From a report by John Rossomando at Newsmax:

The White House declined to comment on a letter that an Illinois Republican sent to President Obama demanding that he cancel funding for two $200,000 State Department grants to groups belonging to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s children.

Rep. Mark Kirk wrote the letter after the State Department notified the House Appropriations Committee on Sept. 15 of its intent to provide the foundation belonging to the Libyan dictator’s son, Saif, with a $200,000 and an additional $200,000 to Wa’ettasmeno UNDP Foundation run by his daughter, Aisha.

“Last month, when Scotland freed Abel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Gadhafi greeted him with a hero’s welcome,” Kirk wrote in his Sept. 23 letter to President Obama. “As you know, Megrahi was accompanied back to Libya by Gadhafi’s son, Saif, who was involved with negotiations for Megrahi’s release. Just weeks after the Gadhafi family celebrated the return of a terrorist for the murders of 189 Americans, the U.S. taxpayer should not be asked to reward them with $400,000. For the sake of the victims’ families who have endured so much pain these last few weeks, I ask you to withdraw your Administration’s request.”

The State Department told Newsmax the grants were part of a larger $2.5 million economic support program intended to promote democracy and women’s economic opportunities in Libya, which Congress appropriated for fiscal year 2009.

Ah, that democracy, and all those opportunities for women in Libya! How proud we American tax-payers can be that we support them. If  only we’d known about them sooner!

Giving away two and half million to the needy in an economic crisis is being really, really nice. Michelle Obama used to think America was ‘downright mean’, but now that her husband is showering Ghadhafi’s family with largesse, she too can at last be proud of her country.

In an article by the admirable John Bolton (read it all here) about the release of al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, we find this :

The state department said on Friday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked “for weeks and months” to persuade Britain not to release the murderer.

As we have learnt that foreign offices, which are dedicated to promoting the interests of foreigners, are very unlikely to tell the truth, we do not believe that Hillary Clinton did anything of the kind.

But we do believe the implication of what the State Department is claiming without apparently realizing what they’re saying: that the release  of al-Megrahi was under discussion for ‘weeks and months’, and that Hillary Clinton knew about it and may have been party to the secret negotiations.

It is incomprehensible why some people’s hearts bleed for terrorists when they are punished for committing their atrocities. The fuss made over those Taliban monsters, all too cushily accomodated at Guantanamo!  Now Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, convicted of blowing up the Pan-Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland on December 21, 1988 , killing 270 people (259 in the plane, 11 on the ground), has been released from prison, after serving a mere 8 years of a ‘minimum 27 year’ sentence, ‘on compassionate grounds’ because the wretch is dying of cancer. What moral right has this Scottish Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose decision it was, to forgive him any of his punishment time? It may make MacKaskill himself feel good, but 270 people dying a terrible death, and the lasting grief of those who survived them, is an exorbitant price to pay for him to have a feeling of personal virtue. To make the disaster matter so little is to mock the victims, the living and the dead.

And there is even more that is sickening about this story.

If al-Megrahi was guilty of planting the bomb on the plane [some doubts over his personal guilt have been argued not entirely unreasonably, but he was found guilty in a court of law and I thought at the time of the trial that the evidence was convincing  – JB], it was certainly not his own plan. Nothing of that sort could possibly be plotted in Libya without the say-so of Qaddafi. We’re talking about a dictator. There are no free-lance terrorists in a country like Libya. When there’s a Libyan terrorist strike it’s because Qaddafi orders a Libyan terrorist strike. Not just allows it. Orders it. And Qaddafi himself will suffer no lasting consequences.

What ‘negotiations’ – read ‘conspiracy’ –  went on behind the scenes between Qaddafi and British diplomats?

What message does the release send to other plotters of terrorist atrocities?

To look into these events is to look into a moral sewer.  Come to think of it, ‘moral sewers’ is an apt description of  the British Foreign Office and the  left-wing parties that govern Scotland and the United Kingdom.