The Salvador Option exposed.Who's Blowing Up Iraq? Evidence shows that bombs are planted by occupation forces.
The Salvador Option exposed.
Who's Blowing Up Iraq? Evidence
shows that bombs are planted by occupation forces.
|
* BRussells Tribunal PDF Dossiers: Introduction to the "Salvador option" and Iraq's "death squads": * Dossier part ONE [PDF]: click here. * Dossier part TWO [PDF]: click here. * Dossier part THREE [PDF]: click here. * Dossier part FOUR [PDF]: click here. * Dossier part FIVE [PDF]: click here.
* Sarah Meyer articles and researches about Security Companies published by the BRussells Tribunal. |
Resources:
One case unraveled: British bombers in Basra.
Basra Shadowlands - The British Bombers - British bombs in Basra - Fake Terrorism Is a Coalition's Best Friend - Who's Blowing Up Iraq? New evidence that bombs are being planted by British - British Special Forces Caught Carrying Out Staged Terror In Iraq? - Were the British Soldiers Engaged in Counter-Insurgency Operation in Basra? - British “Pseudo-Gang” Terrorists Exposed in Basra - Carry on Killing - Middle East Press: "Suspicions occupation involved in armed operations against civilians and places of worship" - Further on arrest of two British soldiers in Basra - The day that Iraqi anger exploded in the face of the British occupiers - More Blatant Lies From CNN! - Five Iraqi civilians killed' in SAS rescue operation - Double Standards in Iraq; British Agents in Local Drag Saved by Cavalry - Agents Provocateurs? - Media Shifts Attention from SAS Screw Up to Iran - Where The Neocon Job Unraveled - What is Covert Action? - Big Trouble for British Occupation of Southern Iraq - Al-Sadr Official Says Staged Bombings Aimed at Starting Ethnic War - Pictures from the Basra "incident" - Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra? - What was the British SAS doing in Basra? - Basra; another milestone in war on terror - British Terrorism in Iraq - Iraqi border guards arrest British national in desert - Cars stolen in US cities used in Iraqi suicide attacks - British military investigator found hung in Basra - British Terrorism in Iraq
September 20, 2005
More details emerge on the most outrageous story from the Iraq occupation
since Abu Ghraib.
The last remaining public justification for
the U.S./U.K. occupation of Iraq is
terrorism:
The foreign forces cannot leave until Iraq is somewhat peaceful and the
terrorists
have been defeated.
That threadbare reasoning was ripped apart on Monday as the world -- other than the United States, where broadcast media avoided the story -- was shown two agents provocateurs employed by the British government. Their exact mission will never be proven. The evidence, however, is damning.
The two commandoes -- alternately identified as members of Britian's notorious SAS or a newer offshoot, the SRR -- were driving around a demonstration in Basra when their suspicious behavior attracted the attention of Basra police.
The Scotsman
now reports
that the men are members of the SRR, or Special Reconnaissance Regiment. The insignia shows a Greek helmet
with a sword thrust through the mouth and up through the back of the skull.
The
police attempted to stop the men, who were disguised as Arabs in local garb over their T-shirts and trousers.
The men wore black-hair wigs and, according to some reports, typical headresses.
And they also carried a whole lot of weapons, including explosives and other bomb-making materials. They began
firing at the police and passers-by.
At least one Basra policeman was shot dead. At least one person in the crowd was shot dead. An undetermined number of others were injured in the gunfight.
The British pair was jailed. Arab television showed the beaten men with bandages on their heads, and their huge collection of weaponry. Basra -- a relatively peaceful city compared to the rest of bloodsoaked Iraq -- had suddenly lost patience with the British occupiers, caught red-handed with all the tools necessary to launch "suicide bombs" against the people.
And then the British tanks rolled in ... and destroyed the jail, releasing 150 "terrorists" in the process. Whether the British commandoes were inside the jail is now disputed, as are most parts of the story, with Britian in damage-control mode and Iraq officials universally condeming the "barbaric" destruction of the jail and the suspected terrorist goals of the captured duo.
The city rioted against the tanks and troops, setting fire to at least one of the tanks.
U.K. media is now desperately backpedaling from the version of events reported by at least a dozen independent reporters working in Iraq, after reporting the same general events as other world media on Monday.
* * *
A spokesman for rebel Shia cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr said
the British commandoes were trying to pass themselves off as members of Sadr's rebel
militia.
Sheikh Hassan told Socialist Worker that the two undercover soldiers seized by Iraqi police last Monday were armed with explosives and a remote control detonator. The soldiers were disguised as members of Sadr's militia, the Mehdi Army.
The trouble started when a senior Sadr official was arrested on Sunday. "We called a protest outside the mayor’s office on Monday demanding the Sheikh be released," Sheikh Hassan said. "This protest was peaceful."
"But events in our city took a sinister turn when the police tried to stop two men dressed as members of the Mehdi Army driving near the protest. The men opened fire on the police and passers-by. After a car chase they were arrested."
"What our police found in their car was very disturbing — weapons, explosives and a remote control detonator," Sheikh Hassan said. "These are the weapons of terrorists. We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets, and thanks be to God they were stopped and countless lives were saved."
There are about 8,500 British troops in and around Basra. Four Iraqis died in the riots against the jailbreak mission. Also, a local reporter who wrote for the New York Times and The Guardian was found murdered after being abducted by mysterious gunmen.
Following the lead of its American partners, the British Ministry of Defense denied all wrongdoing, called the destruction of the jail "absolutely right," and blamed everything on a "civil war" developing (or Iran, depending on the mouthpiece) in southern Iraq.
www.sploid.com/news/2005/09/the_british_bom.php
September 21, 2005
I find myself increasingly becoming the old fogey of the conspiracy field. While the youngsters continue to
come up with new and exciting conspiracies, xymphora slowly deteriorates into a lousy debunking blog.
Witness the latest revelations from Basra. To
summarize,
two British soldiers, disguised as Arabs and with a car full of explosives, somehow find themselves in a
contretemps with an Iraqi policeman, shoot him dead, are arrested by local authorities, refuse to explain what
they were doing, end up in detention, and finally become the subject of negotiations between the British and
Iraqis concerning their release, 'negotiations' apparently meaning to the British driving up to the prison
with tanks and knocking the walls down (a fact which the British finally, but grudgingly, admitted), causing a
riot which results in civilian deaths and the escape of other prisoners (and the soldiers
weren't
even in the prison!). Everybody has come to the obvious conclusion that this is the first documented proof of
the fact that much of the sectarian violence in Iraq is the work of coalition agents provocateurs,
attempting to cause a civil war in Iraq. While I have no doubt that this
intentional
process
is going on elsewhere in Iraq (and largely to fit the Israeli agenda, described here many times before, of
breaking the country up into small, unthreatening statelets, with the additional motive of leading to the new
Israeli ally, the
Shi'ite
Empire, to counter the largely Sunni opposition to Israeli imperial plans), I doubt that the Basra case is an
example of it. There seems to be another conspiracy afoot.
The British have made a big deal of how much better they are than the Americans at shouldering the 'white man's burden' of policing their portion of Iraq. Of course, the Americans are so arrogant, culturally insensitive, and generally stupid, it is not difficult to do a better job. As well, the South is easier to police just because it is majority Shi'ite, and not interested in causing trouble for the central government. Nevertheless, it is true that the British have done a much better job than the Americans, and have some right to feel superior. And yet, just recently, everything has gone sideways. Here is the timeline:
In the early Spring, British officials anticipated that British troops would soon be withdrawing from Iraq.
In July, plans are leaked of a British plan to withdraw almost all British troops from Iraq (sending some of them to Afghanistan). This withdrawal would have started next month. Almost immediately, the deaths of British contractors is said to 'threaten' these plans.
In early August, journalist Steven Vincent, who worked for the New York Times, is found murdered outside of Basra. He had been shot and was found with his hands bound. Days before his death, he "had written an Op-Ed piece for The Times in which he criticized British security forces for failing to act against the Shiite militias' growing power in the local police force." It's unlikely, even given the ubiquity of the internet, that local militias would be on top of very recently published New York Times Op-Eds (although Vincent had written previously on the matter).
Normally quiescent Basra starts to become dangerous for British troops, and three are actually killed. While there has been a constant series of British deaths in Iraq, these most recent deaths seem to cause a new type of overreaction. On Sunday, September 18, the British arrest local leaders Sheik Ahmed Majid Farttusi and Sayyid Sajjad, arrests that almost certainly will lead to more trouble (Juan Cole has the timeline).
The British plans to withdraw are indefinitely cancelled, as conditions have worsened.
The two British soldiers are arrested near a protest arranged against the arrest of Sheik Ahmed Majid Farttusi, and rescued with a completely unnecessary, show of lethal violence.
Journalist Fakher Haider, who also worked for the New York Times, is found murdered on the same day as the British soldiers were arrested. He also had his hands bound and was shot. He had been taken away for 'questioning' by people claiming to be Iraqi police, a claim backed up by the fact they arrived in a police car (!). He "had recently reported on the growing friction and violence among Basra's rival Shiite militias, which are widely believed to have infiltrated the police." Now there are two murdered journalists in Basra, each of whom wrote about the growing power of Shi'ite militias in Basra (scuttlebutt that Steven Vincent's murder was related to his relationship with his Iraqi female translator seems to be disproved by the nature of the second murder). Local militia leaders would almost certainly have been unaware of the writings of these journalists (and you have to wonder why they would care if they did know). Somebody wants to remove Western journalists with good local contacts from Basra.
What I see here is an attempt to sabotage the British withdrawal, and the murders of both journalists may well be associated with this.
Creating sectarian violence doesn't really make sense in Basra, as the Zionist planners intend to keep the South whole, and part of the Shi'ite Empire. Causing trouble in Basra will only mess up those plans. On the other hand, setting a bomb off in Basra would have continued the campaign, started right after the announcement of withdrawal was made, to ensure that the British troops cannot be withdrawn from the South. Who benefits from non-withdrawal?:
the Americans, who would have been all alone in their battle against Islam once the British left;
elements in the British military, who so rarely get to be in a real war these days, are probably loathe having to go back to more endless marching drills in the rain (or, at best, in Afghanistan);
the international cadre of war financiers, who still derive considerable income from the British presence in Iraq; and
Tony Blair, who works for the financiers and has this extremely weird relationship with the United States (he seems to be under the misapprehension that he is Prime Minister of the United States).
I think there is a
conspiracy here, but not necessarily the obvious one.
xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/09/british-bombs-in-basra.html
September 20, 2005
Iraqi police recently caught two terrorists with a car full of explosives. Would it surprise you to learn
they were British Special Forces?
The story sounds amazing, almost fantastical.
A car driving through the outskirts of a besieged city opens fire on a police checkpoint, killing one. In pursuit, the police surround and detain the drivers and find the vehicle packed with explosives – perhaps part of an insurgent's plan to destroy lives and cripple property. If that isn't enough, when the suspects are thrown in prison their allies drive right up to the walls of the jail, break through them and brave petroleum bombs and burning clothes to rescue their comrades. 150 other prisoners break free in the ensuing melee.
Incredible, no? Yet this story took place in the southern Iraqi city of Basra recently. Violence continues to escalate in the breakout's aftermath... just not for the reasons you think.
You see, the drivers of the explosive-laden car were not members of an insurgency group – they were British Special Forces. Their rescuers? British soldiers driving British tanks.
That's right – two members of the British Armed forces disguised as Arab civilians killed a member of the Iraqi police while evading capture. When the people of Basra rightfully refused to turn the murderers over to the British government, per Coalition "mandate," they sent their own men in and released over 100 prisoners in the process.
Winning the hearts and minds, aren't we?
Sadly, this story is really not all that surprising. After hearing countless accounts of using napalm and torture against innocent civilians in addition to the other daily abuses dished out by American overseers, the thought of British scheming seems perfectly reasonable.
So what we have here is a clear instance of a foreign power attempting to fabricate a terrorist attack. Why else would the soldiers be dressed as Arabs if not to frame them? Why have a car laden with explosives if you don't plan to use them for destructive purposes? Iraq is headed towards civil war, and this operation was meant to accelerate the process by killing people and blaming others. Nothing more, nothing less. That the British army staged an over-the-top escape when it could rely on normal diplomatic channels to recover its people proves that.
Such extreme methods highlight the need to keep secrets.
There have been a number of insurgent bombings in Iraq recently. Who really is responsible for the bloodshed and destruction? The only tangible benefit of the bombings is justification for Coalition forces maintaining the peace in Iraq. Who benefits from that? Certainly not the Iraqis – they already believe most suicide bombings are done by the United States to prompt religious war. After reading about this incident, I'm not inclined to disagree.
Even though this false-flag operation was blown wide open, I'm afraid it might still be used in the mainstream media to incite further violence in the Middle East. Judging by the coverage that has emerged after the incident, my fears seem warranted.
Several articles have already turned the story against the angry Iraqis who fought the British tanks as they demolished the jail wall, painting them as aggressive Shia militia attacking the doe-eyed, innocent troops responding to the concern that their comrades were held by religious fanatics. A photograph of a troop on fire comes complete with commentary that the vehicles were under attack during a "bid to recover arrested servicemen" that were possibly undercover. All criminal elements of British treachery are downplayed, the car's explosive cache is never mentioned and the soldiers who instigated the affair are made victims of an unstable country they are defending.
Hilariously, all of this spin has already landed Iran at the top of the blame game. Because when the war combine botches its own clandestine terrorist acts, what better way to recover than by painting the soulless, freedom-hating country you'd love to invade next as the culprit? In a way, I almost admire the nerve of officials who are able to infer that Basra's riots have nothing to do with fake insurgent bombing raids and everything to do with religious ties to a foreign country. It's a sheer unmitigated gall that flies in the face of logic and reason.
"The Iranians are careful not to be caught," a British official said as the UK threatened to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for sanctions. Too bad the British aren't! Maybe then they'd be able to complete their black-ops mission without looking like complete fools in the process!
Make no mistake – any and all violence to erupt from Basra over this incident lands squarely on the shoulders of the British army and its special forces. Instead of stoking the flames of propaganda against a nation it has no hope of ever conquering, maybe Britain should quit trying to intimidate the Iraqis with fear and torture and start focusing on fixing its mistakes and getting out of the Middle East.
These actions are inexcusable and embarrassing; however, they should make you think. If a country like the United Kingdom is willing to commit acts of terror, what kind of false-flag operations do you think the United States is capable of?
If you thought the U.S. wouldn't blow up people it claims to support in the hopes of advancing its agenda, think again. Use this incident as your first reference point.
