Last week Britain and France basked in the limelight at a Paris conference on the future of Libya. This week the relationship between Britain and the new Libya appeared more problematic.
A Libyan rebel commander in Tripoli has claimed that UK intelligence agents betrayed him to the Qaddafi regime, knew he was being tortured, but did nothing to help him.
Abdul Hakim Belhadj is threatening to sue the British Government for 1,000,000 pounds for its alleged involvement in the accusations against him, his capture and subsequent imprisonment in 2004.
As part of his interrogation Belhadj claims he was injected with truth drugs and hung by his wrists in Tripoli while his interrogators questioned him on Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts. At one point, he says, he was questioned by a British agent during the interrogation.
The files appear to blow the lid off years of obfuscation and outright denials that Britain was involved in the illegal transfer of those suspected of terror to countries that engaged in torture.
Captured documents show that the British Special Air Service – SAS whose heroics helped direct NATO Airstrikes on Qaddafi's forces, were involved in training the Khamis Brigade, commanded by one of the dictator's sons who was killed in the fighting. The brigade is accused of committing atrocities in the conflict. Some members of the brigade even underwent training in Britain.
However the Belhadj affair cuts both ways. He was no innocent bystander and the intelligence services became interested in him after he fought with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and was a founding member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).
MI6 and the CIA claim that the LIFG was allied to al-Qaeda and its goal was the overthrow of Qaddafi and the establishment of an Islamist state in North Africa.
History is replete with cases of a major power training a military force only to have to fight that same force later on.
The Americans helped supply the Vietnamese communist guerrillas when they were fighting the Japanese. The Americans aided the Islamic fighters against the Russians in Afghanistan. The Russians supplied Nazi Germany with strategic raw materials for Hitler's attack on Russia.
The question is how these revelations will affect the future tenor of Britain's relations with Libya. British Prime Minister David Cameron has no problems with a full-fledged investigation of Britain's relations with Qaddafi, since, after all, they occurred under his Labour government predecessors.