Cameron Confirms Lockerbie Deal
David Rose writes at Vanity Fair:
Less than two weeks ago, Vanity Fair’s investigation of a secret deal between the government of Scotland and Britain’s Labour government—in order to spring the Lockerbie bomber from jail and return him to Libya—was denounced by Scottish officials as utterly false. Today, under mounting pressure instigated by the V.F. report, the British government released a cache of documents that confirm the story—and Prime Minister David Cameron denounced the previous British government’s actions in Parliament.
“strong>The Lockerbie Deal”< described how the British government and the Scottish Executive arranged the release of Abdelbasset Ali al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence agent responsible for killing 270 people by blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Among the article’s new information was the allegation that Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister, suggested in 2007 to the U.K. justice secretary, Jack Straw, that Scotland could agree to make it easier to send Megrahi home in return for a quid pro quo—a change to British law in order to stem the flood of expensive legal actions which Scotland was then facing from former prisoners who had been forced to use “slop-out” buckets instead of toilets in their cells. Salmond vehemently denied V.F.’s assertion, telling reporters that it was “balderdash.” Megrahi, it was said, had been released purely on grounds of compassion. (He was said to be dying of cancer, with only a few months to live.) Today, however, the British prime minister, David Cameron, got to his feet in the House of Commons and released a report by Britain’s most senior civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus McDonnell. The report not only confirmed the “slop-out” claim—it included the text of formerly secret documents which described the discussion of a deal—but also came to the same conclusion that V.F. did—that overall, in Sir Gus’s words, the previous U.K. Labour government “did all it could” to secure Megrahi’s release, and that this was a “policy” derived from a strong “underlying desire.” That underlying desire, not mentioned by Cameron, was to appease Libya and thereby ease the path for British commercial interests.
So what of the toilet buckets—and, indeed, what of Kevin Pringle’s insistence that V.F.’s report of a suggested deal contained not a “shred or scintilla” of truth? The damning evidence can be found on pages 38–41 of Sir Gus’s report. It contains a memo from Jack Straw dated December 13, 2007, to Des Browne, the U.K. government’s Scottish secretary. It deals with the Scots’ previous insistence that Megrahi should be excluded from a proposed Prisoner Transfer Agreement (P.T.A.) with Libya. Another memo, headed “Somerville Case”—a reference to the legal tangle that had landed Scotland with the slop-out tort cases—states: “As you know the Scottish Justice Minister, Kenny McAskill [sic], wrote to me on 25 October 2007 seeking urgent legislation to reverse the effect of the Somerville judgement on the Scottish Executive's liability for damages under the Scotland Act for breaches of Human Rights. He has subsequently linked progress on this to agreement to the proposed prisoner transfer agreement with Libya. . . . I would be prepared to include provision on this in the Constitutional Reform Bill.”
Days later Browne wrote in his reply of the “overriding case in the national interest” to finalize the P.T.A. with the Libyans, and later that day Straw spoke again to MacAskill. As is usual in Britain, civil servants made an official record of the conversation. This makes it clear that the Scots and the U.K. had indeed been linking the P.T.A. to slop-out claims and to a further Scottish demand, giving them responsibility for firearms licensing, for some time. This additional demand was also reported in the V.F. piece. According to the record, Straw warned MacAskill that he had yet to secure Cabinet consent: “On Somerville and firearms legislation, JS [Jack Straw] said that he had discussed with colleagues and there was no collective agreement. . . . KMA [Kenny MacAskill] said he would need to speak to the First Minister. He made the point that the [Scottish National Party] would be seen to be rolling back on something ‘deep in the Scottish psyche.’” Fortunately for MacAskill, Straw later did manage to persuade his colleagues, and the U.K. amended the law affecting slop-out cases in the way the Scots wanted, so saving Scotland some £50 million.
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