Canon Fodder is a weekly analysis of
politics and society.
www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/canon_fodder/0961_fake_terrorism_coalition_best_friend.html
September
20, 2005
"The Iraqi security officials on Monday variously accused two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi
forces or TRYING TO PLANT EXPLOSIVES." Washington Post, Ellen Knickmeyer, 9-20-05;
"British Smash into Jail to Free Two Detained Soldiers"
In more than two years since the United States initiated hostilities against Iraq, there has never been a
positive identification of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Never.
That doesn't mean that he doesn't exist; it simply suggests that prudent people will challenge the official
version until his whereabouts and significance in the conflict can be verified.
At present, much of the rationale for maintaining the occupation depends on this elusive and, perhaps,
illusory figure. It's odd how Al-Zarqawi appears at the precise coordinates of America's bombing-raids, and
then, miraculously vanishes unscathed from the scene of the wreckage. This would be a remarkable feat for
anyone, but especially for someone who only has one leg.
Al-Zarqawi may simply be a fantasy dreamed up by Pentagon planners to put a threatening face on the Iraqi
resistance. The Defense Dept has been aggressive in its effort to shape information in a way that serves the
overall objectives of the occupation. The primary aim of the Pentagon's "Strategic Information" program is to
distort the truth in a way that controls the storyline created by the media. Al-Zarqawi fits perfectly within
this paradigm of intentional deception.
The manipulation of information factors heavily in the steady increase of Iraqi casualties, too. Although the
military refuses "to do body counts"; many people take considerable interest in the daily death toll.
Last week, over 200 civilians were killed in seemingly random acts of violence purportedly caused by al-Zarqawi.
But, were they?
Were these massive attacks the work of al-Zarqawi as the western media reports or some other "more shadowy"
force?
One member of the Iraqi National Assembly. Fatah al-Sheikh, stated, "It seems that the American forces are
trying to escalate the situation in order to make the Iraqi people suffer.. There is a huge campaign for the
agents of the foreign occupation to enter and plant hatred between the sons of the Iraqi people, and spread
rumors in order to scare the one from the other. The occupiers are trying to start religious incitement and if
it does not happen, then they will try to start an internal Shiite incitement."
Al-Sheikh's feelings are shared by a great many Iraqis. They can see that everything the US has done, from the
forming a government made up predominantly of Shi'ites and Kurds, to creating a constitution that allows the
breaking up to the country (federalism), to using the Peshmerga and Badr militia in their attacks on Sunni
cities, to building an Interior Ministry entirely comprised of Shi'ites, suggests that the Pentagon's strategy
is to fuel the sectarian divisions that will lead to civil war. Al-Zarqawi is an integral facet of this
broader plan. Rumsfeld has cast the Jordanian as the agent-provocateur; the driving force behind religious
partition and antagonism.
But, al-Zarqawi has nothing to gain by killing innocent civilians, and everything to lose. If he does actually
operate in Iraq, he needs logistical supporting all his movements; including help with safe-houses,
assistants, and the assurance of invisibility in the community. ("The ocean in which he swims") These would
disappear instantly if he recklessly killed and maimed innocent women and children.
Last week the Imam of Baghdad's al-Kazimeya mosque, Jawad al-Kalesi said, that "al-Zarqawi is dead but
Washington continues to use him as a bogeyman to justify a prolonged military occupation. He's simply an
invention by the occupiers to divide the people." Al-Kalesi added that al-Zarqawi was killed in the beginning
of the war in the Kurdish north and that "His family in Jordan even held a ceremony after his death." (AFP)
Most Iraqis probably agree with al-Kalesi, but that hasn't deterred the Pentagon from continuing with the
charade. This is understandable given that al-Zarqawi is the last tattered justification for the initial
invasion. It's doubtful that the Pentagon will ditch their final threadbare apology for the war. But the
reality is vastly different from the spin coming from the military. In fact, foreign fighters play a very
small role in Iraq with or without al-Zarqawi. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
revealed this week in their report, "Analysts and government officials in the US and Iraq overstated the size
of the foreign element in the Iraqi insurgency.. Iraqi fighters made up less than 10% of the armed groups'
ranks, perhaps, even half of that." The report poignantly notes that most of the foreign fighters were not
previously militants at all, but were motivated by, "revulsion at the idea of an Arab land being occupied by a
non-Arab country."
The report concludes that the invasion of Iraq has added thousands of "fresh recruits to Osama bin Laden's
network;" a fact that is no longer in dispute among those who have studied the data on the topic.
The al-Zarqawi phantasm is a particularly weak-link in the Pentagon's muddled narrative. The facts neither
support the allegations of his participation nor prove that foreigners are a major contributor to the ongoing
violence. Instead, the information points to a Defense establishment that cannot be trusted in anything it
says and that may be directly involved in the terrorist-bombings that have killed countless thousands of Iraqi
civilians.
Regrettably, that is prospect that can't be ignored. After all, no one else benefits from the slaughter.
(Note: Since this article was written, the Washington Post has added to our suspicions. In an Ellen Knickmeyer
article "British
Smash into Iraqi Jail to free 2 detained Soldiers"
9-20-05, Knickmeyer chronicles the fighting
between British forces and Iraqi police who were detaining 2 British commandos. "THE IRAQI SECURITY OFFICIALS
ON MONDAY VARIOUSLY ACCUSED THE TWO BRITONS THEY DETAINED OF SHOOTING AT IRAQI FORCES or TRYING TO PLANT
EXPLOSIVES."
Is this why the British army was ordered to "burst through the walls of an Iraqi jail Monday in the southern
city of Basra".followed by "British armored vehicles backed by helicopter gun-ships" ending in "hours of gun
battles and rioting in Basra's streets"? (Washington Post)
Reuters reported that "half a dozen armored vehicles had smashed into the jail" and the provincial governor,
Mohammed Walli, told news agencies that the British assault was "barbaric, savage and irresponsible."
So, why were the British so afraid to go through the normal channels to get their men released?
Could it be that the two commandos were "trying to plant explosives" as the article suggests?
An
interview on Syrian TV
last night also alleges that the British commandos "were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets".
"Al-Munajjid] In fact, Nidal, this incident gave answers to questions and suspicions that were lacking
evidence about the participation of the occupation in some armed operations in Iraq. Many analysts and
observers here had suspicions that the occupation was involved in some armed operations against civilians and
places of worship and in the killing of scientists. But those were only suspicions that lacked proof. The
proof came today through the arrest of the two British soldiers while they were planting explosives in one of
the Basra streets. This proves, according to observers, that the occupation is not far from many operations
that seek to sow sedition and maintain disorder, as this would give the occupation the justification to stay
in Iraq for a longer period. [Zaghbur] Ziyad al-Munajjaid in Baghdad, thank you very much. Copyright Syrian
Arab TV and BBC Monitoring, 2005"
And then there was this on
Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, 9-19-05; Interview with Fattah al-Shayk,
member of the National Assembly and deputy for Basra.
."the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type.
It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra
in the popular market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then
fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence
Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are
still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime."<
Copyright Al Jazeera TV and BBC Monitoring, 2005 (Thanks to Michel Chossudovsky at
Global Research
for the quotes from Al Jazeera and Syrian TV)
Does this solve the al-Zarqawi mystery? Are the bombs that are killing so many Iraqi civilians are being
planted by British and American Intelligence?
We'll have to see if this damning story can be corroborated by other sources.)
Courtesy and Copyright © Mike Whitney
September 20, 2005
Media blackout shadows why black op soldiers were arrested
Paul Joseph Watson | September 20 2005
In another example of
how the Iraqi quagmire is deliberately designed to degenerate into a chaotic abyss, British SAS were caught
attempting to stage a terror attack and the media have dutifully shut up about the real questions surrounding
the incident.
What is admitted is that two British soldiers in Arab garb and head dress drove a car towards a group of Iraq police and began firing. According to the Basra governor Mohammed al-Waili, one policeman was shot dead and another was injured. Pictured below are the wigs and clothing that the soldiers were wearing.
The Arab garb is obviously undeniable proof that the operation, whatever its ultimate intention, was staged so that any eyewitnesses would believe it had been carried out by Iraqis.
This has all the indications of a frame up.
This is made all the more interesting by the fact that early reports cited as originating from BBC World Service radio stated that the car used contained explosives. Was this another staged car bombing intended to keep tensions high? As you will discover later, the plan to keep Iraq divided and in turmoil is an actual policy directive that spans back over two decades.
The
BBC reports
that the car did contain, "assault rifles, a light machine gun, an anti-tank weapon, radio gear and medical
kit. This is thought to be standard kit for the SAS operating in such a theatre of operations."
And are fake bushy black wigs and turbans standard kit for the SAS? What happened to the early reports of explosives? Why has the media relentlessly reported on the subsequent rescue effort and failed to address these key questions?
The soldiers were arrested and taken to a nearby jail where they were confronted and interrogated by an Iraqi judge.
The initial demand from the puppet authorities that the soldiers be released was rejected by the Basra government. At that point tanks were sent in to 'rescue' the terrorists and the 'liberated' Iraqis started to riot, firebombing and pelting stones at the vehicles injuring British troops as was depicted in this dramatic Reuters photo.
As the SAS were being rescued 150 prisoners escaped from the jail. Was this intentional or just a result of another botched black op?
From this point on media coverage was monopolized by accounts of the rescue and the giant marauding pink elephant in the living room, namely why the soldiers were arrested in the first place, was routinely ignored.
The only outlet to ask any serious questions was Australian TV news which according to one viewer gave, "credibility to the 'conspiracy theorists' who have long claimed many terrorist acts in Iraq are, in fact, being initiated and carried out by US, British and Israeli forces."
Iran's top military commander Brigadier General Mohammad-Baqer Zolqadr pointed the finger at the occupational government last week by publicly stating,
“The Americans blame weak and feeble groups in Iraq for insecurity in this country. We do not believe this and we have information that the insecurity has its roots in the activities of American and Israeli spies,” Zolqadr said.
“Insecurity in Iraq is a deeply-rooted phenomenon. The root of insecurity in Iraq lies in the occupation of this country by foreigners”.
“If Iraq is to become secure, there will be no room for the occupiers”.
That explanation has a lot of currency amongst ordinary Iraqis who have been direct witnesses to these bombings.
In the past we’ve asked questions about why so-called car bombings leave giant craters, in addition with eyewitness reports that helicopters were carrying out the attacks.
Throughout history we see the tactic of divide and conquer being used to enslave populations and swallow formerly sovereign countries by piecemeal. From the British stirring up aggression between different Indian tribes in order to foment division, to modern day Yugoslavia where the country was rejecting the IMF and world bank takeover before the Globalists broke it up and took the country piece by piece by arming and empowering extremists.
And so to Iraq, New York Times November 25th 2003, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations writes,
"To put most of its money and troops where they would do the most good quickly - with the Kurds and Shiites. The United States could extricate most of its forces from the so-called Sunni Triangle, north and west of Baghdad.... American officials could then wait for the troublesome and domineering Sunnis, without oil or oil revenues, to moderate their ambitions or suffer the consequences."
Gelb argues for allowing the rebellion to escalate in order to create a divided Iraq.
And in 1982, Oded Yinon, an official from the Israeli Foreign Affairs office, wrote: "To dissolve Iraq is even more important for us than dissolving Syria. In the short term, it's Iraqi power that constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. The Iran-Iraq war tore Iraq apart and provoked its downfall. All manner of inter-Arab conflict help us and accelerate our goal of breaking up Iraq into small, diverse pieces."
So if the plan is to keep the different sects at each others' throats then who benefits from the chaos created by the endless bombings? President Bush's slip of the tongue when he stated, "it'll take time to restore chaos and order -- order out of chaos, but we will" seems less farcical in this light.
Plans for 4,000 NATO troops to replace US troops in Afghanistan will likely be mirrored in Iraq and the country will be used as a launch pad for the coming invasions of Syria and Iran.
It is certain that any reports coming out of Iraq accusing occupational forces of being behind car bombings will be brutally censored.
The Pentagon admitted before the war that independent journalists would be military targets and since then we've seen more journalists killed in Iraq over two and a half years than the entire seven year stretch of US involvement in Vietnam.
In many cases, such as that of Mazen Dana, an acclaimed hero who was killed after filming secret US mass graves, journalists are hunted down and executed because they record something that the occupational government doesn't want to reach the wider world.
Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena's car was fired upon and an Italian secret service agent killed after Sgrena was told by the group that kidnapped her that a threat to kill her if Italian troops didn't pull out of Iraq wasn't made by them. This means that Rumsfeld's Ministry of Truth in Iraq is putting out false statements by fake Jihad groups to try and maintain the facade that the resistance is run by brutal terrorists under the direction of Al-Qaeda/Iran/Syria or whoever else they want to bomb next.
Every high profile kidnapping brings with it eyewitness reports of white men in suits and police carrying out the abductions.
Many will find it hard to believe that ordinary soldiers would have it in them to carry out such brutal atrocities. The people carrying out these acts are not ordinary soldiers, they are SAS thugs who have been told that they have to be 'more evil than the terrorists' to defeat the terrorists. This is how they morally justify to themselves engaging in this criminal behavior.
We will update this story as and when new developments take place.
www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2005/200905stagedterror.htm
September 20, 2005
For certain, the ‘free’, ‘independent’ and embedded Anglo-US mass media would have tried to spin the evidences
surrounding the events in Basra to suit the interests of their governments. However, in this case it was too
late, as the facts seemed to have already been reported by various other media outlets. Let us examine what
cannot be denied, on the basis of what has been reported and corroborated by the Iraqi police and Interior
Ministry officials, who are allies of the coalition forces.
a) British undercover soldiers were on a mission wearing traditional Arab dress, driving a civilian car. What
was their mission in Basra, considering that we have hearing how happy and peaceful Shi’ite-dominated Basra
is. According to the earlier embedded media reports, resistance is almost negligible in the region.
b) When the Iraqi soldiers (not the Sunni Insurgents), approached the suspicious looking car at a check point,
carrying the British soldiers in question, they were fired upon. Clearly, the British Soldiers did not fire in
fear but to avoid capture and/or interrogation by the Iraqi police. Therefore, they must have had something
significant to hide from the Iraqi police who are their allies in the region. It would be safe to assume that
the ‘legitimate’ Iraqi government installed by the coalition forces were also ignorant of the facts; so far
they have been quiet about the whole affair.
c) According to the Italian press, when the British soldiers fired, two Iraqi police were shot and one of them
died later. But that matters little for the mass media and no one seems to even know their names. The
benevolent liberators are not perturbed by such small details of killing an Iraqi here and there! However, the
event raised the temperature even more, after the earlier arrests of two prominent members of the Mehdi army
militia (led by the radical Shi'ite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr), carried out by the British forces.
d) After capture of the undercover British soldiers, they refused to state what their mission was. Iraqis in
the mean time had been driving through the streets, with loudhailers demanding that the undercover Britons
remain in jail for their crimes. It was then reported through numerous sources that the British forces with
Tanks surrounded the prison, where the two British soldiers in question were detained. This led to the protest
developing into a riot and pictures were aired showing the British soldiers being attacked by the mob.
e) An Iraqi Interior Ministry official said British forces stormed and demolished the walls of the jail using
six tanks and that dozens of Iraqi prisoners escaped. Basra's governor said the demolition was a "barbaric act
of aggression".
f) However, Britain's Ministry of Defence disputed that the prison had been stormed, on the contrary, stated
that the release of the two soldiers was negotiated. Contradicting the statement of the Basra governor and the
numerous reports (point d), that clearly alluded to the British forces action to release the British prisoners
sparked of the riot. Why was there no statement from the so-called new Iraqi government?
