A period of silence from Senator Menendez would be welcome

It is clear from Alex Salmond's latest letter to US Senator Robert Menendez that the First Minister is, understandably, beginning to lose patience with the persistent demands and allegations levelled at Scotland from across the Atlantic Ocean.

In his latest missive Mr Salmond is fully justified in taking Senator Menendez to task over the claims the Scottish government released Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to pave the way for the prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) between the UK government and Libya for which the oil company BP lobbied.

As the First Minister rightly points out, there has never been any evidence the Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill took his decision to free Megrahi on compassionate grounds as part of this deal and the insinuation by the Senator in a recent interview that this was the case casts an unwarranted slur on the reputation of the Holyrood government and Scottish justice.

And as if these exchanges were not enough, the water was further muddied last night by another letter, addressed to the Scottish government, from Senator Menendez and his Senatorial colleague Frank Lautenberg which questioned the conduct of an inquiry by the Scottish parliament into the Lockerbie affair.

In response the Scottish government was right to point out that this latest Senate salvo is constitutionally illiterate. Scotland has a separation of powers between the executive arm of government and the elected body to which it is answerable. Just like America.

These latest exchanges have been sparked by the continuing controversy over what happened on that terrible night over Lockerbie in 1988: who was responsible; whether the right man was convicted; and if the PTA agreed by the UK government was linked to BP's bid for business in Libya, once held responsible for bringing down Pan Am 103, but brought into the international fold over the past decade.

In their determination to keep the issue alive - in an election period for them - the Senators are seeing matters from a narrow, US-centric, perspective and conveniently ignoring the doubts over their own country's involvement in the wider Lockerbie story.

There are still questions over the US's warship's downing of an Iran Air A300 Airbus in July 1988 in which 290 passengers were killed, and whether the supposedly retaliatory bombing of Pan Am 103 was the responsibility of Palestinian terrorists linked to Syria, and not Libyans as the US subsequently claimed.

If the Senators are serious in their search for the truth behind the Lockerbie tragedy then, with the same self-proclaimed objective of establishing that truth objectively from evidence, they might care to look a little deeper at the involvement of their own country.

But if, as we suspect, they are not interested in the wider issue and are using the deaths of hundreds of innocent people for partisan electoral purposes then the transatlantic flow of letters from Washington should cease. In short, a period of silence from Senator Menendez and his colleagues would be welcome.