British MI6 use of Qaddafy

The cover-up of British-Qaddafy secret service links, including rendition and torture of detainees, is unraveling.

Tripoli was overrun by the rebels so quickly that Qaddafy’s over-confident minions did not manage to destroy all incriminating documents, an outcome that the NATO allies must be quite unhappy about. But the truth is quite rapidly—‘trickle’ may not, in fact, be the right term.

Human Rights Watch has apparently discovered a letter from Mark Allen, the head of MI6’s counter-terrorism unit, to Qaddafy’s chief henchman: ‘I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week. I am so glad’. Allen also refers to ‘the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years’.

The background is that Qaddafy’s years as a notorious bad-boy and terrorist enabler came to an end when Tony Blair and George W Bush realized that he could come in quite handy as a ruthless sonofabitch on the U.S./U.K. team rather than a ruthless, freelance sonofabith. They then incorporated his corrupt regime into their web of torture stations to which anyone suspected of al-Qaeda ties could be easily disappeared.

The discovery by Human Rights Watch also included the unsurprising news that British intelligence was cooperating with the Chinese Communists to spy on Muslims in western China and that the Chinese state arms agency was trying to sell weapons to Qaddafy in the weeks before his overthrow. (The Chinese denials on that one are quite hilarious given that they pretend that this entity was acting on its own without orders from the top.)

How marvelous it would be if someone, somewhere could start drumming it into people’s heads that the supposed architect of the Lockerbie airplane bombing, the one that sent American citizens’ bodies exploding over Scotland, was then made a partner in an ultra-secret CIA-MI6 ‘security’ operation. This is the price we are asked to pay for being ‘safe’.

Jack Straw, Blair’s foreign secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq to seize its ‘weapons of mass destruction’ AND during the time of the now-discovered joint spy venture with Qaddafy, issued the following non-denial denial about the cache of secret papers. Note the weasel words employed:

The position of the British government—successive British governments, not least when I was British foreign secretary—was very clear. And that was that we were opposed to unlawful rendition, we were opposed to any use of torture or any other similar methods and not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it, nor did we turn a blind eye to it . . . . No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing.

Anyone versed in the reading of these legalistic contortionist acts can see immediately that the last line cancels out all the preceding b.s. A fair translation would read: ‘The position of the government—not what actually happened but the position we hid behind—was obviously to behave, i.e., to not do A, to not do B and to not do C. But then we went ahead and did the opposite, and if we get caught, some poor shit way down the food chain is going to get it in the neck, not me’.

A human rights group named Liberty, whose representatives just recently walked out of a phony ‘investigation’ into British renditions last week, demanded a new procedure to get to the bottom of the constant tissue of lies.

Director Shami Chakrabarti said, ‘The latest scandalous revelations of intimate trading of “detainee debriefings” with the Gaddafi regime render the [previous] process completely inadequate. . . . We urge the government to understand the gravity of what happened under the last administration and to think again whilst there is still time to rescue Britain’s reputation in the world’.

That implies that Britain cares about its reputation, which is not an idle question. Torture is still the nail upon which the ‘West’ insists upon hanging its last shred of credibility as a haven of human rights and the rule of law. We will see if the British ruling elite, awash in scandal and incapable of exercising leadership while the world economy heads into the toilet, stubbornly clings to its criminal practices.