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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Lockerbie
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270 people died as a result of the bombing of Pan Am 103. I could nearly name them all by memory, I’ve spent so many days with that list in hand. I say this because I want to make it clear that I am aware of the consequence of the decision I take.
I don’t believe al Megrahi when he says he’s innocent- find me a man in prison who doesn’t claim the same- but I do believe his physician and the consulting oncologist when they tell me he’s dying. Prostate cancer- probably less than 3 months to live, within the statutes for release on compassionate grounds- that’s why I agreed he should be released. Pan Am 103 was torn apart in midair by a bomb, but it did not simply kill everyone on board. It tore the nose from the rest of the plane; the pilots were lucky, in that they likely died within seconds. The rest of the plane wasn’t so lucky, and was buffeted by mach stem shock waves, faster and more powerful even than the initial explosion. Moving like a headless chicken, the fuselage stayed in the air a further 45 seconds before nose diving towards the Earth. Anyone not strapped in was yanked outside the plane into -46° C temperatures, and it would have taken a full two minutes to fall to their deaths. Those who were strapped securely were greeted with hurricane-strength winds that turned mundane items like cups and trays into lethal objects. The fuselage smacked into Lockerbie at nearly the speed of sound, and its nearly hundred thousand kilos of fuel exploded. I bear all possible ill will for al Megrahi, and he’s going to die of ass-cancer, which is the closest thing to justice as I’ve seen in action. But if we want the justice of animals (or Mueller’s mocked “rule of law”)- a kind of system that sees murdering 270 bystanders as righteous- we’d have let him stay in his cell all 27 years, let his corpse rot in there for whatever was left after the cancer took him. In my darker moments, I wanted that; even now, I want it still. But we can’t give ourselves over to that kind of justice. We can’t give our enemies the moral victory or even relative moral equivalency. We have to be better. We need to be better. Or else our victory will be meaningless. |
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