In the wake of the May 22, 2017 Manchester Arena Bombing a number of highly revealing articles were published that exposed direct western government responsibility for training, aiding and financing the al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliated terrorist groups involved in the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 and beyond. These important articles and videos below detail specific western actions that have now led to the 9/11 style “blowback’ of the Manchester Arena bombing. Although the most important excerpt’s are highlighted here, I recommend reading each article in its entirety in order to ascertain the clear larger picture.
Article 1 –
Excerpt 1:
Last Monday, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anit-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans (including one who was under house arrest), “was allowed to go [to Libya], no questions asked,” to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, as Max Blumenthal puts it, in his excellent Alternet piece, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. This was a tough bunch, and everybody—including the cops and Salman’s Muslim neighbors—knew they weren’t the Jets and the Sharks. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”
Could it be any clearer? The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by “the West” to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.
Excerpt 2 – Regarding US politics and the current cognitive dissonance amongst red team/blue team politically divided and conquered US citizens……
Manchester is the latest iteration of a scenario we’ve gone through so many times now, like some groundhog-day dream. At the end of my post two years ago, I was urging and hoping that Americans would wake up. But a lot of American liberals and lefties, including Berniebots, still like to imagine there’s a political space they can inhabit called Progressive Except Imperialism. There isn’t. Imperialism with Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare—even single-payer healthcare—is imperialism, and it’s reactionary and supremacist. Equal-opportunity imperialism is imperialism. African-American, women, Latinx, or LGBTQ presidents, generals, and drone operators do not make it any less criminal, or dangerous, or any less inevitably erosive of all those cherished progressive domestic programs.
Ignoring or putting aside what the U.S. does in Libya, or Iraq, or Syria, or Palestine because…Trump! The Republicans! is ignoring a fundamental element of a progressive politics as well as an immediate danger to the country. One can do it, but those who do, can’t claim to be seriously confronting the horrors of a tragedy like Manchester, no matter how many tears they shed.
The article below is by world renowned investigative war correspondent John Pilger and must be read in its entirety to grasp the full scope of western culpability for the Manchester Arena bombing……..
Article 2 –
Terror in Britain: What Did the Prime Minister Know? by John Pilger
Excerpt 1 – Pertaining to the actions of Theresa May and David Cameron:
The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy. Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”.
The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years. The LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organisation which seeks a “hardline Islamic state” in Libya and “is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida”.
The “smoking gun” is that when Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in “battle”: first to remove Mu’ammar Gadaffi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.
The Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain’s biggest weapons customer.
Excerpt 2 pertaining to the actions of MI5 and the US government under the leadership of Barack Obama:
In 2011, according to Middle East Eye, the LIFG in Manchester were known as the “Manchester boys”. Implacably opposed to Mu’ammar Gadaffi, they were considered high risk and a number were under Home Office control orders – house arrest – when anti-Gadaffi demonstrations broke out in Libya, a country forged from myriad tribal enmities. Suddenly the control orders were lifted. “I was allowed to go, no questions asked,” said one LIFG member. MI5 returned their passports and counter-terrorism police at Heathrow airport were told to let them board their flights.
The overthrow of Gaddafi, who controlled Africa’s largest oil reserves, had been long been planned in Washington and London. According to French intelligence, the LIFG made several assassination attempts on Gadaffi in the 1990s – bank-rolled by British intelligence. In March 2011, France, Britain and the US seized the opportunity of a “humanitarian intervention” and attacked Libya. They were joined by Nato under cover of a UN resolution to “protect civilians”.
Last September, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry concluded that then Prime Minister David Cameron had taken the country to war against Gaddafi on a series of “erroneous assumptions” and that the attack “had led to the rise of Islamic State in North Africa”. The Commons committee quoted what it called Barack Obama’s “pithy” description of Cameron’s role in Libya as a “shit show”.
In fact, Obama was a leading actor in the “shit show”, urged on by his warmongering Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and a media accusing Gaddafi of planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew… that if we waited one more day,” said Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world”.
Article 3 –
Alternet article by Max Blumenthal
The Manchester bombing is blowback from the West’s disastrous interventions and covert proxy wars
Lead excerpt highlights UK government responsibility for Manchester Arena attack:
The heinous suicide bombing by British-born Salman Abedi of an Arianna Grande concert in Manchester was not merely the work of an “evil loser,” as Donald Trump called it. It was blowback from interventionist policies carried out in the name of human rights and “civilian protection.” Through wars of regime change and the arming and training of Islamist proxy groups, the US, UK and France played out imperial delusions across the Middle East. In Syria and Libya, they cultivated the perfect petri dish for jihadist insurgency, helping to spawn weaponized nihilists like Abedi intent on bringing the West’s wars back home.
The son of anti-Qaddafi immigrants to the UK, Abedi grew up in Manchester’s community of Libyan exiles. A report in the London Telegraph indicated that he had traveled just weeks before his attack to Libya, where Salafi-jihadi militias are competing for control of the destabilized country. Abedi had also reportedly traveled to Syria to join up with the extremist rebels that have waged a six-year-long insurgency against the country’s government, with billions of dollars in assistance from the West and its Gulf allies. According to French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, it was in these conflict zones where Abedi was radicalized.
The impressionable 22-year-old returned to the UK with enough training to make a fairly sophisticated bomb that massacred 22 concert goers, many of them children. “It seems likely — possible — that he wasn’t doing this on his own,” Britain’s home secretary, Amber Rudd, told the BBC. She described the bomb as “more sophisticated than some of the attacks we’ve seen before.” According to the Telegraph, “A group of Gaddafi dissidents, who were members of the outlawed Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), lived within close proximity to Abedi in Whalley Range.” They included Abd al-Baset Azzouz, an expert bomb maker who controls an Al Qaeda-affiliated militia in eastern Libya.
