Power Of Love by The Forking Barsteward

The barsteward from londonderry's political career, has rocketed to the fourth dimension, since he acquired the Lord Muck persona, as one of Britain's leading aristocratic figures. A truly top toff, so royal that even the Orange Order have ended up doffing their bowler hats and  started calling him 'Sir'. "Yeah, funny innit?" an MI5 officer stated. "Last thing we heard about Old Lord Muck as we call him in Hollywood, is that he is going to be installed in Hillsborough Castle, with the Queen giving him the responsibility of royal caretaker of her Irish Castle." Lord Muck himself has said: "By shaking the hand of Queen Elizabeth I am effectively, symbolically, shaking the hands of hundreds of thousands of Orangemen."

More stories emerging, as a result of rummaging through some discarded Orange Order hard discs and their netbook diary, suggest that the Orange Order have been emailing back and forth with Lord Muck for several years. One exchange reveals intelligence, leading them to a meeting in an Irish bar overseas, where Lord Muck sipped Perrier water, met the Orange Grand Master and asked him to groom teenage Fenians into more Orange vampires and subsequently recruit his own party colleagues, to perpetually recruit a new vigilante army of personal orange vampires as PSNI reserves. However Orange Order suspicions in Londonderry of the whole project cannot be dismissed so easily, fearing their influence might be diminished over would be loyalist vampires.

Nevertheless  the Orangemen have already set up a room where an Orange handshake will take place, with Lord Muck and the Orange Grand Master, who will be the one waiting on this occasion, while His Lordship Muck having picked up a few tricks from her majesty, will on this occasion, be the one wearing the gloves. According to a dissident, who was mistakenly paid as a stand in at rehearsals for the event, to rehearse the Lord Muck role, things did not quite go to plan, when he said  that " As  the dissident stand-in Lord Muck went to accept the proffered hand of the Orange Master, he withdrew it, making a rude gesture, giving him the finger and kneeing the Grand Master in the groin shouting, 'Take that, ye Orange barsteward ye!'"

Apparently, as the 'Grand Master' fell in a heap on the floor, an orange brother jumped at the dissident 'Lord Muck' yelling: "Brits ite - ye Taig Proddy fecker! Death to Loyalist/Neanderthal barstewards ! Ireland for the Irish Orangutans!" The dissident added: "They then tried a piss process ceremony instead, where everyone pissed together instead of handshaking while collectively bonding as they said hello, to Old Mother Hubbard and her five daughters.

Meantime a character study has been commisioned on WTF is wrong with Lord Muck by the dissidents. The study has revealed that Lord Muck's bloodline, was infected with some twisted blood on purpose, to penetrate the Fenian Derry lair and learn more about alpha fenians. So they got some proper blood in the last few days and made an antidote for Lord Muck. When he was force fed it, Lord Muck went into a sort of a shaman, fever, dream state, where he remembered, being force-fed blue blood. Since the transfusion, the relationship with the Orange Order has turned a bit sour and just yesterday when the Orange Grand Master asked Lord Muck on the phone, “I know you’ve always got my back, right?” he received a half-hearted response of “Yeah, yeah, of course,” from Lord Muck.

One theory floating around Fenian and Orange communities in British Occupied Ireland, is that Lord Muck doesn’t have a soul. Ian Paisley has rebuked him by reminding him, "What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?" Some wonder if Lord Muck’s soul, or most of it at least, is  trapped in hell ? The Jesuits have tested all their demon-banishing techniques on him with no effect. A Bishop has tried an exorcism with the result that the story getting most mileage currently as the most likely explanation, that Lord Muck has in fact no soul and that he only got out of hell, because of some deal he made with the British.

