Princess Di: An Enemy of The people?
Published December 10, 2006
LONDON — An official British report into the 1997 car crash that killed Princess Diana will say the U.S. Secret Service was bugging her phone on the night of her death, according to the London newspaper the Observer.
[ ... ]
The paper said Stevens would report that the U.S. Secret Service was bugging Diana's phone without the approval of its British counterpart on the night of her death. [emphasis mine]
This is more than a little bit bizarre. The Secret Service is under the jurisdiction of the Treasury; they are charged with protecting the President and his family, and nabbing counterfeiters.
Did Princess Diana pose a threat to (then) President Bill Clinton, or was her expensive lifestyle funded with fake $20's run-off a press in the basement of Buckingh
am Palace? Neither has a plausible sound. Nor does it sound believable that her companion, Saudi jillionaire Dodi Fayed, posed any threat to the president or American currency.
This would have the sound of comical prurience on the part of bureaucrats with too much time on their hands and too little supervision if, at the very same time, the September 11th planning hadn't been underway right under Uncle Sam's nose.
It's not unusual for the intelligence services of friendly countries to undertake chores for each other that, for one reason or another, the other can't. The CIA is forbidden to spy on American citizens within the United States, for instance; the British might do the spying for the CIA, then, and give the CIA whatever it learns — and vice versa. The United States might do some spying in England that a British intelligence agency is forbidden to undertake, that is, and then turn over the results. But according to the news story, this was an American solo act; the British didn't know about the spying and, presumably, weren't being given whatever intelligence the spying produced.
We have to be realistic about the fact that we live in a dangerous world, and that governments are sometimes obliged to be ... expedient. But expediencies tend swiftly to become the norm, degrading the safeguards of law. A thorough airing is in order.
- Princess Di: An Enemy of The people?
- Published: December 10, 2006
- Type: Opinion
- Section: Politics
- Filed Under: Politics: Government, Politics: International, Politics: Law and Rights
- Writer: Bob Felton
- Bob Felton's BC Writer page
- Bob Felton's personal site
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Comments on this articleComments
What's interesting about this is that the Observer claims to have gotten the leaked info from Scotland Yard - not any of the M organizations. Even more interesting is that the CIA feels compelled to deny the story, which is so ludicrous that if they'd kept their mouths shut, everyone would assume it was just more typical British tabloidism & ignored it. By responding at all, they raise the question in my mind at least, why on earth do they feel they have to deny it? Hmmmmmm....
I suppose it's feasible there was US involvement. But why? The mother of the future King of England having an affair with a Saudi millionaire ... perhaps therein lies the key. Despite all the conspiracy theories surrounding her death (which I suspect are in reality really about a nation's inability to accept the very human nature of the death of a person they loved), I remain sceptical about their veracity.
What is not in doubt is that Henri Paul, the driver of the vehicle, was a man known to have had a drinking problem and who chose to drive with a very high level of alcohol in his blood that night. It's common for alcoholics to be able to seeem normal when they have drunk enough to flatten most people.
And as I've said above, the other key factor in all this is that she wasn't wearing a seat belt. That should be a salutary lesson in my view.
Yet I don't doubt that MI 5 or another of Britain's ultra-secretive and shadowy security agencies had been keeping tabs on them as they are past masters in the spying game. Mother of the future King and all ... had they not, they wouldn't have been doing their jobs.
This reminds me of an X-Files episode where Mulder was being punished for some infraction or other by being assigned to monitor/spy on all the phone calls of some extemely boring & mundane person. Not that Pcss Di was boring or mundane, but it's pretty unlikely she was doing anything interesting to anyone who wasn't into celebrity watching. Aside from her great outfits, I never had much interest in her activities, myself.
I think we all know the answer: Clinton wanted to "meat her" and just needed to know how she felt about cigars.
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I'd be treating with a grain of salt much of what The Observer might come up with.
And British intelligence agencies aren't forbidden to spy on Britons in Britain if a threat is perceived - just as the FBI isn't forbidden to do the same thing in the US.
There are two different agencies that come under the MI (the Directorate of Military Intelligence) heading: MI6, which despite being James Bond's spy agency actually does exist and is Britain's spy organisation outside the UK, the equivalent of the CIA, while its companion is MI5, set up as a counter-intelligence organisation to look for threats inside the UK (ie: monitoring of Soviet and eastern bloc spies during the Cold War, keeping tabs on IRA bombers, and in today's climate, monitoring the activities of would-be jihadist terrorists).
Both obviously work closely together.
I guess it's feasible that because bugging the mother of the future King of England might be a tad sensitive, MI5 might have recruited their mates in the CIA to do some bugging for them ... just so they could look people in the eye and say they never bugged Diana, nor asked anyone to.
But you'd really have to ask yourself why the Secret Service would bother bugging Diana. Perhaps there were plans for her to meet the Clintons in the future, and they wanted to get a handle on Didi Fayed.
Who knows? However, I'd suggest the real story here is that The Observer was having a really slow news day and has expertly mix-mastered this into more it deserves.
The Observer is right about one thing: Diana was killed by a drunken driver and died because she wasn't wearing a seatbelt.
That's the real story, full stop.