Terror in Britain: What Did the Prime Minister Know?
The
unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of
the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered
by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British
foreign policy.
Critical
questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist
“assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of
the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise
of an internal “review”.
The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi (image
on the right), was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used
by MI5 for more than 20 years.
The
LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organisation which seeks a
“hardline Islamic state” in Libya and “is part of the wider global
Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida”.
The “smoking gun” is that when Theresa May
was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered
across Europe and encouraged to engage in “battle”: first to remove Mu’ammar Gadaffi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.
Last
year, the FBI reportedly placed Abedi on a “terrorist watch list” and
warned MI5 that his group was looking for a “political target” in
Britain. Why wasn’t he apprehended and the network around him prevented
from planning and executing the atrocity on 22 May?
These
questions arise because of an FBI leak that demolished the “lone wolf”
spin in the wake of the 22 May attack – thus, the panicky,
uncharacteristic outrage directed at Washington from London and Donald Trump’s apology.
The
Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal
its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as
Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil
kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain’s biggest weapons customer.
This
imperial marriage reaches back to the Second World War and the early
days of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The aim of British policy was
to stop pan-Arabism: Arab states developing a modern secularism,
asserting their independence from the imperial west and controlling
their resources. The creation of a rapacious Israel was meant to
expedite this. Pan-Arabism has since been crushed; the goal now is
division and conquest.
LIFG (Source: Liwa Al-Umma Facebook Page )
In 2011, according to Middle East Eye,
the LIFG in Manchester were known as the “Manchester boys”. Implacably
opposed to Mu’ammar Gadaffi, they were considered high risk and a number
were under Home Office control orders – house arrest – when
anti-Gadaffi demonstrations broke out in Libya, a country forged from
myriad tribal enmities.
Suddenly the control orders were lifted.
“I was allowed to go, no questions asked,” said one LIFG member.
MI5 returned their passports and counter-terrorism police at Heathrow airport were told to let them board their flights.
The
overthrow of Gaddafi, who controlled Africa’s largest oil reserves, had
been long been planned in Washington and London. According to French
intelligence, the LIFG made several assassination attempts on Gadaffi in
the 1990s – bank-rolled by British intelligence. In March 2011,
France, Britain and the US seized the opportunity of a “humanitarian
intervention” and attacked Libya. They were joined by Nato under cover
of a UN resolution to “protect civilians”.
Last September, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry concluded that then Prime Minister David Cameron
had taken the country to war against Gaddafi on a series of “erroneous
assumptions” and that the attack “had led to the rise of Islamic State
in North Africa”. The Commons committee quoted what it called Barack
Obama’s “pithy” description of Cameron’s role in Libya as a “shit show”.
In fact, Obama was a leading actor in the “shit show”, urged on by his warmongering Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and a media accusing Gaddafi of planning “genocide” against his own people.
“We knew… that if we waited one more day,” said Obama, “Benghazi, a
city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have
reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
The
massacre story was fabricated by Salafist militias facing defeat by
Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be
“a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. The Commons committee reported, “The proposition that Mu’ammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”.
Britain,
France and the United States effectively destroyed Libya as a modern
state. According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike
sorties”, of which more than a third hit civilian targets. They included
fragmentation bombs and missiles with uranium warheads. The cities of
Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. Unicef, the UN children’s
organisation, reported a high proportion of the children killed “were
under the age of ten”.
More
than “giving rise” to Islamic State — ISIS had already taken root in
the ruins of Iraq following the Blair and Bush invasion in 2003 — these
ultimate medievalists now had all of north Africa as a base. The attack
also triggered a stampede of refugees fleeing to Europe.
Cameron was celebrated in Tripoli as a “liberator”, or imagined he was. The crowds cheering him included those secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS and inspired by Islamic State, such as the “Manchester boys”.
To
the Americans and British, Gadaffi’s true crime was his iconoclastic
independence and his plan to abandon the petrodollar, a pillar of
American imperial power. He had audaciously planned to underwrite a
common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and
promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources.
Whether or not this would have happened, the very notion was intolerable
to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African
governments with military “partnerships”.
The
fallen dictator fled for his life. A Royal Air Force plane spotted his
convoy, and in the rubble of Sirte, he was sodomised with a knife by a
fanatic described in the news as “a rebel”.
Having
plundered Libya’s $30 billion arsenal, the “rebels” advanced south,
terrorising towns and villages. Crossing into sub-Saharan Mali, they
destroyed that country’s fragile stability. The ever-eager French sent
planes and troops to their former colony “to fight al-Qaida”, or the
menace they had helped create.
On
14 October, 2011, President Obama announced he was sending special
forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few
months, US combat troops were sent to South Sudan, Congo and the Central
African Republic. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the
African continent was under way, largely unreported.
In
London, one of the world’s biggest arms fairs was staged by the British
government. The buzz in the stands was the “demonstration effect in
Libya”. The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry held a preview
entitled “Middle East: A vast market for UK defence and security
companies”. The host was the Royal Bank of Scotland, a major investor in
cluster bombs, which were used extensively against civilian targets in
Libya. The blurb for the bank’s arms party lauded the “unprecedented
opportunities for UK defence and security companies.”
Saudi King Salman and British PM Theresa May (Source: Stringer / AFP / Getty Images)
Last
month, Prime Minister Theresa May was in Saudi Arabia, selling more of
the £3 billion worth of British arms which the Saudis have used against
Yemen. Based in control rooms in Riyadh, British military advisers
assist the Saudi bombing raids, which have killed more than 10,000
civilians. There are now clear signs of famine. A Yemeni child dies
every 10 minutes from preventable disease, says Unicef.
The
Manchester atrocity on 22 May was the product of such unrelenting state
violence in faraway places, much of it British sponsored. The lives and
names of the victims are almost never known to us.
This truth struggles to be heard, just as it
struggled to be heard when the London Underground was bombed on July 7,
2005. Occasionally, a member of the public would break the silence,
such as the east Londoner who walked in front of a CNN camera crew and
reporter in mid-platitude.
“Iraq!” he said. “We invaded Iraq. What did we expect? Go on, say it.”
At a
large media gathering I attended, many of the important guests uttered
“Iraq” and “Blair” as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not
say professionally and publicly.
Yet, before he invaded Iraq, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that
“the
threat from al-Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action
against Iraq … The worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups
and individuals will increase significantly”.
Just as Blair brought home to Britain the violence of his and George W Bush‘s
blood-soaked “shit show”, so David Cameron, supported by Theresa May,
compounded his crime in Libya and its horrific aftermath, including
those killed and maimed in Manchester Arena on 22 May.
The
spin is back, not surprisingly. Salman Abedi acted alone. He was a
petty criminal, no more. The extensive network revealed last week by the
American leak has vanished. But the questions have not.
Why
was Abedi able to travel freely through Europe to Libya and back to
Manchester only days before he committed his terrible crime? Was Theresa
May told by MI5 that the FBI had tracked him as part of an Islamic cell
planning to attack a “political target” in Britain?
In the current election campaign, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
has made a guarded reference to a “war on terror that has failed”. As
he knows, it was never a war on terror but a war of conquest and
subjugation. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Syria. Iran is said to be next. Before there is another Manchester, who will have the courage to say that?
http://www.johnpilger.com/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/terror-in-britain-what-did-the-prime-minister-know/5592772
NWN: It's starting to get out what has been going on in South Manchester.
