"Last week, Barack Obama said that his administration had been 'surprised, disappointed and angry' in August 2009 when the British government freed the Islamic jihadist Abdelbeset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, who murdered 270 people by bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988," writes Robert Spencer at Frontpagemag.com.

This week, after the failure of the U.S. government to keep secret a letter written by one of its diplomats, it seems that Obama & Co. argued for the "compasionate release" (as preferable to a prisoner transfer) of the Pan Am mass murderer and hence may not have been entirely surprised, etc., by the turn of events after all.

Spencer suggests two questions for Obama:

The key question that should be posed to Barack Obama today is why he believed that "compassionate" release was preferable for this remorseless mass murderer than time in a Libyan jail. And if his administration approved of al-Megrahi’s "compassionate" release, or at least had green-lighted it as a possibility before it occurred, why were U.S. officials "surprised, disappointed and angry" when it actually happened? Were any quid pro quos involved, either from Libya, whose strongman Muammar Gaddafi has lavishly praised Obama, or from Great Britain?

Obama should also be asked, if the White House press corps were not so anxious to further the President’s agenda, why this monster deserved any kind of compassion whatsoever, even if the reports about his terminal cancer had been true. Why should Abdelbeset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, of all people, not die in prison for his pitiless crime of blowing an airplane out of the sky four days before Christmas and killing everyone on board? Isn’t even the contemplation of "compassionate release" for such a man a miscarriage of justice for those who were killed, and an indication of a moral myopia staggering in its severity on the part of British authorities and Obama?

Moral myopia? How about moral relativism?

Recall that according to the Obama White House, we Americans are no longer fighting a "war on terror." You see, "terror" is "evil," and "evil" is so absolutely yesterday (especially the evil of Islamic terror). Instead, U.S. foreign policy consists of managing various "overseas contingency operations" (or some such similar boilerplate).  

In one of these "operations," 270 human beings created in the image of God are murdered. In another of these operations, the murderer goes free. "Compassionately." In the end, "all" is one.

Think of this as life in a nonjudgmental Darwinian universe where the religiously supreme secular state operates in a relativistic vacuum and survives in an ethically silent cosmos. According to this theory, ethics are really just "values" that those rich in power impose as they see fit, the polls allow, victim groups demand, or the political temptations of the moment entice.

For human beings who have not given into the machine, however, screams in the night sky over Scotland declare the unalienable dignity of Man. Their blood cries out.