Whatever the case, the British forces were not happy with two of their soldiers kept in an Iraqi prison,
controlled by their Iraqi allies. Inside the prison, their lives were not under any threat. But what the two
soldiers concealed as regards to their mission must have really worried the British government. Thus, they
moved quickly to get the undercover soldiers out of the prisons by storming it with Tanks and demolishing the
walls.
Now, what has been deliberately avoided by the mainstream TV and Satellite stations is the reference [1] to
allegation from the Iraqi police, that the British soldiers were planting bombs. Turkish and a few other media
outlets also reported that the Iraqi police allegedly found bombs in unidentified cars owned by Britons.
So the facts are, the British soldiers were caught wearing Arab dress in a civilian car, armed, may have been
carrying bombs, shot the Iraqi soldiers when approached by them, later the British government in desperation
stormed the prison to get them out; clearly they were on a secret mission. It was secret because it would be
too embarrassing to conduct openly in an area that is supposed to be the calmest with no insurgency. Given the
facts, the only plausible explanation is that the undercover soldiers were engaged in counter-insurgency
operations. This incident may well prove to be another Abu-Ghraib, confirming the strong rumours of
counter-insurgency operations, particularly the bombs exploding in the markets and mosques, away from
coalition and Iraqi forces that would benefit no one, except the coalition forces.
Without a shadow of doubt, a full scale sectarian war would help the collation forces; they would be the
primary beneficiary. In fact from the very beginning of the conflict the media has been constantly stoking
sectarian tensions, the language employed was crafted accordingly. They kept on repeating minority Sunni Arabs
of 20%, who become minority Sunnis of 20%! The majority Shi’ites became the oppressed Shi’ites, as if the
hearts of the Anglo-US government bleeds for them! The Arab nationalist Baath party became a Sunni party, as
if religion defined it!
But the sectarian conflict failed to ignite, and then the coalition forces engaged in counter-insurgency
activities by exploding bombs in markets, mosques and churches. There have been earlier reports and
independent eyewitness accounts of coalition soldiers caught planting bombs. However, like hurricane Katrina,
this time they were caught and exposed, the world can now see their fork-tongue and insidious nature.
Yamin Zakaria
London, UK
[1]
http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/63808
iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/63926
The murderous fools
are not trying to end the war;
they're trying to keep it going as long as they can
May 24, 2005
The cat is out of the bag now.
It happened quite by accident, as most revelations do. And it is seen by most of the world as the most
revolting of the American/Israeli atrocities in the past few years, although it's hard to prioritize that
claim because of the level and frequency of barbaric acts that are committed on a regular basis by those
affluent automatons who call themselves the good guys.
Yet everyone but the comatose American populace — blinded by its Orwellian media and stupefied by its demented
diet of physical and mental poisons — can see it.
So permit me to spell it out for those cowardly people who say they're living in the freest country on Earth,
but absolutely refuse in their silent ignorance to see the blood they're spilling. No country that condones
deliberate torture for any reason can ever be trusted.
The first hint came in Imad Khadduri's "A warning to car drivers" written in Arabic and posted on
www.albasrah.net
on May 11.
The dispatch was quickly picked up by two of the most realistic and reliable news sites on the Web,
www.uruknet.info
, which I try to read every day,
and
www.globalresearch.ca
, which I try to read every week, since it
offers less breaking and more analytical news. I consider these two sites essential to keeping up with the
real news of the world, and highly recommend that you monitor them, too.
Khadduri recounted a scam that opens up a clear window to seeing who is perpetrating all this inexplicable
violence in Iraq. Beyond the American attempt to pacify an outraged and abused nation through demonic
destruction, and beyond the Iraqi attempt to resist this totalitarian takeover by a foreign conqueror, there
are more than numerous acts of violence that simply can't be understood by straightforward explanations.
I mean, when a mosque blows up and Americans blame Islamic terrorists, whether Sunni or Shiite, it makes no
sense. Muslims never blow up their own houses of worship. Or when reporters sympathetic to either the Iraqi
cause of freedom, or even just general principles of international justice, are suddenly assassinated and the
blame is placed on often imaginary Islamic extremists whose perspective is supported by these writers, how can
anyone believe that Muslims did it, even thought this is what the Zionist American press and government
continue to insist.
So who’s doing all these demented deeds? As if we didn’t know ....
Khadduri’s report went like this:
“A few days ago, an American manned check point confiscated the driver license of a driver and told him to
report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his
license. The next day, the driver did visit the camp and he was allowed in the camp with his car. He was
admitted to a room for an interrogation that lasted half an hour. At the end of the session, the American
interrogator told him: ‘OK, there is nothing against you, but you do know that Iraq is now sovereign and is in
charge of its own affairs. Hence, we have forwarded your papers and license to al-Kadhimia police station for
processing. Therefore, go there with this clearance to reclaim your license. At the police station, ask for
Lt. Hussain Mohammed, who is waiting for you now. Go there now quickly, before he leaves his shift work”.
The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a
heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if
trailing him. He stopped the car and inspected it carefully. He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives
hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors.
The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and
intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and
witnessing the anticipated “hideous attack by foreign elements”.
The same scenario was repeated in Mosul, in the north of Iraq. A car was confiscated along with the driver’s
license. He did follow up on the matter and finally reclaimed his car but was told to go to a police station
to reclaim his license. Fortunately for him, the car broke down on the way to the police station. The
inspecting car mechanic discovered that the spare tire was fully laden with explosives."
If this were the only example of this type I heard, I might have let it pass as just a story. But it wasn’t.
There was also the sorry tale of the Iraqi man who saw American soldiers plant a bomb which shortly thereafter
exploded, and when he said so out loud for all to hear, he was hauled away, never to be seen again.
This story was reported on arguably the most authentic and riveting source of news from Iraq, the
heart-rending "Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq," which is compiled by someone known only as Riverbend or
Iraqi Girl <
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
>. Again, recommended reading.
She recounts, "the last two weeks have been violent ....
The number of explosions in Baghdad alone is frightening. There have also been several assassinations — bodies
being found here and there. It's somewhat disturbing to know that corpses are turning up in the most
unexpected places. Many people will tell you it's not wise to eat river fish anymore because they have been
nourished on the human remains being dumped into the river. That thought alone has given me more than one
sleepless night. It is almost as if Baghdad has turned into a giant graveyard.
The latest corpses were those of some Sunni and Shia clerics — several of them well-known. People are being
patient and there is a general consensus that these killings are being done to provoke civil war. Also
worrisome is the fact that we are hearing of people being rounded up by security forces (Iraqi) and then being
found dead days later — apparently when the new Iraqi government recently decided to reinstate the death
penalty, they had something else in mind.
But back to the explosions. One of the larger blasts was in an area called Ma'moun, which is a middle class
area located in west Baghdad. It’s a relatively calm residential area with shops that provide the basics and a
bit more. It happened in the morning, as the shops were opening up for their daily business and it occurred
right in front of a butcher’s shop. Immediately after, we heard that a man living in a house in front of the
blast site was hauled off by the Americans because it was said that after the bomb went off, he sniped an
Iraqi National Guardsman.
I didn’t think much about the story — nothing about it stood out: an explosion and a sniper — hardly an
anomaly. The interesting news started circulating a couple of days later. People from the area claim that the
man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb. Rumor has it that
he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion.
Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the
neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing
about it. He was promptly taken away.
The bombs are mysterious. Some of them explode in the midst of National Guard and near American troops or
Iraqi Police and others explode near mosques, churches, and shops or in the middle of sougs. One thing that
surprises us about the news reports of these bombs is that they are inevitably linked to suicide bombers. The
reality is that some of these bombs are not suicide bombs — they are car bombs that are either being remotely
detonated or maybe time bombs. All we know is that the techniques differ and apparently so do the intentions.
Some will tell you they are resistance. Some say Chalabi and his thugs are responsible for a number of them.
Others blame Iran and the SCIRI militia Badir.
In any case, they are terrifying. If you're close enough, the first sound is a that of an earsplitting blast
and the sounds that follow are of a rain of glass, shrapnel and other sharp things. Then the wails begin — the
shrill mechanical wails of an occasional ambulance combined with the wail of car alarms from neighboring
vehicles… and finally the wail of people trying to sort out their dead and dying from the debris.
Then there was this one.
On May 13, 2005, a 64 years old Iraqi farmer, Haj Haidar Abu Sijjad, took his tomato load in his pickup truck
from Hilla to Baghdad, accompanied by Ali, his 11 years old grandson. They were stopped at an American check
point and were asked to dismount. An American soldier climbed on the back of the pickup truck, followed by
another a few minutes later, and thoroughly inspected the tomato filled plastic containers for about 10
minutes. Haj Haidar and his grandson were then allowed to proceed to Baghdad.
A minute later, his grandson told him that he saw one of the American soldiers putting a grey melon size
object in the back among the tomato containers. The Haj immediately slammed on the brakes and stopped the car
at the side of the road, at a relatively far distance from the check point. He found a time bomb with the
clock ticking tucked among his tomatoes. He immediately recognized it, as he was an ex-army soldier.
Panicking, he grabbed his grandson and ran away from the car. Then, realizing that the car was his only means
of work, he went back, took the bomb and carried it in fear. He threw it in a deep ditch by the side of the
road that was dug by Iraqi soldiers in preparation for the war, two years ago.
Upon returning from Baghdad, he found out that the bomb had indeed exploded, killing three sheep and injuring
their shepherd in his head. He thanked God for giving him the courage to go back and remove the bomb, and for
the luck in that the American soldiers did not notice his sudden stop at a distance and his getting rid of the
bomb.
"They intended it to explode in Baghdad and claim that it is the work of the 'terrorists', or 'insurgents' or
who call themselves the 'Resistance'.
I decided to expose them and asked your reporter to take me to Baghdad to tell you the story. They are to be
exposed as they now want to sow strife in Iraq and taint the Resistance after failing to defeat it militarily.
Do not forget to mention my name. I fear nobody but God, as I am a follower of Muqtada al-Sadir."
The background and admission of guilt for such satanic shenanigans was clearly outlined in Frank Morales'
piece on globalresearch.ca: "The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi 'Insurgents' — and Global
Terrorism," by Frank Morales <
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR505A.htm
l> clearly demonstrates how Donald Rumsfeld
said he was going to do exactly what these three sorry episodes show he actually did.
Morales writes:
Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be
more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. How could he be so sure of that?
Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld. According to Los
Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army,
"a super-Intelligence Support Activity" network that would "bring together CIA and military covert action,
information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception," to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.
We never got the full story on those ghastly beheadings of Nick Berg and others. Nor have we ever understood
who killed the American mercenaries in Fallujah that eventually precipitated one of the great slaughters in
history. Nor have we ever been able to discern if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is actually a real person or just
another bin Ladenesque boogeyman. Nor if the al-Qaeda website which claims responsibility for various
atrocities is not really run by the CIA.
Provoking this type of violence also further conceals the sinister genocide the Israelis continue to
perpetrate on the hapless Palestinians, which is exactly its point, as is the entire Iraq invasion and
destruction, and as was the inside job mass murder on 9/11 in New York City. The purpose of all these
despicable acts is to conceal what the Israelis and the Americans have been doing all along to the entire Arab
world, namely enslaving and destroying it.
There is not now nor ever was an Arab terror threat. That was all invented by Rothschild, Rockefeller,
Kissinger, Brzezinski, Bush, Cheney, Sharon, Zakheim, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Warren Buffett.
These people are all traitors to not only their countries but to humanity in general, and should all be
slammed and RICOed into Guantanamo immediately.
And so should the government officials, media lackeys, and ordinary citizens who, by their complicity or their
ignorance, support them.
The main point in understanding these deliberate provocations to prevent peace is to understand how the
American capitalist system, now hijacked by billionaires with no trace of conscience, thrives on war and
profits from the misery of others.
The neocon murder menace has been for months ratcheting up the hyperbole about why we need to invade Iran —
which some predict will happen in June — and just this week, rumors of troop movements in the Caribbean and
lockdowns at Florida military bases appear to augur an imminent invasion of oil-producing Venezuela.
The overall plan is to create hell on Earth, and we are succeeding. By our silent complicity and cowardly
reluctance to oppose and stop this homicidal behavior in the name of profit, we are all accessories to mass
murder and the destruction of human society, not to even mention the extinction of individual human freedom
and the God-given right to be safe and secure in the homes of our choice.
So now that you know, what are you going to do about it? You know if you do nothing, these same things will
one day happen to you.
John Kaminski
mailto:
[email protected]
John Kaminski is a writer whose Internet essays are seen on hundreds of websites around the world. These
stories have been compiled into two anthologies, “America’s Autopsy Report” and “The Perfect Enemy.” In
addition, he has written “The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the Official Story of What Happened
on September 11, 2001,” a booklet written for those who still believe the government’s cynical lies about that
tragic day. All three books are available at
http://www.johnkaminski.com/
www.uruknet.info?p=15949
September 20, 2005
Baghdad Dweller
reports two British soldiers held by “Iraqi authorities” in Basra (also described as “Shiite militiamen” in
the corporate media), and subsequently freed after the British stormed a police jail, were working undercover
as bombers. Baghdad Dweller includes a link to the
Washington Post,
where the following appears: “Iraqi security officials on Monday variously accused the two Britons they
detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or trying to plant explosives. Photographs of the two men in
custody showed them in civilian clothes.” The
Herald
notes the following: “Sources say the British soldiers, possibly members of the new Special Reconnaissance
Regiment formed earlier this month to provide intelligence for SAS operations, were looking at infiltration of
the city’s police by the followers of the outspoken Shi’ite cleric, Moqtada al Sadr,” thus admitting the
soldiers worked undercover.
