A recent release of Wikileaks documents must have created a flurry of concern among the anglophiles in the White House. One such document shows that through interrogations of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, it has come to light that Adil Hadi al-Jaza’iri Bin Hamlili, an al-Qaeda assassin of Algerian descent, was found “to have withheld important information from the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS) and British Secret Intelligence Service (BSIS or MI6) (for whom he served as a HUMINT [human intelligence] source), and to be a threat to US and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan” (emphasis added).

Hamlili, the Wikileaks document shows, “has a long history of involvement with Islamic extremists and extremist groups. Detainee has admitted to his affiliation with key terrorist groups including the GIA [Armed Islamic Group of Algeria] and HIG [Hizb-I Islami Gulbuddin], traveling to Afghanistan to participate in combat (initially against the Soviets), training at terrorist camps, and of being involved with the Taliban Foreign Ministry and Intelligence Ministry. Detainee has provided a good deal of consistent information regarding his activities for earlier periods of his life, but has omitted key details of his pre-arrest history. The significant gaps during key parts of detainee’s timeline make it difficult to fully assess his threat and intelligence value. Detainee has provided little information about his activities between November 2001 and his capture in Pakistan in June 2003.”

In other words, it is not likely that Hamlili, without any background to check, walked into the SIS building in Vauxhall Square in London looking for a job. It is most likely that Hamlili was a prize catch of MI6, which runs a gamut of terrorists, some of whom are based in London, while others are scattered around those parts of the globe where Britain is planning to use them at a later time.

The British elites, who are fully cognizant of MI6’s role in nurturing and protecting the terrorists, and consider these actions necessary to further the aims of the empire, expressed their routine concerns about “mistakes that were made.” Lord Alan West of Spithead, a former security minister in the Blair Labour government, issued a canned statement saying that ministers had failed to get a grip on the problem. “The counterterrorist strategy was not working as well as it should have been,” he said. “I hope that this Government is looking at it very closely, I am sure they are. We need to keep this pressure on.” West said that Britain, in the 1990s, was “very slow in realizing the danger of the radicalization that was going on.”

In Canada, where the Wikileaks revelations caused more uneasiness, Ottawa trotted out Wesley Wark, a professor with the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, who tried to console his fellow Canadians saying, “It would be ‘beyond the pale’ for CSIS and MI6 to run ‘a valuable intelligence agent if they knew him to be involved in acts of violence.’” He even suggested that the information that the Guantanamo interrogators prized out of detainees could be “tainted.” However, Wark should note that the connection between London and Islamic radicals has been documented so widely, that by now, books have been written, identifying London as “Londonistan.”

Aligning Itself with the Devil

It is important to realize that, while Hamlili was working as an informer to the Canadians and the British, he was also killing people all over Pakistan. The Wikileaks document points out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has reportedly admitted to masterminding the 9/11 attacks, told his interrogators that Hamlili was behind a March 2002 grenade attack on a church in Islamabad, which killed five people. Hamlili was also known to be responsible for an attack on a church in Pakistan in December 2002 which killed three children.

Separate US intelligence reports said that Hamlili was “possibly involved” in a bombing outside Karachi’s Sheraton Hotel in May 2002, which killed 11 French engineers and 2 Pakistani citizens. To refresh the memory of the anglophiles walking the corridors of power in Washington, the March 2002 grenade attack on the church killed an American woman and her 17-year-old daughter. More than 40 people were injured, including at least 10 Americans.

Following the incident, then-US Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin, now president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, identified the American dead as Barbara Green and her daughter Kristen Wormsley. She described them as “members of the American Embassy family in Islamabad.” “There is a hard lesson to be drawn from today’s tragic events,” Chamberlin said.

Yet, it is evident that no “hard lesson” has been learnt. The United States continues to share intelligence with those who run terrorists, who are presently committed to kill Americans first.

In addition to Hamlili’s links to MI6 and CSIS, the Wikileaks documents also show the BBC’s links to the terrorists. According to Guantanamo Bay interrogators, the phone number of someone at the BBC’s Bush House headquarters was found in phone books, and programmed into the mobile phones of a number of militants seized by the Americans. The assessment on one of the detainees at the Guantanamo camp, dated April 21, 2007, said: “The London, United Kingdom, phone number 0044 207 XXX XXXX was discovered in numerous seized phone books and phones associated with extremist-linked individuals.”

