Another Reason to Hate BP: Lobbying for Lockerbie Bomber

ANALYSIS

WASHINGTON (July 15) -- BP had already called in the heavy artillery to help repair its image after April's oil rig explosion in the gulf. But as the oil still gushes nearly three months later, even a nuclear bomb is unlikely to obliterate the PR fallout over its confirmation that it lobbied the British government over a prisoner release deal that freed the Lockerbie bomber.

The oil giant made the admission hours after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, prompted by a letter from four senators demanding an investigation, said she would look into BP's connection with the controversial release of convicted Pan Am 103 bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi last summer. The company said that while it did lobby the British government in late 2007 related to a stalled oil deal with Libya, it did not discuss al-Megrahi specifically. That said, al-Megrahi was the only Libyan in British custody at the time.

The downing of the jetliner over the Scottish village of Lockerbie on Dec. 21, 1988, killed 270 people, including 189 Americans. Al-Megrahi wouldn't be brought to justice until 2001, when he was found guilty of the mass murder. He sat in a Scottish prison for eight years until August 2009, when the Scottish government put him on plane back to Libya. President Barack Obama called the release a "mistake" amid outrage from family members in the United States.

Scottish officials said they based their decision on compassionate grounds because al-Megrahi had prostate cancer and, according to one British doctor, had less than three months to live. Nearly a year later, he is still alive and the cancer specialist this month said, oops, he could survive for another decade after all.

"We knew that was a phony medical report," Frank Duggan, head of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, told AOL News. "It's all very disappointing."

The revelation that BP pressured British officials over a prisoner transfer agreement that it saw as holding up a $900 million offshore oil exploration contract with Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi isn't new. Headlines last summer made clear the convicted bomber had been "set free for oil." The group boycottscotland.com targeted the company as part of a larger boycott of Scotland.

But BP's confirmation, coming amid the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history that may have been of the company's own making, doesn't surprise the families of al-Megrahi's victims.

"Business is what drove this from the beginning," said Stephanie Bernstein of Bethesda, Md., whose husband, Michael, died on the flight. She has suspected for years that BP was up to no good in the backroom negotiations to allow the bomber to return home to Libya. "This is about oil, and this just shows what we said is true. What drove this was not compassion for Megrahi -- that was the veneer painted over it. What drove this was big business.

"The Libyans have a huge amount of oil offshore. It makes the gulf look like nothing."

This isn't the first time BP has been involved in geopolitics. The company that would later become British Petroleum worked with the CIA to overthrow Iran's elected government in 1953 after it moved to nationalize the country's oil industry. The coup would start a domino effect that eventually led to Iran's Islamic revolution, the 1979 hostage crisis and, arguably, the current standoff over the country's effort to develop nuclear weapons.

Not that BP's dabbling in affairs of state is unique. From banana growers in Central America to rubber companies in Africa to sugar cartels in Cuba, multinational corporations have made it standard business practice to shape the local political landscape to benefit their bottom line. Often, as in Latin America, they've even had the help of the U.S. Marines.

"Major corporations do get involved quietly with respect to issues like this, but I think this is an outlier because of the exceedingly controversial nature of Pan Am 103," said political scientist James Thurber, who teaches a course on lobbying at American University here. "It certainly doesn't help BP and will stain its reputation even more."

Elizabeth Bancroft, executive director of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, whose members are well-versed in transnational transactions, told AOL News that history is filled with such examples.

"Businesses are ruthless, and they will do what they need to survive and grow. It may be the underbelly of capitalism is ruthlessness by some companies. ... They're not worried about the niceties of diplomacy if it's going to stand in the way of also achieving other goals," she said. "It's not unusual. Everybody wants to blame BP, but what they did there many, many other companies have done."