The Lockerbie Bombing

For those to young to remember it here are the background details.

On Wednesday 21 December 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up whilst on a transatlantic flight. It exploded above the small Scottish town of Lockerbie and in fact ploughed right into. Killing all 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground.
It was the worst terrorist atrocity committed in Scotland.
Libya, as part of Gadaffi's lets be friends with the west initative, handed over a man named Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer and the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, for trial. As it happened in Scottish airspace he was to be tried under Scottish law but in a compromise there would be three judges but no jury, it would not sit in Scotland either and worst of all one of the basic tennants of Scots Law was denied: the abilty to find the case Not Proven. Instead he would be either guilty or innocent.
He was found guilty and sent to prison in Barlinnie Jail in Greenock (reputably one of the toughest jails in Scotland the Bar-L).
And that was that as far as everyone was concerned.
Until 2 years ago when the Scottish SNP government released him on compassionate grounds. Megrahi has prostrate cancer and was diagnosed with 3 months left to live. Under Scots law a dying prisoner can have their sentence commuted and be released to die with their family, no matter the crime committed. There is a prisoner released in this fashion in Scotland at least once or twice every year or so.
The decison caused outrage in many quarters not least in the US where many of the victims families live. It also drew equal cries of outrage from the UK government (under Labour and Gordon Brown at the time) and from the Bush administration in the US.

Since then it has emerged that the Libyan government was leaning quite heavily on the UK and US governemnt, offering oil deals to BP and US companies as well as other juicy deals in return for Megrahi's release. Papers released under the Freedom of Information Act show the UK government very much wanted his release to happen. But there were problems, how to get him out and there would be outrage if either the UK or US governments were seen to sanction the release. Nor did either side want any of the murky details of previous deals done with Gadaffi to surface.
Fortunetly the Labour Cabinet was made up of a majority of Scottish MP's, and several of them have 'lawyer' on their CV. All it took was alerting Megrahi's lawyers to this facet of Scottish Law. And there was another benefit to this, under Scottish Law in order to get compassionate release any appeals or retrials are dropped, you concede your right to claim innocence and have to admit guilt. And by a strange coincidence Megrahi was in the middle of just such an appeal.
An appeal he dropped in order to be released.
So it all turned out well for the UK and US governments. They got what they wanted, deals with Libya, and they still got to act outraged about it on the world stage. Scotland took the flack for it and best of all any investigation would find that no one had leant on the Scottsih government because no one had to, the precedents for his release were already there in Scottish law, once the diagnosis of terminal cancer was made his release was a legal inevitablity. A neat plan all round.

Now its back in the news for various reasons. Firstly because its almost the 2 year anniversary from his release with a 3 month life expectancy and he is not dead yet. This is upsetting a lot of people, although he seems very near it from reports I have been reading. His longevity was supposed by some for a long time to part of some conspiracy to release him, and the diagnosis was made up in the frst place, but it has recently emerged the difference is in medication. A new treatment for postrate cancer which only came about after his release but which is highly successful in prolonging life expentancy of patients.
Secondly he is in the news because with the current uprsing in Libya the rebels are apprently trying to snatch Megrahi in order to hand him over to the US. I find this highly unlikely to be a desirbale thing to actually happen for the US, but it sounds good. I doubt very much it will happen or if it does that he lives long enough to make it to any sort of trial, if his health would even permit it under US law. And the reason I think it unwanted by the US is the third reason Megrahi has been in the news of late.

In a Sun exclusive (they do occasionally suprise and break big political stories) a dossier was published drawn up by some of the leading people in Scottish Law casting serious doubt over Megrahi's trial. The list of things they found wrong includes (written in the Sun's unique style!);

