The Price of Terror: How the Families of the Victims of Pan Am 103 Brought Libya to Justice Book

When Libyan agents planted a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 people in the air and I I on the ground, America did not strike back. Instead, the grieving relatives of the victims tried to force Libya to pay for its crime through the legal system. But lawyers told the families that they could never sue Libya -- this would require changing a bedrock principle of international law, a change that every government in the world feared and would fight. Working virtually alone at first, Allan Gerson, a former diplomat and prosecutor of Nazi war criminals, spent the next eight years on the families' quest for Justice. In this high-stakes game of international power politics and legal maneuvering, there were friendships, jobs, and reputations lost, but a precious principle -- that of accountability under the law -- was strengthened and preserved. Now Gerson and his coauthor, Newsweek writer Jerry Adler, follow the threads of this extraordinary tale back to that deadly night over Lockerbie, Scorland -- and forward into a new era of international Justice, when terrorists will learn to fear the righteous retribution of their own victims.Read More