THE IRA IS NOT ON FACEBOOK STUPID

Lonesome Yanks
Postcards from the End of America 
By Linh Dinh

January 14, 2015 "ICH" -  I was sitting in the Friendly Lounge, one block from my Philly apartment. Next to me was a 59-year-old man, Robert. Seeing my wedding band, he confided, “You’re lucky to have somebody to go home to. I always had a lover, a boyfriend, but I haven’t had anybody in ten years. And it’s not the,” and he suddenly dipped his head down near my crotch, “but the support, you know. I can’t just go home and say to somebody, ‘Bitch, I love you!’”

I was getting buzzed in Dirty Frank’s, downtown Philly’s second cheapest bar, when an old friend proposed, “You should come over some time. I’ll make you dinner.” She knew I was married. On another occasion, this lovely woman moaned, “I just want somebody to love.” On a third, she called me after 2AM, “Motherfucker, where are you?!”

Sitting home, I received an email from a Vietnamese poet who lives in a sunshiny state. Though I’ve known this unhappily married 40-year-old for more than a decade, we’ve never met face-to-face. In Vietnamese, she wrote, “Crazy teacher, please help me to translate: I’m aroused. I’m horny. I’m a whore. I’m an aroused whore. I’m an extremely horny whore. Thank you very much.”

I cite these handy examples not to embarrass anybody or to, God forbid, present my splotchy carcass as somehow in demand, but simply to point out the loneliness that afflicts this society is so appallingly pervasive and, I suspect, unprecedented. Our infants are immediately removed from their moms, our toddlers are parked in front of blathering televisions when not institutionalized, our dating millennials stare at separate iPads, our married couples hide their sexting and porn habits from each other, our old people blunder down a dark hallway or endless sidewalk alone. Else, they lie unvisited, waiting for death, and when kaput, may not be discovered for a week, as happened to my friend Lee Goldston. Yo, Lee!

In 1970, only 17% American households had but a single person, but it’s up to 27.5% now. Moreover, many of those who live with others may be sharing a dwelling with annoying strangers, or curled up in their parents’ basement. Take Robert’s situation. In a house with four other people, he has a room “the size of a napkin.” Each time he uses the bathroom, he’s “afraid to step on the floor. The ceiling tiles are falling down. The wall tiles are falling out. It’s gross in there!” And Robert never uses the kitchen because that’s filthy too. No one ever washes the dishes. In short, it’s not a home, but then most Americans don’t really have one anyway.

For many, it’s merely a spot to lie down after the long commute. For others, it’s a nest that can be blown away after the next missed rent or mortgage check. Made of sheetrocks, marathon loan payments and always rising taxes, an American home is about as permanent as a bad sitcom. To have no true home is to be constantly anxious, if not panic stricken, and since many of us are also isolated, physically and psychologically, what you have, then, is a society of frustrated, angry, ashamed and nervous wrecks. No wonder we take more drugs than anybody else!

One man who still has his family home is my acquaintance, Bill. For a decade, Bill made beaucoup bucks as a computer technician but, at age 44, had to switch career to become a transit policeman. (He even applied to Homeland Security, but wasn’t hired.) Assigned to a shopping mall, Bill had to occasionally arrest shoplifters or break up fights among unruly teens, but mostly he just strolled around to flirt with selected cashiers. Fresh from Lindenwold, New Jersey, 18-year-old Chelsea with her bleached blonde hair and rose and vine tattoo climbing up one pale arm was particularly enticing. For a few seconds, Bill fantasized about rescuing her from Starbucks. A playa, in short, he doesn’t mind living alone in his eight-bedroom, inherited house, though his winter heating bills are a real bitch. Though a teenager at heart, Bill has also just turned 50, so most nights find him eating turkey, his favorite, while watching Netflix next a huge dalmatian, Myer. Unlike humans, dogs don’t experience drawn out illnesses that may last decades. Bill likes it that way.

Thanks to a large inheritance, Jim also has his own house and, unlike Bill, doesn’t even have to work. A typical day finds him listening to Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra and Abbey Lincoln while browsing Rolling Stone and CounterPunch. After a leisurely porn pause, he might check in on National Public Radio. At 53-years-old, Jim has never had to take care of anyone save a series of tabbies, and his biggest exertion in life, his greatest achievement ever, was his escape from a decade-long crack habit. Further, Jim considers himself a “revolutionary,” though the only people he’s ever fought were his neighbors. With a shovel, Jim shattered a bar window, then hit a homeless man with a rebar, but it wasn’t until he threatened someone with a grass trimmer that he ended up in a psychiatric ward for three days. Out, Jim’s back to his half-listening, half-reading and half-masturbating routine, and he’ll maintain this progressive regiment until social justice is tightly entwined in a 69, yin yang fashion, with equitable wealth distribution. Actually, forget the second part, for there’s no way Jim will share one square inch of his two-story house with anything larger than a slim cat. Jim likes it that way.

In downtown Camden, I heard a street preacher holler, “We are a relational people!” and he certainly got that right. Further, I ardently believe that human bodies are really one continuum that has been tragically yet mercifully broken up. If you’re cut, I should feel pain, and vice versa, and when we’re at our best, that’s exactly what happens. Too often, though, people derive an orgasmic pleasure from watching someone being blown up. Excited, they cheer.

