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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.
But then bingo. Again, on the very same day last week, the European
Court of Human Rights stated that CIA agents tortured – and sodomised –
Khaled el-Musri, a German of Lebanese origin who was supposedly
“linked to terrorism”. Now I don’t know if our chaps get up to sodomy
during their role as our security Protectors, but the European court was
also much exercised by the fact that Macedonian state agents watched as
poor old el-Musri endured his beating, shackling and sodomisation in
2003. It was “simply unnacceptable”, said James Goldston of the Open
Society Justice Initiative, for the US government to avoid serious scrutiny
of CIA activities. A long bellow of laughter here, I’m afraid.