White House/Pete Souza

I smell a rat in the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.

Here's what U. S. President Barack Obama had to say about the release. "We thought it was a mistake."

In a written statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced herself "deeply disappointed."

Does that not seem like strangely mild language to use about the release of a man convicted in the worst international terrorist attack against U. S. citizens before 9/11?

Two hundred and fifty-nine people were killed aboard Pan Am Flight 103 by a planted bomb. One hundred and eighty of them were Americans; three were Canadians. (One of those Canadians was a friend of mine, a brilliant young woman newly engaged to be married.) The details of the deaths are harrowing, including the high likelihood that many passengers were not killed instantly by the bomb but were asphyxiated by the decompression of the cabin or burned by jet fuel.

So why such a mild response to the Scottish decision?

Two speculative possibilities.

POSSIBILITY 1: THE DEAL

Al-Megrahi and an associate were brought to trial in May 2000 as part of a complex deal with the Libyan government. The U. S. and Britain agreed to drop sanctions against Libya, Libya agreed to pay compensation to the families of the murdered and to surrender two men identified as suspects by U. S. and U. K. intelligence.

The suspects were tried by a panel of Scottish judges at a special court convened in the Netherlands. Al-Megrahi was convicted, his associate acquitted.

From the moment al-Megrahi entered a Scottish prison in March 2002, a campaign to release him gathered force. Nelson Mandela, who had helped broker the U. S.-U. K.-Libya deal, urged in June that al-Megrahi be transferred to a prison in an Islamic country. In 2007, the U. K. and Libya reached a new agreement on prisoner exchanges. British authorities denied that the agreement would apply to al-Megrahi, but in May 2009, the Libyan authorities applied for his transfer anyway. In July, al-Megrahi (now suffering from prostate cancer) applied for release on compassionate grounds. In August he was released.

Question: Did U. K. or U. S. authorities reach any bargain or tacit bargain about al-Megrahi with the Libyans at any point along this timeline? During the bargaining in the 1990s? Upon his extradition in 1999? As part of the deal to end the Libyan nuclear program in 2003?

POSSIBILITY 2: THE WRONG MAN

For years, many well-informed people in the intelligence community have doubted al-Megrahi's guilt in the Lockerbie bombing. They have argued that the bombing was the work of a Syrian based Palestinian group, the PFLP-GC, working for the government of Iran.

Among those who support the Iran-did-it theory are: (i) former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon; (ii) Robert Baer, the CIA official who worked directly on the Lockerbie case; (iii) Hans Koechler, the UN Security Council observer at al-Megrahi's trial; (iv) Robert Black, the Scottish lawyer who organized the trial proceedings; (v) Dr. Jim Swire, the spokesman for the families of British Lockerbie victims who lost his own daughter aboard Pan Am Flight 103; and (vi) David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post.

The U. S. and U. K. publicly identified Libya as the guilty party in 1990. Why might Britain and the U. S. prefer to assert Libyan rather than Iranian and Syrian culpability at that time? Could it have been a thank you to Syria for joining the U. S.-U. K. Gulf War coalition against Iraq? Or was it simply less embarrassing this way? Five months before Lockerbie, a U. S. warship, the Vincennes, had mistakenly fired a missile at an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 people. If Iran downed Pan Am 103, some might cite the Vincennes incident as justification or excuse.

Question: Could it be that Hillary Clinton has come to believe the "wrong man" thesis? Here's what she had to say in a televised interview with the BBC on the eve of al-Megrahi's release:

"I just think it is absolutely wrong to release someone who has been imprisoned based on the evidence about his involvement in such a horrendous crime." (Italics added.)That does not sound like ringing certainty about the man's guilt, does it?

Doubts about al-Megrahi's guilt might explain the limpness of the Obama/Clinton statements about his early release. But such doubts would not excuse that limpness. If al-Megrahi is the wrong man, then there has been a miscarriage of justice. In that situation, al-Megrahi would deserve much more than release and a few quietly murmured words of "disappointment": He would deserve pardon, apology and compensation.

But if al-Megrahi is the right man, then what has just happened in Scotland is an appalling outrage--and the Obama administration's mealy-mouthed response to that outrage is a disgrace.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.