The “Special Reconnaissance Regiment,” according to Regiments.org, “formed with HQ at Hereford from volunteers of other units to support international expeditionary operations in the fight against international terrorism, absorbing 14th Intelligence Company (formed for operations against Ulster terrorists), Intelligence Corps, and releasing the SAS and SBS for the ‘hard end’ of missions.” Is it possible the “hard end” of the “mission” in Iraq is to discredit the resistance and sow chaos in the country by fronting pseudo-gang terrorist groups (or the variant “pseudo-guerilla operations”), as the British have ample experience with elsewhere, notably in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising and in Malaya? “Pseudo operations are those in which government forces disguised as guerrillas, normally along with guerrilla defectors, operate as teams to infiltrate insurgent areas,” writes Lawrence E. Cline for the U.S. Army War College External Research Associates Program. “This technique has been used by the security forces of several other countries in their operations, and typically it has been very successful.” Indeed, one long running pseudo op, Gladio, was so successful it managed to render a nominal Italian terrorist group, the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), into an excuse (after proper infiltration by agents provocateurs) to increase the power of reactionary forces in Italy and discredit socialist, communist, and even labor movements.
The British SAS honed its “counter-insurgency” techniques in Northern Ireland and there is no reason to believe it has refrained from doing so in Iraq. “Formed to perform acts of sabotage and assassination behind enemy lines during World War 2, the SAS evolved into a counter-insurgency regiment after the war,” writes Sean Mac Mathuna. Mathuna cites a 1969 Army Training manual (British Army Land Operations Manual, volume 3, counter-revolutionary operations) that enumerates several “tasks,” including: the ambush and harassment of insurgents, the infiltration of sabotage, assassination and demolition parties into insurgent-held areas, border surveillance … liaison with, and organization of friendly guerrilla forces operating against the common enemy.
Examples “were found during the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya during the mid-fifties,” Mathuna explains, “when SAS officers commanded some of the infamous ‘pseudo gangs’ that terrorized the civilian population,” and in Borneo, where they used cross-border operations to attack and destroy guerrilla bases; and in Aden in 1967, where they dressed as Arabs and would use an Army officer to lure Arab gunmen into a trap and kill them. To defeat the insurgents counter-terror must be deployed back at them—described by Ken Livingstone as “subverting the subverters”….
In order to “subvert the subverters” and discredit the IRA in Northern Ireland, the SAS formed the Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF), a covert pseudo-gang. “During the 1972 [IRA] ceasefire the MRF shot civilians from unmarked cars using IRA weapons,” writes Mathuna. “In November 1972 the Army admitted that the MRF had done this one three occasions. One of these incidents happened on 22nd June 1972—the day the IRA announced its intention to introduce a ceasefire. The shootings appear to have been done to discredit the IRA…”
It is clear now, that because elements within the security forces did not want a political deal with the IRA in the mid-seventies, and the military solution was only possible with a change at the top of the Labour leadership, MI5 and the SAS were prepared to use the same methods the IRA are condemned for - civilian deaths, assassinations, bombings and black propaganda—to bring this about.
In fact, so effective were these “military solution” pseudo-gang terrorist techniques the French employed them in Algeria and Vietnam. “The most widespread use of pseudo type operations was during the ‘Battle of Algiers’ in 1957,” explains Lawrence E. Cline. “The principal French employer of covert agents in Algiers was the Fifth Bureau, the psychological warfare branch.” The Fifth Bureau “planted incriminating forged documents, spread false rumours of treachery and fomented distrust among the [FLN, the National Liberation Front] … As a frenzy of throat-cutting and disemboweling broke out among confused and suspicious FLN cadres, nationalist slaughtered nationalist from April to September 1957 and did France’s work for her,” notes Cline, quoting Martin S. Alexander and J. F. V. Kieger (“France and the Algerian War: Strategy, Operations, and Diplomacy,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 6-7).
Even though the Washington Post mentions two Brits were detained, apparently caught red-handed shooting Iraqi police and planting explosives, it does not bother to mention the SAS or its long and sordid history of engaging in covert pseudo-gang behavior and conclude the obvious: Britain, and the United States—the latter having admitted formulating the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) in 2002, a brain child of neocons staffing the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, designed to “stimulate reactions” on the part of “terrorists” (in Iraq, that would be the resistance)—are intimately involved in sowing chaos and spreading violence in Iraq and more than likely soon enough in Iran and Syria.
Of course, this unfortunate and embarrassing incident in Basra will fall off the front page of corporate newspapers and websites soon enough, replaced with more appropriate, if fantastical, propaganda implicating the Iraqi resistance and intel ops such as al-Zarqawi for the violence, obviously engineered to create a civil war in Iraq and thus divide the country and accomplish the neocon-Likudite plan to destroy Islamic culture and society.
Addendum
It is not surprising the corporate media in the United States and Britain would omit crucial details on this story. In order to get the whole story, we have to go elsewhere—for instance, China’s Xinhuanet news agency. “Two persons wearing Arab uniforms [see the M.O. cited above] opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers,” an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. “The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.”
So, the next time you read or hear about crazed “al-Qaeda in Iraq” terrorists blowing up children or desperate job applicants, keep in mind, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, the perpetrators may very well be British SAS goons who cut their teeth killing Irish citizens.
September 20, 2005
Now at midnight all the agents, and
the superhuman crew,
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do
- Bob Dylan
Damn the blind eyes of anyone who still can't see after Basra.
How it
began:
"Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in
Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers,"
an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives,
the source said.
Here are the two while in Iraqi police custody. Reuters appended a note to each photo over the wire:
"ATTENTION EDITORS - THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REQUESTS THAT THE IDENTIFICATION OF THIS MAN IS NOT REVEALED,
EITHER VIA PIXELLATION OF THEIR FACES OR BY NOT PUBLISHING THE PHOTOS."
As you probably know, they
didn't remain
in custody for long:
British forces using tanks broke down the walls of the central jail in the
southern city of Basra late Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos, who had been
arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen.
Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled the
jail.
Violence flared earlier in the day as demonstrators hurled
stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks; at least four people were killed.
The British Defense Ministry
spun, but
found it difficult to maneuver with its pants about its ankles. "We‘ve heard nothing to suggest we stormed the
prison," a defense ministry spokesman in London said. "We understand there were negotiations." When it found
some equilibrium, it changed its story to
better comport
with the undeniables: "We understand that the authorities ordered their release. Unfortunately they weren't
released and we became concerned for their safety and as a result a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle broke
down the perimeter wall in one place."
These hard men, likely SAS ops, must have had some stories to tell, otherwise tanks would not have negotiated
their way through the prison walls of Britain's reputed hosts so soon after their capture.
Walking into the untidied mess of this astonishing and grotesque and predictable story feels a bit like the
British detective catching the killer red-handed:
"Well
well well, what have we here?"
We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as
we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught
firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its
culpability by breaking them out of prison.
It doesn't make sense? Only if you haven't been paying attention. This is the subtext of the Iraq tragedy:
blow up the
Hajis
and play the Sunnis on the Shias; create the chaos that introduces the conditions necessary for the long-game,
and the long-held aspirations of the neoconservatives to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans.
I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the
failure of US policy, and not its success, and who believe black ops and false flags are figments of our
paranoiac fantasies. Probably, as with so much that would bedevil their worldview if only they were
intellectually honest enough to permit it, this too will be filtered out and forgotten. But our burden is we
won't forget. And damned if the Iraqis will.
A British soldier
jumps from a burning tank which was set ablaze after a shooting incident in the southern Iraqi city of Basra
September 19, 2005. Angry crowds attacked a British tank with petrol bombs and rocks in Basra on Monday after
Iraqi authorities said they had detained two British undercover soldiers in the southern city for firing on
police.
rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/09/carry-on-killing.html
September 20, 2005
Text of report
Syrian TV (Arabic), 19 September 2005
[Newsreader Nidal Zaghbur] Ten Iraqis - seven police commandos, two civilians and a child - were killed and more than 10 others wounded in the explosion of two car bombs near two checkpoints in Al-Mahmudiyah and Al-Latifiyah south of Baghdad while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were heading towards the city of Karbala to mark the anniversary of a religious event.
And in a significant incident in the city of Basra, which is also marking the same religious event, Iraqi demonstrators set fire to two British tanks near a police station after Iraqi police had arrested two British soldiers disguised in civilian clothes for opening fire on police. Eight armoured British vehicles surrounded the police station before the eruption of the confrontations. A policeman at the scene said the two detained Britons were wearing traditional Iraqi jallabahs [loose cloaks] and wigs.
For more details about this development in Basra, we have on the line with us our correspondent in Baghdad Ziyad al-Munajjid. Ziyad, good evening.
[Al-Munajjid] Good evening, Nidal.
[Zaghbur] What are the dimensions of this incident in light of the increasing operations against civilians and places of worship to create sedition among the Iraqis?
[Al-Munajjid] In fact, Nidal, this incident gave answers to questions and suspicions that were lacking evidence about the participation of the occupation in some armed operations in Iraq. Many analysts and observers here had suspicions that the occupation was involved in some armed operations against civilians and places of worship and in the killing of scientists. But those were only suspicions that lacked proof. The proof came today through the arrest of the two British soldiers while they were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets. This proves, according to observers, that the occupation is not far from many operations that seek to sow sedition and maintain disorder, as this would give the occupation the justification to stay in Iraq for a longer period.
[Zaghbur] Ziyad al-Munajjaid in Baghdad, thank you very much.
Copyright Syrian Arab TV and BBC
Monitoring, 2005
bold added
Further on arrest of two British soldiers in Basra
Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, in Arabic 14:14 GMT, 19 Sep 05
Text of report by Qatari Al-Jazeera satellite TV on 19 September
A British military source has said that the Iraqi police in southern Iraq have arrested two Britons. The police said that they had fired at an Iraqi security man in Maydan in the city of Basra.
AFP said that angry Iraqi demonstrators torched two British tanks after the British soldiers fired in the air to disperse them.
[Anchorman Al-Habib al-Ghuraybi] We have with us on the telephone from Baghdad Fattah al-Shaykh, member of the Iraqi National Assembly. What are the details of and the facts surrounding this incident?
[Al-Shaykh] In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. There have been continuous provocative acts since the day before yesterday by the British forces against the peaceful sons of Basra. There have been indiscriminate arrests, the most recent of which was the arrest of Shaykh Ahmad al-Farqusi and two Basra citizens on the pretext that they had carried out terrorist operations to kill US soldiers. This is a baseless claim. This was confirmed to us by [name indistinct] the second secretary at the British Embassy in Baghdad, when we met with him a short while ago. He said that there is evidence on this. We say: You should come up with this evidence or forget about this issue. If you really want to look for truth, then we should resort to the Iraqi justice away from the British provocations against the sons of Basra, particularly what happened today when the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime.
[Al-Ghuraybi] Thank you Fattah al-Shaykh, member of the National Assembly and deputy for Basra.
Copyright Al Jazeera TV and BBC Monitoring,
2005
bold added
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20050920&articleId=973
September 20, 2005
The dramatic events began to unfold just before dawn yesterday, when two British nationals were detained by
Iraqi authorities. It emerged later that they were British soldiers. Dressed in plain clothes - according to
some they were wearing traditional Arab dress - the two men had been driving in an unmarked car when they
arrived at a checkpoint in the city.
In the confrontation that followed, shots were fired, and two Iraqi policemen were shot, one of whom later
died. The Iraqi authorities blamed the men, reported to be undercover commandos, and arrested them.
Mohammed al-Abadi, an official in the Basra governorate said that the two men had looked suspicious to police.
"A policeman approached them and then one of these guys fired at him. Then the police managed to capture
them," he said.
"They refused to say what their mission was. They said they were British soldiers and [suggested they] ask
their commander about their mission," he added.
The Britons were taken to an Iraqi police station, with local officials saying they had been informed that the
men were undercover soldiers wearing plainclothes. British military officials, both in London and Iraq, began
to investigate the arrests.
As a behind-the-scenes operation by British diplomats charged with negotiating a release for the soldiers
started, tension spread across the city, where 8,500 British troops are based. A British army tank was
surrounded.
In a clear demonstration that the holding of the soldiers would not be tolerated, tanks moved quickly to
encircle the police station. Amid the confusion, a crowd initially of about a dozen, which later swelled to
hundreds, soon surrounded the tanks.
Some said it was because the news had spread that British soldiers had been responsible for the death of an
Iraqi policeman. One witness said Iraqis were driving through the streets with loudhailers demanding that the
soldiers should be kept in the police station, and then jailed.
Violence began to break out in the streets near to the prison. As tempers flared, rocks were thrown, and as
tempers flared, the soldiers began to fear that they could no longer contain the situation. What looked like
petrol bombs began to fly through the air, and television footage recorded one tank attempting to reverse away
from the growing mob as the crowds around the tanks tightened their grip.
Then, flames emerged from the top of one of the tanks. It remained unclear whether it was the vehicle itself
on fire, or whether the flames were emerging from military equipment placed on the back of the tank.
One soldier decided to jump. His uniform on fire, the television footage shows him attempting to make his
escape, as the crowd pelts him with stones. Another soldier carrying a riot shield stood by the tank. Last
night the condition of the soldier was not known.
In the rioting that ensued, British control of the city, in the Shia-dominated south of Iraq, began to look
seriously under threat. Two Iraqis were reported dead in the rioting, with 15 Iraqis reported injured, along
with three British soldiers.
Meanwhile, frantic negotiations continued to free the men, whose arrest had sent Basra into near anarchy
within the space of less than two hours.
Images of the men in captivity were available after television cameramen from Arab satellite broadcasters in
the Persian Gulf were allowed in to the jail. Seated on the floor of what looked like a prison cell, their
hands tied behind their backs, the men stared directly into the camera lens.
Their clothes - plain T-shirts and chinos - were spattered with blood. One had a bandage wrapped around his
head, the other also had a head injury, which had been dressed.
The television commentary, in Arabic, identified them only as Britons. A provincial council spokesman for
Basra, Nnadhim al-Jabari, confirmed that they were likely to go before an Iraqi court.
Calm then descended on the city. In London, the Ministry of Defence would give no details about the talks
aimed at securing the men, a spokesman saying only that they were continuing "to thrash out with Iraqi
authorities what is happening and what can be done".
Then, just before midday, a solution of sorts appeared to have been found. Reports coming out of Basra
described how up to ten British tanks, possibly Challenger 2 Main Battle Tanks, possibly Warrior Infantry
Fighting Vehicles, had stormed the jail where the two men were being held.
Witnesses said that they had smashed down a wall to gain entry. The operation was said to be backed up by
helicopters. The witnesses said that up to 150 prisoners took the opportunity to escape through the wall in
the confusion.