"In the dossier - seen by The Scottish Sun - Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who helped finger Megrahi as the bomber, is described as an "unreliable" witness.
Police are also accused of lying in court while prosecutors - including then Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC - are suspected of suppressing bombshell evidence that would likely have seen Megrahi walk free.
Last night Robert Black QC, retired Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University and the architect of the Lockerbie trial, told how he believes Megrahi is innocent.
Mr Black said: "Megrahi is not the Lockerbie bomber and these revelations further underline that.
"I said after reading the daily transcripts of the evidence at the trial and before the judges delivered their verdict that there was no way Megrahi could be convicted on the evidence presented.
"That the judges did convict him on the flimsiest of evidence, which required several leaps of faith on a number of crucial matters that had not been proven by the Crown, remains a matter of profound concern for all of us."
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission says Megrahi WAS denied a fair trial in their damning report.
They said the Crown suppressed from Megrahi's defence team statements showing how much key witness Tony Gauci changed his mind about crucial details over the years.
Maltese shopkeeper Gauci's evidence fingered Megrahi as the man who bought clothes in his shop on the Mediterranean isle that were linked to the suitcase carrying the bomb that blew up Pan Am flight 103.
The SCCRC report says Gauci was an "unreliable" witness but this was not shown to be the case in court.
They said: "The effect of all of these inconsistencies is powerful. The court was left with a distorted and different impression of the witness. In this way Megrahi was denied a fair trial."
The SCCRC found that police said in evidence they first showed Gauci photos of Megrahi on September 14, 1989 - when he had in fact also been shown them on September 8.
The report said: "This was not disclosed to the defence. There is no statement from Gauci produced, no police witness statements produced."
The SCCRC said if Gauci had been shown Megrahi's pic six days before he picked him out as resembling the buyer at his shop, then that ID was totally undermined.
In its report, the SCCRC challenges the integrity of evidence given by retired Strathclyde DCI Harry Bell, who had a close bond with Gauci.
The commission found that events recorded in Bell's diaries didn't always match what he said in evidence.
The commission noted that Bell claimed the Megrahi photo shown to Gauci on September 14, 1989, was the first one. This was not true.
It also reveals Bell, DC John Crawford, a retired Lothian and Borders cop, and an FBI agent all made statements claiming that Gauci had talked of a "striking similarity" between Megrahi and the buyer.
But Maltese officers revealed Gauci was unsure, was coached and told to age the photos by ten to 15 years.
The report says: "This is different to DCI Bell's evidence at trial. It also implies the witness is unclear."
The commission obtained evidence from police memos that Gauci was made aware from his first contact with investigators that his testimony could be worth MILLIONS.
This contradicted evidence given by Scots and US investigators at Megrahi's trial.
One undisclosed memo reveals the FBI discussed with Scots cops an offer of unlimited cash to Gauci - with "$10,000 available immediately".
If a judge was made aware of this in another case, they'd tell a jury to discount the evidence.
In court Gauci was vague about the exact date on which the clothes were bought.
The date was narrowed to either November 23, 1988, when Megrahi was not on Malta, or December 7, 1988, when he was.
Gauci said Christmas lights were NOT on yet in his hometown Sliema when the suspect visited his shop.
Cops said they could not find out when the lights were switched on.
But the SCCRC easily established it was December 6 - a day too early for Megrahi to have been the buyer.
The commission's report says: "It is clear that the police were in no doubt that Gauci was clear in his recollection." It adds "no reasonable court" could have concluded Megrahi bought the clothes from Gauci's shop.
It appears efforts were made to cover up key evidence that would have been useful for Megrahi's defence team.
The commission noted that early uncertainty on the part of Gauci was never passed over to the defence, nor was the fact that Scots detectives feared he was trying too hard to please them.
The fact a senior Maltese detective also considered Gauci to be an unreliable witness was never disclosed to lawyers representing Megrahi.
The SCCRC claims Colin Boyd QC, who was Lord Advocate at the time of Megrahi's trial and conviction in 2001, suppressed key evidence.
The trial judges maintained Gauci was "entirely reliable" on the list of clothing he claimed the buyer suspect purchased.
Yet a statement he made in 1999, and discovered by the SCCRC, saw him produce "a wholly different list of items and prices". This, along with many other files that could damage the Crown case, was suppressed. The report says Mr Boyd failed in his duty of disclosure to the defence."

I apologise for the length of this post but there is a lot of detail to cover. So what we have at the end is a patsy set up for a crime he did not committ by a coalition of the Gadaffi, UK and US governments, who when his appeal was going to cast serious doubt on the conviction was released in a deal cut with Gadaffi to get further oil deals.

Which leaves the questions if Megrahi was not the bomber who did blow up Pan Am 103 and murder all those people? And why?

