Archive: Belhadj’s hush money (potentially a million of your tax pounds): about keeping full extent of his al-Qaeda (and possibly even MI6/CIA-asset) credentials a secret?

First appeared at the Luikkerland website, 12 April 2012

If you read some of the coverage in the corporate-media about the civil suit being brought by Abdel Hakim Belhadj against the British Government and the one-time head of MI6 counter terrorism, Sir Mark Allen, with regards his being handed over by MI6, in contravention of British policy, to the CIA and his subseqent rendition, then you would be forgiven for thinking that Belhadj was some kind of incredibly hard done-by innocent who, because of the treatment served to him, deserved to be wept over. This angle is especially prevalent in association with a desire to incriminate Tony Blair and the last Labour Government as part of a fake internal LibLabCon squabble and election gimmick.

Stephen Glover, in a commentary for the Mail, wrote ‘I make no claims for Belhadj: he may well be an Islamic extremist, though he could hardly be worse than Gaddafi.’ Let me put it this way, I make no claims for Gaddafi, and in no way do I endorse anyone’s torture, but Belhadj is way worse than him. Gaddafi did some good things for lots of Libyan people; Belhadj is very possibly a psychotically murderous criminal who was a key figure in setting a once unified country and a leader of African independence onto a path of savage dismemberment and impoverishment. Gaddafi was seen by many as a liberator of Libya from the British puppet Idris; Belhadj has done the bidding of his master’s in London and Washington, and delivered the wealth of Libya up to the vampiric corporations of the West. Now there is a flurry of anxiety and activity around him, and talk that the British Government might pay him a sum of monies that is ‘well into seven figures’ or else he will spill the beans, so we are told, about the details of his rendition. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is plenty that the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) and the British Government must be incredibly worried about him letting out of the bag; not only skulduggery pertaining to his rendition, but a whole heap of other degenerate geopoliticking and secret scheming that he is privy to.

I couldn’t possibly comment on what exactly this information could be, but it might be the same sort of information that got those two senior SAS men ‘disappeared‘ in March of last year. We do know that it is information that has got the SIS ‘scrambling’ to have the Government pay Belhadj a king’s ransom, which has also been described as ‘whatever it takes’. There is even talk of the Government hurrying ahead with secret courts so that Belhadj’s case can be heard and whitewashed all nice and legally.

It must be explosive material, and Glover gives you a clue when he offers this rationale as to why Belhadj is good, and Gaddafi is evil – as per the narrative sold to you by countless corporate-media types:

…he is now supposed to be on “our side”, or at least one of the rebels on whose “liberation” the Coalition recently lavished billions of pounds.

Naturally, because he is a gangster surrounded by gangsters, as I am about to convey to you, and because it would possibly hurt his case if he actually looked like a blackmailer, the Daily Mail tells of how ‘friends of Mr Belhadj [they call him Mr, when he is in fact an animal] say he has not been approached with an offer of cash and that he would refuse it if MI6 did try to buy his silence’. Indeed, the suit is being made with the stated intention of eliciting an apology; there are other non-financial motivations – apparently. Don’t be taken in. The Coalition Government cannot admit that its predecessor had any part in Belhadj’s rendition; it surely won’t incriminate the secret services. Belhadj must know this, and so the outcome has to be a financial payout. Besides which, Belhadj is described as a senior official in the transitional Libyan Government, but does anyone know what he does and what his salary is? Perhaps his law firm, Leigh Day & Co, know of his whereabouts? The last most people heard of him was that, possibly going under the name of Salem El Alwani (he has a host of false names, apparently), he was leading the NATO mercenaries across the Turkish border into Syria (see here, here and here) – and that it might actually be unsafe for him to show his face in Libya in any case. However good the going rate is for NATO mercenary generals, it can’t be anything like Belhadj must have thought he would make when he appointed himself the military governor of Tripoli after his troops dislodged the Gaddafis from the city.

