http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/
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Also read this article on how SAS soldiers have been running around Iraq waging a secret war against 'Iranian' terrorists in Iraq using IED's, bombs and assasinations
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article570571.ece
TWO SAS soldiers rescued last week after being arrested by Iraqi police and handed over to a militia were engaged in a “secret war” against insurgents bringing sophisticated bombs into the country from Iran.
The men had left their base near the southern Iraqi city of Basra to carry out reconnaissance and supply a second patrol with “more tools and fire power”, said a source with knowledge of their activities.
They had been in Basra for seven weeks on an operation prompted by intelligence that a new type of roadside bomb which has been used against British troops was among weapons being smuggled over the Iranian border.
The bombs, designed to pierce the armour beneath coalition vehicles, are similar to ones supplied by Iran to Hezbollah, the Islamic militant group.
“Since the increase in attacks against UK forces two months ago, a 24-strong SAS team has been working out of Basra to provide a safety net to stop the bombers getting into the city from Iran,” said one source. “The aim is to identify routes used by insurgents and either capture or kill them.”
The forces have tried to seal the notoriously porous border using high-technology sensors that monitor movement by night. They report to a major based in Baghdad in an unmarked building known as the “station house”.
Special forces commanders believe that a tip-off from a local worker at their base may have led to the men’s capture last Monday after a car chase by police, who later handed them to the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shi’ite cleric. They were freed from a nearby house.
The disclosure that the SAS has targeted the Iranian border coincides with claims by a former Iraqi defence minister that parts of Iraq have fallen under Tehran’s control.
Hazim Shalan, who left office last May amid a scandal over huge sums of missing money, claimed that 460 Iranian agents had been apprehended in the past two years. He accused Iranian officials of bringing weapons and drugs into Iraq and of paying voters to back their chosen candidates.
An inquiry into the capture of the SAS team and clashes that followed between British forces and an Iraqi mob was being carried out by the Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said this would focus on how the soldiers had been compromised but it was also expected to address claims that they had shot an Iraqi police officer.
The officer, Quteeb Rasheed Abdul Hameed, alleged that he had been wounded in the leg when the soldiers opened fire as police approached their unmarked car to question them.
A judge said yesterday that he had issued warrants for the arrest of the SAS men over the shooting and the alleged killing of a second man shot in the car chase. Judge Ragheb Mohamad Hassan al-Muthafar told The Sunday Times in an exclusive interview that the soldiers were “suspects who attempted to commit a wilful act of murder”.
He added: “Whatever their mission they have no right to fire intentionally on anyone, let alone a security man whose job is to protect this country.”
According to the judge, nine people were killed and 14 injured, including two boys aged 13 and 14, when the mob attacked British forces surrounding the police station where the men were detained.
The MoD declined to comment on the toll but said the warrants had no legal basis. “All British troops in Iraq come under the jurisdiction of Britain,” a spokesman said.
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/basr-o21.shtml
A senior British military police officer in Iraq, Captain Ken Masters, was found hung in his military accommodation in Basra on October 15.
Masters was commander of the Royal Military Police’s Special Investigations Branch (SIB), charged with investigating allegations of mistreatment of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers. According to the Independent newspaper, in this capacity Masters “had examined almost every single serious allegation of abuse of Iraqi civilians by British troops,” including “the cases of the fusiliers convicted of abusing prisoners at Camp Breadbasket near Basra and a paratrooper who has been charged in connection with the death of Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist.”
In recent weeks, Masters was thought to have been involved in the investigation into the events of September 19, when Iraqi police arrested two British undercover Special Air Service (SAS) officers in Basra.
According to the BBC, the SAS men were disguised as Arabs and were travelling in an unmarked car containing “weapons, explosives and communications gear” when they were challenged at an Iraqi security checkpoint.
The two opened fire, reportedly killing one person and wounding several others, including police officers, before they were taken into Iraqi custody. In response, the British Army launched a military assault on the facility in which the SAS men were being held, demolishing parts of the building. Several Iraqis were killed and wounded during the attack.
In a statement on Masters’ death, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said the “circumstances were not regarded as suspicious.” The only explanation offered as a justification for suggesting that Masters took his own life is that he was suffering due to the stresses of his job.
