Posted by Anna Raccoon at Old Holborn
The ‘special relationship’, by which we paupers comply with any demands from our favourite loan shark, has skidded to a halt in front of civil rights champion David Davis MP.
We may have paid off the Marshall Plan, but that hasn’t stopped the US from firing the odd salvo across our Sovereign bows. This attempt to interfere with the UK judicial process is not remotely acceptable. However, should the UK judicial process have been involved in this matter in the first place?
The American government have threatened to withdraw intelligence co-operation with Britain if details were revealed of the means by which they persuaded Binyam Mohamed to tell them what they wanted to hear. .
Binyam Mohamed? A fine English name! Why is the UK involved in this sordid affair? Because back in 1978, Binyam took the time honoured ‘Euro star’ route into Britain and convinced the authorities that he was in fear of his life as a political dissident in his native Ethiopia. It wasn’t his first port of call, that was – the US! Naturally we weren’t so rude as to enquire how this ‘child’ (for that is how he was treated in England) had managed to get from Ethiopia, to the US to a British port. He was 16 at the time – some threat to the Ethiopian authorities. If indeed he was 16. but no matter, we dusted him down, gave him some money and somewhere to live and told him he could stay with us, he’d be safe here. We educated him and taught him electrical engineering, and we turned a blind eye to his conversion to Islam. We didn’t go so far as to give him a British Passport, having gone to so much trouble to get here, we naturally assumed that he would want to stay here and pay his taxes and help us increase our birth rate.
Binyam had other ideas. He stuck his photograph into someone else’s passport and took off for that other great bastion of the Welfare State – Afghanistan. He had by this time acquired a nasty drug habit and Afghanistan was an obvious first choice to help him kick it. While he was in Afghanistan he continued his education in those attributes essential to English life, weapons training and the manufacture of dirty bombs. He travelled onto Pakistan where he took an advanced course in Passport forgery and then planned to return to the UK to pass on his new skills. A laudable aim.
Unfortunately the Pakistan authorities, obviously acting under undue coercion from the US themselves, and in a gross violation of his human rights, which they had never heard of, and weren’t much interested in anyway, arrested him at Karachi airport. They handed him over to the US authorities. They made enquiries of the British authorities, since he was by now screaming blue murder for his ‘British Human Rights’. MI5 told them that he had had the right to live in Britain, but that his passport was bogus and no genuine one had ever been, nor would be, issued. They told them about his education and his hobbies.
The Americans, aware that he could have elected to stay in the US originally, assumed that he didn’t like the place, and sent him to Morocco. Now the tale darkens. For the Moroccans, patently confused by his various conversions to different faiths, elected to circumcise him, variety being the spice of life. Before, during or after this minor operation, does it really matter?, they mentioned to him his kick boxing trainer. And thus reduced him to the depth of despondency, for he realised that only the British could have known the details of the education they had so kindly given him.
Ha! Terrorist Bingo! He did what any ungrateful, expensively educated, well fed and housed, well travelled, drug addict with dubious bomb making skills would do – he got himself a British lawyer.
This is the basis of his tort which now has the US authorities threatening us with tortuous coercion if we dare reveal what he said when he was tortured by the Moroccans whilst being told the name of his kick boxing trainer in the UK.
You couldn’t make it up. A virtual bottle of champagne for the best suggestion as to what he actually said!