2nd important excerpt covers well the actions of John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Nicolas Sarkozy:
When the Libyan uprising broke out in March 2011, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates immediately pumped arms and logistical support into the armed opposition. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saw the insurgency as an opportunity for America to assert its influence amidst the tumult of the Arab Spring. She advocated arming the rebels on the grounds that Washington could get “skin in the game,” according to her Middle East advisor, Dennis Ross. Ignoring warnings from NATO’s supreme allied commander Adm. James Stavridis about the presence of Al Qaeda in the opposition, President Barack Obama approved shipments of TOW missiles, armored Humvees, and advanced radar systems to the Libyan insurgents.
When she learned of the newly up-armed rebels’ rapid advances, Clinton reportedly exclaimed, “Good! This is the only language that Qaddafi is understanding.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a subject of Qatari political influence and alleged bribery over the 2022 FIFA World Cup vote, urged his Western allies to “ask our Arab friends” to distribute weapons to the National Transitional Council, the official body of the Libyan opposition. When a French shipment of missiles and machine guns arrived through the port of Benghazi, the NTC’s acting defense minister handed them over to Belhaj and the LIFG.
As the insurgency gathered steam, Belhaj found a powerful ally in John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. After a friendly meeting with Belhaj and his militiamen in Benghazi on April 22, 2011, McCain called on “responsible nations” to provide the Libyan rebels with “battlefield intelligence, training, and weapons.” McCain emerged from the meeting stirred with inspiration. “I met these courageous fighters, and they are not al-Qaeda,” the senator proclaimed. “To the contrary: they are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation. We need to help them do that.”
More at link above…..
Below I will highlight an important series of videos that also documents the direct culpability of western powers in the destabilization and war in Libya utilizing terrorist groups.
This informative May 2016 video from the South Front geopolitical analysis group covered well the western government support for al-Qaeda leader Abdul Hakim Belhaj in Libya when putting together a post war start up government that included known terrorists.
The video above proves quite clearly that the west does indeed negotiate with terrorists. Not only do they negotiate with then, they reward them handsomely with large sums of money and powerful political positions.
Insightful comment at the linked above video:
Simplified Western coup formula –
Step 1: Stir an uprising utilizing nefarious proxy groups, then kill the leader of the sovereign (prosperous) nation, after lying your way into the airspace of that country under total BS pretext using social media groups suck as Soros funded MoveOn and Avaaz (just like Syria and Ukraine, but got pulled back due to Russia intervening on behalf of the NATO targeted country).
Step 2: Quickly install a puppet regime while blanketing the media with distractions and false stories, if not implemented quickly, start to create confusion by blaming ”allies” who also committed the illegal act of war in order to achieve the coup, and start giving more influential roles to influential terrorist scum (who we were hoping would just kill each other off) in order to create a semi-puppet government that allows for time and maneuverability. General public now stands completely confused about root causes and actions inside the affected country.
Step 3: Ultimately get this proxy terrorist ”government” to ”invite” the NATO tyrannic army and create bases for an indefinite stay in order to further project power down into sub-Sahara Africa.
Thus, coup accomplished via terrorist scum proxy group detour. Blowback inevitable.
Additional May 2016 video by South Front exposes the expansion of ISIS in Libya after NATO toppled Gaddafi…….
More from South Front here –
At the 4:32 mark in the following South Front video the narrator warns that “the growing destabilization in Libya will also increase the illegal immigration flow to Europe, and moreover, the Mediterranean migration route opens a highway for terrorists aiming to set up sleeper terrorist cells or conduct terrorist actions across the whole of Europe”
Whitney Webb at Mint Press News rounds out the real narrative on UK grooming of terrorists from Libya……
Article 4 –
Manchester Bomber May Have Been Groomed By UK Intelligence
The alleged perpetrator of last week’s bombing in Manchester has been linked to a Libyan terror group that has been aided in the past by British intelligence authorities – a fact that has been conveniently ignored by mainstream media, despite their intense coverage of the attack.
By Whitney Webb | May 27, 2017
MANCHESTER — As the worst terrorist attack to hit the United Kingdom since 2005, last week’s bombing of a concert in Manchester has since been a constant fixture of the news cycle both in the UK and abroad. Absent from mainstream media accounts of the event – and the man allegedly behind it – are several key coincidences that have raised concerns, particularly regarding links between British intelligence and the alleged suicide bomber, British-born Salman Abedi.
Absent from mainstream media accounts of the event, however – and the man allegedly behind it – are several key coincidences that have raised concerns, particularly regarding links between British intelligence and the alleged suicide bomber, British-born Salman Abedi.
Media reports have already established that Abedi, a Libyan national, was radicalized in the hotbed of radical extremism that Libya has become since the U.S.-NATO backed invasion that ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Though most mainstream accounts don’t mention the UK’s role in destabilizing and overthrowing the Libyan government in 2011 – that is, causing Libya’s current state of chaos by arming right-wing rebels who now make up al-Qaeda and ISIS – several have mentioned the link between Abedi and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).
More at link above……
Additional Clarity of Signal post on the plight of sub-Saharan Africans in Libya post NATOs intervention –
CNN caught lying about the plight of sub-Saharan Africans in Libya- Clinton’s war
Clarity of Signal 