Such explanations are problematic in any circumstances, but more so given the politically sensitive nature of Masters’ work.
Masters, aged 40, had 24 years’ experience in the British Army. Married with two children, he was due to return to Britain in just two weeks. Reports indicate that he had displayed no signs of stress or illness and that no suicide notes were found at the scene. The Mirror newspaper cited “senior military sources and colleagues” in Basra saying that his death had been a “devastating surprise.”
Moreover, Masters’ death is only the latest in a series of suspicious incidents in Basra surrounding the September 19 conflict provoked by the arrest of the two SAS officers. Numerous sources have questioned whether the two men were acting as agents provocateurs.
Writing for the Globalresearch web site, Michel Chossudovsky states, “Several media reports and eyewitness accounts suggested that the SAS operatives were disguised as Al Qaeda ‘terrorists’ and were planning to set off the bombs in Basra’s central square during a major religious event.”
He cites an interview broadcast by the Arab news channel Al Jazeera with Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, denouncing “British provocations” in Basra.
The SAS men were in “a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition” that “was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra,” before they were arrested, al-Shaykh claimed. The British Army’s attack on the prison facility was aimed at concealing the nature of the SAS officers’ operation, he continued.
In another report, Al Jazeera quoted Sheik Hassan al-Zarqani, a spokesman for the Mehdi army led by Moqtada al-Sadr, stating, “We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets.”
The news agency continued, “If allegations that the soldiers’ car was loaded with explosives are proved, this will strengthen the theory suggesting that British and American intelligence are involved in the persistent and violent acts of ‘terror’ spreading across Iraq, which means that the current ‘counterinsurgency’ efforts involve the premeditated killing of innocent civilians to achieve US policy objectives.”
Basra officials have reportedly called for the two Britons to face an espionage trial.
Initial reports in Britain on the SAS officers’ arrest had claimed that the two were working undercover to root out Iranian-backed “terrorists” who were using sophisticated bombs to kill British soldiers. The subsequent army assault on the Jamiyat prison was justified with the claim that the captured SAS officers had been handed over by prison staff to local militias and that the militias had heavily infiltrated Basra’s police.
This official version of events was amended by army sources around the same time as Masters died to explicitly link the activities of the two SAS officers to the stormed prison facility. The Sunday Telegraph, October 16, published a report based on unnamed “military sources” claiming that “the real story” behind the SAS men’s undercover operation was that they had been spying on “several members of the Iraqi police, who were believed to be responsible for torturing prisoners at the notorious Jamiyat prison in Basra.”
The operation “was compromised on September 19 when the SAS team became involved in a shoot-out with four plain-clothed police officers just as they were about to withdraw from the surveillance operation,” it continued.
Subsequent news reports have uncritically repeated the Telegraph’s story, without making any account for the initial army claims as to what the two SAS officers were doing. Nor has there been any explanation offered as to why an undercover surveillance operation would involve weapons and explosives.
The revised account has only fuelled suspicion of dirty tricks.
Chossudovsky questions whether the British military were “blocking Captain Masters’ police investigation,” citing a report by the Independent newspaper of “apparent disagreements between British military commanding officers and the military police officials dispatched to the war theater in charge of investigating the actions and behavior of military personnel.”
Last week, it emerged that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had warned that leading British officers had made a “concerted attempt” to block an investigation into the killing of Sergeant Steven Roberts, who was shot dead after he was told to hand in his body armour due to equipment shortages.
According to the Independent of October 18, “Lord Goldsmith revealed that he felt it necessary to move the case to the civilian jurisdiction and said Sgt. Roberts’ case was one example of why top commanders might not be trusted to handle murder investigations.”
In addition, the October 16 Independent on Sunday revealed that eight British soldiers killed in ambushes in Iraq were the victims of bombs “developed by the IRA using technology passed on by the security services in a botched ‘sting’ operation more than a decade ago.”
Citing anonymous military personnel, the newspaper continued, “the bombs and the firing devices used to kill the soldiers, as well as two private security guards, were initially created by the UK security services as part of a counter-terrorism strategy at the height of the troubles in the early 1990s.
