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It's always "them"...not "us"

It is intriguing how the default position of the US and its allies is that it is "they" who are involved in dastardly acts (terrorism, killing innocent people, rendition, etc. etc) but not "us".
The latest example of how even the two best and closest friends conduct themselves when the subject of rendition surfaces.....

"American intelligence agencies including the CIA and the FBI have won a court ruling allowing them to withhold evidence from British MPs about suspected UK involvement in "extraordinary rendition" – the secret arrests and alleged torture of terror suspects.

A judge in Washington DC granted permission for key US intelligence bodies, including the highly sensitive National Security Agency, to exploit a loophole in US freedom of information legislation which bars the release of documentation to any body representing a foreign government."

****

"The Americans' success in resisting the MPs' inquiries will fuel the controversy over the cover-up of the role said to have been played by British intelligence operatives in spiriting away fugitives and suspects with ministerial approval to secret jails and authoritarian regimes, in particular to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya.

Files discovered by The Independent last summer in the abandoned Tripoli offices of Gaddafi's intelligence chief showed a close working relationship with Britain. Claims also emerged this week that British agents initiated the extraordinary rendition of a Libyan couple, Fatima Bouchar and Abdelhakim Belhaj, to Tripoli, where they were imprisoned and, in the case of Mr Belhaj, allegedly tortured. A letter from Sir Mark Allen, then head of counter-terrorism at MI6, to Moussa Koussa, the head of Libyan intelligence, said: "The intelligence about Abu'Abd Allah [a nom de guerre for Mr Belhaj] was British."

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