Elias Canetti talks about how instinctively humans laugh at seeing a person falling, and he traces this to our days as flesh hunters. Since a fallen body represents meat, we laugh out of joy. Beside this atavistic impulse, however, we also rush to help the fallen because we recognize the body in distress as our own. Our entertainment industry, though, is relentless in pushing the fantasy of the super predator, somebody who’s capable of destroying countless bodies “of the bad guys.” With its mesmerizing war and “action” films, Hollywood has amplified, to an insane degree, all of our worst sadistic tendencies. Sex, too, has become a matter of body count, but this is perfectly in line with our obsession with numbers. Ain’t that right, Bill? How many have you scored?

The American porch shrank, then disappeared. Sidewalks emptied or became overgrown with weeds. Behind closed doors, an unending cacophony of disembodied voices hyperventilate over nothing or sing the same old songs. Making duck faces or pulling their pants down, a little lower, yeah, like that, Americans snap selfies compulsively to make sure nothing of their noisily desperate lives is lost to eternity. We’ve all become famous to ourselves, and that’s good enough, somehow.

Say, what are the political ramifications of having a nation of inattentive, narcissistic jerk offs? Well, me, myself and I think it’s way beyond divide and conquer, for what it is is rule by fragmentation into 320,159,176 pieces, and counting. Yes, we have this, that and that camp but each takes its cues from the right or left hand of our ruling apparatus. To know what to do, say or even dress, we look towards Midtown Manhattan, Hollywood and Northwest DC. Talk about a disastrous recipe! Unwilling or unable to deal with each other in the flesh, we must plug in to even squeak a dissident note, so it’s no surprise our feeble rebellion remains virtual.

While the internet allows many fringe voices to find their miniscule audiences, its dominant aim is to tease, tickle and titillate the mind into numbness. With multiple windows and everything flickering by, nothing matters. Skimming over bullshit and insights alike, we forget a minute later what we’ve just glimpsed. Swarming with words, the internet desensitizes us to language.

After that last paragraph, my phone rang, so I picked it up to hear Casey, someone I hadn’t heard from for over two years. After the briefest of chit chat, middle-aged Casey spilled that her wife had left her, “I was crazy, she was crazy, but she was even crazier than I was!” Later, her upstairs neighbor, a crackhead, punched Casey so hard, “my brain moved to the other side! After I maced the bitch, I was dragged to court, can you believe it?!” Concluding, Casey said I should come over soon to catch up. “I always have beer in the fridge.”

“How are you making money these days?” I asked.

“Oh, I do freelance art works,” Casey answered rather defensively, “and I get food stamps.”

For a while, the smirking mainstream media celebrated social media as a tool for rebellions or even revolutions, but let’s get real here. If that shit’s effective, the people of Iraq, Libya and Ukraine, etc., wouldn’t have had their countries wrecked by this empire. FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and the rest are no more than means for the masses to report themselves, minutely and in real time, to the authorities.

Faced with an ultra violent enemy with its kill lists, bombs, missiles, bullets, black sites and torture, we bark abstractions or demand nothing as our demand, such is our feebleness and nihilism. Giving up on reality, we claim a speck sized corner of the internet as our free speech zone. Impotent, we wave virtual fists in the direction of Wall Street or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

To make more concrete statements, true rebels won’t be so vaguely semaphoric. Whether lone wolves or in roving bands, they’ll have to dodge the best technology ruthlessness can buy, however. No pixelated posers, they won’t telegraph their moves in advance but simply act, and though their successes will likely be merely symbolic, at least they won’t be surfing on fantasies.Linh Dinh http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.comThe 



