In March a member of the SAS resigned from the British Army, stating, inter alia, that he ‘didn’t join the British army to conduct American foreign policy’. (1) My initial reaction was: well, what did he think he would be doing? Where is this independent British foreign policy he thought he was going to serve?
There appears to be nothing that the British state won’t do to further the interests of American foreign policy. Look at the Lockerbie bombing story in which evidence was planted and faked (2) and witnesses were nobbled (3) in a prosecution so stinky that the chief law officer of Scotland resigned rather than present the case.(4)
In March The Scotsman carried the comments of Juval Aviv, PamAm’s senior Lockerbie investigator.(5) Aviv offered a version of the story first told by Lester Coleman, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer, in Trail of the Octopus. (6) The Aviv-Coleman version is that the bomb was put on the plane at Frankfurt. In 1987 US agents began monitoring a heroin smuggling route from the Middle East to the United States, run by drug dealers linked to terrorists holding western hostages in Beirut. US agents agreed to let the dealers run their heroin operation through Germany’s Frankfurt airport and London’s Heathrow in return for a promise they would help free hostages. For a suitcase normally full of heroin, one with a bomb in it was substituted by……persons unknown but probably the PFLP, in retaliation for the Americans’ shooting down of an Iranian airliner.
‘ “Conviction of the Libyans was very important because they had to cover up the truth,” Mr Aviv told The Scotsman. “America allowed a civilian airline to run drugs and risk innocent people. That looks very, very bad.“‘
Not that officially-sanctioned heroin smuggling is only done by those nasty Americans. In March the Guardian reported at some length on the British state’s involvement in such a scheme.
‘Members of an international crime gang were allowed to move to Britain while flooding the country with heroin because their leader had secretly worked as an informer for Customs & Excise, according to evidence brought before an immigration appeals tribunal. The Baybasin Cartel, a notorious Kurdish gang, is estimated by police to have controlled up to 90% of the heroin which entered the country after its leading members settled in the home counties in the mid-1990s.’ (emphasis added) 7
You couldn’t make this stuff up!
If you had access to the senior state actors involved, they would claim that being America’s ally in criminal wars, corrupting the Scottish legal system and allowing heroin into this country was – ultimately – in this country’s economic interest; for that is what ‘the national interest’ means. But what is the ‘British economic interest’?
British economic interests?
The annual report for 2004/5 of the Intelligence and Security Committee noted in chapter 13 under the heading ‘Economic well-being’:
‘We took evidence from Ministers, departments and the Agencies on the Agencies’ work to support and safeguard the UK’s economic well-being. This is an important topic, with a large number of departments and government organisations having an interest in it. We note that there is not a common definition across Whitehall of what constitutes economic well-being..…’ (emphasis added)
But how could there be a ‘common definition’? The interests of much of the British domestic economy are not served by the deregulated, global free market, while those of the City and a few UK-based multinationals are. But the bankers are still in charge: challenging the City’s dominance of economic policy has not been on the political agenda in the UK since the 1980s and the last hurrah of the ‘alternative economic strategy’. And as it is American not British military power which is enforcing the global capitalist system, the British state, which is only really interested in the interests of the City and that handful of UK-based multinationals when it comes down to it, has to continue eating American shit and swearing that it’s ice-cream.
Notes
[1] <www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1729553,00.html>
[2] The piece of electronic circuitry which was the core of the physical evidence was apparently planted by the CIA. See Lobster 50 p.31. Evidence presented by the prosecution as being from the suitcase containing the bomb was apparently from the lab tests of an identical suitcase. See <www.guardian.co.uk/libya/story/0,,1588109,00.html# article_>
[3] American fingerprint experts were told by the FBI not to comment on apparent chaos at the Scottish Criminal Records Office for fear it damaged the Lockerbie case. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/ 4731298.stm>
[4] A piece in The Sunday Herald <www.sundayherald.com/7021> begins:
‘Andrew Hardie, the Lord Advocate, resigned from his cabinet post as Scotland’s leading law officer because he realised the Lockerbie case was a shambles which would probably end in acquittal for the two Libyan defendants.’
[5] <http://the.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=348532006> It was a PanAm plane that was blown up.
[6] Coleman got framed and imprisoned, thus preventing him from giving evidence at the trail of unfortunate Libyans designated as the patsies. The same thing happened to Abraham Bolden, a black Secret Service agent who wanted to tell the Warren Commission about an apparent plot to kill JFK in early November 1963 in Chicago.
[7] <www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1741039,00.html> The report said that they had been allowed to do this in return for information on Turkish drug traffickers. Although they weren’t referred to in the report, I would guess that MI6 were involved in a deal of this size.