Women sit by a memorial set up for the victims of the Manchester terror
attack. (photo: Getty)
Terror in Britain: What Did the Prime Minister Know?
By John Pilger, John Pilger's Website
01 June 17
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, 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.
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."
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?
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