"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Why are Lugar and Kerry stalling?


From the Indy Examiner:
Senator Frank Lautenberg's September 2 call for a congressional probe regarding Scotland's release of Libyan terrorist Abdel Bassett al-Megrahi continues to go unanswered. Lautenberg (D-NJ) wrote to Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asking for "a hearing and investigation to uncover whether justice took a back seat to commercial interests." The letter, significantly, asks the committee to investigate whether Megrahi's release "violated the international agreement between the US and the UK," which may unearth corruption in the Obama administration.

John Bolton, writing in the New York Post, succinctly explains this special agreement as follows:
In the Clinton years, the United States made two key concessions in exchange for Libya turning over Megrahi and another defendant to Scotland for prosecution. The first was explicit: The trial would not be used to undermine Libya's regime, which was uniformly understood to mean that prosecutors wouldn't seek to tie Khadafy directly to the decision to blow Pan Am 103 out of the sky. The second was implicit: By agreeing that trial would be under Scottish, rather than US law, the maximum sentence could only be life imprisonment. (The death penalty is not available in Britain.)

Megrahi's release clearly undermines this agreement, particularly given that Libya paid doctors to give Megrahi his three-months-to-live prognosis and given that he is not staying in a hospital.

The most distinct possibility that exists as to why Lugar and Kerry have not responded to Lautenberg's call for a congressional probe is quite unsavory: that they are covering for President Obama, as all indications are that Obama gave the green light to release Megrahi and then lied about it. The administration is now claiming to have been caught off-guard by the decision, but this flatly contradicts the Secretary of State's spokesmen's claim that she had worked for "weeks and months" to prevent Megrahi's release, and that Attorney General Eric Holder knew about the oil-for-terrorist deal back in June. According to Bolton, some even claim that "Obama's national-security transition team was briefed well before the inauguration."

Bolton speculates that Obama did not believe that keeping the terrorist in prison and upholding the sentence/agreement between the U.S. and the U.K. was "worth much effort or political capital" and that what truly blindsided the administration was the public outrage at the decision.

Obama, Kerry, and Lugar all have long, checkered histories as terrorist sympathizers. Discussing Obama's would yield a 200-page tome, so I will just leave it at the fact that he held a Ramadan dinner at the White House just last week with the leader of a Muslim Brotherhood front group and unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation's landmark Hamas-funding case in which all suspects were found guilty on all charges.

Kerry never met an enemy he didn't love. Last February he visited Gaza in the wake of Operation Cast Lead for what was clearly nothing more than a propaganda campaign for Hamas. He was to personally transfer a letter from Hamas to Obama, but when he was blindsided by international outrage over the travesty (or really, that anyone would find out about it) he opted instead to turn the letter over to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, which is essentially a stronghold for Hamas, along with a more moderate terror organization, the Palestinian Authority (a newer incarnation of Yasser Arafat's P.L.O.).

Lugar has always been a strong supporter of recognizing, negotiating with, and aiding Hamas, despite the fact that it is an internationally-listed terror organization predicated on genocide. He has also pushed for the Saudi Plan, which he renamed the "Feinstein-Lugar Israeli-Palestinian Peace Resolution" in order to help it be realized. The plan, which ensures the "right of return" for Jordanians to land which they never inhabited, would flood Israel with terrorists ensure their destruction, or at best, force Israel to officially accept a neighbor who lobs Iranian rockets at them daily.

Senate investigations would likely unearth some very interesting facts. It is likely that Hillary Clinton, whose statements on the matter contradict the official statements by the administration, would testify against President Obama, since she has managed to keep her hands clean throughout the debacle. Now that she may be eyeing a run for governor of New York, this seems all the more likely.

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