Scotland's Compassionate Terrorist Program

The people on Pan Am flight 103 were not allowed to go home and spend their final months with their family members. They were abruptly blown out of the sky by a bomb planted on their plane. Scottish authorities have described their release of the convicted bomber as "compassionate", but in fact it showed an incredible lack of compassion towards the families of the victims:

The head of Scotland's government said Sunday that FBI director Robert Mueller was wrong to criticize the decision to free the Pan Am Flight 103 bomber — insisting there was public support for the release on compassionate grounds.

Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a Libyan convicted of killing 270 people in the 1988 airline bombing, was released Thursday because he is terminally ill with prostate cancer. He has returned to his native Libya to die.

The release was met with outrage by families of the U.S. victims of the bombing and criticized by President Obama as "highly objectionable."

In a letter to Scotland's government, Mueller said that al-Megrahi's release would give comfort to terrorists all over the world.

"Your action," he wrote, "makes a mockery of the grief of the families who lost their own on December 21, 1988."

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond told BBC Radio that Mueller was wrong in assuming that all those affected by the bombing were opposed to al-Megrahi's release.

"I understand the huge and strongly held views of the American families, but that's not all the families who were affected by Lockerbie," Salmond said. "As you're well aware, a number of the families, particularly in the U.K., take a different view and think that we made the right decision."

The explosion of a bomb hidden in the cargo hold of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed all 259 people on the plane and 11 on the ground in Britain's worst terrorist attack.

There are now suspicions that this release is somehow tied into British trade deals with Libya. If that turns out to be true, everyone involved should be taken to 30,000 feet and be unceremoniously dumped over the British Isles.