The British military action was condemned as "barbaric, savage and irresponsible" by Mohammed al-Waili, the
governor of the province. "A British force of more than 10 tanks backed by helicopters attacked the central
jail and destroyed it. This is an irresponsible act," the governor said.
The Ministry of Defence in London confirmed that the soldiers had been released, but said that had been
achieved by "negotiation". Its explanation is unlikely to assuage the anger on the streets of the southern
Iraqi city, which has so far been relatively calm compared with the daily violence that has scarred much of
the rest of the country.
As an uneasy peace was maintained in the city last night, all the indications were that yesterday's violence
could be repeated today.
news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article313848.ece
© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
September 21st, 2005
CNN continued their long tradition of lying to the public today! During their one minute or so that they
dedicate to news items other than the one or two stories they cover during any given hour, they reported about
some tension in Iraq related to some British soldiers who were “rescued” by British troops. “Rescued!” They
told the public that the soldiers were “rescued!!!!” This is a bold face out and out lie! The soldiers in
question were arrested, shot an Iraqi police officer, were dressed up as Arabs, heavily armed, and the British
troops broke them out of jail allowing 150 inmates to escape in the process!!! Can CNN possibly mislead the
public any more than they have on this one news item?
CNN, the most trusted name in news? How sad a statement about the news industry is that? Think about it!
www.tvnewslies.org/blog/?p=126
September 21, 2005
Five Iraqi civilians died in clashes surrounding the controversial operation to free two British SAS men
captured in Basra, it was claimed today.
Iraqi police said the latest two died in hospital today after being wounded as British troops stormed a police
station jail on Monday.
Iraqi police are reported to have taken part in anti-British demonstrations in the southern Iraqi city today.
But John Reid, the Defence Secretary, and Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari insisted relations between
the two countries remained strong.
"There has not been a fundamental breakdown in trust between the British Government and the Iraqi government,"
Mr Reid said at a press conference following talks between the two men in London today.
He said the strategy of the British Government had not changed, and it would work towards a handover of
security to Iraqi forces.
"We will not cut and run, and we will not leave the job half done," he said.
Mr Jaafari also said that the incidents of the last few days would not affect British-Iraqi relations, and
said such incidents were "expected to happen". He said he had ordered a full inquiry.
Confusion still surrounds whether British forces knocked down a prison wall, resulting in the escape of
prisoners, in their attempt to rescue the two SAS men.
The British troops believed the two Special Forces men were being held there but later freed them from a house
in Basra where they were being held by Shia militia.
As concern grew that Iraqi police had handed the men over to the militia, Iraq's government admitted that
insurgents had infiltrated its security forces.
Iraq's national security adviser Dr Mouwafak al-Rubaie said: "Our Iraqi security forces in general, police in particular, in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit, have been penetrated by some of the insurgents, some of the terrorists as well.
"I can't deny this. We are putting in place a very scrupulous, very meticulous vetting procedure in the
process of recruiting a new batch of police and Iraqi army, which will, if you like, clean our security forces
as well as stop any penetration in future from the insurgents and terrorists."
The capture of the SAS men came a day after British forces in Basra arrested two leading members of the
outlawed Mahdi Army, which is loyal to firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and is widely believed to have heavily
infiltrated police in the city.
Other groups to have infiltrated the police are believed to include the Badr Brigade, which is the armed wing
of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution, and Hezbollah in Iraq.
All three groups have historical ties to neighbouring Iran.
Police in Basra said the SAS men, who were travelling in a car dressed as Arab men, shot and killed a
policeman when they were stopped.
But the British said no one was killed and a spokesman for Mr Jaafari said they were arrested for behaving
suspiciously.
British officers say they received intelligence that the men's lives were at risk and bulldozed their way into
the jail, in the face of a mob throwing petrol bombs, to rescue them.
The action, condemned by many in Iraq, was defended as "absolutely right" by Dr Reid.
portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/21/uiraqa.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/09/21/ixportaltop.html
September
21, 2005 - Monday was one of those rare illuminating days. A juxtaposition of events starkly exposed Western
double standards and made the Iraqi government's claims of sovereignty even more nonsensical than it already
was.
Anyone who tuned into the BBC's HARDtalk program during the day would have been subjected to Iraq's corpulent
marionette of a president Jalal Talibani, fresh from groveling around the nether regions of George W.
There he was sporting his omnipresent grin worming his way around Stephen Sackur's questions over Iraq's
so-called democracy, the inclusiveness of the draft constitution and his own shilly-shallying over signing
Saddam's death warrant.
When the Kurdish politician--whose demeanor is more suited to a shisha-puffing carpet trader than a
leader--was faced with a query over his government's legitimacy at a time foreign soldiers were still stomping
all over his land, he nostalgically looked back to June 2004 when the invaders handed back sovereignty to
Iraqis. He thought it was a great day.
Talabani must be one of the few who took the handover seriously, as anyone with an IQ over 80 quickly realized
it was yet another Pentagon production on the lines of the rigged toppling of Saddam's statue, the Jessica
Lynch fiasco, and 'Mission Accomplished'.
But wait! I'm being too tough on the old warhorse. His pal Hazem al-Shaalan, who was Iyad Allawi's defense
minister, obviously believed Iraq was sovereign, too, when he allegedly siphoned off US$1 billion from his
procurement budget, which translated means every cent. A patriot, indeed, especially when one remembers how a
whopping US$9 billion went walkabout under the watch of Paul L. Bremer.
So let's explore the unlikelihood that HARDtalk viewers were dim enough to swallow Talabani's sales pitch.
Let's imagine they bought the purple finger garbage or the new holy grail of a constitution. And, let's
suppose they could even dig deep into their hearts to excuse Talabani from his desire to witness Saddam with
his neck snapped and his eyes parted from their sockets as long as he wasn't the one signing the order. I'll
be absent on that day, he said, with a grin, admitting that task would be left to some subordinate
unfortunate.
So let's suppose that after that program we were left with starry eyes and a wellspring of gratitude towards
America's compassionate conservative leader for freeing the poor, oppressed, long suffering Iraqis, who thanks
to him, have a glorious future in store (those who haven't already been carried off by men in white coats,
that is)
The remainder, who had switched off their sets and gone fishing, or used their newspapers for shelf-lining,
might still be infused with that rosy Talabani glow. But for newshounds, that glow would swiftly fade into a
pallor. Just a few hours after Talabani's schmaltz there came dramatic breaking news.
According to the BBC, two British servicemen dressed like local Shiites drove up to an Iraqi-manned checkpoint
near Basra. They were apparently driving a scruffy civilian car and when challenged they opened fire resulting
in the deaths of an Iraqi policeman. A confused-looking BBC anchor struggling to make sense of the incident
described it as 'murky'.
Naturally, the sleazy Laurence-emulating pair was carted off to the slammer--along with their eclectic arsenal
of weaponry and communication devices--where a rioting crowd soon gathered, furious over the killing.
The Basra police told the British army that the soldiers were due to appear before an Iraqi court, which
sounds reasonable to me. Isn't this exactly what would happen in any so-called civilized country where the
rule of law applies?
But this wasn't good enough for Iraq's Ramboesque British guests, ostensibly there to set this 'sovereign'
country on the road to security even when, after heavy diplomatic arm twisting, Iraq's defense minister
ordered their guys' release.
"Last night, British forces used up to 10 tanks supported by helicopters to smash through the walls of the
jail and free the two British servicemen," reported the Independent, adding, "around 150 prisoners were said
to have escaped during the assault, which was condemned as 'barbaric, savage and irresponsible' by Mohammed
Al-Waili, the provincial governor.
Then after this Hollywood-style blockbuster--thought to have terminally eroded whatever trust there was
between the occupation forces in the south and the Iraqi police--the Brits discovered their men had been moved
to a private house; the home of a militia-man.
Thank the Lord that the Brits are home and dry and even though a British tank was fired with petrol bombs its
occupants have got away with minor injuries. Never mind that three Iraqis lost their lives during those
incidents or that 15 were wounded in their own 'sovereign' democracy appears to be the attitude of most media
outlets.
The British army in Iraq should be ashamed of itself. Its members have behaved like a gang of thugs who
wouldn't look out of place rescuing banditos in a banana republic. But in a way, it's done us all a favor.
We are surely forced to cast off our rose-colored specs mine are terminally grey and face reality. Iraq is
still occupied. And its government is made up of employees of the Bush administration, its 'jump to it'
allies, and its crony companies. Talabani and crew have clearly sold-out, else they would order yes order--the
occupier to sling its hook without delay.
Instead, Talabani told the BBC that the allies are welcome to stay as long as they like. And they will. Don't
worry about that!
After all, there are reconstruction contracts, still to be doled out. There is the privatization of Iraq's
resources to complete. There are four permanent military bases to build and we mustn't forget that foreign
carpet baggers and mercenaries have starving babes of one kind or another to feed back home in London and Los
Angeles.
When the Kurdish leader dared ask Mr. Bush how long that might be during his recent visit to the White House
he was apparently told "as long as it takes to do the job". Pity he didn't enquire to which job the US
President was referring. Could it be the paint job which would allow George W. to stick up two fingers instead
of the usual one perchance?
I know all about the arguments which defend the presence of allied armies, warning darkly of a full-blown
civil war were they to exit. And it is true that there will be bloodshed, but, on the other hand, the cities
and streets are running with the red stuff now. And, unfortunately, the sight of Brits trying to pass
themselves off as Arabs and taking part in shoot-outs simply feeds into insurgents' claims that the allies are
working on a 'divide and rule' ethic.
There is more and more of a consensus that our armies are no longer part of the solution but are the problem.
Studies have shown that ordinary Iraqis unable to stomach the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the leveling of Fallujah
and the brutal 'pacification' of Tal Afar are joining the insurgency.
Others, mostly Sunnis, are outraged over the draft constitution, which they view as either a prelude to an
Islamist state or the break-up of Iraq into three segments. Just about all are just sick and tired of the lack
of electricity, jobs and opportunity and the abundance of backed-up sewage.
Sure, allied fingers point at foreign fighters as being the insurgency's fountainhead but the US military has
admitted that these make-up only six per cent of insurgents. But this isn't something they like to dwell upon;
not when a low-hanging fruit like Syria is being slowly ripened by accusations that it supports the insurgents
by facilitating their entry through its borders.
Put simply, the double standards we impose are nauseating. What if Iraqis had stormed Abu Ghraib to free the
prisoners there from sexual abuse, torture, beatings and assaults on their religious beliefs? If they had
succeeded bashing down the wall of that jail and plucking their friends from their cells, would that cavalry
have been termed "rescuers" or "terrorists"? We already know the answer to that one don't we?
Get with the rule: The allies are honor-soaked heroes when they drop bombs, fire depleted uranium tank shells,
send missiles into heavily-populated areas, use cluster-bombs or napalm and force people into rivers when they
cannot swim. But any Iraqi who would dare retaliate is 'a terrorist' even if that Iraqi happens to be a
policeman at a checkpoint guilty of arresting two trigger-happy drag artist foreign spooks.
Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Mid-East affairs based in Egypt. She can be reached at
[email protected]
www.counterpunch.org/heard09212005.html
September 22, 2005
The car they were
travelling in was loaded with weapons including allegedly, assault rifles, a light machine gun, an anti-tank
weapon, radio gear and a medical kit (’standard’ SAS issue according to the BBC). According to at least two
reports, the car they were traveling in (A Toyota Cressida) was “booby-trapped”.
Subsequent accounts vary according to the source but according to the initial story broadcast on the BBC (19/9/05), the two men wore traditional Arab dress but then this changed to “civilian dress” (BBC TV News).
As more information trickled out, a BBC story reported that the men were freed after the police station had been attacked by British tanks, a report that the British government initially denied saying that “the release of the soldiers had been negotiated” (BBC Website 20/0/05).
Britain’s Ministry of Defence says the release of the two soldiers had been negotiated and it did not believe the prison had been stormed.
“We’ve heard nothing to suggest we stormed the prison,” a ministry spokesman said.
“We understand there were negotiations.”
Lisa Glover, spokeswoman for the British embassy in Baghdad, says three people have been wounded in the operation to free the soldiers.
She did not give further details of how the soldiers were freed.
Then the story changed yet again, only now the ‘official’ story, dutifully reported by the British State Broadcasting Company (BSBC), was that “negotiations broke down” and that the two men were in the hands of the Mehdi Army in another building, in which case, why was the police station stormed?
Then yet another version was issued by the British government only now the police station was indeed attacked but only after “negotiations broke down”. So were the two SAS men in the police station or not?
According to yet another BSBC report, after breaking into the police station, the Brits discovered that they had been moved to a Mehdi Army house for “interrogation”. Yet subsequent accounts revealed that they had in fact, been in the police station all along and, according to a CNN report, were being questioned by an Iraqi judge, not, as the British government alleged, by the ‘insurgents’.
By now, in a classic disinformation campaign, so many stories were being circulated that sorting out the truth from fiction was virtually impossible unless one is prepared to dig and dig deep.
What is clear is that the two SAS “undercover operatives” had been caught red-handed by the British government’s alleged allies, the Iraqi police, dressed as Arabs, replete with wigs and armed to the teeth and in a car which according to one report, was packed with explosives (the car by the way, has been taken away by the British occupation forces).
The question the BSBC was not and still is not asking, is what were they up to, creeping around dressed up as Iraqis in what is meant to be a relatively peaceful Basra?
Once more the BSBC answered the question, sort of, courtesy yet another ‘official’ story, one that was to emerge only after a very angry crowd attacked two British armoured vehicles, setting at least one on fire. The “mob”, as the BSBC described them, were according to the report, angry over the arrest of two Mehdi Army members, also on 19 September, and that it had nothing to with the freeing of the two SAS. In reality of course, the ‘mob’ had already been informed about the two SAS undercover guys and were understandably upset.
So now, the two undercover SAS men were, it is imputed, searching for ‘insurgents’ as part of a counter-insurgency operation, which if true, what were they doing dressed as Iraqis?
Were they on some kind of provocative operation? According to one report, this is exactly what they were up to. Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly told this account to al-Jazeera
If you really want to look for truth, then we should resort to the Iraqi justice away from the British provocations against the sons of Basra, particularly what happened today when the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime.
And in yet another report from Syrian TV we read
[Al-Munajjid] In fact, Nidal, this incident gave answers to questions and suspicions that were lacking evidence about the participation of the occupation in some armed operations in Iraq. Many analysts and observers here had suspicions that the occupation was involved in some armed operations against civilians and places of worship and in the killing of scientists. But those were only suspicions that lacked proof. The proof came today through the arrest of the two British soldiers while they were planting explosives in one of the Basra streets. This proves, according to observers, that the occupation is not far from many operations that seek to sow sedition and maintain disorder, as this would give the occupation the justification to stay in Iraq for a longer period.