Charlie Hebdo Story Simply Doesn’t Wash


By Paul Craig Roberts
January 14, 2015 "ICH" - The Charlie Hebdo affair has many of the characteristics of a false flag operation. The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a disciplined professional attack of the kind associated with highly trained special forces; yet the suspects who were later corralled and killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like two different sets of people.
Usually Muslim terrorists are prepared to die in the attack; yet the two professionals who hit Charlie Hebdo were determined to escape and succeeded, an amazing feat. Their identity was allegedly established by the claim that they conveniently left for the authorities their ID in the getaway car. Such a mistake is inconsistent with the professionalism of the attack and reminds me of the undamaged passport found miraculously among the ruins of the two WTC towers that served to establish the identity of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.
It is a plausible inference that the ID left behind in the getaway car was the ID of the two Kouachi brothers, convenient patsies, later killed by police, and from whom we will never hear anything, and not the ID of the professionals who attacked Charlie Hebdo. An important fact that supports this inference is the report that the third suspect in the attack, Hamyd Mourad, the alleged driver of the getaway car, when seeing his name circulating on social media as a suspect realized the danger he was in and quickly turned himself into the police for protection against being murdered by security forces as a terrorist.
Hamyd Mourad says he has an iron-clad alibi. If so, this makes him the despoiler of a false flag attack. Authorities will have to say that despite being wrong about Mourad, they were right about the Kouachi brothers. Alternatively, Mourad could be coerced or tortured into some sort of confession that supports the official story.https://www.intellihub.com/18-year-old-charlie-hebdo-suspect-surrenders-police-claims-alibi/
The American and European media have ignored the fact that Mourad turned himself in for protection from being killed as a terrorist as he has an alibi. I googled Hamid Mourad and all I found (January 12) was the main US and European media reporting that the third suspect had turned himself in. The reason for his surrender was left out of the reports. The news was reported in a way that gave credence to the accusation that the suspect who turned himself in was part of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Not a single US mainstream media source reported that the alleged suspect turned himself in because he has an ironclad alibi.
Some media merely reported Mourad’s surrender in a headline with no coverage in the report. The list that I googled includes the Washington Post (January 7 by Griff Witte and Anthony Faiola); Die Welt (Germany) “One suspect has turned himself in to police in connection with Wednesday’s massacre at the offices of Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo;” ABC News (January 7) “Youngest suspect in Charlie Hebdo Attack turns himself in;” CNN (January 8) “Citing sources, the Agence France Presse news agency reported that an 18-year-old suspect in the attack had surrendered to police.”
Another puzzle in the official story that remains unreported by the presstitute media is the alleged suicide of a high ranking member of the French Judicial Police who had an important role in the Charlie Hebdo investigation. For unknown reasons, Helric Fredou, a police official involved in the most important investigation of a lifetime, decided to kill himself in his police office on January 7 or January 8 (both dates are reported in the foreign media) in the middle of the night while writing his report on his investigation. A google search as of 6pm EST January 13 turns up no mainstream US media report of this event. The alternative media reports it, as do some UK newspapers, but without suspicion or mention whether his report has disappeared. The official story is that Fredou was suffering from “depression” and “burnout,” but no evidence is provided. Depression and burnout are the standard explanations of mysterious deaths that have unsettling implications.
Once again we see the US print and TV media serving as a ministry of propaganda for Washington. In place of investigation, the media repeats the government’s implausible story.
It behoves us all to think. Why would Muslims be more outraged by cartoons in a Paris magazine than by hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by Washington and its French and NATO vassals in seven countries during the past 14 years?
If Muslims wanted to make a point of the cartoons, why not bring a hate crime charge or lawsuit? Imagine what would happen to a European magazine that dared to satirize Jews in the way Charlie Hebdo satirized Muslims. Indeed, in Europe people are imprisoned for investigating the holocaust without entirely confirming every aspect of it.
If a Muslim lawsuit was deep-sixed by French authorities, the Muslims would have made their point. Killing people merely contributes to the demonization of Muslims, a result that only serves Washington’s wars against Muslim countries.
If Muslims are responsible for the attack on Charlie Hebdo, what Muslim goal did they achieve? None whatsoever. Indeed, the attack attributed to Muslims has ended French and European sympathy and support for Palestine and European opposition to more US wars against Muslims. Just recently France had voted in the UN with Palestine against the US-Israeli position. This assertion of an independent French foreign policy was reinforced by the recent statement by the President of France that the economic sanctions against Russia should be terminated.
Clearly, France was showing too much foreign policy independence. The attack on Charlie Hebdo serves to cow France and place France back under Washington’s thumb.
Some will contend that Muslims are sufficiently stupid to shoot themselves in the head in this way. But how do we reconcile such alleged stupidity with the alleged Muslim 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo professional attacks?
If we believe the official story, the 9/11 attack on the US shows that 19 Muslims, largely Saudis, without any government or intelligence service support, outwitted not only all 16 US intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, Dick Cheney and all the neoconservatives in high positions throughout the US government, and airport security, but also the intelligence services of NATO and Israel’s Mossad. How can such intelligent and capable people, who delivered the most humiliating blow in world history to an alleged Superpower with no difficulty whatsoever despite giving every indication of their intentions, possibly be so stupid as to shoot themselves in the head when they could have thrown France into turmoil with a mere lawsuit?
The Charlie Hebdo story simply doesn’t wash. If you believe it, you are no match for a Muslim.
Some who think that they are experts will say that a false flag attack in France would be impossible without the cooperation of French intelligence. To this I say that it is practically a certainty that the CIA has more control over French intelligence than does the President of France. Operation Gladio proves this. The largest part of the government of Italy was ignorant of the bombings conducted by the CIA and Italian Intelligence against European women and children and blamed on communists in order to diminish the communist vote in elections.
Americans are a pitifully misinformed people. All of history is a history of false flag operations. Yet Americans dismiss such proven operations as “conspiracy theories,” which merely proves that government has successfully brainwashed insouciant Americans and deprived them of the ability to recognize the truth.
Americans are the foremost among the captive nations.
Who will liberate them?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

WILL U.S. PEACE PROCESS ENVOY DO THE RIGHT THING

Oh, croppies ye'd better be quiet and still

Ye shan't have your liberty, do what ye will

As long as salt water is formed in the deep

A foot on the necks of the croppy we'll keep

And drink, as in bumpers past troubles we drown,

A health to the lads that made croppies lie down

Down, down, croppies lie down.

The Irish Peace process has encouraged Irish people to accept, to tolerate and to understand the Orange Order culture as practiced by hundreds of thousands of Orange men, since the creation of their sectarian state almost a hundred years ago. Heaven knows Irish people have tried for centuries to understand the planters and be patient with their culture, that seems to be based exclusively on prejudice, bigotry and “Croppie lie down” mentality. But the hatred is as overwhelming and simply unbearable to sensitive souls, as their massive bonfires and sectarian killing rituals drag on year after year. Their tactics are straight out of a KKK manual and they are now once again parading in KKK garb as above. This eternal marching chant, continues to rant through Irish streets, in several thousand marches annually.

They burn anything from thousands of effigies of his holiness, to anything remotely Celtic or green, to native property, accompanied by huge Lambeg drums with viriolic “hate speech,” which the British seem to selectively mentor or ignore while censoring the Irish. They scrawl vile racism on the Irish flag. They flaunt KKK slogans, such as, “Wee are not racist we just hate cotton picken N..”. which are paraded down Irish streets, while the vast majority of Irish people, are expected to accept and encourage this culture, for the sake of the Peace Process. Turn the other cheek they say but if you observe carefully, people from that part of Ireland, you will notice they are disfigured, from winding in their necks and talking out of the side of their mouths. A rude generalization you may exclaim but I have scrutinized them carefully firsthand.

