One of the opportunities being presented by the chaos at Libya is for America to get in there and seize Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. He is the Libyan agent who had been convicted and imprisoned at Scotland for his role in the bombing that brought down Pan Am 103. After serving eight and a half years of his sentence, Al-Megrahi, allegedly suffering from prostate cancer, was released on compassionate grounds and permitted to return Libya to die in the bosom of the regime that sent him to do his killing. The decision to send him back was one of the most feckless ever made in Britain, and it has been astonishing to watch the Obama administration acquiesce in the betrayal.

This newspaper has long favored an American raid to seize al-Megrahi and bring him to an American jail — or Guantanamo. There is little doubt that the Supreme Court would permit such an act, as we noted in an editorial over the summer. But the Obama administration has contented itself with a policy of wheedling for al-Megrahi to be returned to prison in Scotland, a point we marked in an editorial called “Losing the Aura of Leadership.” So disappointing has been Mr. Obama’s performance that it compares unfavorably to France, a point that was marked this morning in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

Of the 270 persons slain in the attack on Pan AM 003, 178 passengers and 11 crew persons were Americans. The opportunity still presents for forceful action by the Obama administration, particularly because of the likelihood that it a new regime will emerge from the current uprising. It will need recognition and, if it is democratic in its spirit, support. And so the first thing we can say to them is that nothing will go forward until al-Megrahi is in American hands. The idea of sending him back to Scotland is as offensive as was the British betrayal by which he was returned to Libya.

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No doubt having al-Megrahi in our hands would aid in the pursuit of Colonel Gadhafi himself, who, as the uprising has been closing in on him, has been named by one of his own henchmen, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, in an interview with the Swedish tabloid Expressen as having given the order about Lockerbie. It would be hard to overstate the urgency of the Obama administration moving to gain access to any and all available evidence that may become available in the current revolution so that there can be a complete lustration and that justice can be done not only for the crimes Gadhafi committed against his own people but those he committed against America.