Read this earlier and meant to reply then.

Lockerbie is one of those events that holds a strange place in life for me. It is one of the first global events that I remember having an imapct and one of the first that kinda suggested that the world may not be a safe friendly place (it was the year I started secondary school)

The horrendus thing about this is the lack of justice for victims. To be honest I think we were all aware that Megrahi was a scapegoat and from my clouded recollections getting him tried under the Scottish law in itself was something of a triumph.

The principle that he should be released is a good one. One that I admired at the time as I felt it is the moral thing to do, the fact that he has survived longer should really not play into peoples opinions on the correctness of the ideal.

To find that actually it may all be backroom deals is disturbing, but as I said, lack of justice has to be the main concern

Yes its been one long game with the only thing no one seeming to care about being justice for the victims. After all this time we still no nothing about it, who was behind it or why. And with the situation in Libya and seeming inevitable fall of Gadaffi there is little chanc eof finding out now I supsect. Much to the relief of the UK and US governments not to mention a lot of oil companies and arms manufacturers. It stinks- as usual.

Cynical?

Who me? I used to think i was then it truned out it was just realistic.

Facetious, too?

Thought as much.

Saw that on an episode of Air Crash Investigation - I really like it! It's probably really bad for me because I'll never want to fly again, but I like it. So there.

The SUnday Herald today, illegally- sort of- published a report by the Scottish legal authorities into the Lockerbie Bombers appeal case- the appeal was never heard as release on compassionate grounds, which he was given, cannot be granted whilst an appeal is ongoing, so although he still wanted to clear his name, Megrahi dropped his appeal to return home and die with his family.
The paper however are not going to be charged for publishing the report as it 'was clearly in the public interest' and they had permission from Megrahi and his family. Also the SNP have been pushing for publication of this for a long time (its under Westminister control despite Scottish law being devoloved- official secret act and stuff).
The upshot of the report is that the consensus of the Scottish legal profession was that an appeal would most likely have ended with a complete acquittal and therefore possible grounds for a miscarriage of justice.
I have always said that trial was a stich up- I watched most of it live, as that in itself was so unusual as in Scotland cameras are prohibited from courts- and I thought it stank from the start. So this does not suprise me in the slightest.

Megrahi is dead. He was almost certaily only involved in a very limited capacity in the bombing or not at all- I dont know anyone here who doesnt think the trial was a joke and an embarrising mockery of what is supposed to be Scots Law.
So I wanted to set a few things straight that I have been hearing today on tv since he died.
The trial was under a version of Scots law stipulated and mucked about by international bodies, particularly the US.
In Scots Law he should have had a jury- there was no jury it was decided by a panle of judges. In Scots Law there are three verdicts-Guilty. Not Guilty. Not Proven. If the trial had been heard in Scotland before a jury it was the most clear case of a Not Proven ever seen. He would NOT have gone to prison at all.
Compassionate Leave- there are all sorts of conspircaies that the UK government wanted a deal, prisoner exchanges, oil deals.
What is true is that Gadaffi told the UK goverenment if Megrahi died in prison it would not go well for UK business interests in Libya- the UK government wanted rid of him, but (a))-didnt want to be seen to say so and (b)-didnt have the authority anyway.
The Scottish government refused the prison transfer deal- emails since released show this categorically. They refused to do any deal withthe libyan at all in fact, or the UK government.
The release on compasionate grounds is normal Scots practice. There are two or three such releases on average every year, for all sorts of serious criminals who are dying. The only thing differnet about the Megrahi release was its high profile. Had the Scottish Justice Minister refused the release he would have been overtunring centuries of Scots law.
I have heard a lot of people on the news, mainly Americans it has to be said, saying he showed his victims no compassion so deserved none and is release was a travesty- thats their view, in Scotland we prefer not to become the thing we hate or fear- a criminals lack of compasion should not reduce it in the rest of us and our law reflects that, rightly in the view of the majority of Scots. We are not them, thats the point.

In the US if you have a 'hung jury' (not unanimous guilty or innocent) it typically is tried again with another jury. This implies the fault is with the jury. (the retrial is not compulsory or it would be screaming that the fault is with the jury) I prefer the terminology 'not proven' because it implies the problem is with the evidence.