When viewed in the context of all the stories that have been circulating about the mythical ‘al-Zarqawi’ and the alleged role of al-Queda, the events in Basra are the first real evidence that we have of the role of occupation forces in destabilising Iraq through the use of agents provocateurs masquerading as ‘insurgents’.
And, as I have long alleged here, it is now almost certain that ‘al-Zarqawi’ is probably long dead. An AFP story tells us
[The] Imam of Baghdad’s al-Kazimeya mosque, Jawad al-Kalesi said, that “al-Zarqawi is dead but Washington continues to use him as a bogeyman to justify a prolonged military occupation…He’s simply an invention by the occupiers to divide the people.” Al-Kalesi added that al-Zarqawi was killed in the beginning of the war in the Kurdish north and that “His family in Jordan even held a ceremony after his death.”
And indeed, last year, in a piece I wrote about ‘al-Zarqawi’, I referred to a report about ‘al-Zarqawi’ being killed when the US flattened the ‘base’ of his group Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq in early 2003, a report that actually originated with the US government.
Yet the BSBC, along with the rest of the Western media continues to put out endless reams of disinformation about ‘al-Zarqawi’ and his connection to the fictitious ‘al-Queda in Iraq’. Given the long-held assertion by the West that goes back to 2003, that Iraq was on the verge of ‘civil war’, it’s instructive to note that as the military situation of the occupation forces has deteriorated, so too has the level of so-called al-Queda operations increased, in a transparent attempt to divide the Iraqi national resistance, thus the increasing stories about impending civil war and the wave of ‘suicide’ bombings.
The exposure of the undercover SAS operations will only add to the resolve of Iraqi resistance forces to step up their campaign to expel the occupiers regardless of what kind of blatant propaganda line the UK government puts out.
It furthermore exposes the untenable position of the Iraqi ‘government’ which is now being squeezed by both sides, thus we get contradictory positions from the Iraqi ‘government’, with one denying that the SAS operatives had been handed over to ‘Shiite militia’ and the other trying desperately to tread an almost invisible line between condemning the actions of the British government whilst blaming the actions of the Iraqi police in Basra on ‘insurgents’ who have ‘infiltrated’ the police force. Yet it is a fact that at best, perhaps only 25% of the Iraqi military can be relied upon to serve their colonial masters.
Continuing to call them insurgents is itself an admission that the majority of Iraqis are opposed to the occupation and indeed, the bulk of the fighting is being carried out by the Kurdish Peshmerga as Iraqi forces simply cannot be relied on. It’s a classic situation that the US and UK military top brass know only too well having ‘been there and done that’ before.
Thus the occupiers become more desperate to destabilise the situation and no doubt we’ll see more SAS and US provocations revealed over the coming weeks as the situation continues to deteriorate.
www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-0365.html
September 21, 2005
Leave it up to the
Moonie-owned United Press International to attempt a none-too delicate effort to steer attention away from
the fact British covert intel goons killed a cop and bystander and were caught red-handed cruising around
Basra in car loaded with explosives and detonators. “Attacks on British forces in southern Iraq may be
directed from Iran,” reports the
UPI. “The clashes and the arrest of two undercover British soldiers was almost certainly triggered by the
arrest at the weekend of Sheikh Ahmed al-Fartusi, the leader of the Mahdi Army, a banned militia loyal to
Moqtada al-Sadr.”
Indeed, al-Fartusi, commander of al-Mahdi’s militia in Basra, was arrested by the Brits in a Gestapo-like raid, thus leading to “the spread of a great number of members of al Sadr Militia in al Basra streets and the gathering of many of these men near a building in the city center, which contains the headquarters of Al Sadr movement,” explains al-Mendhar News. “Eyewitnesses said that they are still in their locations hiding their weapons. Sheikh Mohamed Al Ka’bi, a member of Al Sadr trend in Baghdad, confirmed, ‘Our office in Al Basra ordered us to remain calm and adopt political means to release our Sheikh and his men.’”
Editors on the Moonie payroll grabbed their story from the Times. “Political assassination, murder, smuggling and extortion: the activities of a 50-strong gang of Iraqi policemen in Basra [dubbed the “al-Jameat gang”] whose members seized two British servicemen on Monday were brought to the attention of the Iraqi government six months ago, according to official sources in the city.” claims Anthony Loyd for the Times, not making mention of the fact the arrested “British servicemen” were dressed up as Arabs and driving around in a car packed with weapons and explosives. According to Loyd, this “50-strong gang” of Iraqis, supposedly led by al-Fartusi, is “allegedly connected to a terrorist cell responsible for recent attacks on British units in the city,” a terrorist cell of course linked to Iran. Al-Fartusi’s alleged
terrorist cell is said to be a splinter group of the Mahdi Army, whose followers are loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric at the centre of last year’s Shia insurgency. Now more of a populist, political figure, al-Sadr is not believed to have been aware, or in control, of al-Fartusi’s activities. Al-Fartusi, 32, had been sacked from a command position in the Mahdi Army. Iran, however, was aware of his operations. This year an influx of sophisticated shape-charge devices appeared in southern Iraq. New methods and materiel bore the hallmarks of the Iranian-funded Hezbollah movement.
Of course, it all makes sense—the irresponsible and impulsive Moqtada al-Sadr, who had the impertinence to go up against the occupation when he should have had the common decency to throw rose petals at the invaders, spawns a break-away gang involved in “assassination, murder, smuggling and extortion,” and these ruthless thugs are naturally linked to Iran and Hezbollah, thus attempting to buttress the oft-demonstrated bogus claim outsiders are running the resistance in Iraq and maybe stirring up trouble amongst pacified Shi’ites in southern Iraq. Instead of an explanation of why the Brits are running a pseudo-gang of phony-baloney terrorists in wigs and headdresses—careless enough to blow their cover and get apprehended red-handed with the goods—the British media is diverting attention away from the exposed truth—the SAS is responsible for at least some, probably a lot of the terrorism in Iraq—and are brazenly attempting to shift blame in the direction of Iran and Hezbollah, two of the usual suspects.
It should be obvious the two Brits arrested—and subsequently released after British tanks knocked down the building where they were held—are part of a larger plan to destabilize Iraq and foment civil war. Is it possible the Brits are behind a series of suicide bombings in Basra (73 people were killed and 200 wounded, including the incineration of 17 children, on April 21, 2004, and 68 were killed on June 24, 2004, to name but two) or are we to believe it was the work of the Shi’a-hating al-Zarqawi, determined, as we are told in various audio and video tapes released with curiously appropriate timing, to wipe every Shi’ite Muslim off the face of the earth?
“British military intelligence has concluded that Iran has been supporting a local terror group run by Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, who is blamed for the murder of at least 11 British soldiers. And in a secret report, military intelligence warned commanders that attacks on British forces were being deliberately intensified,” concludes the Moonie Times, excuse me United Press International. Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani is “working for Iran,” warns Time Magazine. “According to a U.S. military-intelligence document obtained by TIME, al-Sheibani heads a network of insurgents created by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps with the express purpose of committing violence against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq…. the U.S. believes al-Sheibani’s team consists of 280 members, divided into 17 bombmaking teams and death squads. The U.S. believes they train in Lebanon, in Baghdad’s predominantly Shi’ite Sadr City district and ‘in another country’ and have detonated at least 37 bombs [described as “shaped” explosive charges] against U.S. forces this year in Baghdad alone.” Considering the track record of U.S. intelligence—from overthrowing democratically elected governments (in Iran for example) to customizing lies in preparation for the invasion of Iraq—we can trust the al-Sheibani campfire story about as far as we can throw it. In other words, it has about the same degree of veracity as the al-Zarqawi campfire story—that is to say none, since virtually everything the U.S. and its corporate media disinformation ministries write or report about al-Zarqawi is undocumented fear-mongering.
As should be obvious, the Iraqi resistance has almost completely stalled the Anglo-American effort to pacify the country and reconstruct (or rather deconstruct) it into an acceptable model for the neocons and their carpet-bagging neolib co-conspirators who entertained high hopes to “structurally adjust” the Iraqi economy and steal its natural resources—not simply oil but also its minerals, natural gas, phosphates, sulfur, hydropower, and other resources of commercially exploitable importance, including cheap human labor. In lieu of the neocon promise that Iraqis would welcome this thievery with open arms, the Bushites and their British collaborators are working to split the country into three distinct pieces along religious and ethnic lines through civil war—and thus SAS goons (and their counterparts in the Pentagon who have yet to stupidly blow their cover) are running around with explosives and detonators, pretending to be al-Zarqawi Arabs engaged in a mindless jihad. Of course, it will not work and the Iraqis will eventually be victorious.
Unfortunately, here in America, we have an installed president—not the guy from the fake cowboy ranch in Texas, but the other guy, the chicken hawk from Wyoming—who talks about lobbing around nukes if millions of people (mostly Arabs and Muslims) don’t assume the position. If indeed the Iraqis (and the Iranians) eventually eject the U.S. military from the Middle East (as Hezbollah did in Beirut on October 23, 1983), irradiating the entire region or at least significant portions will become a distinct possibility with the current crew in control of the levers of mass murder. Of course, this would only be an increase in magnitude, since the U.S. has already nuked and poisoned Iraq (and Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia) with depleted uranium (half-life of 4.5 billion years), a crime that rivals anything the Nazis have done in terms of outright viciousness since Iraqis will be getting sick and dying from various cancers for a very long time to come.
September 21, 2005
No matter how they spin it, the red-handed nabbing of two British agents-provocateurs in Basra will lift the
veil of deceit that has cloaked the otherwise unexplainable internecine attacks between Sunnis and Shi’ites.
The long-held Israeli/Neocon goal has been to break up Iraq, among other Arab states, into more easily managed
Bantustans. The obvious fault lines among the Sunni, Shia, and Kurd communities made Wolfowitz believe
achieving the goal would be a cakewalk. It wasn’t the toppling of Saddam he was talking about, you see, and
all those terrible 'mistakes' made by Proconsuls Garner and Bremmer were as carefully calculated as the rest
of this bloody farce.
What happened in Basra, from the Iraqi standpoint — which is all that matters now that the end-game
approacheth — is that two Brits in robes were driving a civilian car packed with explosives. Their mission was
to throw a heavy distraction at the Shia militias who were quite upset that three of their chiefs were taken
captive by the Brits. They sought to blow up a huge bomb in the busy marketplace, with the obvious blame
pointing to Sunnis. But, as often happens with such false flag tactics, they backfired.
Now, those in the Shi’ite community who favor the withdrawal of the occupation troops, sidelined only by their
apparent power grab in the elections, are smelling the salts of reality and will come out of their stupor to
realize the Yanks have screwed them yet again. They’ll go back to the bloody beginning, say, to the massive
bombing of the UN Headquarters in Baghdad, and recalculate. They know they weren’t responsible, and it will
dawn on them that the ‘coalition’ had far more to gain from the routing of the international body, such as it
is, than the ‘dead-enders’ in the Sunni Community. Same goes for the Jordanian Embassy, the scores of
journalists, the mosque bombings, and virtually all of the so-called suicide bombers. These actions all had
the effect of fomenting civil war with the Kurds, who are heavily backed by the Israelis, being the only local
party to gain from the mayhem.
Early in the war, there were reports of Iraqi men being detained by occupation authorities for several hours
while they were interrogated and had their vehicles ‘searched’. The were released on the condition they must
go to a specific police station to pick up their papers, or some such necessity. Fortunately, a lucky few
discovered by happenstance that explosives had been placed in their vehicle with the purpose remote detonation
at whatever destination they were directed to. Apparently the trick still works, because the rash of ‘suicide’
car bombings is unceasing.
But back to Basra. The Yanks have to placate the Shia — at least enough to feel secure that they will not be
overwhelmed from the rear, the only point of escape if such becomes necessary. It was the only reason
elections were held in a way that would guarantee nominal Shia control of the ‘government’. But, perhaps with
Iran’s nominal assistance, the Shia began to look for proof of coalition involvement in acts that really only
benefit the coalition. Hence the capture of the two Brit operatives en flagrante. You can ignore comfortably
British claims their disguised boys were just surveying suspected militants. If that was their true mission,
why would they shoot up the Iraqi police who stopped them, and why would storming of the police station occur
before negotiations could produce the soldiers’ release with far less hoopla? More crucial, why would the
usually calm city of Basra erupt in such rage? Perhaps they’re feeling the twisting Yankee knife in their
backs yet again.
As for the other predictions I have made, the potential for economic collapse has been virtually guaranteed by
Katrina and her sibling, Rita, which is poised to take out the drilling platforms Katrina missed. Throw in
further damage to refineries, and they’re going to have to retrofit the nation’s gas pumps to accommodate
triple digit fill-ups. Toss in roughly the cost of another Iraqi war, which has quietly surpassed the Vietnam
debacle in one third less time, to sop out the pork to Halliburton and the like for hurricane cleanup, and
it’s clear the numbers in the debit column will overwhelm real American assets to back them up. It’s all blue
sky from here on out, baby.
As for the growth of doubts about the official legend of 9/11, a former Bush official has bluntly stated that
the WTC buildings were brought down by explosives, and it is reported that the probe into the outed CIA asset
has begun to sniff at the edges of the strange anomalies for which no answer has been given. And this is the
real danger for the Neocons, the only thing that could conceivably bring down the Bush administration, or lead
to unabashed martial law so that all would know the color of their true designs. In this regard, America will
collapse from the rot within and on a schedule that resembles the famously aggressive Spartans far more than
Britain or Rome.
Enjoy your Fall, folks, I’ve got to go stock the storm shelter.
© Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com
September 21, 2005 "ICH" --
-- Intelligence services generally are organized into the following major functional areas:
· Intelligence Collection
· Analysis
· Counterintelligence
· Covert Action
Intelligence Collection is the collection of Intelligence information, secret or otherwise, through spying,
interrogation, satellites, etc. If the information is collected through spying or interrogation, it is known
as HUMINT (human intelligence). If it is collected through technical means such as electronic eavesdropping or
satellites, it is known as TECHINT (technical intelligence). Open-source Intelligence (OSINT) is information
gathered from non-secret, public sources.
Intelligence Analysis is the assessment of collected raw intelligence and the processing of it into usable
intelligence product that can be used to guide policy and operations.
Counterintelligence has as its mission the prevention of a foreign intelligence service from obtaining
intelligence information from one’s own country. In a preventative role, it ensures the employment of security
practices to safeguard information. In a more active role, it conducts operations against enemy intelligence
services; in other words, it spies on the spies. Such action is often referred to as spycatching.