This is not culture, it is simply pure hatred and bigotry, it has no place in a civilized Ireland from any quarter, including the resulting reactionary politics, which is far easier talk than walk, when it is marching down your streets for most of the year. So in this context, as Gary Hart is a very welcome envoy from the the US to people craving a solution, sits down to negotiate with these British mentored power brokers and ruling elite. However, let there be no illusions about what he is dealing with and let him honestly call them by their correct names in plain English rather than be seduced, by the rhetoric of the British gravy train of political careerists.

He is dealing with racists not a culture. He is dealing with hate speech not free speech. He is dealing with sectarian incitement to violence, not empty and harmless slogans.The sooner Gary Hart faces these realities, the better the odds, of Ireland avoiding a looming, sectarian, civil war. Denial of these hard facts, of what the Orange Order consider acceptable behavior, will simply lead us further down the road to the abyss. Like the Middle East Peace Process, the Irish version remains in eternal gridlock, because of the intransigence of supremacist ideology. It must be called out. The Orange Order bretheren of the KKK is not acceptable in the States why should it be in Ireland. Republicans in the States are permitted to bear arms for self-defence, while any republican in Ireland is deemed a terrorist who protects his home on such hate filled streets. Don't get me wrong, I do not advocate a military solution but in a sectarian state, where police walk in, and liquidate whole families, people are entitled to defend their flesh and blood.

Objective political analysts, that include the Unionist and British tradition, are slowly coming to the realization, that the only realistic road to a lasting peace is a Federal Ireland. London is tiring in a time of contrived austerity of it's 10 billion annual subsidy, to the non-viable, artificial 'statelet'. That is the trump card for any honest broker of substance to face down the Orange Order bullying and bluff. If Gary Hart himself cannot do the right thing and he does carry enough clout to do it, then the only realistic alternative for the ordinary people, who are being held hostage to this anomaly, is that the European Union starts to assume it's political and financial responsibilities, if the British continue with their hands off approach and continue to enable this Orange Order monstrosity, to ruin the lives of generations of Irish people to come.  

Perhaps this writer has become cynical, with the amount of hot air, that has been expended around the Irish Peace Process, so I hope our American friends can forgive me, when I write, that searching through the US envoy's speech yesterday, around negotiations in Belfast currently, I can find nothing of substance, that offers hope that the monster of the Orange Order Veto will finally be faced down. I sincerely hope I am wrong and I would be happy to see any evidence from anyone, who can demonstrate it simply and clearly, that the US is truly being an honest broker of substance and prove my analysis incorrect. Meanwhile in such avoid, I remain a proponent of of moving on to a Federal solution, rather than remain stuck in the eternal, internal, problem of a sectarian contrived entity. Below is a copy of Gary Harts speech of yesterday, where he asks people to do the right thing. Mr Hart, with all due respect, I urge you, with all the resources that a reformed pacifist can command, to lead by example.

GARY HART 14 NOVEMBER 2014

I've been honoured to represent United States Secretary of State John Kerry on issues related to Northern Ireland. It is well-known that the current talks span a great number of issues from finance to parades, flags, and the past to implementation of previous agreements to restructuring political institutions. Given the wide array of group interests, fashioning any kind of comprehensive resolution of all these subjects, each one more dear to one group than another, is an immense challenge to those seeking negotiated solutions.
As we in America have done for more than two decades, we continue to try to be helpful. The United States Government does not bring a preconceived solution to the table. The citizens of Northern Ireland well know by now that we are an outside presence simply seeking to support these negotiations. Other than a peaceful and prosperous future for all the people of Northern Ireland, we have no agenda of our own.

Her Majesty's Government and the Government of the Republic of Ireland have been very welcoming to a continued US presence. They both understand that we have no political agenda of our own. The ability of the United States Government to add encouragement, ideas, and assistance is dependent on this collective trust among our governments and we will continue to build upon it.

After many years of public service at home and engagement in projects in nations around the world, I find a concern that virtually all human beings share - the love of our children and the hope for a better future for them. This is perhaps the most powerful common human instinct. We can build upon it.

All of us must appreciate this: we do not have to sacrifice the common good and the interests of future generations in order to maintain our identity. My nation, a nation of immigrants, did not demand that immigrant groups give up their cultures and histories in order to become American. But we have promoted the idea that all in America, regardless of their origin, had an interest in achieving a better common future as a nation.

The ghosts of the past must not be allowed to haunt the future of those yet unborn. Despite historic differences, I am struck by the intelligence and goodwill of all the party leaders I have met. Yes, they have their respective party agendas. But there is in each and all of them a desire to move beyond the past. It is not a question of whether; it is a question of how.


We in the United States can seek to encourage private investments, and thus employment opportunities, to Northern Ireland. But our success in that effort will require political stability and a functioning, problem-solving government operated by men and women of goodwill.

As a frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, I am finding citizens organising themselves around a common future, a future that will be better in every way for their children. Pursuing a sense of the common good requires us to place the interests of traditional politics at a distant second.

Northern Ireland's great poet, Seamus Heaney, once described a "republic of conscience" in which there were "no porters, no interpreter, no taxi". In this republic, he wrote, "you carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared". And as to public leaders, he said, they "must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office".