As I hinted at, the point of this article is to get to the bottom of what Abdel Hakim Belhadj actually is; when you appreciate that, then you will also have everything you need to tell you what his alliance with the British Government tells you about that institution (and, extrapolating from it, how most MPs belong in jail given that they voted for the invasion of Libya), and how you should be very angry that he might well now be gifted the very same money that you work the majority of each day, every day to earn in order to have it taken off you in taxation.

The way I am going to do this is to lay a little initial foundation in terms of Belhadj’s career. Then I am going to relate various extracts from news stories about Belhadj, or give a summary of an analyst’s take on him.

Belhadj, aka Abu Abdullah Assadaq, aka Abdel-Hakim al Hasidi, aka Abdel Hakim al-Hasadi, aka Abdel Hakim al-Hasady, was a Mujahideen – ‘the CIA backed prototype of al-Qaeda’ – during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In 1992 he returned to Libya; two years later, going under the name of Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, he formed the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and waged insurrection against the Gaddafi government before his hopes of an Islamist revolution were crushed in 1998, along with the LIFG.

Belhadj then fled to Afghanistan and joined the Taliban. In 2001, presumably fleeing the US invasion of Afghanistan [or escaping on the Airift of Evil?], he was arrested in Pakistan, handed over to the US, and repatriated to Libya where an arrest warrant had been issued. For some reason that is not clear, by 2004 Belhadj was said to be living in China with his wife. In that same year, Belhadj was trying to travel to the UK to claim political asylum when he was picked up en route at Kuala Lumpar holding a false Iraqi passport. His wife claims that he was told that he could travel onwards to the UK without a visa – which the Daily Mail describes as a MI6 ruse to get him to Bangkok where he was picked up. MI6 allegedly arranged him handed over to CIA, who flew him to Libya where he was jailed and supposedly tortured. In 2007 the LIFG merged with Al Qaeda. In 2010, Belhadj was released from jail in an act of clemency by the Libyan Government.

During the Libyan conflict, April 2011, to be precise, Webster Tarpley published his insights into who Belhadj, or al Hasidi, was. At the time he was commanding forces in the town of Darna, a place that in a 2007 West Point study was reckoned to be ‘the single greatest center of terrorist recruitment anywhere in the world’ (Tarpley’s words). Moreover, Libya, as the study showed, ‘provided 20% of all Al Qaeda fighters crossing the Syrian border into Iraq’:

al-Hasidi [is] an al Qaeda terrorist controller who trained and hobnobbed with Osama bin Laden at the Khost terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Hasidi boasts of having sent 25 fighters to fight US and NATO forces in Afghanistan; one wonders how many they managed to kill.

On Saturday April 9th, 2011, a story written by Michael Georgy appeared in Reuters. Georgy, it appears, had interviewed Abdel Hakim al-Hasady, ‘former Islamic fighter in Afghanistan’, in Darna. I have added my own emphasis:

He says he was once questioned for two months by U.S. agents in Pakistan for suspected ties to al Qaeda — which he denies — and was later imprisoned in Libya for three years.

Hasady, an Islamic preacher and teacher who spent time at a training camp in Afghanistan, was arrested by Pakistani authorities after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and then turned over to American agents in Islamabad, he said.

His story has changed several times in interviews

Kamran Bokhari, regional director of global intelligence firm Stratfor, [told Reuters that] “there is no way to tell whether or not the likes of Hasady have abandoned their old ambitions and if so to what extent.”

Hasady said previously that he fought the Americans in Afghanistan. Now he says he only engaged in “self-defence” against U.S.-backed Afghans who fought the Taliban.

Hasady was released to Libyan custody after his detention in Pakistan. He was later imprisoned in Libya from 2004-2007 and then freed as part of a reconciliation with Islamists.

The week before Georgy’s story, a piece by Charles Levinson appeared in the Wall Street Journal (again with my emphasis):

Abdel Hakim al-Hasady, an influential Islamic preacher and high-school teacher who spent five years at a training camp in eastern Afghanistan, oversees the recruitment, training and deployment of about 300 rebel fighters from Darna.

