Question: It is almost three months since Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released and some people are wondering whether he was as ill as he was said to be at the time. Have you any information about his health?
Prime Minister: The medical reports that were done at the time were done independently, but it was and is a matter for the Scottish administration to deal with the consequences of these reports. They made their decision, we accepted their decision, medical advice was provided to them and the Foreign Office is aware of what medical advice was given.
[From a press conference given by Gordon Brown on 10 November. The full transcript can be read here.]
Oh my. Did he live longer than three month? What a disaster. Let's keep prisoners with a metastatic prostate cancer in jail, just to prevent that they might actually outlive the few months that some (not including Clinton and Nobel peace-prize winner Obama) will give them.
ReplyDeleteAs it says in this article:
"So you could easily find he could get back to Libya and they could give him all of these new drugs, and he could be alive six months, nine months, 12 months later."
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/megrahi-how-long-has-he-really-got-1.825232
What kind of treatment did he receive in jail, then?
Metastatic prostate cancer, like all other terminal tumor-inducing cancers, usually results in extreme pain in the terminal stages.
My own father died from painful cancer. I can't describe the feelings I'd have had if he'd in this period had been imprisoned somewhere, on charges that I had every reason to believe were false. Would somebody blame me if the idea of giving some of this pain back to that society would have come to mind?
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What always gets to me is the hypocrisy. If what we want to see is prisoners dying a painful death in prison, then let's at least be honest about it. By all means, the attitude makes sense, doesn't it? Painful executions has been used throughout human history.
But let us not at the same time swing the flag of "(christian?) compassion", being a superior civilization - contrasting to those barbaric ones we claim exists elsewhere, which we, for the benefit of the poor people living there, attack them with the most effective and painful weapons our scientists can produce, including Mark-77 (once called napalm), cluster bombs with cancer-inducing depleted uranium and mining-effect and white phosphorus. Extrapolating from the Lancet's figures 20 people will have died a violent death in the time it took me to write this, compared to 0 under Saddam Hussein.
My hope is, that one day we will get more people to understand that to become the good guys we want to be, something has to be changed first, and that is the responsibility of us all that it does.
The Lockerbie-case (where something bad has happened to ourselves) should be an eye-opener. That is also the primary reason why the same powers that takes us to wars will fight against the truth being known.
Well said.
ReplyDeleteAn excellent comment sfm.
ReplyDelete