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Sacoolas's privileges are a product of the operations of a vast imperial network

THE police boss who told the family of Harry Dunn — the teenage motorcyclist killed outside a US spy base in Northamptonshire — that their legal representative should exercise “restraint” went far beyond the competence of a public servant when confronted with a grieving family who have lost their son in a road traffic incident involving a US citizen now fled from the jurisdiction.

The job of law enforcement officers must be to investigate and monitor the movements of anyone reasonably suspected of involvement in a death.

Northamptonshire Police Chief Constable Nick Adderley gives no convincing explanation of the failure of his force to do so.

The bare facts are that young Harry died after he was in collision with a car on the wrong side of the road.

In defending his actions Adderley told a press conference two days ago that “if the circumstances remained the same and the same again happened we would take the same course of action.”

This is a barefaced attempt to gloss over the fact that between the incident and the much-deferred date at which the family were told that the driver involved has fled to North America, the police contrived to give the impression that the fugitive Anne Sacoolas enjoyed immunity from prosecution accorded by the status which diplomats enjoy.

It now seems that her entitlement to this protection is questioned and the suggestion that it is extended to her by virtue of her husband’s status is also surrounded by a studied ambiguity.

Jonathan Sacoolas works for a joint CIA/National Security Agency that functions from what is the ludicrously named “RAF” Croughton, which operates as part of a chain of spy stations across the globe.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s reputation was further shredded after he admitted that the US told Britain that they would remove Anne Sacoolas before it happened.

The time by which Harry’s family were told of Anne Sacoolas’s flight — which took place via a military transport rather than a commercial airline is the surmise — was filled with a desperate scramble by police in collusion with less public organs of the state and the Foreign and Defence Ministries — to spread confusion and disinformation.

This typifies the panic that sets in when the subterranean operations of the secret state are revealed.

The joke in police circles is that if a police chief constable ascended to heaven the Lord Almighty would find his celestial authority challenged by people who are so habituated to exercising untrammelled authority that they cannot comprehend a hierarchy which they do not command. 

But we can be assured that this particular cop is the front man for more powerful organs of state.

The Dunn family are showing that they are no more likely to bend at the knee to the wishes of authority here. They deserve our support and their crowd-funded legal appeal needs our cash.

The paralysis of our supplicant state and its servants when the interests of the bigger imperial power are in play is so much a part of political convention that it doesn’t occur to politicians and the rich and powerful that this is felt as intolerable by many millions.

Extra-territorial privileges for “visiting” US spooks are the inevitable accompaniment to the unsupervised operations of a vast imperial network. 

Over the last decade opposition to imperial war became the common sense response of the British people. 

Waging such wars is not possible without this massive infrastructure of subversion and surveillance that accompanies our country’s membership of Nato.

The logical next step is to get out.

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