BY REITERATING his opposition to the release last August of Libyan airline bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, British prime minister David Cameron apparently hoped to allay a source of tension between the US and Britain.
But the issue will not go away, and commentators have suggested that Mr Cameron actually made the problem worse. His efforts to dissociate the Gulf oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in US history, from BP’s lobbying on behalf of Megrahi’s release may have backfired.
Senator Charles Schumer from New York objected to Mr Cameron telling journalists at the White House that it was up to BP to explain its efforts, and whether they were connected to the company’s obtaining exploration rights off the coast of Libya.
“I don’t think that (remark) was appropriate,” Senator Schumer said on Tuesday evening, after Mr Cameron met senators from New York, New Jersey and California, the home states of most of the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 people were killed.
"There is just too much suspicion here to brush this aside," Senator Schumer told reporters outside the British embassy. "Cameron said that the case is not closed." Earlier, Mr Cameron expressed opposition to a full-blown British inquiry into the release, but he promised to see whether any additional documents could be made public. The New York Daily Newsdismissed the offer as an agreement "to shuffle some papers".
On July 29th, the US Senate will hold a hearing on the circumstances of Megrahi’s release. During Mr Cameron’s visit, relatives of the Lockerbie victims went on television to vent their anger over his refusal to revisit the Scottish decision.
Mr Cameron won some approval in Britain for his request to President Barack Obama to allow Gary McKinnon to serve a possible future sentence in Britain. Mr McKinnon suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, and claims he broke into US government computers in 2001-2 only to search for evidence of UFOs.
“It was amazing that we’ve now got someone brave enough in government to actually stand up for British citizens and to raise it with Obama,” Mr McKinnon’s mother, Janis Sharp, told GMTV.
The US and Britain are each other’s biggest foreign investors, and Mr Cameron had hoped his two-day visit would focus on trade. After the Lockerbie distraction, he was able to discuss US investment in Britain with top bankers from JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Citadel, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock and Bank of New York Mellon yesterday.
Mr Cameron was also scheduled to call on the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon and the chief executive of pharmaceutical company Pfizer.
Any visit by a British leader invariably prompts scrutiny of the “special relationship” – the phrase coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 – between the US and Britain.
Although Mr Cameron did not recreate the much-criticised friendship professed by Tony Blair for Bill Clinton and George W Bush, he went some way towards warming the frosty relations between former British PM Gordon Brown and Mr Obama.
In an episode known as “snubgate”, Mr Obama five times rejected Mr Brown’s requests for meetings last autumn.