“According to investigators examining past collusion between the security forces and paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, members of the shadowy army undercover outfit, the Force Research Unit, and officers from MI5 learned in the early 1990s that a senior IRA member in south Armagh was working to develop bombs triggered by light beams. They decided the risks would be diminished if they knew what technology was being used.
“‘The thinking of the security forces was that if they were intimate with the technology, then they could develop counter-measures, thereby staying one step ahead of the IRA,’ a senior source close to the inquiry explained. ‘It may seem absurd that the security services were supplying technology to the IRA, but the strategy was sound.
“‘Unfortunately, no one could see back then that this technology would be used to kill British soldiers thousands of miles away in a different war.’”
For the Independent, revelations of an IRA pedigree for the bombs was significant because it contradicted the Blair government’s claims that Iran had been working with insurgents in Basra to make the devices.
But they raise another important question as to how such bombs have turned up in Iraq. The Independent suggests the route was directly between the IRA and Palestinian and/or other Middle Eastern groups. However, this is not the only possible explanation, given the involvement of British security forces in dirty tricks operations in Ireland and their alleged role in developing the bomb in question.
Yet another incident has yet to be explained. On October 4 it was reported that a British civilian and nine Iraqis had been arrested by Iraq’s border security force. An Iraqi police official in Najaf told CNN that the “ten suspected terrorists” had been arrested near the Saudi border the day before.
The group were reportedly travelling in three GMC Suburbans containing machine guns and GPS satellite technology when they were stopped. The Briton, Colin Peter Wanley, had claimed to be a contractor, but was briefly detained after his identification failed to support this.
Wanley was said to be working on bomb disposal at a water treatment plant in southern Iraq for his UK-based firm, Ammtech International Consultants Ltd. Subsequent reports indicate that Wanley had served in the British Army for 12 years in Northern Ireland before leaving to set up his company, and had previously been involved in “humanitarian” work in Bosnia.
Why an engineer should be in possession of an invalid visa, let alone Kalashnikov rifles and satellite navigation equipment, has never been revealed. Nor has the nature of Wanley’s relations with the nine Iraqis detained with him.
Instead, media coverage of the incident quickly fell silent.
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http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0510/S00052.htm
Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra?
Suspicions Strengthened by Earlier Reports
by Michael Keefer
September 25, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca
Does anyone remember the shock with which the British public greeted the revelation four years ago that one of the members of the Real IRA unit whose bombing attack in Omagh on August 15, 1998 killed twenty-nine civilians had been a double agent, a British army soldier?
That soldier was not Britain’s only terrorist double agent. A second British soldier planted within the IRA claimed he had given forty-eight hours advance notice of the Omagh car-bomb attack to his handlers within the Royal Ulster Constabulary, including "details of one of the bombing team and the man’s car registration." Although the agent had made an audio tape of his tip-off call, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, chief constable of the RUC, declared that "no such information was received" (http://www.sundayherald.com/17827).
This second double agent went public in June 2002 with the claim that from 1981 to 1994, while on full British army pay, he had worked for "the Force Research Unit, an ultra-secret wing of British military intelligence," as an IRA mole. With the full knowledge and consent of his FRU and MI5 handlers, he became a bombing specialist who "mixed explosive and … helped to develop new types of bombs," including "light-sensitive bombs, activated by photographic flashes, to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices having their signal jammed by army radio units." He went on to become "a member of the Provisional IRA’s ‘internal security squad’—also known as the ‘torture unit’—which interrogated and executed suspected informers" (http://www.sundayherald.com/print25646).
The much-feared commander of that same "torture unit" was likewise a mole, who had previously served in the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Squadron (an elite special forces unit, the Marines’ equivalent to the better-known SAS). A fourth mole, a soldier code-named "Stakeknife" whose military handlers "allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA," was still active in December 2002 as "one of Belfast’s leading Provisionals" (http://www.sundayherald.com/29997).
Reliable evidence also emerged in late 2002 that the British army had been using its double agents in terrorist organizations "to carry out proxy assassinations for the British state"—most notoriously in the case of Belfast solicitor and human rights activist Pat Finucane, who was murdered in 1989 by the Protestant Ulster Defence Association. It appears that the FRU passed on details about Finucane to a British soldier who had infiltrated the UDA; he in turn "supplied UDA murder teams with the information" (http://www.sundayherald.com/29997).
