YESTERDAY the bourgeois media were demanding to know ‘exactly why this killer was freed’, calling Abdelbaset Ali al Megrahi a ‘despicable mass murderer’.
The news outlets tried to give short shrift to those who argued that the release was an act of mercy to a dying man, responding: ‘The people best placed to judge whether mercy should be shown are those whose lives and loved ones suffered from the bombing’.
The Sunday Telegraph thundered to its conclusion that ‘Our Government must be completely transparent about its role in the episode. Anything less will be a betrayal of the standards of justice, decency and humanity that ministers claim to uphold.’
In fact, all of the bourgeois hypocrites know exactly why Abdelbaset Ali al Megrahi was freed.
He was freed because the Blair-Brown governments, with the full backing of the banks and the bosses, have been seeking desperately for some time, and at any price, to get a business footing inside Libya with its massive gas and oil deposits.
The government literally stopped at nothing to get on the right side of Colonel Gadaffi, including involving Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of York in the process, for which the royal duo were duly thanked by Colonel Gadaffi yesterday.
Next week, British diplomats and diplomats from many other countries will be carrying on with the good work, when these representatives of crisis-ridden capitalism will be massing in Libya to please the good Colonel by celebrating with him the 40th anniversary of the Libyan revolution.
What is so disturbing to the bourgeois media is that the price that has been paid may turn out to be unbearable. They are disturbed that the weakness of British capitalism, and its desperate need for oil and gas, has forced a breach between the UK and the US, as the letter from the FBI to the Scottish government, and the general ranting of US Secretary of State Clinton show.
As yet, the breach is somewhat narrow, but it has been made, and can be further widened by the deepening crisis in Afghanistan and the further decline of the world capitalist economy.
Churchill recognised in 1940 that without the support of US imperialism, the sun of the UK ruling class was due to set.
Everything he did was calculated to bring the US into the war and after 1945 to show that the UK was the US’s only really reliable ally.
The fact that this alliance held was the reason why the UK triumphed in the Malvinas War in 1982.
Thatcher made Reagan choose between the UK and Argentina and he chose the UK.
Now the UK has acted unilaterally, to gain economic advantage in an action that has succeeded in upsetting a major portion of the US ruling class.
The Sunday Telegraph and other bourgeois factions are deeply disturbed at just what the consequences of this action will be for the ‘special relationship’. It will find out the next time the UK needs the assistance of US imperialism.
In fact, all British governments have always put economic class interests before abstract morals.
All over the globe, there are regimes made up of leaders who have directed the killings of thousands of British citizens, who were amnestied and let out of prisons to occupy high political office and attend Buckingham Palace garden parties, for the sake of political and economic advantage for the ruling class.
The News Line supports the freeing of al Megrahi, who has always claimed that he is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing, and whose case has been supported by many relatives of those killed there.
It must also be remembered that in 1986 Prime Minister Thatcher allowed the US to use East Anglian air bases for a bombing raid on Libya, in the course of which Colonel Gadaffi’s adopted daughter was murdered along with a number of other people.
Nobody was tried for this crime against the Libyan people.
There was no campaign for justice in the British bourgeois media.
Then in 1988, the USS Vincennes opened fire with a missile in the Gulf and brought down an Iranian aircraft killing all 290 passengers.
Nobody was tried for this crime, in fact a medal was struck for the captain, and again there was no campaign for justice in the bourgeois media.
The News Line sends its greeting to al Megrahi and is pleased that the depth of the British crisis has produced the beginning of a major breach between the two main imperialist gangsters, the US and the UK, a breach that can only aid the struggle for worldwide socialism.
