NEW YORK DAILY NEWS – Editorial: It was Winston Churchill who asked in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, "What kind of people do they think we are?" And it is Gordon Brown who has given grounds to believe that today's British are a cowardly, unprincipled, amoral and duplicitous lot. Because he is all of those.
Can he remain in power having been revealed as at least complicit in an atrocious miscarriage of justice and breach of faith? That will be up to the Brits, but on this side of the Atlantic Ocean it is inconceivable that an elected official would have a snowball's chance after sanctioning an oil-for-terrorist deal.
Surely Brown can hardly survive the revelation that his government assured Libya that the prime minister did not want the Lockerbie bomber to die in prison, a message duly passed on to the Scottish official who released Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on "compassionate grounds."
As for the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Britain, the storied alliance built on the resolve of World War II and carried on through Thatcher and Blair, through Iraq and Afghanistan: It is, in a word, gone.
Brown's maneuverings to get into the good graces of Libyan mass murderer Moammar Khadafy broke the bond between America and the Blessed Plot beyond his ability to repair it. That work will fall to someone else, someone who values human life more than commercial expediency, someone who is stalwart rather than a sneak, someone true to his pronouncements.
The U.S. and the U.K. committed to imprisoning Megrahi in Scotland after the Libyan spy was convicted of blowing Pan Am Flight 103 out of the air over that country in 1998. The atrocity was a direct precursor of 9/11, and no one could have imagined that Brown - leader of a nation that, too, has been terror's target - would trash the pledge.
But Brown did trash the pledge, and in the most revolting terms, letting it be known, it bears repeating, that he did not want Megrahi, author of 270 murders, to die in prison.
So, Megrahi has returned to Libya a hero, perhaps dying of prostate cancer, perhaps not. Brown got his way, and he will never outlive the stain. [Source: New York Daily News] | Wednesday, September 02, 2009
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Brown the betrayer: U.S. fury over British broken promise to keep Lockerbie bomber in jail >>> James Chapman | Wednesday, September 02, 2009
