And while there is a lot of smoke in the Suharto case, like Pinochet, he too is old and fragile. And it now seems the Lockerbie trial is coming apart. One way of reading Pontius Pilate's washing of hands over the case of Jesus and Barrabas is that the politics of the Jewish world at the time was so convoluted that it would have hurt his career in the Roman hierarchy if he had sought justice and not expediency in the case. America now is an even greater empire than was Rome in its time. Even the other great powers, like China, Russia, India, concede this.
Empires work best when they seek expediency and forget about justice.
When, in Roman times, the Christian movement quickly became a spiritual flood it appeared that justice had been left to the Final Judgement when all the living and the dead would appear before the bar of justice. In the case of the Lockerbie trial there are indications that, right from the beginning, expediency and not justice was the aim of the plaintiffs, America and Britain. The motivation is suggested by global oil. The question is easily answered. After several leads were abandoned the investigators finally fingered Libya as the perpetrator.