Letters | 31 December 2015

What Blair omitted to say

Sir: Mr Blair’s latest in these pages, like his recent Foreign Affairs Committee appearance on Libya, papers over so much history that one hardly knows where to start (‘What I got right’, 12 December). His own Libyan history will do. We all know the ‘deal in the desert’, whereby Gaddafi relinquished a feeble ‘WMD’ programme to come in from the cold, lift the sanctions, and pave the way for oil deals. What was not known until 2011 was the real price of this bargain. The price was a UK-US-Libyan conspiracy to kidnap two whole families from exile and ship them to Gaddafi.

Had we not seen the proof in black and white after the dictator’s fall, who would have believed it? But documents don’t lie. In them, Blair’s counter-terror head cheerleads the delivery of the ‘air cargo’ — a Libyan dissident and his pregnant wife — to Gaddafi’s dungeons.