The Libyan national convicted of the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was sent home to Libya late last week due to the nature of his mental state and the realization that he has but a few months to live because of his terminally ill condition of prostate cancer.  Not surprising, international organizations and the families of the nearly 300 victims howled with protest at this news, while Libya organized a celebration deserving of a national hero.

It would be a moot point to state that this is a very poor decision on the part of the Libyans and the prison committee in this matter.  For those individuals who look for a personal connection in things for them to strike a personal pang of involvement, let me tell you that approximately 30 of the victims were Syracuse University students returning from a study-abroad term overseas.  The next time you watch Syracuse playing football or basketball on TV, remember that a portion of the students -in the process of becoming more worldly and desirous to make an impact on the world via business, education, journalism, etc.- lost their lives because political opponents of the western world thought that the best way to isolate the West would be to attack passenger liners.

Now, the "hero" of this attack can die peacefully in his home in Libya; all thanks to his battle with cancer.  How poignant.  Certainly, putting bombers and hijackers in prison hasn't prevented people from going after planes since then; in fact, even the aftermath of the 1973 Entebbe Raid, where German and Israeli commandos killed all the hijackers hasn't dissuaded the ranks of the militants.

But, to release the person convicted of the crime is unheard of, almost...(more to come).   Speculation abounds that the British, intent on selling weapons to the Libyans, released the prisoner as a show of good faith and goodwill.  Keep in mind, please, that the British also insisted on banning U.S. food shipments to the Irish during the Potato Famine because it was '''God's Will'" that the Irish suffer their fate (look up the Corn Laws just to see how they achieved this).  Apparently, the British authorities have a monopoly on moral suasion. 

Certainly, a great deal of anti-Americanism played into this, and the Americans have also participated in efforts to overthrow unsympathetic regimes, sometimes with great loss of life.  More on this to come.  But nations hostile to American beliefs -including Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others, tend to blithely hide behind religion as their key motivation to commit atrocities (something which the Prophets might not look to fondly on, as speculation).  Religious nut-jobs from any faith have long since and continue to promulgate these ideas of  "holier-than-thou, the only good (insert targeted religious faith) is a dead (believer in that faith)."  The same belief could hold true of nationalities or ethnicities, as the Darfur genocide has shown. 

It is a shame that technological, economic, and social changes are attributed solely to one nation (as in the misguided case that Globalization is an American creation; as if international trade is only a recent occurrence).  As a historian, I have to interject that the Soviet Union was also accused of attempting to subvert the stability of Afghanistan in the late 1970s.  How did they aim to do this?  By sending a few hundred individuals to the region to set up schools that would teach women and girls how to read.  Afghan militants responded to this by executing the Soviet educators in much the same way current militants execute captured Coalition troops.  Due to this, the USSR used this as one of the excuses to invade the nation in 1980.

Now, about the precedent the release of the Bomber alluded to earlier.  Does anybody remember that a situation similar to this occurred a few years back, when Augusto Pinochet was to be tried for Crimes Against Humanity during his reign of terror in Chile?  He was found to have the same conditions as the current former-prisoner: mental instability and terminal illness.  Keep in mind, he was tried in a Spanish courtroom.  Why Spain?  Well, Spain had nearly 3,000 of its citizens murdered by Pinochet's death squads during his rule (also, about the same number of Americans were killed in Chile) while untold thousands of Chilean citizens also met their end during this time period.  So, to say that Pinochet was mentally unstable would be about as much of an understatement as saying that Hitler had a difficult time with other cultures. 

Sadly, the United States had a hand in putting Pinochet in power, as the CIA couldn't tolerate the democratically-elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, from taking power because he leaned toward the Socialist side of the spectrum.  American textile companies feared that his regime would force them to pay Chilean workers fair wages and provide adequate working conditions.  Apparently, they wanted to keep the nation in a state reminiscent of the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.  All it cost?  Thousands of lives lost due to political ideologies. 

It's amazing; modern society can find other planets in our galaxy and spend enormous sums of money and energy trying to find out whether they can support life, when, over the span of 100,000 years, we haven't been able or willing to support the life we have on this planet.