In italy they just chuck you in prison guilty or not, then some dipstick forensic dude has his lunch over the evidence bag, and they decide the murderer was a pig, from Parma to be exact. justice done. and you get out on a technicality. pretty neat really, or if you are the prime minister you can just make another law saying the under age prozzies and coke were Communist plots.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Megrahi is dead. He was almost certaily only involved in a very limited capacity in the bombing or not at all- I dont know anyone here who doesnt think the trial was a joke and an embarrising mockery of what is supposed to be Scots Law.
So I wanted to set a few things straight that I have been hearing today on tv since he died.
The trial was under a version of Scots law stipulated and mucked about by international bodies, particularly the US.
In Scots Law he should have had a jury- there was no jury it was decided by a panle of judges. In Scots Law there are three verdicts-Guilty. Not Guilty. Not Proven. If the trial had been heard in Scotland before a jury it was the most clear case of a Not Proven ever seen. He would NOT have gone to prison at all.
Compassionate Leave- there are all sorts of conspircaies that the UK government wanted a deal, prisoner exchanges, oil deals.
What is true is that Gadaffi told the UK goverenment if Megrahi died in prison it would not go well for UK business interests in Libya- the UK government wanted rid of him, but (a))-didnt want to be seen to say so and (b)-didnt have the authority anyway.
The Scottish government refused the prison transfer deal- emails since released show this categorically. They refused to do any deal withthe libyan at all in fact, or the UK government.
The release on compasionate grounds is normal Scots practice. There are two or three such releases on average every year, for all sorts of serious criminals who are dying. The only thing differnet about the Megrahi release was its high profile. Had the Scottish Justice Minister refused the release he would have been overtunring centuries of Scots law.
I have heard a lot of people on the news, mainly Americans it has to be said, saying he showed his victims no compassion so deserved none and is release was a travesty- thats their view, in Scotland we prefer not to become the thing we hate or fear- a criminals lack of compasion should not reduce it in the rest of us and our law reflects that, rightly in the view of the majority of Scots. We are not them, thats the point.

I'm sure they will all strongly deny it of course, but not agreeing upon a jury because they fear that a jury would not convict him, is just so wrong. I imagine some people saw the possibly of Megrahai not to be convicted as just not an option so pushed this through.

And personally I think that a justice system which accounts for compassion for dying inmates is right. Keeping someone locked up when you know they're on the verge of death isn't really justice, especially if the convicted was convicted on such (seemingly- I have little knowledge on the trial & case) prosecution evidence.

The underlying problem, which will only get worse, is that there are different expectations of justice wherever you go.

This works fine as long as everybody stays put, but as transportation gets easier and people become more mobile it's easy to get a situation where there can be 2 (or even 20) different expectations of justice among the aggrieved parties. And if there isn't some consensus of justice among the aggrieved parties, then the justice system is at least partially broken.

The USA has been plagued with this problem since the beginning, with 13-50 states, all with different laws, and people moving freely between. But attempts to standardize the law cause their own problems, and attempts to keep people from moving from one to another don't work either.

If I remember correctly with Pan Am 103, neither the perpetrators, nor most of the victims (excepting the unlucky people on the ground), nor the airplane itself (which was the scene of the crime), were Scottish. The crime just dropped out of the air on you (And the court case fell on you almost as violently!)

So it's no wonder there were 20 different ideas of justice. Ideally there should be a world court with a world legal code to settle these sorts of things. But can you imagine what sort of nightmare that would be?!?

It did indeed just drop on us so to speak, or more precisely on the people of Lockerbie in the middle of the night- this it seems was just one of life cruelties, it was not meant to, they think it went off too soon and was supposed to go off somehwere over the Atlantic. And given 90% of Scotlands landmass is uninhabited wilderness you can appreciate the cruel irony of landing on a small town and worse on peoples actual houses.
It therefore was deemed to be a crime on Scottish soil (and airspace) so subject to Scottish Law.
America however was not satisfied with this and a period of diplomatic wrangling began. When Megrahi was arrested for it the Americans wanted to put him on trial under American law as most of the victims were American- but as it not only happened in Scottish territory but also destroyed part of a small town and quite a few of its inhabitants Scotland felt it was their right to try him. So more diplomatic wrangling with the end result that a panle of Scottish Judges would try him under a version of Scottish Law (including the removal of a jury and of Not Proven verdict-making it in the eyes of most Scots not our law at all) and the trial had to be held outside of Sctoland on neutral International Ground- it was a farce from the start .All the main evidence has been so fully discredited that no one actually thinks he had much, if anything to with it.
Of course until its put the test in a court again, now more unlikely than ever, this new evidence remains up in the air but theres a lot of it, heres some examples:

