Maybe I would be too, heric (though I hope not). But I would certainly be a little bit concerned to know whether anyone convicted was actually guilty as charged.

One of the New Jersey woman's more idiotic remarks to a BBC interviewer was "Why don't you show some sympathy for ME?" To which Jim Swire, who was in the same discussion and who lost his daughter in the Lockerbie atrocity, asked how it could possibly help her if a potentially innocent man was made to die in prison. Her response was to say that her daughter had not been killed by a UFO, as Jim Swire obviously believed. Presumably that's where Paco Rabanne's coming from too. God almighty.

Sinsull, who thinks the BBC has an axe to grind, should do what very few in the US seem to have done and take a look at the case against Megrahi. It is wafer thin. And is Sinsull saying that the words attributed to American and British relatives have been distorted in some way?

For many Americans, and alas for many Brits too, such trivial considerations as the establishing of guilt beyond doubt are secondary to the thirst for revenge on any terms. But surely justice should rise above gut instincts and set itself a higher bar. Or are we supposed to abandon all civilised values in the face of crimes against us, and resort to an eye for an eye?

Why are American families of the victims not fighting, as many of the British families are, to find out why Britain and America are content to see a single individual jailed when it is crystal clear to both governments - as it was to the court that convicted Megrahi - that even if guilty he was far from being the atrocity's mastermind? Frankly those unquestioning families are acquitting themselves like an army of the brain-dead.