Nothing glorious about the 'glorious twelfth' Guardian

BY KEVIN PLUMMER

Photo of Orange Parade at Queen’s Park in 1912. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 1388.
Nowadays, the Orange Order is thought of as a quaint anachronism, a benevolent society that marches every twelfth of July to commemorate the victory of William III at the Battle of the Boyne. But the Protestant fraternal organization once had a stranglehold on power in Toronto, and its subjugation of Irish Catholics gave the parade on every “Glorious Twelfth” an ominous undercurrent of potential violence. While Toronto’s municipal affairs were never as corrupt as elsewhere, the Orange Order operated as a de facto political machine throughout the nineteenth century. Between 1845 and 1900, all but three of Toronto’s twenty-three mayors and countless city councillors were members of an Orange Lodge. Protestant principles and moral order, as espoused by the Order, were synonymous with good governance and permeated the city’s culture. Moreover, the city council’s control over patronage ensured that fellow lodge members filled the civic administration, municipal utilities, and even, for a time, the police and fire departments. So wide was the Order’s influence at city hall, that on the occasion of the “Glorious Twelfth” in 1893, the Evening Telegram wrote in jest:

Like the temple of old Egypt
Empty as a noxious mine
Stood the City Hall deserted
For “the byes” were all in line.

Drawing of Orangemen by C.W. Jefferys.
The first Grand Lodge was established in Toronto in 1830, and it expanded steadily so that (according to historian Greg Kealey) there were over 20 lodges in 1860, 31 in 1880, and 56 by 1895. Nevertheless, Kealey concludes that “the political and social importance of the order always transcended its official membership.” Even at the Order’s height in 1892 there were only about 2,500 or 4,000 paid members. In addition, there were scores of socially prominent citizens who were granted honorary membership but did not actually participate in official lodge business. Surprisingly, given the prestige of the institution in city life, lodge membership was predominantly drawn from the ranks of labourers, street railway workers, teamsters, and other elements of the working class. Besides sentimental patriotic or imperialist motivations, many Orangemen joined because the benefits of mutual aid, security, and health supports made it easier to survive the difficulties of working class life. Middle class members, such as professionals, small-shop owners, and tavern-keepers, saw membership in terms of commercial gain through the steady attraction of lodge members as clientele. The Order’s secrecy, solemn oaths, and masonic-type rituals bonded men together as part of a greater whole, and dressing in the order’s distinctive sash and regalia for the Twelfth of July parade let members show off their status and achievements to the greater community.
The deep Protestant flavour to city life made “The Belfast of Canada,” as Toronto was nicknamed, anything but hospitable to the great influx of Irish Catholic immigrants who arrived in the wake of the Great Famine. Despite their population growing from about 2,000 in the 1840s to 12,135 (or over 27% of the total population) in the 1860s, Irish Catholics could find only unskilled factory work that offered little opportunity to escape the appalling conditions of the slum neighbourhoods of Corktown and Cabbagetown. Aslocal historian Bruce Bell described it: “To be Irish and Catholic at the height of Victorian Toronto meant menial work with no promise of advancement.”

Photo of Parade Marshall on horseback in 1932. City of Toronto Archives, Series 1057, Item 2072.
In addition to this economic discrimination and political domination, Orangemen also used their Twelfth of July parades to intentionally challenge Irish Catholic, or Green, territory. In addition to St. Patrick’s Day and Guy Fawkes Night, Orangemen marching en masse through Green neighbourhoods each July was one of the most common causes for riots in nineteenth century Toronto. In the twenty-five years between 1867 and 1892, Orangemen and Irish Catholics clashed twenty-two times. For the most part, the ritualized violence was limited to fisticuffs, arrests, and broken windows. On two occasions, however, brawling escalated to full-scale sectarian violence.
In the Jubilee Riots of September 26, 1875, armed Orangemen took exception to a Catholic procession. A raucous crowd of 6,000-8,000 rocked the entire city core for a number of hours. Deployed to defend the Catholic right to parade, the Toronto Police were commended for keeping cool heads in the face of the violence. One history of the department recalled:

Revolver shots were fired by the mob with startling frequency, while stones and other missiles fell among the Police and processionists like hail. Many were seriously injured; and although fully armed not a single man so far forgot himself as to return the fire, but throughout all behaved with remarkable coolness and with a degree of forbearance that was certainly very creditable.

Three years later, on St. Patrick’s Day, another serious incident followed an incendiary speech by O’Donovan Rossa, a leading Fenian. A crowd of thousands gathered outside the hall—local historian Bruce Bell somewhat incredulously claims 30,000 took part in the riot—screaming for Rossa’s blood. It’s said that in order to escape, Rossa had to dress as a woman and flee down a back staircase while mob violence exploded outside. Once again, the police were called out to quell the Orangemen, but accounts differ as to the diligence with which they protected the Irish Catholics from being attacked.
The very fact that the the predominantly Protestant police force was deployed to restore order on both occasions demonstrates an interesting quirk of Orange power in the city. Toronto politicians, as Kealey puts it, “built or demolished their careers in proportion to lodge support.” They needed Orange support at election time, but were always caught between the Orangeman’s love of tradition and ritual—and the potential for subsequent violence—and the burgeoning city’s need for social order. Under increasing political pressure, religious riots ended by the late 1880s, and Twelfth of July parades became less focused on antagonistic anti-Catholic behaviour and remained popular well into the twentieth century.

Photo of Mayor Thomas Foster in an Twelfth of July Parade in 1927. City of Toronto Archives, Series 372, Sub-Series 41, Item 172.
Over the city’s history, the decline of lodge influence was declared prematurely numerous times. In 1893, newspapers heralded Mayor Robert John Fleming for breaking the “secret society influence at City Hall.” In 1928, Mayor Samuel McBride’s landslide victory was credited to his campaign literature, which stressed that he was “not dominated by any set or clique.” The Orange Order, however, remained an important force in partisan politics well into the twentieth century. The old-boy networks of provided by lodge member offered candidates a basis of electoral support for launching a campaign. But elections were fought on issues of taxation and public ownership of utilities, not on a polarization of Protestant and Catholic sentiment. Politicians had to reach far beyond the dwindling number of Orangemen for voter support. Once elected to city council, Orangemen did not vote as a single bloc, but as individual office-holders representing diverse interests. Policy continued to reflect an Orange influence because civic ambitions remained closely aligned to the Order’s tenets.
In the end, it was the growing cosmopolitanism and changing demographics of the booming city that finally put an end to Orange political influence. In the 1950s, MayorLeslie Howard Saunders, a leading Orangeman, set off a firestorm of sectarian controversy when his letter on official city stationery celebrating the Twelfth of July was criticized by the press and fellow Orangemen alike as being intolerant of religious minorities. Saunders’s fervent anti-Catholic rhetoric—as well as some nefarious uses of public funds—pushed voters towards Nathan Phillips. Of Jewish descent, Phillips became the first non-Protestant, non-Orangeman mayor of the twentieth century. When he was branded as “the mayor of all the people,” it was a direct repudiation of a hundred and fifty years of Orange Lodge influence in municipal politics.

---

FILED UNDER: JUBILEE RIOTS, NATHAN PHILLIPS, HISTORICIST, HISTORY, ORANGE ORDER, POLITICS,RELIGION

 1  7 EMAIL0 REPORT ERROR SEND A TIP

TALES OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE BRITISH OCCUPIED IRELAND

From the Guardian

The refusal of the star witness, journalist Toby Harnden, to undergo cross examination at the Smithwick tribunal in Dublin has thrown thewhole inquiry into disarray and leads to questions about holding one in the first place.

The tribunal was set up by the Irish government to investigate claims that in 1989 a member of the Garda Síochána (Irish police) helped the IRA to murder two high-ranking RUC officers: Harry Breen and Ken Buchanan. This is despite the fact Canadian judge Peter Cory had already investigated these killings in 2003 and ruled that the IRA did not need the help of a traditionally hostile southern Irish police force to kill the two officers.

In a now familiar pattern, the Garda/IRA story was first circulated by former low-ranking agents of the British army's force research unit (FRU). Most Irish people saw the decision to extend the Cory investigation as a sop to unionists – a perverse quid pro quo for all that Irish republican fuss about Pat Finucane and the hundreds of other victims of Britain's dirty war. Speaking to an expectant Irish public, bizarrely, via his Facebook page rather than bothering to turn up at a tribunal his work helped instigate, Harnden tells us he still stands by his allegations.

Perhaps the Irish government should have listened more closely to Judge Cory, who cast doubt on Harnden's evidence in relation to the murders, saying he took unattributable testimony from security force or intelligence sources and repeated these as fact: "Statements and allegations were put forward as matters of fact, when in reality they were founded upon speculation and hypothesis."

Here lies the heart of what, I believe, has not just duped Toby Harnden but a whole raft of otherwise sagacious scribes: much of the narrative of our most recent Troubles is being dictated by those same FRU spooks whose testimony is not only driven by an anti-Good Friday agreement animus but is also often incorrect.

In the case of the two murders, for instance, FRU operatives say the formidable IRA units from north County Louth and South Armagh, which carried out the killings, were "riddled with spies" and that their favourite spy for Britain in the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, knew all about these killings. This is pure fantasy; deadly IRA cells would have no need or desire to consult with anyone before launching this kind of attack – least of all a Belfast man like "Scap". Territory is important in Ireland.

But don't take my word for it. A high-ranking RUC Special Branch officer (witness 62) told the Smithwick tribunal: "No agent of the state or anyone who was recruited at that time was in any way involved in the shooting." But guess what? The "riddled with spies" mantra got all the headlines and witness 62 was mostly ignored – even by the Guardian.

Many books have been written by experienced journalists that regurgitate the farrago of lies, half truths and speculations by maliciously motivated FRU operatives. All intone that Freddie Scappaticci more or less ran the IRA – ergo MI5 controlled the IRA.

In fact he was a member of a debrief unit that questioned IRA volunteers after certain operations and in certain areas. He was never briefed about upcoming operations. He was never in a so-called "nutting squad" and never in a position to walk into a particular area and demand prior details of an operation or the head of an IRA volunteer on a plate. Yet this FRU-inspired myth has become the accepted narrative.

But it's not just a question of journalistic standards. The repeated (and incorrect) assertion that MI5 was running the IRA and pushing the peace process feeds the ire of armed groups in Ireland who oppose the Good Friday agreement. A headline that says "IRA riddled with spies" is, in that sense, an incendiary device and undermines our democratic all-Ireland decision to try another, unarmed, way to find justice and peace and ultimately end partition.

The reality is that we will probably never get further than what Judge Cory discovered about the Breen and Buchanan killings, but the Smithwick tribunal may have served a purpose if it finally exposes the undue influence that a devious and anti-Irish-unity group of spooks has had on the Troubles narrative.

• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree

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 FRUduring 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.

(Continued after the jump.)

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


Politics, parapolitics, history

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/

Olympic Games London 2012 Without Human Rights

With the publication of the European Commission report from the European Court of Human rights concluding that Britain was guilty of torture in British Occupied Ireland, alongside the introduction of internment, the ensuing public and Parliamentary disquiet, the British Government  was forced to commission a committee of inquiry, chaired by Lord Parker, the Lord Chief Justice of England to look into the legal and moral aspects of the use of "Sensory Deprivation." The "Parker Report" was published on 2 March 1972, and found the techniques of "Sensory Deprivation" to be illegal under domestic law:

10. Domestic Law ...(c) We have received both written and oral representations from many legal bodies and individual lawyers from both England and Northern Ireland. There has been no dissent from the view that the procedures are illegal alike by the law of England and the law of Northern Ireland. ... (d) This being so, no Army Directive and no Minister could lawfully or validly have authorized the use of the procedures. Only Parliament can alter the law. The procedures were and are illegal.
On the same day  the Prime Minister Edward Heath stated in the House of Commons:

The Government, having reviewed the whole matter with great care and with reference to any future operations, have decided that the techniques...The statement that I have made covers all future circumstances."As foreshadowed in the Prime Minister's statement, directives expressly prohibiting the use of the techniques, whether singly or in combination, were then issued to the security forces by the Government."[3] These are still in force and the use of such methods by UK security forces would not be condoned by the Government. The leading nationalist party of that time, the SDLP took a principled stand and resigned from Stormont, "the sectarian parliament for a sectarian people," as boasted by Unionist leaders.




Last year the British once again have broken their promises with the re-introduction of internment without trial and torture once again. One of those interned is Marian Price who has been tortured now in solitary confinement for more than year whom the British refused to allow UN monitors into the prison to independently research exactly what was happening untile they moved her to a hospital so they could not see her torturous conditions. Marian Price now a mature woman with considerable years as a political activist on behalf of Sinn Fein is in both physical and psychological daily agony but the British agents who have infiltrated Sinn Fein have abandoned her.

A United Nations expert on torture has already called on Britain and all countries to ban the solitary confinement of prisoners except in very exceptional circumstances and for as short a time as possible, with an absolute prohibition in the case of juveniles and people with mental disabilities.“Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit… whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by States as a punishment or extortion technique,” UN Special Rapporteur on torture Juan E. Méndez told the General Assembly’s third committee, which deals with social, humanitarian and cultural affairs, saying the practice could amount to torture.Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit… whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by States as a punishment or extortion technique

“Solitary confinement is a harsh measure which is contrary to rehabilitation, the aim of the penitentiary system,” he stressed in presenting his first interim report on the practice, calling it global in nature and subject to widespread abuse.Indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement in excess of 15 days should also be subject to an absolute prohibition, he added, citing scientific studies that have established that some lasting mental damage is caused after a few days of social isolation.Considering the severe mental pain or suffering solitary confinement may cause, it can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment when used as a punishment, during pre-trial detention, indefinitely or for a prolonged period, for persons with mental disabilities or juveniles,” he warned.


The Queen of England ordered her release many years ago with an unconditional pardon, witnessed by the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, which the British now say they have lost or shredded, without conducting any investigation. Two judges have already ordered her release based on the same evidence as and unelected Englishman overuling everyone in Ireland, including the judiciary and his own Queen on the matter. It is generally accepted that his motives are bigoted in conjunction with his sectarian colleagues and personal as he is a close ally to several loyalist extremists, whom he in the process of co-opting into his British Tory party, along with much of the elitist colonial horsey set of fox hunting Tories in British Occupied Ireland.

For the above reasons we ask those who care about human rights, peace and justice to protest at the Olympic Games in London 2012 is the same way that the hypocrites of the British Government protested the Olympic Games in Beijing !

CALLS FOR REGIME CHANGE UK CENSORED BY INDYMEDIA IRELAND

 international | rights and freedoms | news report  Tuesday July 03, 2012 17:44 by BrianClarkeNUJ - AllVoices 

Calls for Fascist Regime Change in the UK to Restore Habeas Corpus

Habeas corpus is Latin for "you may have the body" . It is a writ which requires the authorities to bring the body before a court of law so that the legality of the detention may be examined. The name comes from the opening words of the writ in medieval times.
It could be demanded by anyone for almost a thousand years who believed they are unlawfully detained, it being issued by a judge.

Trialmyarse

Habeas corpus is Latin for "you may have the body" . It is a writ which requires the authorities to bring the body before a court of law so that the legality of the detention may be examined. The name comes from the opening words of the writ in medieval times.
It could be demanded by anyone for almost a thousand years who believed they are unlawfully detained, it being issued by a judge.

It is not to determine guilt or innocence, simply whether a person is legally imprisoned. If the charge relating to the detention was considered valid, the person must be sent to trial but if not goes free. Habeas Corpus passed in the Parliament of 1679 guaranteeing this human right in law but its origin goes back to Anglo-Saxon times preceding the Magna Carta of 1215.as a protection for the individual against arbitrary detention.

The Magna Carta stated in Article 39: "No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land." It was enshrined in law in 1679. However the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 gave the home secretary the power intern without trial Germans, Irish and Jewish refugees. In 1971 the British Government interned of hundreds of republican suspects without trial.

The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 set aside habeas corpus and internment without trial has been re-introduced in British Occupied Ireland last year where anyone suspected of opposing British Occupation in Ireland can be interned in solitary confinement without being charged or prosecuted which includes if your a woman being held in an all male prison or imprisoned without consent in a hospital.

Even Winston Churchill the right wing British leader of the Second World War who fought the Nazi's castigated the “odious” practice of jailing people without charge. It is a very frightening time for many ordinary Irish people in British Occupied Ireland currently when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow dissident and even Indymedia Ireland are joining the corporate media censoring articles on Habeas Corpus (Calls for Fascist Regime Change in the UK to Restore Habeas Corpus _ CENSORED).

Britain terror bombed Germany, with deliberate targeting of civilians and destruction of their homes, in total disregard for human life on a breathtaking scale, during the second world war. The Queen of England as the Sovereign Head of British Armed Forces, is the only person who can declare war, dating back to when the Monarchy was responsible for raising, maintaining and equipping the British Army and Navy. She is also of direct German ancestry and her family's role in bombing Germany is so controversial, that there is still considerable British censorship about the British Royal family's involvement in the deliberate targeting of civilians, the deliberate destruction of homes and utter disregard for human life. In fact it was quite simply unadulterated state terrorism of the most crude kind. Britain therefore is the last nation on earth, in any position to lecture anyone on human rights and most certainly terrorism. Their history in the matter, disqualifies them from having any credibility whatsoever.

From 1942 the Royal British cabinet took a strategic decision, to bomb densely packed working class areas, to cause firestorms and disrupt industrial war production. The pretence was that they were attacking military targets but it was cities, that were the main British target. Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg were targeted, with enormous numbers of planes which continued right to the end of the war. The city of Dresden was bombed to dust, in February 1945, even though its population had increased considerably with refugees caught in a firestorm, that flattened the city, killing hundreds of thousands of people in March 1945 as the RAF dropped levels of ordnance, greater than that of the entire war. This continued despite there being no question by 1945, that the Nazis were already defeated by invading armies from the east. All British terror achieved, was destroying huge numbers of lives particularly refugees and buildings. The bombings were simply meant to inflict shock and awe on an already defeated German population.

Tony Blair was the first Primes minister to indefinitely suspend Habeas Corpus in Britain, while at the same time warning senior Judges in Britain who expressed alarm at the attacks on civil liberties, that he would tolerate no dissent. He did so from a British Parliament of cons and neo-cons, who legislated new authoritarianism, from a second-rate political autocrat with a third-rate mind, while his Tory echo-chamber Cameron a third-rate politician with a second-rate mind was handicapped with a royal Viceroy in British Occupied Ireland called Patterson, who doesn't rate on any political scale whatever, all denouncing their own law lords and judges, who stated that the indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects, contravenes the Human Rights Act.

Even a senior Tory minister stated at the time, "Parliament must be supreme. Aggressive judicial activism will not only undermine the public's confidence in the impartiality of our judiciary. It could also put our security at risk and with it the freedoms the judges seek to defend. That would be a price we cannot be expected to pay." The important section of the establishment, driving the current reality is MI5, the intelligence agency, with tried and tested political internment without trial during years of the Irish 'troubles'. Special courts have sanctioned imprisonment without trial for years, etc., with sectarian judges ever reliable in those days. Now even judges themselves have to be security-vetted by MI5, with files opened to determine the reliability of judges. What chance ordinary British commoners.

Central to all of this is Habeas Corpus, a centuries-old British central legal reform, that prevented authorities from arbitrarily throwing a person into a dungeon and leaving them there forever without presenting charges in a court of law. Without this protection, there is no liberty of any sort for anyone. This political internment is a newly disguised form of tyranny for everyone. It is not law and it is not justice. It is also suppression of the truth, as it is impossible to have truth and at the same time beat your neighbor whether Irish, black or Arab, your dog or a large part of your kingdom. When will Britain recognize this principle or desirable truth? The War on terror is a war on Truth. There is a seat in the dock for the queen of England, when real War Crimes Trials begin.

Karl Marx said "All wars are class wars." Internment without trial in British Occupied Ireland and in Britain are designed to deprive suspects of internationally-recognized human rights like other repression tested in their laboratory of Ireland the English can expect more of the same when they stand up for their rights.The current internment without trial of Marian Price, her torture and the torture of political prisoners, is in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions and permits the queen's non elected English Viceroy in Ireland to use his own bigoted judgment, with the sectarian approval of loyalist political bedfellows, as to the precise meaning of “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment.

Britain are once again breaking undertakings given to the court of Human Right in Strasbourg when they were found guilty of torture in British Occupied Ireland. It also reinforces Paterson's subjective racist interpretation of “Irish dissidents” which now includes anyone who opposes the non democratic, royalist, writ in British Occupied Ireland. This unelected English autocrat is free to imprison Irish citizens, who may simply disagree with his subjective analysis of the war on terror, bearing in mind the British tradition and culture of ceaseless, terror worldwde. For example the queen's man in Ireland, McGuinness recently attacked independent journalists, as dissidents, with a follow up attack attempting to also silence them with political imprisonment.

Internment without trial and the dumping of the centuries old safeguard of Habeas Corpus is a vigorous attack on any form of a Bill of Rights a prerequasite for any basic form of republicanism. Witnessing a former Irish republican commander, shaking hands with the Queen of England on Irish soil, while her Government currently and systematically breaks, almost all of its GFA undertakings, without the slightest protection for what the royalist call British commoners, is an insult to any basic form of humanity, never mind any thinking republican with a brain cell. From the very beginning of the current Tory administration, they have set about dismantling the rudimentary protections of the sold call GFA or Bad Friday Agreement. This has resulted in a long list of systematic violations of international human rights, with secret intelligence based detentions, torture, humiliating treatment, indefinite detention without charge and criminal treatment. British activities are transparently flouting European law, without the slightest, conventional sense of human decency, not exactly surprising then this power hungry careerist is sucking the royal paw.

In conjunction with the loyalist fanatics surrounding the current unelected British Viceroy, they have all focused their attacks on Habeas Corpus as their point of attack, since the arrival of the Tory elite. If the English Viceroy has the statutory authority in Ireland to incarcerate Irish citizens or even loyalist commoners without filing charges, any illusion of Irish republican gains, after 40 years of war or any element of even the most basic form of a republican Bill of Rights is irrelevant. Thus the attack on Habeas Corpus as a primary lever of British tyrannical rule in Occupied Ireland, explains why the Tories, Paterson and his loyalist extremist loyalist, henchmen, have been working to undo Habeas Corpus, with political internment without trial. The sadistic British government with their Ghengis Khan want to be, Patterson have daily tortured Marian Price in solitary confinement, without any coherent charge or producing any evidence, as they savage Habeas Corpus and the centuries old inalienable right of a rudimentary form of protection, now itself reduced to being arbitrarily rescinded, like their lost royal edicts and dishonourable, broken, royal promises.

It is but another form of British terrorism in Ireland, as they attempt to cow and bully with kidnapping and violence, ordinary Irish people, standing up for their basic rights human rights as Irish citizens not British commoners. The British have been trying to bully their smaller island neighbour for 800 years, as they have done for centuries all over the world, with tens of millions of human beaings, loosing their lives, at the hands of British state terrorism invading their lands. Britain's terror bombing of Germany, with deliberate targeting of civilians, is every bit as much a crime against humanity, as the Nazi holocaust itself, indeed Britain's engineered holocaust in Ireland has cost more lives, than Hitler caused with his holocaust. Handshakes without proper restitution, as a mark of contrition and sincerity from British royalty to ensure it will never happen again, in both the current political context or class context, is an insult to all who lost their lives, their families, communities and particularly all those working class people from every quarter, who made the supreme sacrifice and were often simply used as cannon fodder by both sides of the political clown's handshake.

Related Link: http://irishblog-irelandblog.blogspot.com/