This republic is what Vaclav Havel called "a politics above politics". It is the realm where we must do what is right and not what is politically advantageous to us and our group.

As the years have passed - in my case many years - I have come to pay attention to the republic of conscience more than the republic of traditional politics. And in doing so I have found an increasing number of people shedding any notion of power in the form of creeping privilege and putting the common good above the presumptions of political office.

Perhaps if we all keep our eyes on the republic of conscience, a place where politics and power are kept in perspective and we atone for our presumption to hold office, those in Northern Ireland and those of us in America, can escape the worst of our past. A friend of mine once said that each of us is better than the worst thing we have ever done.

Americans must always be cautious in our interventions. We must always keep in mind that we killed hundreds of thousands of our own citizens in a bloody civil war. We are still atoning for our early history of slavery and that has not been easy. But each generation of Americans has produced a few citizens of the republic of conscience who have led us to higher things and who have urged us to keep our eyes on the stars.

So too with Northern Ireland. You have some remarkably capable and visionary leaders in office and in the public square. You have every right to be optimistic, to hope for a better future for your children, to say, in the words of Martin Luther King's memorable speech: "I have a dream today."

The people of America wish for you to achieve that dream and to be with you when it happens. As President Obama put it in his speech in June 2013 at the Waterfront Hall: "And you should know that so long as you are moving forward, America will always stand by you as you do."

BRITISH HEROIN & PAEDOPHILLIA WARS

History repeats itself and the evidence is in front of our eyes in Ireland, for those who care to wake up, open their eyes and connect the dots. The British secret services were around for the Empire, long before they passed it on to their WASP cousins in America and helped them found their own secret services. Margaret Thatcher's special relationship with Ronald Reagan in the war on drugs, deregulation and on the former USSR, included a deep paranoia of her own secret services, to the point, that she employed foreign agents in Ireland both for surveillance and counter revolutionary activities. The following summary by Benjamin Fischer, gives us a glimpse of this with respect to the former USSR

"Soviet intelligence services went on alert in 1981 to watch for US preparations for launching a surprise nuclear attack against the USSR and its allies. This alert was accompanied by a new Soviet intelligence collection program, known by the acronym RYAN, to monitor indications and provide early warning of US intentions. Two years later a major war scare erupted in the USSR. This study traces the origins and scope of Operation RYAN and its relationship to the war scare.

Some observers dismissed the alert and the war scare as Soviet disinformation and scare tactics, while others viewed them as reflecting genuine fears. The latter view seems to have been closer to the truth. The KGB in the early 1980s saw the international situation--in Soviet terminology, the "correlation of world forces"--as turning against the USSR and increasing its vulnerability. These developments, along with the new US administration's tough stance toward the USSR, prompted Soviet officials and much of the populace to voice concern over the prospect of a US nuclear attack.

New information suggests that Moscow also was reacting to US-led naval and air operations, including psychological warfare missions conducted close to the Soviet Union. These operations employed sophisticated concealment and deception measures to thwart Soviet early warning systems and to offset the Soviets' ability--greatly bolstered by US spy John Walker--to read US naval communications.

In addition, this study shows how:
The war scare affected Soviet responses to the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the administration's condemnation of the Soviet Union following the 1983 shootdown of a South Korean airliner, and a NATO nuclear-release exercise late that same year.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sought to use the Soviet alert/war scare to influence President Reagan's thinking about the USSR.
Moscow's threat perceptions and Operation RYAN were influenced by memories of Hitler's 1941 surprise attack on the USSR (Operation BARBAROSSA).
The Kremlin exploited the war scare for domestic political purposes, aggravating fears among the Soviet people.
The KGB abandoned caution and eschewed proper tradecraft in collecting indications-and-warning intelligence and relied heavily on East German foreign and military intelligence to meet RYAN requirements.

" 'Never, perhaps, in the postwar decades was the situation in the world as explosive and hence, more difficult and unfavorable, as in the first half of the 1980s.

--Mikhail Gorbachev, February 1986' "

To try to understand and grasp the political control, British secret services exercise on countries like Ireland, using the tried and tested tools of both heroin and paedophile trafficking, we need to look at how they used them historically, to being down the huge Empire of China. We can be absolutely certain, they are being employed worldwide today within the prohibition environment of the Reagan and Thatcher creation of the War on Drugs. There are smarter cheaper ways to counter this scourge but it would not serve the political purpose of the intelligence services. MI6 are known as the the Lords of the International Heroin trade, which is worth hundreds of billions of British Pounds Sterling annually.


In the final decade of the 1800s China's had a population of 450 million people. The ruling dynasty of the Ching, from Manchuria, had in 1644 superseded the Ming dynasty.The Manchu emperors were successful Empire builders and the reign of Chien-lung 1736-1795, was a time of great expansion. China gained Turkestan, Burma, and Tibet. At the end of eighteenth century Manchu power extended into Nepal, and its territory was as extensive, as any dynasty.

The British in India were irritated by high customs duties and by the attempts of China, to stop the growing import trade in opium, which was destroying their society. The drug from the poppy, had traditionally been used for medicinal purposes, but in the previous centuries, the British cultivated a habit among people of all classes, to use it for recreation. The opium came from India via the front of the British East India Company, and in 1800, the import of heroin was forbidden by the Chinese imperial government. Despite this the British opium trade continued to flourish. British traders made huge profits from the growing number of Chinese addicts. The Chinese government in Peking, noted that the British were intent on dragging down China, through mentoring opium addiction.

