Torture, rendition, sodomy: with ‘protectors’ like these, who needs ex-friends?
by Robert Fisk, The Independent
Last week was a bad week for our Protectors. It kicked off with the shameful details of the De Silva report, which concluded that the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane had been murdered with British state collusion. It’s something that all who knew Finucane had long suspected. Sir Desmond de Silva concluded that “a series of positive actions by employees of the state (ie MI6) actively furthered and facilitated his murder” and that there was afterwards “a relentless attempt to defeat the ends of justice”.
In other words, it was a set-up.
Our Protectors helped the Protestant UDA “loyalist” militia to knock off this troublesome lawyer just after a Tory Home Office minister – the very same Douglas Hogg who years later thought he could get the taxpayer to clean his moat – was used as a patsy in Parliament where he announced, three weeks before the Finucane murder, that a number of Northern Ireland solicitors were “unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA”. There is no suggestion that Mr Hogg was involved in the Finucane case.
At virtually the same moment as the De Silva report was published last week, our Government agreed to pay £2.2m to the family of Sami al-Saadi, who was “renditioned” to Libya with the help of our Protectors in 2004 and subsequently was tortured most savagely in Gaddafi’s dungeons. We have to thank Human Rights Watch for this information, by the way – no government inquiry was set up into this outrage – and HRW was only able to finger our Protectors because of correspondence between the CIA and Gaddafi’s goons in Tripoli.
Mr al-Saadi, “kidnapped” with the help of our own goons in Hong Kong not long after Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara had done his kissy thing with Gaddafi in the desert, emerged from his Libyan torture chamber last year “close to death”. Another of his fellow opponents of Gaddafi still plans – quite rightly – to sue our Protectors.