As Tony Blair prepares to visit Australia to share his invaluable lessons in killing Arabs and launching illegal wars – organised by one of the country’s largest Jewish families, the Pratts, who clearly love Blair for backing Israeli apartheid – it’s worth recalling what the former British Prime Minister has done.
Here’s Gareth Pierce in the Guardian on the moral and legal bankruptcy of fighting the “war on terror”:
During the past week academic institutions have expressed contrition at past links with Libya and parliament has debated whether control order legislation should continue. Yet there has been total silence as to why it was that Libyan dissidents came to form a significant block of those made subject to control orders, and to a second highly contentious measure: deportation to a country that practised torture.
Following the bombings in London on 7 July 2005, known within a day to have been carried out by young British nationals, Tony Blair said: “The rules of the game have changed.” Within weeks he had initiated an agreement with Colonel Gaddafi on the deportation of Libyan dissidents who had sought asylum and whose presence, he claimed, constituted one of the gravest threats to the security of this country.
As to why this small group required such urgent and extreme attention, parallel chronologies provide some clues. In 2005 Libyan oilfields were made available for public auction. Might there have been a two-way accommodation? You give us oil, we give you your dissidents?
In order to achieve the men’s removal to Libya, a country whose leader had a grim record of eliminating opponents, the government had created new mechanisms: memorandums of understanding (MOU), whereby regimes known to practice torture might sign up to an unenforceable promise that they would not torture deported individuals. Gaddafi was evidently a man who could be trusted, but for good measure an independent organisation would monitor the wellbeing of the men deported to Libya: the Gaddafi Foundation, headed by Gaddafi’s son Saif.