Many British critics of the action, which resulted in the deaths of 323 Argentinian sailors, see the sinking as a war crime.
These critics, who are invariably on the far Left, and include the former Labour MP Sir Tam Dalyell and the former Ministry of Defence civil servant Clive Ponting, argue that the Belgrano represented no threat, and was actually sailing away from the 200-mile Total Exclusion Zone declared by the British around the Falkland Islands.
In their eyes, the action was a disgraceful act of provocation by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher designed to escalate the conflict.
However, a new book reveals that these critics have been wrong all along, and the Belgrano was indeed a fair target, not least because — it now emerges — it had been ordered to proceed into the Exclusion Zone at the time it was attacked.
In The Silent Listener, the book’s author Major David Thorp recounts how in 1984 he was ordered by Mrs Thatcher to carry out an investigation — never published — into the circumstances of the sinking.
Given access to every document related to the Belgrano, Thorp, a member of a highly-secret signals-intercept unit during the Falklands War, describes in his book how he found an Argentinian signal intercepted by the British in which the Belgrano was ordered to rendezvous with other Argentinian warships at a location east of the islands, and well inside the Exclusion Zone.
This crucial new evidence flies in the face of what is often claimed by many Argentinians and their useful idiots among the British Left — that the Belgrano was heading back to her home port when she was sunk, and that she did not represent a threat to the British Task Force.
Nearly three decades later, it is now possible to tell the full story of the General Belgrano, and to show that the sinking, although horrific, was a justifiable act of war that probably saved more lives than it claimed.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2080490/Belgrano-Britain-WAS-right-sink-ship-attacked-Task-Force.html#ixzz1i5YlHlIz