Perhaps the most interesting and sinister field in Intelligence is Covert Action (also referred to as
Clandestine Operations, Black Ops, and Black Operations). Some do not consider Covert Action as being part of
the traditional Intelligence mission, and they therefore believe that it should be treated independently and
even organized within a separate organization. Others feel that, because it often interrelates with
Intelligence Operations and Counterintelligence Operations, it should continue to remain within the same
ruling organization or apparatus.
There are many types of Covert Action operations, not all of them violent. For example, if a government wishes
to influence the politics of another country’s government, the government may secretly fund an opposition
party in that country in order to influence that country’s elections. Another method is to employ foreign
newspaper reporters to write articles that give the version of events, the propaganda, that you want people to
believe, even if it is the furthest thing from the truth. Or perhaps the owners or editors of a newspaper or
media service can be bought or won over to allow articles or news stories created by the Intelligence
organization for propaganda purposes to be planted in the newspaper or media service. A slant can then be
given to influence public perceptions. For example, mercenaries can be referred to as “contractors”, thus
making people believe that casualties among the mercenaries are innocent civilian construction workers who
were unjustly victimized.
The main thing about Covert Action is that it must be deniable. There is a term called “plausible deniability”.
When a government authorizes a covert action operation, the operation must be done in such a way that the
government can claim that it knows nothing about it; in other words, the operation must not be attributable to
the government that authorized it.
Covert Action operations are often Disinformation Operations, which are conducted in such a way as to
discredit the opposition or the enemy. This is done, for example, by doing a violent action, such as a bombing,
but making it look like the forces of another country or group did it. Such operations are sometimes called
False-Flag Operations, meaning that the operation is conducted to make it look like it was done by people
serving under another flag, preferably the enemy’s flag. If the operation succeeds as designed, people will
blame the action on the wrong party (the enemy). Thus, public opinion will be won over to the side that
actually did the killing. Such false-flag, covert action operations are often referred to as Dirty Tricks.
The British regularly employed Covert Action operations in Ireland, with the result that it is likely that the
IRA often took the blame for violent actions with which they had no involvement, although they were hardly
innocent players in the general mayhem. Many people suspect that the Northern Irish bank robbery that occurred
some time back was actually a British Covert Action operation designed to make the IRA take the blame, so that
people would believe that the IRA was not honouring the Good Friday Agreement. Incidentally, most of the
British Northern Irish bank notes taken were worthless old notes, so they were no skin off anyone’s teeth.
The policy in Iraq is to keep the country destabilized and on the verge of civil war to show that it cannot
govern itself and that it therefore requires the continued presence of American and British forces. The man
accused of being behind much of the bombing going on there is Al-Zarqawi, a man known to be dead for some time
now. Also, because he is (or, rather, was) a Sunni, bombings against the Shi’ia population, if blamed on him
and the Sunni insurgents, can keep the pot of civil war simmering, thus giving further justification to
keeping American and British forces there.
Most recently, two British Covert Operations specialists were captured in Basra, in Southern Iraq. They were
disguised as Arabs and were carrying bomb-making materials. When Iraqi police tried to apprehend them, the two
covert action operatives resisted arrest and killed two policemen. They were eventually caught and held in
jail. After the British military learned that they had been captured, it sent tanks into Basra to forcibly
free the two men. An enraged mob attacked the tanks with petrol bombs, and people around the world saw British
soldiers jumping out of a flaming tank and being stoned. The reaction was one of sympathy for the British
soldiers. Few stopped to wonder what was behind the anger and the assault. Most were sympathetic towards the
“poor” British soldiers, who were perceived as being unjustly victimized.
So, who is behind many of the bombings against the Shi’ia and Sunni populations? It is quite possible, even
probable, that many of them are being carried out by American, British, and even Israeli Covert Action
operatives.
So, when you watch the news, think more deeply about what you’re seeing; and when you read your newspapers,
try reading between the lines or wonder about the source or the writer behind the article. Has the article
been planted? Is the writer in the pay of an intelligence service?
J.V. Grady
informationclearinghouse.info/article10356.htm
Iraqi border guards arrest British national in desert
Tue Oct 4, 5:55 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051004/wl_mideast_afp/iraqbritainarrest_051004095405
A British national has been arrested by Iraqi border guards near the Saudi border in Najaf province, British and Iraqi officials said.
"We can confirm that a UK national has been arrested by the Iraqi department of border enforcement," a British military spokesman said on Tuesday, adding the Foreign Office was investigating the arrest which was believed to have taken place on Monday night.
An Iraqi border guards spokesman in Najaf, Saadun al-Jaaberi, said guards arrested "a terrorist group consisting of 10 people, including one British national called Colin Peter, near Mathlum, near the Saudi border".
The other nine were Iraqis from the southern city of Basra, he said.
The group was armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and were carrying a video camera, a satellite telephone and GPS satellite-tracking device, Jaaberi added.
The British embassy in Baghdad could not immediately be reached for comment.
Who Are The Real Terrorists In Iraq?
Clear Evidence British special forces are recruiting, training terrorists to heighten ethnic tensions
Elite SAS wing with bloody past operates with immunity, provides advanced explosives
Some attacks being blamed on Iranians
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, February 5, 2007
An article in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend pointed towards evidence that an secretive and elite unit of the British army is actively engaged in recruiting and training Iraqi insurgents and terrorists as double agents.
This confirms what many have speculated for a long time, that Britain and the US are deeply involved in bombings and attacks inside Iraq which are subsequently attributed either to Sunni insurgents or shadowy terrorist cells such as "Al Qaeda in Iraq".
The Telegraph article states:
Deep inside the heart of the "Green Zone", the heavily fortified administrative compound in Baghdad, lies one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war in Iraq. It is a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit that goes by the deliberately meaningless name of the Joint Support Group (JSG), and it has proved to be one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror.
Its members - servicemen and women of all ranks recruited from all three of the Armed Forces - are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level. Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents.
A look into the history of the secretive JSG or Force Research Unit (FRU), the cover name it operated under in Northern Ireland, reveals the extent to which the British government supports and engages in acts of terrorism in order to further its agenda in occupied territories. Iraq, as it turns out, is unsurprisingly no exception.
The FRU is the same ultra secret cell of the SAS whose criminal activities in Northern Ireland were under investigation by former Scotland Yard commissioner Sir John Stevens for more than a decade, during which time it emerged that the unit was involved in the murder of civilians in Northern Ireland.
According to Detectives, 'Military intelligence was colluding with terrorists to help them kill so-called "legitimate targets" such as active republicans...many of the victims of these government backed hit squads were innocent civilians.'
“Beginning in the 1980s the highly secretive FRU was sent into Northern Ireland to recruit and train double agents to work inside the paramilitary groups,” writes Michael S. Rose.
“The FRU combated IRA terrorism by the use of paid informers, blackmail, ambushes, and other methods not approved by the Geneva Convention. In the worst case, British officers decided that in cases when it would be difficult to bring suspected IRA terrorists to justice by legitimate means, the FRU would enlist outlawed guerilla groups that possessed both the desire and the means to murder the IRA men. According to Stevens Three, the FRU assisted Protestant terrorists in carrying out what were, in effect, proxy assassinations of Catholics. In order to forge such alliances, the British officers had to overlook the fact that the interests of the Protestant death squads were not those of the United Kingdom and its government.”
The FRU was further exposed by former member turned whistleblower Kevin Fulton.
Fulton worked for the FRU for much of his career as he was infiltrating the IRA. In his role as a British FRU agent inside the IRA, he was told to 'do anything' to win the confidence of the terrorist group. Fulton Told the Sunday Herald:
"I mixed explosive and I helped develop new types of bombs. I moved weapons. If you ask me, 'Did I kill anyone?' then I will say 'no'. But if you ask me if the materials I handled killed anyone, then I will have to say that some of the things I helped develop did kill.
I reiterate, my handlers knew everything I did. I was never told not to do something that was discussed. How can you pretend to be a terrorist and not act like one? You can't. You've got to do what they do. The people I was with were hard-hitters. They did a lot of murders. If I couldn't be any good to them, then I was no use to the army either. I had to do what the man standing next to me did.
I broke the law seven days a week and my handlers knew that. They knew that I was making bombs and giving them to other members of the IRA and they did nothing about it. If everything I touched turned to shit then I would have been dead. The idea was that the only way to beat the enemy was to penetrate the enemy and be the enemy. At the time I'd no problem with this way of thinking."
Fulton revealed that his handlers told him that his operations were 'sanctioned right at the top... this goes the whole way to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister knows what you are doing.'
Every major IRA bombing in England and Northern Ireland has had the fingerprints of the British government and the FRU all over it.
The August 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people, was known ahead of time by the security services and yet the bomb team wasn't intercepted. The reason? One of the members of the bomb squad was working for army intelligence and MI5. The bombing was allowed to go ahead.
Kevin Fulton claims that he phoned a warning to his RUC handlers 48 hours before the Omagh bombing that the Real IRA was planning an attack and gave details of one of the bombing team and the man's car registration.
Documents, lodged as part of a court action being taken against the British government by a disgruntled military intelligence agent, also reveled that an FRU major was the officer who was the handler of the British army's most infamous agent inside the IRA -- a man codenamed Stakeknife.
Stakeknife is one of Belfast's leading Provisionals. His military handlers allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA.
The London Observer further revealed some of the methods employed by the FRU in Northern Ireland, including the “human bomb” technique, which involved “forcing civilians to drive vehicles laden with explosives into army checkpoints”.
This throws a great deal of light on at least one reported incident in Iraq just over a year ago where British SAS agents, dressed in Arab garb and head dress, were caught attempting to stage a terror attack.
The soldiers drove a car towards a group of Iraq police and began firing. According to the Basra governor Mohammed al-Waili, one policeman was shot dead and another was injured.
Early reports cited as originating from BBC World Service radio stated that the car used contained explosives.
In light of this it is pertinent to ask the question, are civilians in Iraq being killed as "legitimate targets"?
We have previously covered the Iraq "order out of chaos" or "strategy of tension" theories in great detail, citing Pentagon documents, esteemed researchers and the testimony of Congressmen and Ambassadors.
All agree that it is entirely plausible to suggest that the US and British governments are operating an underlying strategy which serves to keep the country mired in turmoil to justify the continued presence of occupational forces.
In many cases the evidence suggests that the armed forces role is to prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to "quick-response" attacks. The FRU revelations of recruiting, training and equippingterrorists in Iraq is thus telling.
An even more startling question comes to mind, are everyday ground troops being killed in attacks that their higher ups either have extensive knowledge of or have actually coordinated themselves?
Recently there have been reports of US soldiers being killed by insurgents wearing American military uniforms. Iraqi officials said the gunmen disguised their intent with uniforms, American flak jackets, guns and a convoy of at least seven GMC sport utility vehicles, which are usually used by American officials in Iraq.
It is possible that insurgents may have been able to lay their hands on a couple of uniforms, but where did they get a whole convey of vehicles from?
Further interesting light is thrown on this topic when one considers that the explosives being used in many roadside bombs and car bomb attacks in Iraq have been proven to be developed using advance technology from photographic flash units, which were employed by the IRA some 15 years ago after Irish terrorists were given advice by British agents.
Kevin Fulton has again provided vital information on this, revealing how MI5 helped to buy bomb parts and technology in the US which were subsequently used by the FRU in Northern Ireland and have now found their way into the hands of Iraqi resistance fighters.
“In late 1993 and early 1994, I went to America with officers from MI5, the FRU and RUC special branch. They had already sourced the transmitters and receivers in New York following liaison with their counterparts in the FBI,” Fulton told the Sunday Tribune in June, 2002. Fulton’s trip was confirmed by the FBI, according to Matthew Teague, writing for the Atlantic. The Independent on Sunday “has also spoken to a republican who was a senior IRA member in the early 1990s. He confirmed that Mr. Fulton had introduced the IRA to the new technology and that the IRA shared this with ‘like-minded organizations abroad.’”
There can be no more clearer evidence that our special forces are recruiting, training and arming the Iraqi insurgents.
What's more, in an attempt to shift the blame away from British and US special forces, the US government has attempted to pin the blame for the use of this advance infra-red bomb technology on Iran:
“According to U.S. military figures, 198 American and British soldiers have been killed, and more than 600 wounded by advanced explosive devices manufactured in Iran and smuggled in through the southern marshes and along the Tigris River. Attempts to disrupt these networks, combined with the decision to send a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran, significantly raises the stakes, according to former Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk.”
So all in all here we have clear evidence of Britain and the US recruiting terrorists in Iraq, training them, providing explosives and advanced detonating technology and then blaming the attacks on Iran, thus raising the possibilities of widening the war across the Iranian border.
The FRU is, as previously stated, a wing of the SAS. A cursory look into some of the covert activities of the SAS, along with the equivalent Delta forces in the US, involving terrorist groups again reveals the fact that the British and US establishments are not engaged in fighting a war on terror, they are perpetuating the terror as part of their overall agenda.
British and American special forces notoriously paved the way for an influx of radical Islamic mujahideen fighters and arms into the Balkans in the early nineties and trained them in order to counter Serbian forces during the Bosnian conflict.
The SAS, under a joint strategic directive of MI6 and the US Defence Intelligence Agency, also later notoriously trained Kosovo Liberation Army terrorists in the Balkans in the mid to late nineties. Several investigations corroborated this.
The KLA was known to be heavy infiltrated at this time by "Al Qaeda" or mujahideen fighters associated with Osama Bin Laden who had declared a "global war on the US". It was even alleged that Bin Laden had directly financed the group, yet the US and Britain still went ahead and covertly trained the KLA.
The KLA was then used to increase ethnic tensions and further destabilize the region, just as is happening now in Iraq. Attacks by the KLA were used to justify Western intervention in the Balkans.
There is also extensive evidence to suggest that British and US special forces have helped create, support and train Albanian terror cells from which a great deal of the KLA finances are derived.
The activities of the FRU in Iraq need to be investigated immediately. We have a branch of the military that is operating above the law and outside of the Geneva convention within a theatre of war. Moreover this unit has an extremely dirty past that involves carrying out terrorist atrocities and blaming them on persons or groups it wishes to see removed.
The driving agenda in Iraq is to set down permanent bases and dominate the middle east from there. Thus the war is allowed to rage on to keep our forces there.
The FRU's past activities also clearly reveal that the British government is not engaged in a real war on terror, they use the vehicle of terrorism to steer the greater agenda of conquer and control where ever they see fit. The Delta forces of the US work in direct collusion with this wing of the SAS towards the same goal.
http://infowars.net/articles/february2007/050207FRU.htm
The Anglo-American Dirty War in Iraq
By Chris Floyd
02/13/07 "ICH" -- -- Imagine a city torn by sectarian strife. Competing death squads roam the streets; terrorists stage horrific attacks. Local authority is distrusted and weak; local populations protect the extremists in their midst, out of loyalty or fear. A bristling military occupation exacerbates tensions at every turn, while offering prime targets for bombs and snipers. And behind the scenes, in a shadow world of double-cross and double-bluff, covert units of the occupying power run agents on both sides of the civil war, countenancing -- and sometimes directing -- assassinations, terrorist strikes, torture sessions, and ethnic cleansing.
