As Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is being rowed across the River Styx, let us reflect on the scandal of his final years. It will always be a mark on the administration of President Obama that the Libyan died a free man. He had been convicted in the downing of Pam American World Airways flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was jailed but briefly. Once a Scottish judge gave him his freedom, there was chance aplenty to act. But the American government failed to lift so much as a finger.

It may — or may not — be that the administration could have prevented al-Megrahi’s release from a Scottish prison or his flight back home to Libya, where he was greeted by adoring throngs. The judge who freed him supposedly did so on “humanitarian” grounds, because, even though al-Megrahi killed 270 people, he was suffering from the indignities of prostate cancer. If the terrorist’s release caught Mr. Obama and Secretary Clinton by surprise, as they suggested at the time, it’s all the more shocking that there was no attempt to seize the mass murderer after he got to Libya.

To those who think such an idea as piratical, let them take a look at the precedents that have been established by our courts. We’ve reprised the question in The New York Sun and in Tablet magazine. It strikes us as an important point, given the twilight nature of the war in which our country has found itself. The record is clear that if, in a lawless world, the violators of our laws are brought back to our shores to face the music, our own be-robed justices aren’t going to be overly particular as to the methods used to get them here.

This has been established as precedent over a long period of time, including as recently as 1992, in a case involving a Mexican, Humberto Alvarez Machain. As his tale was later told by Chief Justice Rehnquist, Alvarez had been indicted for participating in the kidnapping and murder of a special agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Enrique Camarena Salazar. It was a gruesome situation. Alvarez was a medical doctor. What he did, as Rehnquist told the story, was to prolong “agent Camarena’s life so that others could further torture and interrogate him.”

In April of 1990, Alvarez was kidnapped from his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, to be flown by private plane to El Paso, Texas, where DEA agents arrested him on the spot. The Supreme Court made no bones about the fact that the DEA was responsible for Alvarez’s abduction. It didn’t even quibble with the doctor’s protests that his abduction was outrageous conduct by the government. It gave no credit to the protests of the Mexican government.

The Supreme Court actually suggested that the kidnappers of Alvarez were on stronger ground because they didn’t go through the niceties of extradition. It concluded that while Alvarez’s abduction might well have been shocking, “forcible abduction does not therefore prohibit his trial in a court in the United States for violations of the criminal laws of the United States.”

If we’d made that point before, we make it again because the failure of our government in this case was so abject. President Obama just didn’t get it, and neither did Secretary Clinton. There may be those who say that they finally served the Libyan regime, including Colonel Gadhafi, their just deserts in the end. But the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is one that will always stick in the craw. That the killer died a free man will stand forever as a reminder of the folly of letting other countries take care of America’s business.