PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche-Slanderer Baroness Symons Swimming in the BAE Mire
June 8, 2007 (EIRNS)—The following release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.
Baroness Elizabeth Symons arranged for the British government to run the case of student Jeremiah Duggan, whose suicide was made over into a grotesque slander of Lyndon LaRouche, implying murder.
The Baroness has been extremely sensitive about the $2 billion BAE bribery cover-up scandal now pressing on the Blair regime. As Tony Blair's special emissary to Saudi Arabia, she was in that country last February 25 when Reuters news asked her why Blair had stopped the Serious Fraud Office investigation of BAE. She asserted that the agency had found no evidence of bribery! She went on, "the reason they did not find anything is because there was nothing to find."
The Baroness is chairman of the Saudi-British Business Council. In a story printed February 27, Symons noted that Britain is the second largest investor in Saudi Arabia. She claimed that "these relationships are very strong indeed and they are enduring. I think [the BAE bribery scandal] is a thing of the past, it is closed here and closed by the United Kingdom."
Baroness Symons was already deeply into international arms intrigues as early as 1998. Then a Foreign Office minister, she was blasted for misleading the Parliament over sanctions-busting sales of weapons to catastrophically war-torn Sierra Leone. As Tony Blair's Minister of State for Defence Procurement from 1999 to mid-2003, Baroness Symons pushed British arms sales in the Middle East and South Asia. She negotiated and approved a $200-billion contract with Lockheed Martin, just before the company's board member Lynne Cheney saw her husband inaugurated U.S. Vice President. Symons is a leading member of the British-American Project for a Successor Generation, that coordinates strategy between Cheney-neoconservative circles and the City of London oligarchy.
She ran British military procurement when the governemnt privatized QinetiQ, a giant defense company supplying Iraq War weapons, and turned it over to the Bush family's Carlyle Group, BAE's American partner company, after which sales of Qinetic's armor and copters through Symons' ministry could enrich them all.
In 2003 the London Observer exposed Symons' role in a scheme to sell BAE jets containing U.S.-made engines to Iran, an attempted end-run around U.S. sanctions.
British lawyer David Mills (husband of Culture Secretary Theresa Jowell) asked Baroness Symons to help him arrange the deal which he was nailing down with his business partners in Iran. Symons inquired with her friends in Washington, and then wrote to Mills, on Government letterhead:
"Dear David- Given the obvious political sensitivities you will need to tread very carefully with this one. This is a difficult time to be raising Iran policy in Washington. The advice I have been given ... is that our official support for you with the administration would raise the profile of the case and, by so doing, increase the chance of eliciting a negative response.
"So you will need to think very carefully about a lobbying strategy calibrated to achieve the right result. I am pleased that Allan Flood [the British Aerospace director] will be in Washington next week and that he will be calling on the Embassy to discuss this further. They are best placed to advise on next steps.
"If after that meeting, you need further advice or help from me, please let me know. Yours sincerely, Liz."
David Mills was subsequently charged with taking a $700,000 bribe to testify for Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, and money laundering and tax crimes. The Symons/BAE deal did not go through.
As Blair's special envoy to the Middle East, and "Special Envoy to the Two Kingdoms Dialogue between the UK and Saudi Arabia," Baroness Symons now coordinates "globalist" strategy of the City of London fianciers with Arab countries, and helps run security affairs for the Blair govenrment with respect to Middle Eastern regimes.
