Scotland freed the terminally ill Lockerbie bomber last week so he could die at home in Libya. "Our beliefs dictate that justice be served, but mercy be shown," a Scottish official said. Did Scotland do the right thing? Should we have any mercy for mass murderers who are terminally ill?
I have hesitated to comment on the release from Scottish prison of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, because there is no clear moral line that I can see. The facts are well known, and by now most people have made up their minds. But on what grounds? Of the 270 people killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, 189 were U.S. citizens. Libya didn't formally admit to planting the bomb, yet the Qaddafi regime has paid $2.7 billion in restitution to the victims' families. Despite the assumption that the attack must have involved any number of conspirators, only Megrahi was convicted. He has always proclaimed his innocence, and some of the victims' families believe him while others call him a mass murderer.
All the moral choices are cloudy and tangled in this case. When the Scottish justice secretary decided to grant Megrahi a release -- the prisoner is in the final stages of advanced prostate cancer -- he cited "compassionate grounds." Even though Megrahi showed no mercy to his victims, the secretary said, Scotland was bound by its own values, which include mercy, not the values of the convicted criminal. This seems like a position Christians would endorse, but in the U.S. the teaching of "forgive your enemies" hasn't prevented avowed Christians on the right from being among the strongest advocates of the death penalty and harsh sentences for drug crimes. In a sense the justice secretary was using the term mercy in a very narrow sense. Pure mercy would have been not to send Megrahi to jail, an abhorrent choice to most people -- even Jesus speaks on both sides of the issue in the New Testament. Forgiveness is clouded by other references to punishment, both divine and secular. At one point Jesus even says, "I bring not peace but a sword." In many places he has no tolerance for sinners. Yet there's no doubt that forgiveness stands out as a major tenet of the faith.
So what is justice? On religious grounds an eye for an eye settles the matter for millions of devout believers, while others struggle between mercy and vengeance. That's why secular society has turned justice, for all practical purposes, into a technicality of the law. Whatever the law says to do, that is just, even when the law changes (thus the debate over the death penalty in this country has gone back and forth several times, with yes and no standing for justice if it happens to be in force). How are laws made? With great fickleness, depending on the public's mood, recent events, political ideology, legislative horse trading, racial and class prejudice, and religious tradition. The ideal of making the punishment fit the crime has been achieved only sporadically, and there are stretches of history, as when the courts upheld that escaped slaves should be returned to their masters, when the law has sided with gross immorality.
If I've described a tangled situation, it also happens to fit reality. It was more realistic for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to wash his hands of the Lockerbie controversy and give it back to those in Scotland who made the decision than for President Obama to issue a blanket condemnation. The public doesn't agree, however, since as so often happens, those who cry for vengeance the loudest tend to win the most support. There is another path. Instead of wrestling with flawed choices, you can go deeply into how justice affects you.
As bystanders to tragedies like the Lockerbie disaster, you and I have no moral weight; we are outsiders. But we aren't outsiders in our own lives, where we face moral choices that are just as tangled as this one. When you go inward with honesty and clear sight, you see in yourself all the elements that clash here: mercy, anger, compassion, revenge, high-mindedness, impartiality, bias, and fairness exist side by side. Just this realization brings you out of the illusion that justice is simple. Then you have a choice to empathize with everyone concerned, and step by step you arrive at the ancient principle of non-violence as a living part of your own consciousness. Having achieved that stage, daily situations will look very different from how they look now. One sees that Jesus wasn't really contradicting himself -- a universal empathy allowed him to feel what it was like to be both the judge and the condemned. Until you and I expand beyond the narrow limits of our own consciousness, our moral judgments will be very imperfect. Seeing this, you can't help but stop judging other people so quickly, and at the same time, the desire to reach higher consciousness grows stronger, because that is the only way out of impossibly tangled questions.
Published in the Washington Post
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P.S. Come on LIBERALS! Don't fall for the right wing foreign policy lies that have been pushed down your throats since World War II. There is always another "truth" when it involves right wing foreign policy and the United States.
Chopra has turned our notion of who gets to mete out justice on its head. In both the UK and in the US, justice is meted out by people who have no personal ax to grind, no personal agenda or stake in the outcome. The reason is that such people can be objective and will impose punishment only to the extent it is necessary to protect society both from that individual and others who would act similarly.
What Chopra suggests is that we, who do not see things through the filters of our own reactions to such tragic personal loss, lack a moral gravitas. Put another way, he seems to be saying that we should let those who likely are least incapable of setting passions aside decide what will be done in our name.
I believe the sentence handed down was just and should have been left intact. When we find out conclusively that the real reason behind the release was not mercy but money, the decision will do more to harm the concept of blind, dispassionate justice than nearly anything else that the Justice Secretary could have chosen to do with that very goal in mind.
