of the murmurs surrounding evidence/witness statements and the like to be produced in support of the appeal are true, a lot of embarassment may well have been heading in the direction of both British and US governments.

The compassion route taken was an easier option and regardless of what Obama or any Scottish/English/British government official may say about his release, in reality they are secretly pleased that it's basically "case closed" regards appeal and potential embarassment.

Personally I think it right he has been repatriated purely on the basis that I believe the conviction to be unsafe.

BTW, the British government have a past record of similar, how easily we forget:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_Agreement

one of the provisos:  conditional early release within two years of paramilitary prisoners belonging to organisations observing a ceasefire. Not a compassionate decision, purely a political one, they released many (from both sides) responsible for the murder of a few more than 270.

And yet they allowed an innocent civilian like Ken Bigley be beheaded instead of giving consideration to the release of female prisoners because "we do not do deals with terrorists!!"

Geo

Thanks for saving me the bother of typing all that myself Geo, spot on IMO.

Yer, been reflecting on this, it's actually pretty serious, even worse than some of the shit Bush came out with. It has to be put in the context of what he goes on to say in the rest of the speech. He talks of the history of compassion of the scottish people but he points out that this comes from our 'faith'. The historical faith of Scotland is christian. So he is passing a judgement, as a member of Government, and justifying his actions by appealing to the faith he says he shares with his countrymen. A judgement passed on a man from a muslim country, who he says god is killing with cancer.
wp

Who said God was killing him with cancer?
Did he use those words? Coz that's just silly talk.

Could it have been more of a, he is dying and so soon will be up before God to be judged, kinda thing?

It's a jaw dropping thing for him to have said really.  He'd probably been watching that film Misery and thought the line, "There is a justice higher than that of man. I will be judged by Him" sounded intelligent and profound.  Would like him to explain if there is such a power why the Scottish judicial system needed a trial in the first place if they were so confident God had it covered.  Also why God allowed the bombing to take place in the first place and many many many more questions.  Really not much consolation here for the Atheists amongst those objecting to this decision that MacAskill is banking on the existence of an omnipotent sky fairy to close this one out.

why did a picture of Tikay just spring to my mind?

I think the underlying political machinations are worthy of far more attention and scrutiny than his release on compassionate grounds. I think the simple fact that they required the appeal to be dropped before releasing him speaks volumes about his questionable conviction in the first place, and you have to wonder what it was the Government feared coming out of that. It's a depressing episode, in many ways. Can't say that it really comes as a surprise to me, though. Seems the norm in recent years.

 ;carlocitrone;

erm........you sure?

they should of just killed him in prison and said that he died of natural causes, if he's as ill as they are saying it would of been believed then they could cremate and send ashes back to libya and all would be forgotten in 2 weeks by the press and the familys would have some closure.

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/mar/31/lockerbie.libya in March 2004

-------------

As he basks in the success of his controversial visit to Libya, the prime minister has to grapple at once with an awkward letter. It was delivered on Monday by UK Families Flight 103 representing most of the British families bereaved by the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The letter starts by reminding Blair that the families supported his visit to Libya in the expectation that the talks with Colonel Muammar Gadafy would lead to more information about the bombing. Moreover, the letter says, their support for the visit was widely used by ministers to justify the visit to Libya. Yet the visit has not led to any more information about the bombing.

And recent letters to the secretary of the group, Pamela Dix - whose brother died at Lockerbie - from Baroness Symons, minister of state at the Foreign Office, and from the Crown Office in Edinburgh, have argued that any further questions to the Libyans about Lockerbie would not be helpful. In short, ministers took the credit of the families' support without asking a single question about Lockerbie to justify that support. In a sense of deep outrage, the families are asking the prime minister for a meeting to discuss Lockerbie as a matter of urgency.

More people died at Lockerbie than in Madrid, and you would have thought that the government, if only as proof of its horror at terrorism, would be keen to question its new friends in Tripoli about the bombing. Not so, apparently. So the only hard information the families have is that Abdul Basset al-Megrahi, a Libyan official, apparently working in intelligence, was convicted in January 2001 of bombing the airliner. How he accomplished this feat is still a mystery. The details of the crime did not emerge at the trial, which was held by Scottish judges sitting without a jury in Holland. It lasted 18 months and cost an estimated £50m.

Megrahi's co-accused was acquitted, so the prosecution's suggestion that the two men conspired to bomb the plane cannot be right. Indeed, the crucial evidence that the bomb was put on a feeder flight at Malta and was transferred twice, at Frankfurt and at Heathrow, was so thin it was derisory.

No one knows whether anyone else took part in this sophisticated crime of terror. One man has been convicted. The Libyan government has forked out many millions in compensation. And that, apparently, is the end of the matter. Many of the bereaved relatives, including Dix, are increasingly disturbed at the behaviour of ministers who talk business and politics to the Gadafy regime, but are not remotely interested in pressing anyone in it to tell the whole story about Lockerbie.

There is, in my opinion (not necessarily shared by the families), an explanation for all this, an explanation so shocking that no one in high places can contemplate it. It is that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects - some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.

This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein's occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. The indictment was based on the "evidence" of a Libyan "defector", handsomely paid by the CIA. His story was such a fantastic farrago of lies and fantasies that it was thrown out by the Scottish judges.

In Britain, meanwhile, Thatcher, John Major and Blair obstinately turned down the bereaved families' requests for a full public inquiry into the worst mass murder in British history.

It follows from this explanation that Megrahi is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing and his conviction is the last in the long line of British judges' miscarriages of criminal justice. This explanation is also a terrible indictment of the cynicism, hypocrisy and deceit of the British and US governments and their intelligence services. Which is probably why it has been so consistently and haughtily ignored.

Thanks MrT and Geo, excellent posts.

Now the FBI are sticking their neb in

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8216122.stm

He was involved in the original investigation according to the report, so he has no vested interest here obv.

Gotta love the FBI.

lol yeah "the fbi sticking their neb in"

I read it as the prosecutor of the case getting pretty miffed but w/e

He was involved in the original investigation yet he doesn't even understand how the trial was conducted.

"regardless of the quality of the investigation, the conviction by jury after the defendant is given all due process, and sentence appropriate to the crime"

There was no jury.

"The details of the crime did not emerge at the trial, which was held by Scottish judges sitting without a jury in Holland."

Pretty much sums up this entire case. Why let the facts get in the way of a convenient story?

They'd welcome someone homw who destroyed an airliner with 290 on board - & then give them medals.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655)

http://www.jonathanmitchell.info/2009/08/24/megrahis-release-kenny-macaskill-was-right/