Gadaffi’s death and press and media coverage

The Libyan Revolution has succeeded, and I’m glad. With reservations, I was in favour of the intervention of Britain and France. Gadaffi was an evil dictator and is guilty of appalling crimes. I would have wished, for the sake of the Libyan people’s nascent democracy that he had been captured and brought to trial.

I understand why young men who have taken huge personal risks to free their country from a murderous tyrant, who have seen their comrades killed in battle, have perhaps lost members of their family and who have witnessed the horrors of Gadaffi’s regime at first hand, in the heat of the moment - in their rage and euphoria - killed him. It was wrong, but I neither judge them nor condemn them – no one who has not experienced what they have may do so.

But I am revolted by the behaviour of the  British media, not in their immediate coverage of the manner of his death, but in the subsequent gloating triumphalism and the publication today on the front page of almost every newspaper of his dead face, and the almost medieval celebration of the brutality of his end. Short of bringing his head back and displaying it on a spike on Westminster Bridge, the primitive instincts of sectors of our ruling classes could not have expressed more satisfaction.

We claim rightly that ours is a more civilised society than the regime of terror that Gadaffi presided over for over forty years. Some claim Britain as a Christian society, and it is certainly a society that reflect many faiths, including the three great religions of the Abrahamic tradition – Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Nothing in this behaviour accords with the core tenets of these religions at their best, whatever the horrific political manifestations of their dogmatic differences have been historically and in our own time.

There is something obscene in the prospect of our politicians – some of them – rejoicing in the manner of Gadaffi’s death from the safety and comparative security of Westminster. At least we have been spared the spectacle of Liam Fox gloating over the tyrant’s bloody end.

I hope the so-called spiritual leaders of the nation speak, if they have not already done so.

Sampling opinion of friends and neighbours, the reactions I have got range from a similar kind of primitive satisfaction in the brutal end of an enemy to a feeling that such photographic evidence was necessary “to prove he was really dead”. Given that any television and film special effects company could have produced an effective ersatz corpse - on the CSI television series model, or any number of British pathology-based TV series, allied to the 21st century to capacity to manipulate an image - I don’t see that the image alone ‘proves’ anything.

But I do believe he is dead, based on all the reports and the facts, just as I believe that Hitler is dead, Kennedy is dead, John Lennon is dead, etcetera, without having to see press photographs of the corpse. He is gone, and whatever the manner of his death, Libya – for the moment – is a better place for his demise. Whether our world is a safer place, or the West’s oil supply is more secure remains to be seen …

The Sunday Times deliberately distorts the latest Megrahi story

The Wikileak about the last Labour Government’s lies and hypocrisy over their shameful involvement with Libya and Gadaffi over the potential release of the Lockerbie bomber in return for commercial deals was, in one sense, God’s gift to the beleagured Cameron ConLib Coalition, giving them an opportunity to attack the Labour Party.

However, they and their press backers realised that it was potentially a double-edged sword as far as the Union and the United Kingdom was concerned, since it placed the Scottish Nationalist government’s refusal to have any truck with the Prisoner Transfer Agreement under Blair’s sleazy Deal in the Desert, and their refusal to release Megrahi at that time in a good light. That, together with the SNP Government’s decision to release Megrahi - who by a much later date had been diagnosed as being terminally ill - looked even more like the humane, principled decision that it was, taken in the full belief, by the Scottish Justice Minister and the Scottish government, that Megrahi was guilty of the Lockerbie bombing, and that the sentence of the Scottish Court was a valid one.

Despite the clear political advantage to be gained over Labour, this could not be allowed to happen so close to a pivotal Scottish election, because it showed up the disgraceful hypocrisy and ineptitude of Holyrood Labour’s stance after the Megrahi release. The circle had to be squared - a way to muddy the water, distort the facts and smear the Scottish Government had to found - and quick.

A blatant lie was hastily constructed, that the Scottish Government had been complicit with the Westminster Labour Government of the day in trying to negotiate Megrahi’s release under the PTA in return for concessions on the prisoners’ slopping out case - a proposition and a scenario so ludicrous that Scottish Nationalists would have fallen about laughing, had it not been for the seriousness of the lie.