Recent events in Basra have raised suspicions that the British army may have reactivated these same tactics in Iraq.
Articles published by Michel Chossudovsky, Larry Chin and Mike Whitney at the Centre for Research on Globalization’s website on September 20, 2005 have offered preliminary assessments of the claims of Iraqi authorities that two British soldiers in civilian clothes who were arrested by Iraqi police in Basra on September 19—and in short order released by a British tank and helicopter assault on the prison where they were being held—had been engaged in planting bombs in the city
(See Global Research (1); Global Research (2); Global Research (3)).
A further article by Kurt Nimmo points to false-flag operations carried out by British special forces troops in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and to Donald Rumsfeld’s formation of the P2OG, or Proactive Preemptive Operations Group, as directly relevant to Iraqi charges of possible false-flag terror operations by the occupying powers in Iraq ( Global Research (4)).
These accusations by Iraqi officials echo insistent but unsubstantiated claims, going back at least to the spring of 2004, to the effect that many of the terror bombings carried out against civilian targets in Iraq have actually been perpetrated by U.S. and British forces rather than by Iraqi insurgents.
Some such claims can be briskly dismissed. In mid-May 2005, for example, a group calling itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" accused U.S. troops "of detonating car bombs and falsely accusing militants" (LINK). For even the most credulous, this could at best be a case of the pot calling the kettle soot-stained. But it’s not clear why anyone would want to believe this claim, coming as it does from a group or groupuscule purportedly led by the wholly mythical al-Zarqawi—and one whose very name affiliates it with terror bombers. These people, if they exist, might themselves have good reason to blame their own crimes on others.
Other claims, however, are cumulatively more troubling.
The American journalist Dahr Jamail wrote in April 20, 2004 that the recent spate of car bombings in Baghdad was widely rumoured to have been the work of the CIA:
"The word on the street in Baghdad is that the cessation of suicide car bombings is proof that the CIA was behind them. Why? Because as one man states, ‘[CIA agents are] too busy fighting now, and the unrest they wanted to cause by the bombings is now upon them.’ True or not, it doesn’t bode well for the occupiers’ image in Iraq." (countercurrents.org)
Two days later, on April 22, 2004, Agence France-Presse reported that five car-bombings in Basra—three near-simultaneous attacks outside police stations in Basra that killed sixty-eight people, including twenty children, and two follow-up bombings—were being blamed by supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on the British. While eight hundred supporters demonstrated outside Sadr’s offices, a Sadr spokesman claimed to have "evidence that the British were involved in these attacks" (http://www.inq7.net/wnw/2004/apr/23/wnw_3_1.htm).
An anonymous senior military officer said on April 22, 2004 of these Basra attacks that "It looks like Al-Qaeda. It’s got all the hallmarks: it was suicidal, it was spectacular and it was symbolic." Brigadier General Nick Carter, commander of the British garrison in Basra, stated more ambiguously that Al Qaeda was not necessarily to blame for the five bombings, but that those responsible came from outside Basra and "quite possibly" from outside Iraq: "’All that we can be certain of is that this is something that came from outside,’ Carter said" (http://www.inq7.net/wnw/2004/apr/23/wnw_4_1.htm). Moqtada al-Sadr’s supporters of course believed exactly the same thing—differing only in their identification of the criminal outsiders as British agents rather than as Islamist mujaheddin from other Arab countries.
In May 2005 ‘Riverbend’, the Baghdad author of the widely-read blog Baghdad Burning, reported that what the international press was reporting as suicide bombings were often in fact "car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs." After one of the larger recent blasts, which occurred in the middle-class Ma’moun area of west Baghdad, a man living in a house in front of the blast site was reportedly arrested for having sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman. But according to ‘Riverbend’, his neighbours had a different story:
"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."
(Baghdad Burning – May 18, 2005 )
Also in May 2005, Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi-exile physicist whose writings helped to discredit American and British fabrications about weapons of mass destruction, reported a story that in Baghdad a driver whose license had been confiscated at an American check-point was told "to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license." After being questioned for half an hour, he was informed that there was nothing against him, but that his license had been forwarded to the Iraqi police at the al-Khadimiya station "for processing"—and that he should get there quickly before the lieutenant whose name he was given went off his shift.
"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’."
(Albasrah.Net – 16th May 2005)
According to Khadduri, "The same scenario was repeated in Mosul, in the north of Iraq." On this occasion, the driver’s life was saved when his car broke down on the way to the police station where he was supposed to reclaim his license, and when the mechanic to whom he had recourse "discovered that the spare tire was fully laden with explosives."
Khadduri mentions, as deserving of investigation, a "perhaps unrelated incident" in Baghdad on April 28, 2005 in which a Canadian truck-driver with dual Canadian-Iraqi citizenship was killed. He quotes a CBC report according to which "Some media cited unidentified sources who said he may have died after U.S. forces ‘tracked’ a target, using a helicopter gunship, but Foreign Affairs said it’s still investigating conflicting reports of the death. U. S. officials have denied any involvement."
Another incident, also from April 2005, calls more urgently for investigation, since one of its victims remains alive. Abdul Amir Younes, a CBS cameraman, was lightly wounded by U.S. forces on April 5 "while filming the aftermath of a car bombing in Mosul." American military authorities were initially apologetic about his injuries, but three days later arrested him on the grounds that he had been "engaged in anti-coalition activity"
( huffingtonpost.com).
Arianna Huffington, in her detailed account of this case, quite rightly emphasizes its Kafkaesque qualities: Younes has now been detained, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, for more than five months—without charges, without any hint of what evidence the Pentagon may hold against him, and without any indication that he will ever be permitted to stand trial, challenge that evidence, and disprove the charges that might at some future moment be laid. But in addition to confirming, yet again, the Pentagon’s willingness to violate the most fundamental principles of humane and democratic jurisprudence, this case also raises a further question. Was Younes perhaps arrested, like the Iraqi whose rumoured fate was mentioned by ‘Riverbend’, because he had seen—and in Younes’ case photographed—more than was good for him?
Agents provocateurs?
Spokesmen for the American and British occupation of Iraq, together with newspapers like the Daily Telegraph, have of course rejected with indignation any suggestion that their forces could have been involved in false-flag terrorist operations in Iraq.
It may be remembered that during the 1980s spokesmen for the government of Ronald Reagan likewise heaped ridicule on Nicaraguan accusations that the U.S. was illegally supplying weapons to the ‘Contras’—until, that is, a CIA-operated C-123 cargo aircraft full of weaponry was shot down over Nicaragua, and Eugene Hasenfus, a cargo handler who survived the crash, testified that his supervisors (one of whom was Luis Posada Carriles, the CIA agent responsible for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner) were working for then-Vice-President George H. W. Bush.
The arrest—and the urgent liberation—of the two undercover British soldiers in Iraq might in a similar manner be interpreted as casting a retrospective light on previously unsubstantiated claims about the involvement of members of the occupying armies in terrorist bombing attacks on civilians.
The parallel is far from exact: in this case there has been no dramatic confession like that of Hasenfus, and there are no directly incriminating documents like the pilot’s log of the downed C-123. There is, moreover, a marked lack of consensus as to what actually happened in Basra. Should we therefore, with Juan Cole, dismiss the possibility British soldiers were acting as agents provocateurs as a "theory [that] has almost no facts behind it" (http://www.juancole.com)?
Members of Britain's Elite SAS Forces
It appears that when on September 19 suspicious Iraqi police stopped the Toyota Cressida the undercover British soldiers were driving, the two men opened fire, killing one policeman and wounding another. But the soldiers, identified by the BBC as "members of the SAS elite special forces" (BBC News), were subdued by the police and arrested. A report published by The Guardian on September 24 adds the further detail that the SAS men "are thought to have been on a surveillance mission outside a police station in Basra when they were challenged by an Iraqi police patrol" (Guardian Unlimited).
As Justin Raimondo has observed in an article published on September 23 at Antiwar.com, nearly every other aspect of this episode is disputed.
The Washington Post dismissively remarked, in the eighteenth paragraph of its report on these events, that "Iraqi security officials variously accused the two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or trying to plant explosives" (SF Gate). Iraqi officials in fact accused them not of one or the other act, but of both.
Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, told Al-Jazeera TV on September 19 that the soldiers opened fire when the police sought to arrest them, and that their car was booby-trapped "and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market" (quoted by Chossudovsky). A deliberately inflammatory press release sent out on the same day by the office of Moqtada al-Sadr (and posted in English translation at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog on September 20) states that the soldiers’ arrest was prompted by their having "opened fire on passers-by" near a Basra mosque, and that they were found to have "in their possession explosives and remote-control devices, as well as light and medium weapons and other accessories" (http://www.juancole.com).
What credence can be given to the claim about explosives? Justin Raimondo writes that while initial BBC Radio reports acknowledged that the two men indeed had explosives in their car, subsequent reports from the same source indicated that the Iraqi police found nothing beyond "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 theater of operations" (http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7366).
One might well wonder, with Raimondo, whether an anti-tank weapon is "standard operating equipment"—or what use SAS men on "a surveillance mission outside a police station" intended to make of it. But more importantly, a photograph published by the Iraqi police and distributed by Reuters shows that—unless the equipment is a plant—the SAS men were carrying a good deal more than just the items acknowledged by the BBC.
I would want the opinion of an arms expert before risking a definitive judgment about the objects shown, which could easily have filled the trunk and much of the back seat of a Cressida. But this photograph makes plausible the statement of Sheik Hassan al-Zarqani, a spokesman for Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia:
"What our police found in their car was very disturbing—weapons, explosives, and a remote control detonator. These are the weapons of terrorists. We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets…" (quoted by Raimondo)
The fierce determination of the British army to remove these men from any danger of interrogation by their own supposed allies in the government the British are propping up—even when their rescue entailed the destruction of an Iraqi prison and the release of a large number of prisoners, gun-battles with Iraqi police and with Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, a large popular mobilization against the British occupying force, and a subsequent withdrawal of any cooperation on the part of the regional government—tends, if anything, to support the view that this episode involved something much darker and more serious than a mere flare-up of bad tempers at a check-point.
US-UK Sponsored Civil War
There is reason to believe, moreover, that the open civil war which car-bomb attacks on civilians seem intended to produce would not be an unwelcome development in the eyes of the occupation forces.
Writers in the English-language corporate media have repeatedly noted that recent terror-bomb attacks which have caused massive casualties among civilians appear to be pushing Iraq towards a civil war of Sunnis against Shiites, and of Kurds against both. For example, on September 18, 2005 Peter Beaumont proposed in The Observer that the slaughter of civilians, which he ascribes to Al Qaeda alone, "has one aim: civil war" (Observer).
But H. D. S. Greenway had already suggested on June 17, 2005 in the Boston Globe that "Given the large number of Sunni-led attacks against Shia targets, the emerging Shia-led attacks against Sunnis, and the extralegal abductions of Arabs by Kurdish authorities in Kirkut, one has to wonder whether the long-feared Iraqi civil war hasn’t already begun" (Bodton Globe).
And on September 21, 2005 Nancy Youssef and Mohammed al Dulaimy of the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau wrote that the ethnic cleansing of Shiites in predominantly Sunni Baghdad neighbourhoods "is proceeding at an alarming and potentially destabilizing pace," and quoted the despairing view of an Iraqi expert:
"’Civil war today is closer than any time before,’ said Hazim Abdel Hamid al Nuaimi, a professor of politics at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. ‘All of these explosions, the efforts by police and purging of neighbourhoods is a battle to control Baghdad.’"
(Realcities.com)
Whether or not it has already begun or will occur, the eruption of a full-blown civil war, leading to the fragmentation of the country, would clearly be welcomed in some circles. Israeli strategists and journalists proposed as long ago as 1982 that one of their country’s strategic goals should be the partitioning of Iraq into a Shiite state, a Sunni state, and a separate Kurdish part. (See foreign ministry official Oded Yinon’s "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," Kivunim 14 [February 1982]; a similar proposal put forward by Ze’ev Schiff in Ha’aretz in the same month is noted by Noam Chomsky in Fateful Triangle [2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999], p. 457).
A partitioning of Iraq into sections defined by ethnicity and by Sunni-Shia differences would entail, obviously enough, both civil war and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. But these considerations did not deter Leslie H. Gelb from advocating in the New York Times, on November 25, 2003, what he called "The Three-State Solution". (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/iraq/three.htm).
Gelb, a former senior State Department and Pentagon official, a former editor and columnist for the New York Times, and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, is an insider’s insider. And if the essays of Yinon and Schiff are nasty stuff, especially in the context of Israel’s 1981 bombing attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, there is still some difference between speculatively proposing the dismemberment of a powerful neighbouring country, and actively advocating the dismemberment of a country that one’s own nation has conquered in a war of unprovoked aggression. The former might be described as a diseased imagining of war and criminality; the latter belongs very clearly to the category of war crimes.
Gelb’s essay proposes punishing the Sunni-led insurgency by separating the largely Sunni centre of present-day Iraq from the oil-rich Kurdish north and the oil-rich Shia south. It holds out the dismembering of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s (with the appalling slaughters that ensued) as a "hopeful precedent."
Gelb’s essay has been widely interpreted as signaling the intentions of a dominant faction in the U.S. government. It has also, very appropriately, been denounced by Bill Vann as openly promoting "a war crime of world-historic proportions" (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/gelb-n26.shtml).
Given the increasing desperation of the American and British governments in the face of an insurgency that their tactics of mass arbitrary arrest and torture, Phoenix-Program or "Salvadoran-option" death squads, unrestrained use of overwhelming military force, and murderous collective punishment have failed to suppress, it comes as no surprise that in recent military actions such as the assault on Tal Afar the U.S. army has been deploying Kurdish peshmerga troops and Shiite militias in a manner that seems designed to inflame ethnic hatreds.
No one, I should hope, is surprised any longer by the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—that fictional construct of the Pentagon’s serried ranks of little Tom Clancies, that one-legged Dalek, that Scarlet Pimpernel of terrorism, who manages to be here, there, and everywhere at once—should be so ferociously devoted to the terrorizing and extermination of his Shiite co-religionists.
Should we be any more surprised, then, to see evidence emerging in Iraq of false-flag terrorist bombings conducted by the major occupying powers? The secret services and special forces of both the U.S. and Britain have, after all, had some experience in these matters.
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Interesting article here ;
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MOR20050510&articleId=67
The Provocateur State
Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi "Insurgents"--and Global Terrorism?
by Frank Morales
Global Research, May 10, 2005
- 2005-06-14
The requirement of an ever-escalating level of social violence to meet the political and economic needs of the insatiable "anti-terrorist complex" is the essence of the new US militarism.
What is now openly billed as "permanent war" ultimately serves the geo-political ends of social control in the interests of US corporate domination, much as the anti-communist crusade of the now-exhausted Cold War did.
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.
According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization--the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)"--would actually carry out secret missions designed to provoke terrorist groups into committing violent acts. The P2OG, a 100-member, so-called "counter-terrorist" organization with a $100-million-a-year budget, would ostensibly target "terrorist leaders," but according to P2OG documents procured by Arkin, would in fact carry out missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among "terrorist groups"--which, according to the Defense Secretary's logic, would subsequently expose them to "counter-attack" by the good guys. In other words, the plan is to execute secret military operations (assassinations, sabotage, "deception") which would intentionally result in terrorist attacks on innocent people, including Americans--essentially, to "combat terrorism" by causing it!
This notion is currently being applied to the problem of the Iraqi "insurgency," it seems. According to a May 1, 2005 report by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine, two of the top US advisers to Iraqi paramilitary commandos fighting the insurgents are veterans of US counterinsurgency operations in Latin America. Loaning credence to recent media speculation about the "Salvadorization" of Iraq, the report notes that one adviser currently in Iraq is James Steele, who led a team of 55 US Army Special Forces advisers in El Salvador in the 1980s. Maass writes that these advisors "trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses."
The current senior US adviser at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which Maass writes "has operational control over the commandos," is former top US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Steve Casteel, who worked "alongside local forces" in the US-sponsored "Drug War" in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, "where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel."
The US "drug war" in Latin America also serves as a cover for ongoing counterinsurgency, employing terrorist methods to achieve two aims: one, actually combating genuine insurgency; two, the ratcheting up of a "strategy of tension," heightened social violence designed to induce fear among the citizenry and the subsequent call for greater "security."
This was the essence, for example, of Operation Gladio, a decades-long covert campaign of provocateur-style terrorism and deceit. The ostensible purpose of Gladio, officially launched as a covert NATO program in 1952, was to establish a clandestine network of "stay-behind" teams which would organize armed resistance and sabotage in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. But the network actually took a far more proactive role. Directed by US/NATO intelligence services of the West against their own populations, Operation Gladio led to possibly hundreds of innocent people being killed or maimed in "terrorist" attacks which were then blamed on "leftist subversives" or other political opponents. The most notorious such attack was the 1980 bombing of the train station at Bologna, which left 85 dead. Initially blamed on left-wing radicals, the blast was revealed upon investigation to be the work of an ultra-right network linked to the Italy's Gladio team; four Italian neo-fascists were eventually convicted of the crime.
The purpose was again twofold: to demonize designated enemies (the "communists") and to frighten the public into supporting ever-increasing powers for the national security state. It appears the Pentagon has been implementing Gladio-style operations for quite some time--possibly including 9-11. A stretch? Maybe not.
Witness the US Joint Chiefs discussion of "Operation Northwoods" back in 1962, a plan to blow up U.S. "assets"--including U.S. citizens--in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. Later, US Army Field Manual 30-31B, entitled "Stability Operations Intelligence - Special Fields," dated March 18, 1970 and signed by Gen. William C Westmoreland, promoted terrorist attacks (and the planting of false evidence) in public places which were then to be blamed on "communists" and "socialists." It called for the execution of terrorist attacks throughout Western Europe, carried out through a network of covert US/NATO armies, in order to convince European governments of "the communist threat."
What is striking is that during this period the primary source for US government info on the Russian "threat" was coming from the Gehlen Organization, Hitlers eastern front intelligence apparatus, which in the aftermath of World War II had cut a deal with the CIA's Allen Dulles and worked out of Fort Hunt, just outside Washington DC, before being relocated back to Munich. Headed up by super-spy Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, the Org's "special operations" expertise was heeded, financed and well-protected by U.S. tax dollars well into the 1970's. Could the Gehlen Org have had an influence in the production of FM 30-31B?
According to FM 30-31B,
"there may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness. Most often such situations come about when the revolutionaries temporarily renounce the use of force and thus hope to gain an advantage, as the leaders of the host country wrongly consider the situation to be secure. US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger."
The U.S. Army now claims the document was a Russian forgery. Journalist Allan Francovich in his BBC documentation on Gladio and US/NATO "special operations" terrorism, asked Ray Cline, CIA deputy director from 1962 to 1966, if he believed FM 30-31B was for real and he replied: "Well, I suspect it is an authentic document. I don't doubt it. I never saw it but it's the kind of special forces military operations that are described," to be implemented at the discretion of the president and Defense Department on the "appropriate occasion."
It could be that in Iraq--and elsewhere around the world--the "appropriate occasion" has arrived. Bush's war on terrorism could be the ultimate manifestation of the provocateur state; carrying out of clandestine "executive actions" and "special operations" directed against populations, including our own, who are truly ignorant of the real "enemy" in the face of the ever-present manufactured one, traumatized by strategic terror designed to engender fear and acquiescence to further "security measures"--thereby enriching the military, police agencies, and munitions and nuclear business enterprises.
RESOURCES:
Peter Maass, "The Salvadorization of Iraq?," New York Times Magazine, May 1, 2005.
A.K. Gupta, "Unraveling Iraq's Secret Militias," Z Magazine, May 2005
Lila Rajiva, "The Pentagon's 'NATO Option'," CommonDreams, Feb. 10, 2005.
Statewatch Briefing on Operation Gladio
US Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Operation Northwoods", 1962
National Security Archives on Operation Northwoods
US Army, Field Manual 30-31B, 1970
FM 30-31B excerpts from Cryptome.org
WW4 REPORT #58 on P2OG
Frank Morales, "John Negroponte and the Death Squad Connection," WW4 REPORT #108
