Archive: Over again, by its actions, the British Government lets you know who the real enemy is
First appeared at the Luikkerland website, 29 March 2012
Before the month of March expired, I wanted to review some news that I hadn’t covered contemporarily. I want to relate two events, one of which I will be able to discuss more robustly than the other, that are in the same vein. The most recent happened at the beginning of this current month, the other happened in March 2011. The passing of the annual anniversary of the earlier event in the same month as the occurrence of the later one seemed to me to be particularly apposite. I also felt that the lapse of a year without any further news regarding the development of the earlier story was, in itself, very newsworthy.
On March 6th, 2012, a Royal Navy petty officer on a nuclear submarine based in Plymouth was arrested by counter-terrorism police. He was taken to a local police station and questioned. A Metropolitan Police spokesman was reported by press on the 8th March as saying that a number of searches had been carried out in connection with the arrest.
The submariner, Edward Devenney was charged not with any terrorist offence, but with ‘communicating information to another person, which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy’ [also worded in other places as ‘an enemy of the state’], contrary to the Official Secrets Act (from here).
He appeared in Westminster Magistrates Court on the 8th March where, according to Sky news*, District Judge Wickham remanded him in custody after sending the case to crown court for trial. The only other information about court appearances that I could find was a tweet from Sky’s crime correspondent to the effect that ‘Edward Devenney [is/was] being defended by Lord Carlile QC, former Government terror laws watchdog’. As you can probably gather from the inclusion of my brackets, I don’t know if this reference to Devenney’s defence counsel was reporting on a future or a past court appearance.
All that remains for me to say about this case is that the Daily Mail reportage of it mentions the possibility that Devenney tweeted something on the 28th January that breached the Official Secrets Act. The same article noted that ‘this could not be confirmed’ but also observed that ‘all of Devenney’s Tweets for January 28 appear to have been erased’. I myself noticed today that the twitter account of someone called Edward Devenney had been suspended.
Before I move on, I wonder if the reader has taken particular notice of how counter-terrorism police arrested Devenney (it says so in the Guardian article) and if the reader has really let the nature of the charges levelled against Devenney sink in:
Communicating information to another person, which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy.
If you have noticed the significance of the choice of words ‘calculated’ and ‘intended’ in the formal charge, then you might have come to a conclusion that they are accusing Devenney of deliberateness in the act. If you are wondering about who ‘the enemy’ is supposed to be, then the words ‘al-Qaeda’ might have drifted across your mind. I shouldn’t wonder if they had; we are told on a nearly daily basis that we must habitually consider the enemy to be al-Qaeda. Consequently, if you are wondering about the likelihood of a certain conjunction, then that’s something that you have arrived at independently and has not got anything to do with me.
Now for the second event: on March 2nd, 2011, and you may remember this if you are the sort of person who notices these sorts of things, two members of British Special Forces were arrested by counter-terrorism police under the Official Secrets Act.
Significantly, this news didn’t appear in the papers until the 9th April, 2011. According to an article that I saw dated at that time, the two men were senior personnel. They had attempted to leak the details of highly sensitive covert Special Forces operations to a major broadcaster. This information was primarily ‘relating to the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda’. However, it was reported that the two men also had access to information pertaining to ‘Libya and other countries where Special Forces have been operating’. Indeed, one of the men was said to be ‘based in the heart of the MoD headquarters in central London where the Libyan operation was being planned’.
The men, aged 33 and 35, were said to have been arrested on suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act 1989, and taken to a central London police station. They were fingerprinted and forced to pose for a police mugshot and provide a DNA sample. On the 3rd March 2011 they were bailed to return to a police station in May (presumably of the same year). Four searches were carried out at offices and addresses linked to the two suspects, and ‘because of the sensitivity of the probe’ they were carried out very discreetly. Not only that, the case was said to be so sensitive that the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office were being regularly briefed on its progress by anti-terrorist officers. The Daily Mail article, where I saw this story reported, went on to say that:
Whitehall officials last night described the allegations against the men, who would have had a high security clearance, as “extremely serious”.
