You're right you don't have the eloquence, robomatic, so it's perhaps not so smart to accuse someone else of rambling.

I have to say I'm amazed to see anyone advocating, or at least defending, vengeance. For me it is one of the most alarming and sickening failings of the human condition. No doubt we have all thirsted for it in a red-mist moment, on account of some crime against us, great or small. But surely the laws of justice in any civilised state should rise above such base instincts. And to underscore Backwoodsman's point, those who lust for revenge often finish up destroying their own lives.

Getting back to Megrahi, I agree with Anne Croucher that he surely can't last much longer. Which will at least prove that God is on John Bolton's side. (I put a link to his obscene comment on the matter in my previous post.) Megrahi, incidentally, says he is going to give all his defence papers to Jim Swire who will use them to continue pressing for a public enquiry into Lockerbie.

If I had committed a crime myself, and was protesting my innocence, I'm not sure that I would be as agitated as Megrahi seems to be about having the case crawled over again in every detail. This brings me to one of robomatic's most idiotic arguments: his concern that Megrahi's family may share his jihadist mentality. It's idiotic because (sorry, but I have to spell this out for robomatic)... It's idiotic because Megrahi continues vehemently to deny involvement in the atrocity. Clearly he intends to die protesting his innocence rather than claiming jihadist status. That's rather unusual for a jihadist.

The BBC's radio reconstruction of the trial can now be heard on their website until Sataurday. Again I put a link in my previous post. No-one hearing it could be sanguine about the verdict, but for me it highlighted a point I'd forgotten and which no-one else has mentioned: Megrahi's guilt was decided not by a jury but by three judges, who would certainly have been more aware than a jury of realpolitik pressures.

On that question of realpolitik. the (London) Sunday Times published correspondence today which showed a senior UK government minister seeking to appease Libya, at the time of a major oil deal, by ensuring that Megrahi was not excluded from the terms of a prisoner transfer agreement between the two ocuntries. That stinks, but it's no worse than we would expect from a government that sold Saudi Arabia an airforce. It doesn't alter the fact, now widely acknowledged by constitutionalists, that the matter was outside the UK government's gift. And it doesn't alter the fact that the decision in Scotland (which Don chose casually and uncharacteristically to smear) was on compassionate grounds.