A Terrorist Disposal Problem
Haunting British Intelligence
“Don’t
forget that we have a disposal problem,” CIA director Allen Dulles told
President John F. Kennedy in early 1961, a warning about the possible
consequences of cutting loose what the CIA knew to be a volatile and
potentially vengeful asset, the exile force it had trained to invade Cuba at
the Bay of Pigs. As Joan Didion reported in her classic book Miami, the disposal
problem haunted south Florida for decades, as the defeated Cuban fighters
turned to drug trafficking and violent vendettas in the 1970s and 1980s.
Now
Britain faces a reckoning with its own disposal problem, involving Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber
who killed 23 people including himself at pop music concert in Manchester,
England in May 2017. A recent investigation by the independent
investigative news site Declassified UK, concluded
that, “The Manchester
bomber and his closest family were part of Islamist militia forces covertly
supported by the British military and Nato in the Libyan war of 2011.”
With an official inquiry into the Manchester bombing due to
report later this year, Declassified UK asks. “Did innocent citizens pay a
blood price for British foreign policy?”
The web site found that Abedi, his
father Ramadan and brothers, Ismail and Hashem, were allowed to freely operate
in the war zone of Libya for years before the 2017 atrocity. Salman Abedi
was never subject to controls on his movements to Libya despite a stream of
intelligence showing his contacts with extremists.
Abedi’s father and brother were stopped by UK security officers in
2011 and 2015 respectively. The officers downloaded jihadist material from
their mobile devices. Nonetheless, they were allow to travel back and forth to
Libya where Ramadan Abedi actively supported of the Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda linked organization at war with the government of
Muammar Gaddafi. (Watchman comment, LIFG is one of the worst and most violent
Islamic terrorist groups. The article says linked but LIFG may have merged with
al-Qaeda.)
An investigation by Middle East Eye found
the U.K. government operated an “open door, no questions asked” policy toward
Libyan exiles who wanted to fight Gaddafi. Yet the Manchester inquiry did not call anyone from MI6, the
British foreign intelligence service, a decision UK Declassified called
“bewildering.”
MI5,
Britain’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism service, told the
inquiry that “there was a range of reasons for such travel” to Libya,
“many of which were entirely legitimate,” adding it did not have intelligence to
indicate that Salman Abedi was engaged in fighting or was attending training
camps or affiliating with Islamic State.
The
inquiry’s expert on Islamic extremism, Matthew Wilkinson, countered that
“There’s a lot of evidence from 2011 onwards—2012, 2014, 2017 in particular …
[that] Salman was surrounded by people that had heavy weaponry, heavy machine
guns”. Pete Weatherby, a lawyer for the bombing victims, told the
inquiry, “It is highly likely that [Salman Abedi] had a baptism of violence by
exposure to the 2011 uprising.” (Watchman comment: it has been alleged for decades that MI-6 founded
the Muslim Brotherhood and that MI-6 controls various Islamic terror groups. I highly recommend the movie "Shadow Dancer" which is about the IRA and MI-5 and of course there is the movie "The Good Sheperd" about the CIA.)
https://jihadintel.meforum.org/identifier/228/libyan-islamic-fighting-group-emblem
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