Apparently, the Crown Prosecution Service were going to decide whether the men would face criminal charges, pending the completion of a report into whatever the men were supposed to have done. As it is, there seems to have been no further news in a whole year about the case, and therefore no developments. This might not be entirely surprising.
As it happened, these arrests took place merely days before that incident near Benghazi, Libya, when an MI6 officer and some SAS men were held by so-called rebel forces (I wrote about the incident at the time). Given that these people had reportedly been carrying some kind of letter of introduction (if my memory serves me correctly) from the British Government, and that we now know how British Special Forces would later play an essential role in the Libyan conflict on the ground, this captured forward party must be construed as an effort to establish or bolster British control over what would become a military campaign synchronised in its execution with NATO bombing missions.
It doesn’t take too wild an imagination to suspect that what happened a year ago with the arrest of these two senior Special Forces personnel, one of whom worked in the place where planning for operations in Libya was taking place, was the prevention of a whistle-blowing attempt to discredit the whole Gaddafi versus unarmed protestor narrative that was being used to justify the proxy invasion of Libya.
If things really are as this suspicion tells us they are, I would say that the issue at the very heart of this case is the British Government acting to prevent its own criminality being exposed so that there would be no question of its subsequent demise – that is to say, the Coalition Government would fall. This is why everyone in the highest echelons were so nervous. This is why the reporting of the story was delayed for a whole month and the inquiries around the case made ‘discreetly’. The way I see it is if the news of the arrest of two agents had been in the public arena immediately, any others who might have been sympathetic would have been forewarned that the net was closing on them – prompting them to act when they could. Instead, I suspect that all possible security breaches were swept up in the intervening period between the arrests and the publication of the story.
For all the baloney spoken in this country about it being a free one, what this case shows you before your eyes is the very real phenomenon of the state disappearing people to protect itself – yes, we may as well say that the two Special Forces men were arrested, and then they were effectively disappeared so that they could not have a voice and so that none could speak about them. I’m not saying that they were physically eradicated, I am saying that their presence in the public eye, and the potential ramifications coming from it, have been snuffed out.
To make a final point, I want the reader to notice that the arrest of these two senior Special Forces people and the subsequent investigation was conducted by Counter Terrorism Command, although a Scotland Yard spokesman said at the time that the case was not terror related.
Does this ring any bells for you?
So, because no particular charges against the Special Forces men were expressed at the time – nor have been for a whole year (as far as I can find) – why don’t we frame this case in the terms we saw before, and let’s imagine that they could be accused of attempting to release information that would be advantageous to ‘the enemy’. Who is the enemy? Why, in this case it would be the general public via a major broadcaster. Why are we the enemy? Because the treasonous LibLabCon British Government is launching illegal wars against sovereign countries in the Middle East in order to capture resources for the sustenance of both the EU superstate and the City of London global bankster-types (the latter being puppeteers who benefit by the oblivion of the British nation and the doing away of English civil liberties). We, the people, being desirous of justice as is our natural character, are considered a potential obstacle to these and other nefarious ends of the British Government and the wider Establishment; it follows, does it not, that anyone attempting to arm us with information would too be considered an enemy of the state.
Well, in actual fact, and as you will know, dear reader, we are not the enemy; we, the people, are the usurped sovereign commonwealth. We are the nations in England and Scotland. The enemy of the nations is the British Government and its many evil-doing subordinate agents in the ministries and the corporate-media, and its puppeteers on different levels in the EU and the mega-banks, and we won’t be anything like free until we are free of them.
*Sky news appears to think that Devenney was in breach of the 1989 Section 2 repeal and replacement Act, and helpfully provides the relevant law:
A person who is or has been a Crown servant or government contractor is guilty of an offence if without lawful authority he makes a damaging disclosure of any information, document or other article relating to defence which is or has been in his possession by virtue of his position as such.
[
2014: It appears that the content of the corporate-media articles linked to relating to Devenney have been altered in the intervening period. Also, please see the following links for news on the outcome of these cases:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mi5-spy-sas-spooks-spied-2928028
http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/Royal-Navy-submariner-admits-breaching-Official/story-17309434-detail/story.html
]