'Crucial information about a fragment of electrical circuit board that was alleged to have come from the bomb which destroyed a passenger aircraft over the skies of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people in 1988, was given to police in the run-up to Megrahi's trial in 2000 but never disclosed, it is claimed. The allegations are made in the book Megrahi: You Are My Jury, by John Ashton.
It claims that a key fragment of circuit board, found at the Lockerbie crash site and said by the prosecution to be from a timer which detonated the bomb, could not have been one of a batch that was sold to Libya by the manufacturers.
During Megrahi's trial it was accepted the fragment from the timer came from the Swiss company Mebo. The company admitted selling 20 such timers to the Libyans, but new evidence points to the Lockerbie fragment not being one of them. The one at Lockerbie was coated in tin, whereas those sold to Libya were coated with a tin and lead alloy, Mr Ashton says. A sworn affidavit from the production manager said the company only ever used alloy, rather than pure tin.
notes by a prosecution forensics expert, Alan Feraday, during his original examination of the circuit board fragment in 1991, reveal he was aware of a difference in the make-up of the circuit board. However, his notes, which were given to police on 8 November 1999, were not disclosed to Megrahi's defence team until 2009.
"Had these documents been disclosed to the defence team, they would have provided the basis for a vigorous cross-examination of Feraday but, in the event, his claim that the fragment was 'similar in all respects' to the control samples went unchallenged," said Mr Ashton. "I don't believe the police would have withheld the documents from the Crown, which raises the second question: why was it not disclosed to the defence?
The fragment was a vital link in the prosecution argument that the bomb was placed in the aircraft by Megrahi.'- The Independent

'An investigation by BBC's Newsnight has cast doubts on the key piece of evidence which convicted the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. Tests aimed at reproducing the blast appear to undermine the case's central forensic link, based on a tiny fragment identified as part of a bomb timer. The tests suggest the fragment, which linked the attack to Megrahi, would not have survived the mid-air explosion.
Newsnight has been reviewing that evidence, and has exposed serious doubts about the forensics used to identify the fragment as being part of a trigger circuit board. The fragment was found three weeks after the attack. For months it remained unnoticed and unremarked, but eventually it was to shape the entire investigation. The fragment was embedded in a charred piece of clothing, which was marked with a label saying it was made in Malta.
So the focus turned to Malta and the question of who had bought the clothes.
A shopkeeper on the island identified Megrahi, but this came only years later after he saw him pictured in a magazine as a Lockerbie suspect.
Newsnight has discovered that the fragment - crucial to the conviction - was never subjected to chemical analysis or swabbing to establish whether it had in fact been involved in any explosion.
And the UN's European consultant on explosives, John Wyatt, has told Newsnight that there are further doubts over the whether the fragment could have come from the trigger of the Lockerbie bomb.
He has recreated the suitcase bomb which it is said destroyed Pan Am 103, using the type of radio in which the explosive and the timer circuit board were supposedly placed, and the same kind of clothes on which the fragment was found.
In each test the timer and its circuit board were obliterated, prompting Mr Wyatt to question whether such a fragment could have survived the mid-air explosion.
He told Newsnight: "I do find it quite it extraordinary and I think highly improbable and most unlikely that you would find a fragment like that - it is unbelievable. We carried out 20 tests, we didn't carry out 100 or 1,000, but in those 20 tests we found absolutely nothing at all - so I found it highly improbable that you would find anything like that, particularly at 10,000 feet when bits are dropping into long wet grass over hundreds of miles."

