The four Democratic U.S. Senators from New York and New Jersey -- Kirsten Gillibrand, Robert Menendez, Charles Schumer, and Frank Lautenberg -- want answers about credible allegations that BP lobbied for the release of the Pan Am 103 bomber in order to secure an oil deal with Libya:
Four Democratic senators are calling on BP to suspend all drilling operations in Libya so the State Department can conduct an investigation into allegations that the company worked behind the scenes to help coordinate the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in order to finalize plans for drilling in the African country.
The idea that BP would lobby for the release of a terrorist simply to pursue an oil contract seems hard to believe. But all indications are that it's true.
On September 5, 2009, The Guardian reported:
The row over the release of the Lockerbie bomber was reignited last night when Jack Straw, the justice secretary, directly contradicted Gordon Brown by saying Britain had been partly motivated by the need to secure fresh oil contracts when ministers tried, in 2007, to make it easier to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.
Straw accepted in an interview that he had decided in 2007 to drop his plan to exclude the bomber from a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) with Libya after lobbying by UK oil interests, notably BP and the Libyan government. Straw was lobbied on 15 October and 9 November 2007 by Sir Mark Allen, a former MI6 officer, who was by then working for BP as a consultant. Libya was stalling on a £500m-plus oil deal with BP.
Brown, in a statement on Wednesday, said Megrahi's release had nothing to do with oil and was solely motivated by the desire to bring Libya back into the international fold after the country agreed to abandon its programme of weapons of mass destruction.
Straw had made his comments to The Daily Telegraph a day earlier:
In his interview today, Mr Straw admits that when he was considering in 2007 whether the bomber should be included in a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) with Libya, Britain’s trade interests were a crucial factor.
Documents published this week showed Mr Straw originally promised that a PTA would only be reached with Libya if Megrahi was excluded. But he later caved in to Libyan demands to include Megrahi. It followed a warning from BP that a failure to include the bomber could hurt the oil giant’s business interests.
When asked in the interview if trade and BP were factors, Mr Straw admits: "Yes, [it was] a very big part of that. I’m unapologetic about that... Libya was a rogue state.
"We wanted to bring it back into the fold. And yes, that included trade because trade is an essential part of it and subsequently there was the BP deal."
Mr Straw also claims today that Mr Brown had nothing to do with his change of heart over the PTA, adding: "I certainly didn’t talk to the PM. There is no paper trail to suggest he was involved at all."
Assuming that this is true, BP not only is a company responsible for fouling the Gulf Coast, it also was a key player in securing the release from prison of a terrorist responsible for killing 270 innocent civilians, including 190 American citizens.
Given all that, it's reasonable to ask why BP is allowed to continue doing business in this country. On what basis can we possibly trust them to act responsibly? Maybe someone will ask Dick Cheney's former press secretary to explain the answer to that. After all, she's now a spokeswoman for BP. War on terror, indeed.
Update: BP has responded, acknowledging that it pushed for al-Megrahi's release, but saying that it did so through the British government, not the Scottish government, which ultimately made the decision. That misses the point, however: if the British government was lobbying the Scottish government on BP's behalf, then BP might as well have been lobbying the Scottish government. And the bottom-line is that BP got what it wanted when the Scottish government released al-Megrahi.