The central bureaucracy of China declined in efficiency, as a result, and the emperors became weaker, to the point, where they were unable to rule properly.The balance of trade turned against China in the 1830s and the British forced the issue of increased trading rights. The conflict was essentially the opium trade. By this time, more than 30,000 chests, each holding 150 pounds of heroin extract, were brought in by the British annually. Some of China's authorities asserted, that opium trade alone reversed China's formerly favorable balance of trade. In 1839 Chinese authorities confiscated and burned the opium. In response, the British invaded stratefic positions around Canton.

In the war that followed, as in the instance of other British Colnial conquests, the technological and tactical superiority of the British, perfected in their perpetual worldwide wars of invasion, prevailed. In 1842, China agreed to the Treaty of Nanking. Hong Kong was given to Britain, along other strategic ports, which were opened to British residence and trade.

Later the French and Americans, having learned from devious British piracy, approached the Chinese after the Nanking Treaty became public and gained the same trading rights, like the British. The advantages gained with the Chinese, set a precedent, that still dominates trade relations, worldwide today with their "most favored nation" treatment.The humiliation of China, is still remembered today and affects most aspects of its foreign policy. Meanwhile, the heroin trade continues to thrive worldwide, largely under British control.

The British adopted the same strategy, when overtly or nominally, exiting all of their colonies, of Empire worldwide, replacing them with the British Commonwealth. This is also the foundation of the special relationship, post the Suez Crisis, between the UK and US worldwide today. In the two scum states, established in divided Ireland, after its war of independence, the British left their form of bureaucracy behind intact, to rule covertly, infected with its agents in the Irish armed forces, policing, secret services, civil service, media and every important aspect of Irish life to the present day. 

The British elements of heroin and paedophillia trafficking, are critically important instruments of leverage, to maintain covert control and Imperial collusion.This of course, creates further suspicion and division, within Irish communities. Political assassination, internment without trial and draconian censorship, are now ingrained, within the Irish culture as a result, including the make-up of both Irish scum states, used since their formation, for the purpose of control and secrecy. Every generation of Irish people, since the formation of both bastardized states, in divided Ireland, since their creation, has felt the full effects of this oppression, up to the present day.As a result of publicity around anti-heroin operations, by groups aligned to the Continuity IRA, the Irish police have been forced into action in recent weeks, against drug trafficking. Yesterday the Irish Navy and the Garda prevented a major drug smuggling operation into Europe, when they detained a yacht with €80 million worth of cocaine off the west coast of Ireland. They detained an 19 metre luxury yacht, called Makayabella, carrying one ton of cocaine on board at 3 A.M. yesterday morning, 250 miles off Mizen Head in West Cork. The yacht was crewed by three British operators, who complied with a demand to hand over control of the yacht to the Irish.

The three men are from West Yorkshire, and are currently detained from two Irish naval ships, escorted the Mayakabella to the Irish Naval Base in Cork Harbour. The detention of the yacht involved members of the Garda National Drugs Unit and was the result of an international operation. The National Crime Agency of the UK and French customs, received intelligence on the shipment of cocaine from the Carribean to the UK and passed on the intelligence to the Maritime Analyis Operation Centre Narcotics in Portugal, which co-ordinates anti-drug trafficking in several European Union states, who then ordered the Irish Joint Task Force, to get off their arses immediately and detain the luxury yacht off the coast of Ireland. The consignment was meant to rendezvous with a collection vessel off the UK, for import into Britain. Another man was already arrested in the West Yorkshire area, for questioning about the drug shipment.

INDYMEDIA IRELAND Heil, mein Führer!

ROTHSHITES & GOBSHITES - Indymedia Ireland:

PRESSTITUTE CENSORED LINK ABOVE

The article above along with another recent article was censored by what purports to be Indymedia Ireland. Both articles are included below. This censorship of two factual articles, is an example of what is really happening under the guise of a failed Peace Process in Ireland, where fascism hides it's ugly face, even in what is known worldwide as Indymedia. I have my articles published worldwide in all of Indymedia outlets, in every country except Ireland. I'm sure fair minded people who read the articles below, can come to their own conclusions, about how little freedom there is any part of Ireland even among those who wear a liberal mask. Decide for yourself, but meantime I brand this excuse for a free press as the Presstitutes of Indymedia Ireland. Please help un-censor these articles by re-sharing and re\tweeting their links if you agree.


Senior Pentagon Official ;

“No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale, We bought them. They report to us.” Perhaps this explains Tony Blair’s $50 million fortune one year out of office."

We've suspected this for years in Ireland. Why else would Ireland and Britain's health systems, our national assets, built over many generations, with taxpayers contributions, change to U.S. private interests, the very same U.S. private interests which cannot provide proper health care to ordinary Americans. Why else would Shannon Airport, in a supposedly a supposedly neutral country, be handed over for NATO use?

We now have the story above, straight from the horse's mouth of the Pentagon, spilling the beans. Every Irish and European leader and past ministers alive, should be questioned and interrogated on this article, but the mainstream presstitute, whores, won't do it. They'll be allowed to walk away with the money as usual no questions asked.

Colonization was the theft of resources in places like Ireland, the only difference today, is a name change. Resources worldwide are now stolen through the IMF and corporations. Colonization is more prevalent than ever, with none of the wealth shared by average citizens, of even the wealthier states. Everyone is now colonized, enforced by police states, impoverished and brainfilthed by mainstream corporate whore houses of political porn.

