I'm guessing this is supposition, but do you base it on anything other than assumption of good will? I would think if it's your job to know these things, or you have people whose job is such, it surely must at least have come up. If they're having meetings and whatnot regarding this, would some research on the facts not be done beforehand? It seems a bit of a dilemma to me, since as far as I can they're either shockingly ill-informed, or they're effectively evil. I can forgive the man on the Clapham omnibus for not knowing the details of the case, here or in the US, but these are people whose purpose is to know about such things.
Maybe I'm biassed by having watched these US senators putting their "case" on TV here. They are quite jaw-droppingly ignorant. I just watched one of them try to bluster his baseless suppositions in front of Christine Grahame, an MSP (and also a qualified Scots lawyer), and try to tell her that her explanation of the legal and political situation was "clearly wrong". I actually
saw her irony meter explode. It's extremely obvious that these people have their own little CT they're trying to run for pure political gain, and they have no idea of the actual conspiracy underlying it all.
However, I note Beerina wasn't talking about the senators themselves but "the people in the US State Department". I don't know enough about the internal politics to know which department would know about this, and which not. It's true, though, that the kangaroo court travesty at Camp Zeist was only ten years ago, and the US was definitely calling the shots and masterminding the frame-up at that stage. (With lots of co-operation from the UK authorities and the Scottish criminal justice system, I have to say.) The people involved can't all have retired or forgotten about it already.
Nevertheless, a lot of people probably do believe that the evidence was much less flaky than it actually is. Dick Marquise, for example, displays all the symptoms of cognitive dissonance on the subject. If you've persuaded yourself that Gauci really did say, "that's the man, I'm sure of it", and the Maltese authorities were all corrupt and in the pay of Libya, then you tend to go on believing it.
I don't know. It's still a bit of a shock to me to realise this actually does seem to be a conspiracy, as opposed to a common-or-garden miscarriage of justice. My guess is that the people closest to it all are saying NOTHING. (Cannistraro has shut up like a clam in recent years.) Those not quite so close are
certain that the evidence was strong enough to convict, and really, really aren't going to re-think that.
That said, I have encountered a peculiar in several people when I've tried to explain some of the facts to them and their opinion seems to be along the lines of "OK, but he's obviously guilty of something, so we shouldn't have let him go." The mind boggles.
Well, not really. If you're going to frame someone for a crime, then you don't usually pick the Sunday-school teacher. You pick the small-time villain, the guy with a bit of a record. It's very very common in these cases for the victim of the frame-up to attract little or no public sympathy because of this.
Megrahi was a Libyan security officer. Maybe a spy of some sort. He was apparently involved in running aircraft parts for Libyan Arab Airlines past the sanctions that were in place against Libya at the time. He had some business contacts with arms dealers. He swears he isn't a killer. However, Libya was known as a terrorist state at the time (and surely that wasn't
all Cannistraro's invention), and who knows what he might have been involved in.
It depends on your attitude. He didn't put that bomb on PA103. He was nowhere near when that bomb was put on PA103. (I, on the other hand, was less than 50 miles away....) Somebody else bought those clothes, and somebody else put that suitcase on that plane.
I don't believe it's right to jail a guy for something he didn't do just because you might have some vague feelings he might not be the Moslem equivalent of a Sunday-school teacher.
Rolfe.
I may presume the people in the State Department know about the solidity of the case - i.e., the civil servants. Though I note that American governments tend to replace quite a bit of higher-ups in the departments with a change of administration, so that knowledge may have got lost in the high echelons. However, knowledge within the State Dept. doesn't imply that politicians will act according, and senators aren't coached by the State Dept.