FBI director Robert Mueller is having kittens over this week’s decision by a Scottish court to allow Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi (who was serving time for blowing up the Pan Am flight that crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988) to return to Libya.

It seems Al-Megrahi, a former spy, is gravely ill with cancer and we’re told this was a humanitarian decsion. He’d been imprisoned since 2001.

So, before we unpack that whole thing, let’s take a look at what Mueller has been spouting. According to ABC News…

Robert Mueller said in a letter to Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill that the decision to free him makes a mockery of justice and gives comfort to terrorists around the world.

But Edinburgh has hit back, saying that compassionate release might be alien to the US but that it was part of Scotland’s justice system.

“Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice,” Mr Mueller wrote.

“Indeed, your action makes a mockery of the rule of law.”

A mockery of the rule of law. Hmmm. How about what the FBI did under the Patriot Act? As a nice pice on Wired reported in 2007:

In March, the Justice Department’s Inspector General revealed that FBI agents had sent a flurry of fake emergency letters to phone companies, asking them to turn over phone records immediately by promising that the proper papers had been filed with U.S. attorneys, though in many cases this was a complete lie.  More than 60 of these letters were made public today as part of a FBI document dump in response to a government sunshine lawsuit centered on the FBI’s abuse of a key Patriot Act power.

Well, true, that’s not the same as freeing a guy who allegedly (more on that later) killed 270 people. But it’s a pretty perverse subversion of our civil liberties. And yes, the rule of law. And again, after investigating the FBI’s practices last year, the ACLU issued the following statement:

A report released today by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on the FBI’s use of National Security Letters (NSLs) reveals a systemic, widespread abuse of power. The FBI’s authority to issue NSLs was widely expanded by the USA Patriot Act and it has been increasingly used to collect private information on American citizens without court approval. Today’s audit follows a report released last year that found serious breaches of department regulations and multiple potential violations of the law.

Alright then, Mr. Mueller. Perhaps you should be little less high-handed in your approach to Scotish official then. Your hands ain’t clean.

Now, about Al-Megrahi’s release: It doesn’t make sense. Unless, of course, he’s innocent. Stay with me here for a second. I can’t see the Scots — or Brits — being so hard up for trade that they’d free a guy doing time for a brutal crime for a “better relationship.” With freakin’ Libya, for crying out loud.

And, sorry, but I don’t take the Scots as soft-hearted humanitarians who want a guy accused of killing 270 people to just die with piece and dignity in the arms of his loved ones.

Al-Megrahi’s lawyers were working on a second appeal, and it seems there was quite a bit of crucial evidence that wasn’t heard in court at the time of his trial.

The Times Online reported that…

Although he lost his first appeal in 2002, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred his case back to the courts in June 2007, finding six points in his original trial which could have constituted a miscarriage of justice, including concerns about the testimony of a key witness, and doubts about the timer which set off the bomb.

It’s possible that the appeal case was strong enough to get him off, but that ultimately, Al-Megrahi’s illness prompted him to just take the option to go home rather than die in prison in the process of clearing his name.