BP Provides Opportunistic Moment For Senators
By James Rothenberg
26 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org
It’s an excellent time to stand against a giant, multinational corporation, particularly if that corporation is BP and you are a professional politician. The timing has been heightened by the purported link between the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and the finalization of an oil deal between BP and Libya.
Such is the basis of the called-for investigation by the Justice Department by New York Senator Charles Schumer, who had been previously joined by co-Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as Senators Menendez and Lautenberg of New Jersey, calling on BP to halt its drilling plans and requesting a State Department investigation. This is interesting considering the US Defense Intelligence Agency’s take on the subject at the time of the bombing, to follow.
Corporations go to great lengths to conceal the power relationships they enjoy with the capitalistic states that empower them. Every now and then they are illuminated and it can prove to be temporarily embarrassing. We may assume that these senators are not unaware of the working connections between Anglo-American corporations and fascist states, prominently the European fascist regimes from the 1920’s-1940’s and continuing in present day global relationships.
The confluence of BP’s vulnerability and the deep moralizing points to be won politically have given rise to the senators’ grandstand play.
Menendez: “If BP is found to have helped free this mass murderer…”
Schumer: “It almost too disgusting to fathom…”
Lautenberg: While Megrahi was sent home to his family, 189 American victims never made it home to theirs.”
Gillibrand: “What has happened here is a total miscarriage of justice. Al-Megrahi should never have been released – period. All Americans are well aware of the dangerous behavior that BP is willing to engage in the pursuit of profits. We’ve seen the results down in the Gulf. Now we are learning that they may have had a role in letting an international terrorist, who was convicted of murdering 270 innocent people, go free.”
BP’s involvement is no more or less than should be expected of a large multinational that is expected to act amorally and is only legally obliged to maximize profits. Surely none of the four senators object to the corporate charter. The BP furor brings back Megrahi but not in a way that has anything to say about the original case against him.
Megrahi’s conviction for the crime is not without controversy. He has always maintained his innocence and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found prima facie evidence in June 2007 that Megrahi had suffered a “miscarriage of justice” (unlike Gillibrand this miscarriage being against Megrahi) and recommended that he be granted a second appeal, something the British government is not eager to see.
In the words of Professor Robert Black QC, the Scottish lawyer who was the architect of the original trial and is on record for accepting some responsibility for the miscarriage that occurred, “The Crown and the prosecution are using every delaying tactic in the book to close off every route available to Megrahi except prisoner transfer, as this means he has to abandon his appeal."
According to the UK’s Sunday Times of August 16, 2009, “American intelligence documents blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.”
The Times cites a memo from the US Defense Intelligence Agency implicating Iran as being behind the attack on Pan Am flight 103 in response to the shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner by the USS Vincennes, an American warship, five months earlier. Megrahi’s defense team planned to produce a DIA memo, dated September 24, 1989, that stated, “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorized and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister.
What are the possible reasons for US/UK reluctance to see this appeal take place? One can speculate that they are not eager to rekindle the dying memory of US culpability in shooting down IR 655, a civilian airliner, given the present paradigm of Amer-Anglo goodness/Iranian evilness. The US reached a settlement at the International Court of Justice paying $61.8 million to the families of the Iranian victims, but did not admit responsibility or apologize.
And how to explain the senators’ seeming indifference to the appeal? They may be unaware of the DIA’s analysis, and thus unaware of the official US position on the subject. They may have confidence that the British state, no stranger to this, can continue to strangle Megrahi’s appeal efforts. And then they may not care about any of this beyond seizing the personal opportunity.
If the four senators have more indignity to go around, I suggest they take up the highly uncontroversial case of Luis Posada Carilles and Orlando Bosch, the undisputed engineers of the international terrorist attack that brought down Cubana flight 455 on October 6, 1976 killing all 73 people on board. Declassified CIA and FBI documents state as much.
Both Posada and Bosch worked for the CIA making the world safe from Communists, like the young girls from the Cuban fencing team that was on board of whom Bosch recently said in a Spanish language television station interview in Miami, “I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant [Castro]…” Reason enough for Bosch.
George H. W. Bush pardoned Bosch of American charges for political reasons as a favor to his son, Jeb. Other countries want him extradited for terrorism. That won’t be forthcoming.
A U.S. immigration judge has ruled that Posada should not be deported to Cuba or Venezuela on terrorism charges because he might be subjected to torture. Ingeniously, Congressman William Delahunt has argued that the U.S. was making an exception for Posada, because with our practice of “extraordinary rendition” we routinely transfer suspected terrorists to Syria and Egypt, both of which practice torture.
Recall when Rumsfeld said it was time to “take the gloves off” with terrorists? Make those “kid gloves” when the terrorists advance U.S. interests. Would the four senators care to join Mr. Delahunt in pressing that these “disgusting”… “mass murderers”…whose… “victims never made it home”…do not… “go free”?