How strange then, that Irish people who claim, they would do anything for their children, while at the same time selling out their country, that will be barely inhabitable for the their children. Scameron's other island of Orangemen, Blueshirts and Sellouts.

Speaking with many people from across the political divide in Ireland currently , the general consensus privately, is that Irish Peace Process, is currently dying a slow death. One of its principal architects Gerry Adams in a statement recently stated, “The political process is in trouble. I believe that the political process faces its greatest challenge since the Good Friday Agreement negotiations in 1998. The anti-Good Friday Agreement axis within unionism; the pro-unionist stance of the British secretary of state Theresa Villiers; the refusal of Downing Street to honour its own obligations, are combining to create the most serious threat to the political institutions in the North in recent years.

“The result of all this is directly undermining power-sharing and partnership government. The unionist leaderships have been encouraged in their posture by a British government that has not been fully engaged with the political process for four years.” He added, that traditional pro-British Unionist were unwilling to participate positively in any of the Agreement's institutions, stating that “Instead it has adopted a tactical approach aimed at serving the political agenda of a fundamentalist rump in their party rather than the needs of the whole community,”

Again yesterday, Adams made a veiled attack, on the current Fine Gael regime in Government in the South of Ireland, which has traditionally protected the Unionists in the North, stating, "An anti-agreement axis has now emerged. There needs to be a pro-agreement axis and the two Governments need to be very, very focused on delivering on the agreement.” 

The Irish Government has been too passive in my view and the Taoiseach(Irish Prime minister) could well emulate the example of Albert Reynolds (Another Peace Process architect who died last week)  to get involved and press ahead but particularly to keep the British Government to its obligations.”

The traditional Unionist Leader in the north Peter Robinson statement in reply, "Once more we see the self-serving attempt by Sinn Fein to distract public attention from real problems by blaming everyone, except itself, for what it asserts is a crisis that impacts on the political institutions."

Last week Hilary Clinton 's aide “Today, too many in Ireland take two decades of a ceasefire for granted. They still focus on their own sense of victimhood of the past and fail to forge a new united community that can not only solidify the peace, but even build shared prosperity. A look back at the hard-fought ceasefire may encourage some broader thinking about the responsibility of leadership to build a better shared future for the people of Ireland.”

The British Conservative Government and their Vice Royal in Ireland, since coming to power, other than enforcing a heavy censorship of international media coverage of the ongoing low intensity war In Occupied Ireland, have irresponsibly taken a hands off approach with the Peace Process and essentially have failed to understand the critical small print of the dying Good Friday agreement.

In a recent statement the leader of Republican Sinn Fein, the traditional  Irish Republican voice, leader Des Dalton stated, "We are being asked to abandon the high ideals, that inspired that revolutionary generation of a century ago and instead embrace the mythology of empire. It is evident that in the decade of centenaries, the political establishments of Leinster House, Stormont and Westminster, are determined to draw a line under Irish history. By demonising and isolating Irish Republicanism and refusing it access to public debate, they hope, that it will simply fade from the public consciousness, robbed of historical or political legitimacy. Quoting from a Ronan Fanning article in the Irish Times, he added,  “…the propagation of a bland, bloodless, bowdlerised and inaccurate hybrid of history, which if carried to extremes, is more likely to provoke political outrage than to command intellectual respect, let alone consensus.”

The Freemasonry of the Orange Order are now front and centre in Unionist, Fine Gael and British politics. Its Chaplain, Rev Mervyn Gibson, the most influential person in all-party talks on flags, parading and the past, is even more influential after the DUP and UUP scuttled the talks by the recent US Government to try move the dying process on, with its envoys Richard Haas and Meghan Sullivan sent packing by the Orange Order, exercising its trump card, the Orange veto.This is one of many critical factors, that was not dealt with by The Peace process. Another was the issue of large numbers of political prisoners still languishing in British Gaols, in both parts of Ireland. This threatens to explode again at any moment, in the same way that, the Hunger Strike of Bobby Sands and the 11 other Irish Republicans, who starved to death on Hunger Strike, changing the face of Irish politics and giving the platform to Adams voice, to be serious player he now is in Irish politics.


Now however, as the Orange Order have demonstrated themselves to be the real voice of traditional Unionism, while  Adams clearly does not speak for traditional Irish Republicans. What Nancy Soderberg and the British Conservative Party in London have failed to grasp, is that the Good Friday Agreement will not stick, without a proper foundation, in the context of both the Orange and Green traditions of Ireland. These traditions are deep in the psyche of the majority of Irish people's consciousness. One of the principal lessons of the last 800 years of irish History which Ms Soderberg in the context of Ireland and many American citizens in the context of their own short history, fail to understand is "Old Europe."


In light of all of this, one does not have to be particularly bright to observe, that the Peace Process is past its sell by date on the ground in Ireland. It clearly needs to evolve into something more comprehensive and inclusive with respect to the matter of Orange/Green traditions and their real voices. Clearly again for a more permanent solution, the "Peace Process needs to evolve from a superficially contrived short term solution into a bedded down Comprehensive Settlement Process


Settlement Process


The English Oxford dictionary  defines "settlement"as "An official agreement intended to resolve a dispute or conflict." Obviously in any permanent settlement, compromise is critical and nobody is going to achieve their ideals.This needs to be first accepted by everyone at the negotiating table, however painful.The alternative is a war for total victory, the consequence of which, no sane mind can countenance. Most fair minded traditional Irish republicans will acknowledge, that the Orange tradition has made considerable sacrifices, with respect to their identity, particularly in the context of both World Wars and the recent ongoing war in Ireland, with tens of thousands losing their lives in all of this.This is a considerable factor in their tradition and identity. Any agreement that ignores this reality is doomed.