“Our view is starting to change of the U.S.,” said Mr. Hasady. “If we hated the Americans 100%, today it is less than 50%. They have started to redeem themselves for their past mistakes by helping us to preserve the blood of our children.” [Webster Tarpley’s interpretation of this is that Belhadj is hinting that Americans can redeem themselves by appeasing Al Qaeda with arms, money, political power, and diplomatic support.]

After the uprising began in Libya, Mr. Hasady told several journalists that he had joined the fight against the Americans during his time in Afghanistan. He now says he was misquoted and that he only settled in Afghanistan because Islamists of his ilk were unwelcome everywhere else.

Adm. James Stavridis, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s supreme allied commander in Europe, pointed to this concern when he told a Senate committee on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence has picked up “flickers” of al Qaeda among rebel groups in Libya.

On Friday 9th December, 2011, the former Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, wrote an article that appeared on the CNBC website in which he had this to say:

Abdul Hakim Belhad [is] a well-known jihadist who was one of the suspects involved in the Madrid train bombing of March 2004.

The following extract is from Belhadj’s Wikipedia entry:

Belhadj and other leaders of the LIFG fled to Afghanistan, and joined the Taliban. In 2002, after the 11 September attacks and Gaddafi’s reconciliation with the west, an arrest warrant was issued for Belhadj by the Libyan authorities. In it, it was alleged by Gaddafi government that Belhadj had developed “close relationships” with al-Qaeda leaders, and specifically Taliban chief Mullah Omar. Based in Jalalabad, he is alleged to have run and financed training camps for Arab mujahideen fighters.

The following is from the same Daily Mail article that I linked to at the top of this peice:

In 2004 Mr Belhadj was the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which MI5 had linked to recruiting young Britons for Al Qaeda.

He had alleged links with the Taliban and had lived in Afghanistan until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. He fiercely denies the links with Al Qaeda.

To summarise, Belhadj is al-Qaeda through and through. Even if he denies it, remember that he is also a piece of work that likes to alter his stories. If you know what al-Qaeda really is, that is to say, if you know that al-Qaeda is the ‘database’ and is really an asset of the CIA, then you wouldn’t perhaps be surprised to discover that Belhadj thought that he could travel to the UK to claim asylum at the same time that he might have been on the run after the Madrid bombings. On hearing that Belhadj thought that he could find safe haven in Britain, you then might not be surprised to discover that the LIFG somehow had contacts in the UK that were recruiting for al Qaeda. Do we even know where Belhadj was between 2001 and 2004? He says that, at a later date, he was in detention in Libya, but he says a lot of things. Had he really been handed over to Libya, or did he go to Guantanamo like terrorists usually did? Why was he so much at liberty that Aznar thought he had committed the bombings in Madrid? Doesn’t he actually just look like the sort of slippery someone who the CIA would find very useful?

There was a story in the corporate-media yesterday about how US intelligence agencies had managed to win a court decision in Washington that meant that certain material pertaining to the UK’s involvement in CIA renditions will not be made available to a parliamentary committee looking into the matter. Tony Lloyd, the vice-chairman of the relevant cross-party group told the Independent newspaper that the judgment was ‘disappointing’. He went on to say the following:

It suggests this material is not really something that affects national security or intelligence, but is being withheld to prevent the embarrassment of officials.

As I said above, if you know what al-Qaeda really is, then this is not a very surprising thing for this MP to have said.

At stake, somewhere down the line, is the whole al-Qaeda hoax, and the whole 911 hoax, the whole justification for war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran, and the whole justification for the spurious security apparatus and control grid that our government wants to enslave us with. At stake, for ‘officials’, is not just embarrasment – it’s jail time.

[2014 – update regarding Belhadj’s case:

http://www.redress.org/case-docket/belhadj-v-jack-straw-and-others

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