My own father died of prostate cancer in 2006 after exceeding his "life expectancy" by a factor of at least two - 8 months vs. the predicted 3-4 months. And he did pretty well until the final 3 weeks when he finally needed residential care.
Nobody can calculate these things at all accurately, so sounding off about the passage of days on a calendar towards a man's death is worse than futile, it's gross.
My cousin's husband died of the same thing some years ago. He went more quickly than the (tentative) predictions, and before he died he looked remarkably like Megrahi coming off that plane. It's all just half-educated guesswork, and everybody knows this. In a less high-profile case nobody would be batting an eyelid. They're not even batting an eyelid about Biggs, although he was high-profile enough in all conscience.
There have been a couple of newspaper articles in the
Scotsman (which hates the SNP like poison) about how embarrassing it is for Kenny MacAskill that Megrahi hasn't had the decency to die yet. The comments on these articles unanimously slammed them as ghouls. One poster asked if there was a word for journalism that had yet to aspire to the dizzy heights of the gutter.
I can't sit here and tell anybody that Megrahi is innocent of any involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. I can tell you, having studied the evidence, that the legal case made against him would be considered woefully inadequate to secure a conviction for illegal parking.
Who can say for sure
who was or wasn't involved in that bombing? There have been a number of posters who have declared, well, maybe the evidence against him sucks, but how do we know he didn't do it anyway? Longtabber claimed to have inside knowledge that the authorities had basically fitted up the right guy - just before he vanished for good after Joey Donuts exposed him as a fraudulent poser on another thread.
Maybe Megrahi was involved in some way. Hell, maybe
I was involved in some way! Once you leave the evidence behind, anything's possible.
However, if the evidence suggests that he neither bought those clothes from Tony Gauci nor smuggled an unaccompanied suitcase aboard KM180 at Luqa, which frankly is what it does suggest, all you're left with is, he's Libyan, and was an intelligence officer, and we sort of think Libya might at least have supplied some of the munitions that went into that bomb.
Not much of a connection to hang a prosecution on.
If anyone's interested, a quick scan of the Lockerbie threads on the CT forum might raise a few eyebrows. Or a £5 download of the Paul Foot study from
Private Eye magazine would also be a good place to start. If pushed I've no doubt that posters
Rolfe and
Caustic Logic et al could be persuaded to put together an analysis of the main evidence
I'd even do it myself, but they are much better writers.
I don't feel I know enough about the detail yet to put anything substantial together. Something this convoluted takes a group of people reading the evidence and bouncing ideas off each other. We have a few but more would be nice. I'm still astonished by the total lack of interest by most CT forum posters in this incident, which despite its smaller death toll is approaching 9/11 in complexity and significance.
What does annoy me is the number of people prepared to verbally put the boot in, demanding that the man should have been forced to die in jail in a foreign country, and responding to every protest that the conviction might have been unsafe with the retort that in that case he should have appealled and since he hadn't appealled successfully he can be assumed to be guilty.
He applied for permission to appeal in 2003.
The SCCRC spent four years reviewing the evidence.
In 2007 they published a report saying that they had identified six points on which there might have been a miscarriage of justice, and allowed the appeal.
For almost two years the authorities put every obstacle they could in the way of the appeal getting to court, including repeated refusal to disclose documentary evidence the court had ruled should be disclosed. In 2008 the appellant was diagnosed as being terminally ill.
In 2009 the appeal finally started, only to be adjourned a few weeks later because one of the judges was unwell. Rather than appoint a substitute, they shut up shop, with the projected date to resume being this month - that is, about the point the appellant was expected to die.
Meanwhile, Megrahi was "persuaded" that his chances of being allowed to return to Libya would be enhanced if he abandoned the appeal, which, unsurprisingly, he did. Which was a great disappointment to some of the families of the Lockerbie victims, who had intended to continue the appeal after Megrahi's death (as was their right if it was still ongoing) in the hope of finding out what actually happened.
Yes, I do find it hypocritical to bay for the man's blood under the circumstances, relying on the fact of a verdict which was nothing short of perverse, and deliberately ignoring not just the evidence, but the shameful obstruction of the appeal process.
Rolfe.