'Evidence which could have affected the credibility of key evidence was not passed to the defence team. Tony Gauci, who picked al-Megrahi out in a line-up, had looked at a magazine photograph of him just four days before he made the identification. BBC TV programme The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie has now seen documentary evidence that Scottish police knew this was the case.
That information should have been passed to the defence, but the disclosure did not take place.
In June last year (2007) the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which has been investigating the case, concluded that al-Megrahi could have suffered a miscarriage of justice and recommended that he should be granted a second appeal.-BBC

'A key witness against al-Megrahi was the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who owned Mary's House, where the police say the garments were bought.
He identified al-Megrahi as having been in his shop some weeks before the bombing.
His evidence contradicted itself and Mr Gauci had seen al-Megrahi's photograph in a magazine under a headline "Who planted the bomb?" a few days before he picked him out at an identity parade. -BBC

And I'm only touching the tip of the iceberg of supsect and wobbly evidence used to convict him.
I think in part it explains the lack of a reaction on th ewhole to his release in Scotland. I know people who think it was right and fewer, but some, who think it was wrong. But neither side is particualrly passionate about it and its becasue of the serious uncertainly over him ever being guilty at all.
Had he been tried, convicted beyond any doubt of his guilt under our law on home soil of the worst atrocity in modern history, and sent to jail for life and then been given compassionate release, I think then there might have been more of a testing about how much we really believe as a nation in showing compassion no matter what the other person has done. (And its something similar I imagine the people of Norway are feeling with the horrible trial ongoing there).

Yeah, unfortunately it appears that the take-away message of Pan Am 103 was that the traditional justice system is unable to cope with international bombings, where the physical evidence is usually destroyed and there isn't the access to the kind of detective work that you would traditionally use in your own jurisdiction to make a credible case (imagine the FBI trying to subpoena evidence in Gaddafi's Libia )

So now we've gone back to a Cold War/ Spy vs. Spy / "extrajudicial" approach....

I sure wish there were a better option.

Have we tried just stopping doing all this crap and stopping being silly buggers waving willies at each other and that we are all human beings on the same planet with limited resources and we really should just all sit down and sort some stuff out and maybe stop fighting each other in stupid battles for patches of ground which will only change hands again in the future anyway at the cost of even more lives, yet? Might be worth a go.

We'll start by getting rid of Religion, I think.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Have we tried just stopping doing all this crap and stopping being silly buggers waving willies at each other and that we are all human beings on the same planet with limited resources and we really should just all sit down and sort some stuff out and maybe stop fighting each other in stupid battles for patches of ground which will only change hands again in the future anyway at the cost of even more lives, yet? Might be worth a go.

I'd love to live in a world that didn't need laws and courts, but I don't expect to see that till humans forget what greed is. Until then people will exploit loopholes for gain, and they will often do it with violence.

Until after the Civil War, Americans could move across state lines and avoid laws pretty much at will. The border zones created a perfect soil for organized crime, as you find along many borders today. The Secret Service and the organization that became the FBI were created because the federal government felt they had a need to cross the lines. Often they made up their own rules when no federal laws existed. (Not pretty but it makes for good Westerns and Gangster movies. )

The same thing is going on now along the US borders with Canada and with Mexico, and many other boarders in the world. It's just a natural consequence of borders and laws. If there is no legal way to cross the imaginary lines, people, businessmen and governments will all figure out illegal ways to do what they feel they need to. The more global the world economy gets, the more pressure it puts on these border zones, and the more bad things happen. International bombers are just one flavor of this. Until there is universal love or universal law there will be bad guys and good guys working the loopholes of each others countries.

I'm rambling a bit, but that's the world I've seen as I travel. Not pretty, but it is what it is.

have you noticed, the more dusty and barren the bit of ground the more savagely people fight over it, weird. You dont get blood baths in Alpine pastures.

Central America and Equatorial Africa have had their moments though. As has Southeast Asia. And Europe has gotten quite unpleasant from time to time.

I think it may come down to this: Warm, well fed people are more apt to fight than cold starving people (ever hear of an Eskimo war?)

But then there are the Finns and the Russians.... Hmmm... this may take more thought.....

[after some thought] I think the very worst people for causing trouble in the world are people who are hungry enough to be angry and warm enough to fight about it. That could explain your "dusty, barren" theory, Mrs Figg.

Perhaps a good dictator should make sure his people are either fed or frozen.... Hmmm, that might apply to running an empire too. But who would want to do that?