That said, everyone deserves compassion, no matter how much they also might need enlightenment. A bit of grace goes a long way.
The shooting down of a civilian plane in spite of that plane's identification of itself as such, coupled with the snotty attitude of bush 41 and his high-handed refusal to apologise "ever", showed the world that the U.S. was already on the downhill slide toward the oligarchy we have today. That Iran should want justice for those lost on that plane strikes me as a very human desire. Since prostate cancer is a very slow mover, perhaps he knew he had it when he agreed to become the public face for the Lockerbie event.
The people of the United States (what an oxymoron THAT is!) as a whole need to grow up. We must stop thinking of ourselves as in any way superior to everyone else. A good way to begin that process is to follow your advice and THINK.
i can agree with him on this, and i can also say that we are not necessarily bystanders.
I did not have much investigation into this case prior to the release, but since then what I have heard officially does not add up; something stinks. I think it is important to pay attention to these patterns in the world around us, and to not always accept the official view when compelling underlying motivations and previous cover ups are revealed, sometimes in plain sight.
Iran Air Flight 655, flying from Bandar Abbas, Iran, to Dubai, UAE, was a civilian airliner shot down by the United States Navy's guided missile cruiser, USS Vincennes on Sunday 3 July 1988, over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 passengers and crew aboard, including 66 children.
Even though the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time, AND the airliner was transmitting an Identification friend or foe code for a civilian aircraft, AND Captain William C. Rogers III of the Vincennes was known as being overly aggressive in earlier incidents, he returned to the U.S. to a HERO's welcome.
To add further injury and insult, in August 1988 V.P. George H. W. Bush said of the incident: "I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are."
According to the US government, the crew mistakenly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter. The Iranian government maintained that the Vincennes knowingly shot down the civilian aircraft.
In addition, with regard to the Lockerbie bombing, there still remains the question of whether al-Megrahi's was a fall guy and is in fact innocent.
Do research and inform yourselves before following mainstream media's cue and crying over manufactured outrage.
The convicted killer was tried in court under international scrutiny and found guilty and any compassion he sought was moot. The arrogance of fhe Scottish government to take it upon themselves to lift the awareness of others around the world is as bad as the crime itself... The killer did not deserve compassion or even the illusion of it.... The Arab has taken the west for suckers once again... does anyone really think showing them compassionate for one highly visible man will change anything at all? As they say 'don't count on it'...
The relatives of the victims are displaying an excruciatingly vengeful, mean and un-christian obsession. Was it not enough that they accepted pecuniary compensation from Qaddafi. They crassly put a dollar price on their loved ones' lives. They want to eat their cake and have it too. And sell it too. Some British victims’ relatives have declared Megrahi innocent. Don't they feel the pain of their loss ? Are American lives "more precious" ?
There is a far more important issue here that to my acute astonishment, nobody has raised. Mind boggling double standards here. One theory is that Qaddafi ordered the Pan Am bombing in retaliation for the downing of Iran Air 655 by US Vincennes. (I'll bet that in a Quiz contest , no more than 5 Americans would be able to name what that is even though 200 million would know all about Pan Am 103).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
290 people died including 66 children !! Most were Iranians and Indians.
The US blithely claims that the Pan Am was an act of "terrorism" whereas I suppose Iran Air bombing was only an act of "errorism" !!
US paid a measly compensation after years of litigation. Peanuts compared to the billions that Libyans paid and admitted no wrong-doing, indulged in a massive cover-up and gave a medal for bravery to the guy who shot down the civilian airliner.
And they want Megrahi to die in prison. Some justice.
This is what Justice has become. We're too busy cleaning up the mess afterwards rather than trying to find ways of preventing these tragedies from happening in the first place. Better law enforcement is a good step in the right direction, of course, but since most terrorism is the result of bad politics, we need to hold politicians accountable, as well.
But a simple place to start is to first embrace the idea that life is not about "us" - meaning our collective egocentric expression of Self. And not knowing this is at the heart of all of our misery; for it is our attachment to things manufactured by the ego that keeps truth, harmony, and our unlimited potential from our grasp. I stated on this post before, that we can never even begin to solve complex problems, until we realize that truth is discovered in a "simple place", not a complicated place. That's why "the 'devil' (the ego) is in the details", because particulars are relativistic, and cannot, in their entirety, be resolve by a finite consciousness, using limited objective thinking.
Of course some will say: "What does this have to do with anything?" My answer is that it has nothing to do with "anything", but everything; for all is One.
All is One!
Justice for the victims of Lockerbie would see the appeals process through, and then identify the real bombers and their motivation. That is, the Palestinian militants paid by the Iranian government, in revenge for the 1988 US downing of Iran Air Flight 655 (for which the US Gov't eventually paid $61.8M.)
Can you tell me where libya fits in this? I would like to know.
Thanks!