This lie has, knowingly or unwittingly, been repeated so often now by every unionist newspaper and superficial commentator - including at a point in time the BBC and Channel Four News - that it runs the risk of becoming a factoid - something that everybody knows to be true, except that it ain’t, to quote Norman Mailer, the originator of the term.

And now The Sunday Times are at it today -

Lockerbie Bomber ‘won his release by blackmail’

Note the quotes, achieving the dual feat of giving it spurious credibility while retaining the ability to repudiate it as something somebody else said, if the need arise.

This non-story uses a methodology now widely practised in the Scottish press as well, that of hoping that the headline will be the story, and that the casual reader will not examine the flimsy and inaccurate foundation upon which it is constructed.

The story rest upon the statement by Mustapha Abdel Jali, Libya’s former Justice Minister. I invite you to consider that title - Libya’s Justice Minister - a personal friend of Gadaffi, servant to a brutal, repressive, dictatorial regime, responsible for the suppression of its citizens for forty years by torture and murder, an international pariah state. This man, apparently expert at playing both ends against the middle, and now faced with the collapse of the regime he helped to sustain - with a few well-judged liberal gestures just in case - is desperate to curry favour with the US and British governments, and he knows exactly what they want to hear. A little caution is advisable when considering anything he has to say …

But I believe him - that Gadaffi did order the Lockerbie bombings, that Megrahi was involved, probably with others, and was therefore guilty. I also believe that Gadaffi was actively negotiating with Blair and the former Labour Government for his release.

This is in fact the only story, but the Sunday Times, a News International paper, solidly Tory and right-wing in its sympathies, has to find room for the Scottish smear in their cobbled-together little piece. So they included this paragraph - which is factually accurate - in the hope of beginning the mud-slinging -

“Megrahi, who has always publicly maintained his innocence, was given compassionate release by the Scottish authorities in August 2009 after being diagnosed with  cancer. He remains alive, despite being given only three months to live.”

That last sentence is the ST’s hook - the implication being that Megrahi was not terminally ill.

A rent-a-mouth Tory MP, Ben Wallace, is quoted, and in his statement, a justifiable attack on Brown and his Labour Government’s disgraceful politicking over Megrahi for economic advantages, Wallace also says, referring to alleged bugging of Libyan intelligence services by the British Secret Service -

“The Scottish Government  must now come forward and the Labour government tell us whether they were aware of these conversations, and if not, why not.”

Given that Alex Salmond quoted in last Thursday’s FMQs that the Scottish Government was excluded by Westminster from the COBRA talks over the Libyan crisis, the idea the the British Secret Service would be falling over itself to tell them about bugged conversations involving Libya is risible.

And that is the sum total of this shabby little report - it tells us nothing new, but implies a great deal.

God preserve Scotland and the Scots from the lies of the Union and its PRAVDA-style press ..

Saor Alba!

Iain Gray, Scotland’s Invisible Man, is nailed to the floor over the Megrahi Release by Isabel Fraser

The Politics Show Scotland, with the superb Isabel Fraser in the chair.

Iain Gray, Scotland's invisible man, is again pinned to the floor on his Holyrood party's hypocrisy over the Megrahi release. He waffles about what he knew, what he says he didn't know, what he said and didn't say to Gordon Brown, and tries to maintain the utterly ludicrous position that Scottish Labour had a shred of independence from their London-based party and Westminster bosses.

A puppet trying to pretend that his strings weren't pulled ...

He attempts, yet again, to muddy the water over slopping out, trying to maintain the ConLib, Labour UK and unionist media desperate attempt to limit the damage - initially caused by the Wikileaks disclosure of their dirty double-dealing  - by smearing the SNP, but is nailed on the vital timescale discrepancy that is the gaping hole in the UK lie.

But the polls would indicate that Labour has been rumbled, and the Scottish people will trust their ain folk. The Middle East is convulsed by oppressed peoples trying to throw off corrupt dictators. Scotland is under the heel of a corrupt democracy, the United Kingdom, but only needs the ballot box to get the hell out from under it.

Vote for your ain folk on May 5th, Scots - vote SNP - the only party that acts solely in the interests of Scots and Scotland, while playing a full, moral part in the European and the international communities.