Who knew what about MI6 and Number 10’s dealings with Gadhaffi?

Last evening’s revelations from Human Rights Watch regarding MI6, the CIA and Gadhaffi is probably the most explosive plitical news story in a generation, and has the potential to bring down some leading Labour politicians from the last decade, perhaps even see some prosecutions.

At the very least it looks as though Number 10 under Blair and possibly Brown worked with the Gadhaffi in order to rehabilitate this monster, even to the point of helping him with speeches and the stage-managing of the 2004 meeting between Blair and Gadhaffi in the latter’s bedhouin tent (the venue was the idea of Number 10).

According to the Independent newspaper, “[The prime minister’s office is] keen that the prime minister meet the leader in his tent,” (quoting a memo from an MI6 agent). “I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is the journalists would love it.”

In another memo according to the Independent, UK intelligence appeared to give Tripoli details of a Libyan dissident who had been freed from jail in Britain.

Foreign Secretary William Hague tried last night (Saturday) to play down the revelations, saying that they “relate to a period under the previous government so I have no knowledge of those, of what was happening behind the scenes at that time”.

That isn’t good enough. Our strange ‘constitution’ doesn’t have Labour Governments and Conservative Governments, they have Her Majesty’s Government and Her Majesty’s Opposition, that ensures continuity regardless of the occasional general election. David Cameron understood this when he apologised for the Bloody Sunday massacre on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, even though he was a boy in short trousers at the time of this atrocity carried out by the British Army.

Questions need to be asked about who knew what and when. These questions will be asked, and it would be best if they were asked openly and answered publicly and honestly by the political establishment. For Labour, the party with most to lose from this Watergate moment, will it damage itself further by being party to a cover-up, even though the truth will out in due course – it always does. Will Ed Milliband assist in ensuring that light is shone in the darkest corners even if it provides discomfort, or worse, for his brother David who was the previous Foreign Secretary?

People are dying in Libya as I write this

You will have to forgive me if I do not post anything for the next few days. The intervention mandated by the UN Security Council for military action against Libya, has Impacted on my mood. As I write, people are dying, slaughtered by the corrupt regime and by coalition forces.

While I find all military action distressing in the extreme, I feel less opposed to this action than, say, Iraq and Afghanistan. My concern regarding Libya is the level of civilian casualties and what the motives are of the US government. To paraphrase Churchill: “You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing ….. once they have exhausted all other options”.

I am also exhausted by ‘military experts’ who say that modern weapons are so accurate that they can “enter buildings through open windows”. We have been told something like that during every conflict, yet civilians are always killed. And I am also sickened by the salivating at the BBC and on Sky News at the prospect of Britain at War once again.

I might not feel so depressed had Britain not been the poodle of the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan.