Freesteel Blog » Opposition friends of Simon Mann

Opposition friends of Simon Mann

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 11:30 am Written by:

It’s outrageous. A mere five months after his ordinary rendition from Zimbabwe to Equatorial Guinea, Simon Mann suffered an unfair trial that lasted three weeks and found him guilty of something for which he was caught red-handed and has continued to confess to, providing evidence that is consistent with many other facts on the ground.

Clearly, Simon Mann was trying to cause a public emergency threatening the life of the government nation, and in a civilized country like Britain, this would get officially declared so that those guys who were a threat to the nation could be held in captivity indefinitely without taking them to trial or even telling anyone exactly what they had done wrong.

Timelines of this plot have been printed in the press. But this single link gives you a timeline for what’s been happening in the UK Parliament about this important issue of a colleague and friend in need.

Then our man from the Campain for Nuclear Weapons, Julian Lewis, went berserk and had 9 questions answered on 18 February 2008. The issue at hand was the sudden transfer of Simon Mann from Zimbabwe to Equatorial Guinea when the appeals case against extradition had not been fully exhausted in the Zimbabwe courts.

Man, you’ve got problems if you’re fighting to stay within the jurisdiction of the Zimbabwean courts!

One of Lewis’s questions was:

Will the Secretary of State “make representations to the United States Administration requesting it to exert its influence on Equatorial Guinea to secure the safe return of Simon Mann.”

You see, the problem was, Simon Mann wasn’t going to get a fair trial in Equatorial Guinea of the kind that Mark Thatcher got in South Africa, where he was allowed to confess to something no one believed was possible (ie that he gave money away to a humanitarian cause and accidentally bought a tactical weapons system), pay some cash, and run home to mummy.

That’s the issue at stake.

Lewis isn’t concerned about those British citizens who were in Guantanamo Bay. There’s this strange concept that the bad guys are all powerful, and, for example, because al-Zarqawi was not arrested in Iraq 2004, the whole US bombing of Falluja was a response to the havoc this single guy was causing.

I mean, the amount of damage that can plausibly be caused by someone who is being evil must relate to the quantity of resources he has at his disposal. And Mann connects to a lot more resources than al-Zarqawi. Also, Mann’s removal from the field of battle was followed by no coup against the government of Equatorial Guinea. Meanwhile, after the 2006 photo of al-Zarqawi’s mutilated corpse was tastefully framed in gold by the US military, the war in Iraq quickly drew down, didn’t it?

Now, Simon Mann hasn’t yet been killed and had the photo of his corpse put up on display, but Julian Lewis was sure of the threat:

“My constituent, Mr. Simon Mann, has been illegally handed over by Zimbabwe to a dictator in Equatorial Guinea who has promised to sodomise him, skin him alive and drag him through the streets of the capital city. What steps can the Government take against Zimbabwe for the outrageous breach of my constituent’s human rights when he was handed over before his appeal procedures were completed.”

And it went on.

What more to say?

Well, the fingerprints of a campaign are scattered all across the Official Record, if one cares to look for them. And each incident makes its mark and leaves a permanent blemish on the fool who took part in the process.

Now there’s nothing wrong with standing up for individual and unpopular causes like this one, just as there’s nothing wrong with donating a helicopter air-ambulance to an impoverished African country who may or may not benefit from the generosity.

Mistakes happen.

But form means something, and can be found in the evidence.

If Henry Bellingham’s and Julian Lewis’s concern for due process of the law extends to certain privileged individuals, and not to other more blatant cases which ought to demand their attention, then maybe their cries for human rights are not as helpful as they seem.

There are other cases, someone else can go into. Maybe starting with Natwest Three. Here’s the wikipedia article.

The tools and the techniques are now all here. Essentially it’s about getting a complete assessment of the wider context, and observing which cases are chosen from it for focused attention, and asking why.

It dries down to the single question when you hear of a politician going on about something:

What are they not going on about?

1 Comment

  • 1. Freesteel&hellip replies at 18th June 2009, 9:47 am :

    […] Kremlin would have been safe had they not published the GPS coordinates of Moscow on the map), but here’s an earlier blog post about his defence of the international man of mercenary Simon […]

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