Is this a portrait of Belfast
during "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland? Or a picture of Baghdad
today? It is both; and in both cases, one of Britain's most secret – and
most criminally compromised – military units has plied its trade in the
darkness, "turning" and controlling terrorist killers in a dangerous bid
to wring actionable intelligence from blood and betrayal. And America's
covert soldiers are right there with them, working side-by-side with
their British comrades in the aptly named "Task Force Black," the
UK's Sunday Telegraph reports.
Last week, the right-wing, pro-war paper published an early valentine to
the "Joint Support Group," the covert unit whose bland name belies its
dramatic role at the center of the Anglo-American "dirty war" in Iraq.
In gushing, lavish, uncritical prose that could have been (and perhaps
was) scripted by the unit itself, the Telegraph lauded the team of
secret warriors as "one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly
weapons in the fight against terror," running "dozens of Iraqi
double-agents," including "members of terrorist groups."
What the story fails to mention is the fact that in its Ulster
incarnation, the JSG – then known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) –
actively colluded in the murder of at
least
15 civilians by Loyalist deaths squads,
and an untold number of victims killed, maimed and tortured by the many
Irish Republican Army double-agents controlled by the unit. What's more,
the man who commanded the FRU during the
height of its depredations – Lt. Col. Gordon Kerr – is in Baghdad now,
heading the hugger-mugger Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), a large
counter-terrorism force made up of unnamed "existing assets" from
the glory days in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.
This despite the fact that a
10-year, $100 million investigation by Britain's top police officer,
Lord Stevens, confirmed in 2003 that the Kerr-led FRU "sanctioned
killings" through "institutionalized collusion" with both Protestant and
Catholic militias during the 1980s and 1990s. Stevens sent dossiers of
evidence against Kerr and 20 other security apparatchiks to the Blair
government's Director of Public Prosecutions, in the expectation that
the fiery Scotsman and the others would be put on trial.
But instead prosecuting Kerr, Blair promoted him: first to a plum
assignment as British military attaché in Beijing – effectively the
number two man in all of UK military intelligence, as
Scotland's Sunday Herald notes – then with
the SRR posting to Baghdad, where Kerr and his former FRU mates now
apply the "methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the
Troubles," as the Telegraph breathlessly relates.
The Telegraph puff piece is naturally coy about revealing these methods,
beyond the fact that, as in Ireland, the JSG uses "a variety of
inducements ranging from blackmail to bribes" to turn Iraqi terrorists
into Coalition agents. So to get a better idea of the techniques
employed by the group in Baghdad, we must return to those "mean streets
of Ulster" and the unit's reign of terror and collusion there, which has
been thoroughly documented not only by the exhaustive Stevens inquiries,
but also in a remarkable series of investigative reports by the Sunday
Herald's Neil Mackay, and in extensive stories by the BBC, the Guardian,
the Independent, the Times and others.
We will also see how the operations of the JSG and "Task Force Black"
dovetail with U.S. efforts to apply the lessons of its own dirty wars –
such as the "Salvador Option" – to Iraq, as well as long-running Bush
Administration initiatives to arm and fund "friendly" militias while
infiltrating terrorist groups in order to "provoke them into action." It
is indeed a picture painted in black, a glimpse at the dark muck that
lies beneath the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and civilization
forever issuing from the lips of the war leaders.
II. Whacking for the Peelers
Gregory Burns had a problem. He was one of Gordon Kerr's FRU informers
planted deep inside the IRA, along with two of his friends, Johnny
Dignam and Aidan Starrs.
But as Mackay noted in a February 2003 story,
the already-partnered Burns had acquired a girlfriend on the side,
Margaret Perry, 26, a "civilian" Catholic with no paramilitary ties.
Forbidden fruit is sweet, of course – but pillow talk is dangerous for
an inside man. "Burns didn't keep his mouth shut and [Perry] found out
he was working for British intelligence," an FRU officer told Mackay.
"He tried to convince her he was a double-agent the IRA had planted in
the [British] army – but she didn't buy it."
Burns called his FRU handlers and asked to come in from the cold. He'd
been compromised, he said, and now he and his friends needed to get out,
with new identities, relocation, good jobs – the usual payoff for
trusted agents when the jig was up. But Kerr refused: "He said [Burns]
should silence Perry," the FRU man told Mackay. Burns, panicking at
thought of the IRA's horrific retributions against informers, insisted:
he would have to kill the woman if they didn't bring him in, he told
Kerr. Again Kerr refused.
And so Burns arranged a meeting with his lover, to "talk over" the
situation. His friends, Aidan and Johnny, volunteered to drive her
there: "On the way, they pulled into a forest, beat her to death and
buried her in a shallow grave," Mackay notes. Two years later, when her
body was found, the IRA put two and two together – and slowly tortured
Burns and his two friends to death, after first extracting copious
amounts of information about British intelligence operations in Ireland.
'In Kerr's eyes, Burns just wasn't important enough to resettle," the
FRU source told the Sunday Herald. "So we ended up with four unnecessary
deaths and the compromising of British army intelligence officers, which
ultimately put soldiers' lives at risk. To Kerr, it was always a matter
of the ends justifying the means."
Then again, Kerr could well afford to sacrifice a few informers here and
there to the wrath of the IRA's dreaded "security unit" – because his
own prize double agent was the head of that security unit.
Codenamed "Stakeknife," Kerr's man
presided over, and sometimes administered, the grisly torture-murders of
up to 50 men during his tenure in the IRA's upper ranks. The victims
included other British double agents who were sacrificed in order to
protect Stakeknife's cover, as the Guardian and many other UK papers
reported when the agent's work was revealed in 2003. ("Stakeknife" was
later identified in the press as Alfredo Scappaticci – an Irishman
despite the Italian name, although he continues to deny the charge.)
The FRU also "knowingly allowed soldiers, [police] officers and
civilians to die at the hands of IRA bombers in order to protect
republican double agents,"
the Sunday Herald's investigations found.
As Mackay reports: "FRU sources said around seven police and army
personnel died as a result of military intelligence allowing IRA bombs
to be placed during Kerr's time in command of the FRU. They estimate
that three civilians also died this way, with casualties in the
hundreds."
But some of the worst excesses came from the FRU's handling of
operatives on the other side, in the fiercely pro-British Protestant
militia the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). Here, among the Loyalists,
Kerr's top double agent was Brian Nelson, who became head of
intelligence for the UDA.
As John Ware put it in the Guardian: "Kerr
regarded Nelson as his jewel in the crown… For the next three years
[from 1987], Nelson colluded with murder gangs to shoot IRA suspects.
Month after month, armed and masked men crashed into homes. Sometimes
they got the wrong address or shot the wrong person."
Such as Gerald Slane, a 27-year-old Belfast man shot down in front of
his three children. A gun had been found dumped on his property; this,
and his Catholicism, was enough to get him assassinated at the order of
Kerr's man Nelson. Afterwards, it was found that Slane had no IRA
connections.
Another "wrong person" killed by the FRU's agents was the Belfast
attorney Pat Finucane, who was shot 14 times in front of his wife and
children. Finucane was a civil rights activist who had defended both
Catholics and Protestants, but was considered an IRA sympathizer by
Loyalists – and a thorn in the side by British authorities. He was
killed at Nelson's order by a fellow FRU informer in the UDA, Ken
Barrett, who was convicted of the murder but freed last year after as
part of an amnesty program in the Northern Ireland peace process.
Barrett was unapologetic about his FRU "wetwork" on Finucane. "The
peelers [authorities] wanted him whacked,"
he told a BBC documentary team after his release.
"We whacked him and that is the end of the story."
Kerr gave Nelson packages of intelligence files to help facilitate the
assassination of UDA targets, including at least four "civilians" with
no IRA ties, the Stevens inquiry found. The FRU also obtained
"restriction orders" from other British security and military units in
Northern Ireland, whereby they would pull their forces from an area when
Kerr's UDA agents were going to make a hit there, allowing the killers
to get in and get out without hindrance, investigator Nick Davies
reports.
Yet the FRU was wary of sharing its own intelligence with other security
services – which was the ostensible reason for running the double-agents
in the first place. Instead, Kerr engaged in fierce turf wars with other
agencies, while "stovepiping" much of his intelligence to the top
circles of the UK government, including the cabinet-level Intelligence
Committee chaired by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, when
Nelson was finally exposed and brought to trial on five counts of
conspiracy to commit murder, Kerr testified in his behalf, noting for
the court that Nelson's intelligence "product and his reporting was
passed through the intelligence community and at a high level, and from
that point of view he has to be considered a very important agent."
As one FRU man told Mackay: "Under Kerr's command…the mindset was one of
'the right people would be allowed to live and wrong people should
die.'"
This is the "mindset" now operating in the heart of the Green Zone in
Baghdad, where the JSG is carrying out – we are told in glowing terms –
precisely the same mission it had in Ulster. a unit which has allowed
its agents to torture, murder and commit acts of terrorism, including
actions that killed local civilians and the soldiers and intelligence
operatives of their own country.
III. The White House Green Light
Of course, Kerr and his Baghdad black-op crew are not alone in the
double-dealing world of Iraqi counterinsurgency. The Pentagon's
ever-expanding secret armies are deeply enmeshed in such efforts as
well. As Sy Hersh has reported ("The
Coming Wars," New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005),
after his re-election in 2004, George W. Bush signed a series of secret
presidential directives that authorized the Pentagon to run virtually
unrestricted covert operations, including a reprise of the
American-backed, American-trained death squads employed by authoritarian
regimes in Central and South America during the Reagan Administration,
where so many of the Bush faction cut their teeth – and made their
bones.
"Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” a
former high-level intelligence official said to Hersh. "We founded them
and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area
we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it." A Pentagon
insider added: "We’re going to be riding with the bad boys." Another
role model for the expanded dirty war cited by Pentagon sources, said
Hersh, was Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during
the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their
own terrorist groups to confuse and discredit the insurgency, and killed
thousands of innocent civilians in quashing the uprising.
Bush's formal greenlighting of the death-squad option built upon an
already securely-established base, part of a larger effort to turn the
world into a "global free-fire zone" for covert operatives, as one top
Pentagon official told Hersh. For example, in November 2002
a Pentagon plan to infiltrate terrorist groups
and "stimulate" them into action was uncovered by
William Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times. The new unit, the
"Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group," was described in the Pentagon
documents as "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that brings
"together CIA and military covert action, information warfare,
intelligence and cover and deception."
Later, in August 2004, then deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz
appeared before Congress to
ask for $500 million to arm and train non-governmental "local militias"
to serve as U.S. proxies for
"counter-insurgency and "counterterrorist" operations in "ungoverned
areas" and hot spots around the world, Agence France Presse (and
virtually no one else) reported at the time. These hired paramilitaries
were to be employed in what Wolfowitz called an "arc of crisis" that
just happened to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic
pipeline routes of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South
America.
By then, the Bush Administration had already begun laying the groundwork
for an expanded covert war in the hot spot of Iraq. In November 2003,
it created a "commando squad" drawn from the sectarian militias of five
major Iraqi factions,
as the Washington Post reported that year.
Armed, funded and trained by the American occupation forces, and
supplied with a "state-of-the-art command, control and communications
center" from the Pentagon, the
new Iraqi commandos were loosed on the then-nascent Iraqi insurgency
– despite the very prescient fears of some U.S. officials "that various
Sunni or Shiite factions could eventually use the service to secretly
undermine their political competitors," as the Post noted.
And indeed, in early 2005 – not long after Bush's directives loosed the
"Salvador Option" on Iraq – the tide of death-squad activity began its
long and bloody rise to the tsunami-like
levels we see today. Ironically, the first big spike of mass
torture-murders, chiefly in Sunni areas at the time,
coincided with "Operation Lightning," a
much ballyhooed effort by American and Iraqi forces to "secure" Baghdad.
The operation featured a mass influx of extra troops into the capital;
dividing the city into manageable sectors, then working through them one
by one; imposing hundreds of checkpoints to lock down all insurgent
movements; and establishing a 24-hour presence of security and military
forces in troubled neighborhoods, the Associated Press reported in May
2005. In other words, it was almost exactly the same plan now being
offered as Bush's "New Way Forward," the controversial "surge."
But the "Lightning" fizzled in a matter of weeks, and the death squads
grew even bolder. Brazen daylight raids by "men dressed in uniforms" of
Iraqi police or Iraqi commandos or other Iraqi security agencies swept
up dozens of victims at a time. For months, U.S. "advisers" to Iraqi
security agencies – including veterans of the original "Salvador Option"
– insisted that these were Sunni insurgents in stolen threads, although
many of the victims were Sunni civilians. Later, the line was changed:
the chief culprits were now "rogue elements" of the various sectarian
militias that had "infiltrated" Iraq's institutions.
But as investigative reporter
Max Fuller has pointed out in his detailed examination
of information buried in reams of mainstream news
stories and public Pentagon documents, the vast majority of atrocities
then attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias were in fact the
work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by
Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets.
As Fuller puts it: "If there are militias in the Ministry of Interior,
you can be sure that they are militias that stand to attention whenever
a U.S. colonel enters the room." And perhaps a British lieutenant
colonel as well
With the Anglo-American coalition so deeply embedded in dirty war –
infiltrating terrorist groups, "stimulating" them into action,"
protecting "crown jewel" double-agents no matter what the cost, "riding
with the bad boys," greenlighting the "Salvador Option" – it is simply
impossible to determine the genuine origin of almost any particular
terrorist outrage or death squad atrocity in Iraq. All of these
operations take place in the shadow world, where terrorists are
sometimes government operatives and vice versa, and where security
agencies and terrorist groups interpenetrate in murky thickets of
collusion and duplicity. This moral chaos leaves "a kind of blot/To mark
the full-fraught man and best indued/With some suspicion," as
Shakespeare's Henry V says.
What's more, the "intelligence" churned out by this system is inevitably
tainted by the self-interest, mixed motives, fear and criminality of
those who provide it. The ineffectiveness of this approach can be seen
in the ever-increasing, many-sided civil war that is tearing Iraq apart.
If these covert operations really are intended to quell the violence,
they clearly have had the opposite effect. If they have some other
intention, the pious defenders of civilization – who approve these
activities with promotions, green lights and unlimited budgets – aren't
telling.
This article was first published at Truthout.org