What, however, eventually triggered Washington to feebly inform London of its concerns, was the finding that Britain ignored repeated warnings to stop granting asylum to Islamic radicals wanted in other countries for terrorist offenses. This came in a leaked US diplomatic cable, sent five days after the July 7, 2005 bombings that killed 52 people on London’s mass transit system.

The cable stated that Britain “should have expected such blasts.” Lord West, the minister in charge of counterterrorism, admitted that the last government had failed to get a grip on the problem. The cable revealed that Washington was told that politicians had allowed “Londonistan” to develop.

According to the cable, obtained by the WikiLeaks website, and passed on to London’s Daily Telegraph, a former military attaché to the Algerian Embassy in Washington told US diplomats that Britain had been warned years ago to stop granting asylum to members of two “very dangerous” terrorist groups. An Algerian politician said Britain invited the attacks by “aligning itself with the devil,” as stated in a cable sent five days after the attacks on July 12, 2005. The attaché asked: “Did the English consider the risks of allowing Londonistan to develop? The British thought that sheltering terrorists was a good solution, but they did not realize that one can never align oneself with the devil, and they did precisely that for years and years.”

Londonistan

Britain’s Londonistan is a hydra-headed monster, fed and harbored by British intelligence. For instance, another set of Wikileaks documents provides narratives from a detainee, Al-Afghani, about how Osama bin Laden, surrounded by American troops, escaped from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan in early December of 2001. In addition to this account, CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said that he was given an account of this by Noman Benotman, then, a senior figure in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which had ties to al-Qaeda. Benotman was in phone contact with Abu Leith al Libbi, a Libyan al-Qaeda official close to bin Laden, after 9/11.

Benotman told Cruickshank, that when planning his exit, bin Laden knew not to trust local people across the border in Pakistan—a lawless area where criminals and drug traffickers would not have thought twice about trading the al-Qaeda leader for the $25 million bounty offered by the United States.

No matter how much filtering of this story has been done, it is evident that Benotman was involved in the effort to find a safe passage for Osama. Benotman is now a senior analyst at the Quilliam Foundation, a UK counterterrorism think tank.

The Quilliam Foundation was created by Tony Blair & Co, when the British Prime Minister was under pressure to outlaw the Islamic terrorist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT), which was already banned in Germany, and all the Central Asian “-stan” nations, among many other countries. Since HuT is an asset of Londonistan, Blair, and Gordon Brown later, hemmed and hawed about lack of evidence needed to brand it a terrorist outfit, and then set up Quilliam, run by “ex-HuT” senior members.

Benotman is a senior analyst of the Foundation, established by Maajid Nawaz, Ed Husain, and Rashad Zaman Ali. Both Ali and Nawaz are former members of the UK-headquartered Islamist HuT, and Husain studied with the group or group members. The creation of the Quilliam Foundation by Blair & Co. was aimed at legitimizing the HuT. Now, the funds and donations to this foundation are surely finding their way to the HuT, and at the same time, Quilliam, an MI5/MI6 front, functions ostensibly as the watchdog, so that the HuT never gets blamed for any terrorist act.

In the context of the current conflict in Libya, the role of Benotman and other LIFG members assimilated into Quilliam should be of interest. Although the LIFG, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists as a functioning organization, some of its members in recent weeks have taken advantage of the recent chaos in Libya to form a new political organization, al-Haraka al-Islamiya Lil Taghier, the Islamic Movement for Change.

This group’s spokesman, a former LIFG member (not named) based in London, has appeared on al-Jazeera, and expressed support for international intervention to remove Qaddafi. Quilliam, acting as the mediator, claims that the spokesman holds positive views about Mohammed Abdul Jalil, the head of the Transitional Government in Benghazi.

Thus, while the non-existent LIFG, as an organization, cannot be considered to be involved in the opposition to Qaddafi, some of its members are actively involved in the political opposition to Qaddafi on behalf of Britain. In other words, Britain, using the HuT and Quilliam Foundation, is busy trying to get control of Libya after the removal of Muammar Qaddafi.

The author is South Asian Analyst at Executive Intelligence Review News Services Inc.