The weekend of unreason
It was a weekend for seeking consolation in philosophy, political and otherwise. I turned first to Tom Paine. ‘Lay the axe to the root and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind’. I was thus consoled. But then, to borrow one of the phrases of the weekend, I made a grave error of judgement: I opened the newspapers.
Shares in that failing company, Quality of Mercy Limited, had fallen to a record low. Everywhere was bile and fury, much of it generated by the Scots themselves. We may be ‘pariahs in the eyes of the world’ – though I rather doubt it – but our supreme skill is in damning each other. ‘Flyting’, Hugh MacDiarmid called it. It is our national sport, the only one in which we are the masters. But in this case there was an unfamiliar dimension. We had been challenged to show compassion and we were proving not to be temperamentally cut out for it. I was reminded of the prayer of the Aberdeen minister: ‘We thank thee, O Lord, for all Thy mercies, such as they are’. They were few indeed this weekend. But it was not simply that mercy was in short supply. Reason seemed to have gone, too.
The letter
All the newspapers were excited by a letter to the Scottish justice secretary, the beleaguered Kenny MacAskill, accusing him of making ‘a mockery of justice’. Some went so far as to claim that Mr MacAskill’s political career was ‘on the line’ because of it. Yet, on examination of the letter from Mr Mueller, the head of the FBI, we find the following paragraph:
Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world who now believe that regardless of the quality of the investigation, the conviction by jury after the defendant is given all due process, and sentence appropriate to the crime, the terrorist will be freed by one man’s exercise of ‘compassion’.
It would be fruitless to expect Mr Mueller to be a stylist of higher English prose, but we are entitled to expect that, before he fires off a missile in the direction of Edinburgh, he should have an elementary grasp of the essentials of the case. Megrahi was not convicted by a jury, but by a panel of judges; no jury was involved. The newspapers, for their own reasons, chose not to expose this error in Mr Mueller’s understanding of the Netherlands trial. Or perhaps they are so sunk in ignorance and prejudice that they, too, have convinced themselves that Megrahi was convicted by a jury.
The burden of proof
In an extraordinary editorial, Scotland on Sunday described Megrahi as ‘the man who committed the worst slaughter on Scottish soil since the Butcher of Cumberland’ but acknowledged that the flying of the Scottish flag at Tripoli airport ‘might have been an acceptable price to pay if some moral imperative of natural justice, such as irrefutable evidence of Megrahi’s innocence, had dictated his release’. Only ‘might’? Not ‘would’? And what is this newspaper recommending, exactly? Scots law demands that an accused should be convicted only if a jury is satisfied ‘beyond reasonable doubt’: that is the bar of proof. It does not demand ‘irrefutable evidence of innocence’; indeed the burden is on the Crown to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, not on the accused to prove innocence. If it is a choice between Scots law, with all its faults, manifold in the case of Megrahi, and Scotland on Sunday law, we should unhesitatingly choose the former.
Nowhere in this editorial – nowhere in any of the editorials I read at the weekend – was there the faintest acknowledgement that there are substantial doubts about Megrahi’s guilt, that these doubts are widely and deeply shared by many of those most familiar with the case, that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission granted a second appeal (which will not now take place) because of its conclusion after a four-year review that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred, that two years elapsed after the commission’s findings and still the Scottish judicial system did little to expedite the appeal. None of these doubts, reflecting so badly on Scottish justice, was allowed to surface in the weekend of non-reason, when the only thing that mattered to the newspapers was ‘the shaming of the Saltire’.
The conspiracy theory
Journalists are addicted to conspiracies. The conspiracy in the Megrahi case which the weekend newspapers expect us to believe – hundreds of column inches were devoted to it – is that the UK government asked its friends in the SNP administration in Edinburgh to facilitate the prisoner’s release as part of a trade deal and that Mr MacAskill was the agent of this plot. I myself have never quite given up hope that Elvis Presley is still alive. I have less hope of Kennygate.
Not in our name, Mr MacAskill
As I say, it was a weekend for seeking consolation in philosophy. I didn’t find much in Auden:
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye
24 August
31.08.09
Issue no 133
THE BBC AND
KENNY MacASKILL
Kenneth Roy
Can the public service
broadcaster be trusted?
[click here]
THE LOCKERBIE FILE
Recently in SR
In the interests of justice
28 August
[click here]
Die or else
27 August
[click here]
The changing mood
26 August
[click here]
Speed reacting
25 August
[click here]
The weekend of unreason
24 August
[click here]
Marina and her sister
21 August
[click here]
Why Megrahi will be missed
20 August
[click here]
Obstruction of justice?
13 August
[click here]
GALLERY
Contemporary Scottish art
Michael Murray:
The Hidden Lane
[click here]
In view of the continuing political crisis in Scotland, SR continues to publish daily for the time being
