It was oil:
Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.
The letters were sent two years ago by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to Kenny MacAskill, his counterpart in Scotland, who has been widely criticised for taking the formal decision to permit Megrahi’s release.
The correspondence makes it plain that the key decision to include Megrahi in a deal with Libya to allow prisoners to return home was, in fact, taken in London for British national interests.
[...]
The exploration deal for oil and gas, potentially worth up to £15 billion, was announced in May 2007. Six months later the agreement was still waiting to be ratified.
On December 19, 2007, Straw wrote to MacAskill announcing that the UK government was abandoning its attempt to exclude Megrahi from the prisoner transfer agreement, citing the national interest.
[...]
Within six weeks of the government climbdown, Libya had ratified the BP deal. The prisoner transfer agreement was finalised in May this year, leading to Libya formally applying for Megrahi to be transferred to its custody.
For those who haven’t been following this story:
On Aug. 20, 2009, the Scottish government released him on compassionate grounds, saying that medical evidence showed he would die within months of prostate cancer. Mr. Megrahi, who served 8 years of a 27-year minimum sentence, was flown to Tripoli, Libya, and welcomed home as a hero, setting off angry protests in Britain and the United States.
I’m wondering just what, if anything, the West won’t do for oil.
We invade countries that were not a threat to us, killing tens of thousands of civillians.
We lie to our own people.
We poison our air and land and threaten the future of the entire globe.
We torture and indefinitely imprison people who, if they didn’t hate us before, surely do now.
And we release a convicted terrorist, who killed 270 people, to a hero's homecomning.
It seems to me that oil is a pernicious thing, bringing us so much wealth and such a high standard of living over the past 50 years. But at what cost?
I ask you this: What good will it be for a man to gain the whole world, if he loses his soul? What price have we placed on our souls?
Is this it? Easy living, big cars, cheap food, big houses, nice clothes? Are we bought so cheap, then?
Surely the devil is laughing.
