July 15, 2022 "The Terrorist Disposal Problem"

 

Above, the logo of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group

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

Salman Abedi