We deserve answers on bomber's release

The U.S. State Department has attempted to quell the growing outrage over last year's release of the Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish prison by publishing a letter it says proves the Obama administration's sustained opposition to letting this mass murderer return to Libya a free man. The letter proves precisely the opposite, and the American people - and citizens of the other 20 nations who lost countrymen in the bombing - should be more outraged than ever.

Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was convicted by a Scottish jury in 2001, more than 13 years after the Christmas bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 sent 270 people to their deaths, including 189 Americans on the plane and 11 people in the small Scottish village of Lockerbie who were killed by the plane's fiery wreckage. Megrahi was the only terrorist convicted in the case.

In August of last year, Scottish authorities released Megrahi after he had served only eight years of his life sentence. The grounds for that action, which astonished the world, grieved the families of the victims, and purportedly surprised the Obama administration, was a physician's finding that Megrahi's prostate cancer left him only three months to live. Let loose on "compassionate grounds," Megrahi promptly went home to Libya, which he had allegedly served as an intelligence officer, receiving a hero's welcome and the warm embrace of the Libyan president's son.

The cameras rolled for the celebration. Today, one year on, Megrahi is alive and well and his physician reports he may live another 10 years. If so, he has more life left in him than he spent in captivity for one of the most despicable terrorist acts of modern times.

Day by day the plot thickens, and officials of our government and officials of the previous government in the United Kingdom shift uneasily in their seats. Writing in this newspaper last August, I registered the reasons why the release of Megrahi demanded answers. (For the record, as I acknowledged then, I was a personal friend of a young woman killed in the bombing and represented her family in their lawsuit against the Libyan government.)

What, I asked, did American officials know about the decision to free Megrahi and when did they know it? More important, what did they do to try to prevent it? How, given our special relationship with Great Britain and common stake in confronting and defeating terrorism, could our government not know about what Scotland was planning to do? And if we did know, how could President Obama not have picked up the phone to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown or the Scottish first minister and demanded, in the strongest possible terms, that Megrahi not be freed?

After a year of ignoring such demands, during which Megrahi's health has enjoyed a remarkable restoration, new evidence has emerged that the terrorist's release was linked with what former Justice Secretary Jack Straw has called a "trade deal" involving the British oil giant BP. Straw has now admitted he negotiated a prisoner-exchange agreement with Libya that included Megrahi, even though Straw had recently denied that the Libyans had Megrahi in view.

BP claims that while it was lobbying the British government in 2007 for just such an agreement, its successful procurement of a $900 million oil-drilling lease off the Libyan coast, announced just six weeks after Megrahi's release, was not a quid pro quo for Scotland's allegedly independent decision to release the Libyan. Straw, unconvincingly, makes basically the same argument.

Fortunately, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are aggressively pursuing Scottish and British officials for testimony about what appears to be an oil-for-terrorists trade. The committee is willing to travel to the United Kingdom to interview officials who declined this week to travel here for a hearing. But the committee needs to look homeward as well.

The State Department letter that, its spokesmen say, shows consistent U.S. opposition to Megrahi's release does nothing of the sort. Words matter, and the words used by a State Department official last year, before Megrahi's release, were astonishingly mild. Diplomatic language is renowned for its "coded" property. References to "frank exchanges" in diplomatic communiqués often mean harsh and unyielding arguments led to an impasse between the parties.

As Megrahi's liberation loomed, the American letter to Scottish authorities indicated that the United States was "not prepared to support" the bomber's release. The letter reads more like a permission slip than a profound objection. Our correspondent, Robert LeBaron, deputy chief of the U.S. Embassy in London, wrote that "it would be most appropriate for Megrahi to remain imprisoned" in Scotland, perhaps in some sort of hospice facility. Being "unprepared to support" an impending travesty and considering an action not "appropriate" are not the words to express a compelling national interest. They are the kind of phrases kindergarten teachers apply to unruly schoolchildren.

Surely, our Scottish and British counterparts sensed, and rightly, that such a letter from an embassy deputy was not intended to put a serious obstacle in their path. Surely they knew that nothing about the American-British special relationship, already downgraded by the man who sits in the Oval Office, was at risk in their scheme to offer Megrahi the safe flight he ruthlessly denied nearly 300 innocent people on Flight 103.

The real question is, "Where was that man who sits in the Oval Office?" Why did President Obama not make clear that Megrahi could not be set free without serious damage both to our relations with our British allies and to our reputations in the global fight against the terrorists' blood lust?

Sending investigators overseas to question the actors in this drama in Glasgow and London is a good idea. But we deserve more and better answers here at home as well. Exchanging a terrorist for oil revenue is as egregious as trading arms for hostages. Deceiving free peoples about these matters is equally egregious.

Justice is not a commodity to be put up for sale to lift faltering economies. The American people deserve better answers than we've gotten so far from either side of the Atlantic - and we deserve them now.