Friday 18 December 2015

International agreement on Lockerbie trial

On this date in 1998 the governments of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands concluded in The Hague an agreement setting out the arrangements for a trial of the Lockerbie suspects to take place before a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands. The full text of the agreement can be read here.
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  1. SM18 December, 2015

    Humans must make conclusions based on the understanding they have acquired, however poorly founded.

    I have read that one reason for the success of the Häagen-Dazs ice-cream brand was that the name was being carefully chosen to be associated with a renowned quality of Danish diaries.
    The name was freely invented by one of the founders, and is as un-Danish as being un-English. We neither have an "ä" or, to my knowledge, any word single word containing "zs", except as a part of a genitive.

    Still, it worked, due to perception of the buyers.


    The relevance to the Lockerbie case is, that before it was revealed how rotten the Scottish judicial system is, there might just have been some loose idea in Gadaffi's camp that it was of premium quality, or that it at least would be better than a trial in UK, US or Scotland itself.

    Out of the blue. As we have seen it could hardly have gone worse.

    "A Scottish court sitting in the Neatherlands", well, if the fear would be that the crowd would lynch the accused it might have made a difference.
    As we now know it didn't. All to be followed by discoveries of just how far authorities went to twist matters and keep doing it.


    Well, politics is the art of the possible as they say, and this was politics, the only possible way to move on for Libya, complying, getting the embargo lifted.
    At the price of a single unfair conviction, it was of course a needed deal, even if such a sacrifice was not intended.

    And even if being completely free from irrational illusions, nobody could ever have predicted they way things worked out.

    The Lockerbie trial history is most of all a psychological study into what people are willing to base their beliefs on.
    That a good-old-fashioned lynching can well be done by robe- and wig-clad people talking themselves into believing that they have insight into how to conclude from a selective, long-winded and at times absurd reasoning.

    For this purpose it may still be some of the best ever written:
    http://www.lawphil.net/international/int_cases/lockerbie_verdict.html

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