Site News & Correction: Who Released al-Megrahi?

Yesterday, I made a post regarding new emails obtained by the Observer relevant to the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.

As was pointed out by one of my commenters, Mr. Jonathan Mitchell (who writes a rather interesting legal blog), I did not make clear that the Memorandum of Understanding between Britain and Libya dealt only with prisoner tranfer. Mr. al-Megrahi was, of course, released independently of this agreement under provisions in British law which allow for compassionate release in case of illness and imminent death (the same provisions which saw Ronnie Biggs released shortly before Mr. al-Megrahi).

I managed to overlook this fact in my concluding paragraphs in yesterday’s post when I said:

Despite what Kenny MacAskill maintains, it does appear that the decision to release al-Megrahi was out of his hands. By signing a treaty which legally bound the Scottish Government to release Libyan prisoners, the Westminster administration over-ruled the devolution settlement undermining the sovereignty of the Scottish Government and the democratic will of the Scottish People in order to appease a dictatorship. It is no surprise that Brown gave his support to MacAskill – if this had come out at the time of al-Megrahi’s release, it would have done nothing but damage the Westminster Government further.

I was over-indulging in hyperbole and failing to consider all of the relevent information. Indeed, I was overlooking key facts in the events of the past few months, namely the provisions under which al-Megrahi was released.

This was, as the phrase goes, a moment of madness, which I’m inclined to blame on human error. However, I do believe that the Memorandum did probably impact on Kenny MacAskill’s decision to release al-Megrahi, that the Holyrood and Westminster Governments did work together on the release of al-Megrahi between 2007 and 2009 probably due to the instability of his conviction, and, had Labour formed the Government in 2007, we would very probably have seen al-Megrahi released or transfered much earlier.

As I stated yesterday, this is a very complicated political and legal case. It is likely that the whole story will not be known until the relevant documents are declassified in years to come.

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In considerable less important news, I have added functionality to this website to allow it to be easily displayed on iPhones, Blackberrys and other mobile devices. This makes it much faster to view over a mobile connections, at the loss of some it’s good looks and functionality. If viewing from a mobile device, you can view the normal site by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking on the relevant option.

I also discovered that some parts of the site template were malfunctioning slightly, causing problems when being crawled and recorded by search engines. These errors have now been fixed. In the next few days, if you search for anything from the site, you should see an except from the relevant post rather then a list of tags and categories.

Please let me know if you have any problems with any aspects of the site or any other feedback.