Likewise within the "green tradition" millions of Irish have died, as a result of British colonialism. This reality cannot simply be airbrushed out of Irish history by revisionism because it is deeply embedded, consciously or unconsciously, within the Irish psyche, on the same scale as the Jewish Holocaust is with Israelites. It also must be addressed within any credible settlement.There are  many other pressing, critical social issues within Ireland, such as a Bill of Civil Rights, People before Profit, transparent genuine Immediate Democracy, with modern technology, such as the internet democracy, with checks and balances, that ensure ordinary people have real voting power against unregulated Corporate monopolies hijacking the constitutional process with political bribery and the current endemic corruption of the present sytem, in all parts of Ireland


To any objective political view, of the small island of Ireland, with its current political realities, it is crystal clear, that a Federal solution similar to many other European countries, is really the only feasible solution to the current reality with an arrangement where Unionists in Ulster keep their identity and traditions, within a British Commonwealth arrangement, customized specifically to facilitate their specific traditions and arrangements and possibly protect them along with their British brethren form the creeping, fascist monopoly of Europe. This of course will be anathema to many traditional Irish republicans, but it will take compromise, fair mindedness and sacrifice, in any credible settlement, that is based on reality, as opposed to the horrific alternative.

Of course many will argue, that the changing demographics on the ground will change this, but in a Spirit of true reconciliation all minorities, including immigrant aspirations, must be respected in any genuine modern democracy. Traditional Irish Republicans like Ruarai O'Bradaigh, recognized this and presented drafts for a comprehensive agreement that factored in much of this compromise, in a Spirit of Genorosity, which has traditionally been a much acclaimed Irish characteristic, at least until recently. It is time for everyone to get real, put their ego's and personalities to one side and make this comprehensive, inclusive, settlement a reality, based on civilized principles of human progress.

The author formally does not belong to any political organization and offers this proposal in a spirit of unity not division. Because of fascist censorship in Ireland presently, I also ask  those readers who agree with the outlines of this proposal, to share it wherever you can. If you belong to a political party, trade union or political forum or platform, please take up this proposal and make it as inclusive as possible. If you are overseas or non Irish, we still need your help for a comprehensive, inclusive settlement.

by Brian Clarke

BRITISH INVENTED US CONCENTRATION CAMPS READY FOR AMERICANS Jesse Ventura

Closed Material Procedures (CMP) have already been used in ordinary civil cases in Britain, on the instructions of the USA while British invented concentration camps are being prepared for ordinary Americans and British commoners within the special relationship, between the UK and US secret government. The process already has Royal Assent from April 25th earlier this year.

 It is just a matter of time, before secret courts are the norm across all of the Britain, after being first tested on Irish guinea pigs in the political laboratory of the Scum State of British Occupied Ireland. Closed Material Procedures or “CMPs” means that the accused or their lawyers cannot take any part of their trial. The British government and its lawyers however are allowed to be present during the CMP. 

a)

The commoner's lawyer cannot be present 

b) 

The commoner may be told if they won or lost but not why.

c)

The commoner cannot see the evidence the government is relying upon which is said to be national security sensitive information,

d) 

The commoner cannot know the government’s case or their evidence,

e)

The commoner cannot challenge the evidence or the government’s case

In a democracy the individual is called a citizen but in the British monarchy, they are her majesty's property and are known as a British commoner. British Occupied Ireland is known as a Scum State for the reasons mentioned as follows, in the Urban Dictionary :

"1. Scum State

A Police State without basic human rights and extreme injustice,with secret courts, secret evidence and secret sentences, that executes lawyers and journalists.

As in states such as British Occupied Ireland, where there is no rule of law, because it is overruled by an unelected British Viceroyal. There is no right to a fair trial in the instance of Martin Corey for example people are politically interned without trial. There is no due process, in fact there is no process at all, the British Viceroyal overrules any process, setting aside basic standards of universal justice. It is a British neo-colonial Scum State where British police and the British Army murder innocent people, operating from loyalist farms.

scum state scum state british occupied ireland occupied six counties neo-colonial martin corey political internmentinternment secret trial police state "

The commoner may be told whether they have won or lost, but not the full reasons why. Brigadier Frank Kitson's recommendation to blend sociological 'normalisation', political policy and legal elasticity is currently operated in the Scum State of British Ocupied Ireland already. He recommended the Law and the Courts to be used as just another part of the British Army's arsenal. He advocated:
"The Law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public. For this to happen efficiently, the activities of the legal services have to be tied into the war effort in as discreet a way as possible."

Currently the best known example of several internees of the secret courts the British Scum Sate, is Martin Corey. On the 9th of July 2012, Judge Treacy ordered Martin Corey’s immediate release from political internment, stating his human rights had been violated. This was overruled by the un-elected English Viceroyal, who ordered the internment of the Irishman, against whom there is no evidence of wrongdoing, that could possibly lead to charges in an open court of law.

However secret evidence, in secret courts, that neither the his defense or the general public have a right to access has secretly convicted him.This evidence has been provided by the British secret service MI5, who were involved in gun running, the murder of lawyers Pat Finucane, Rosemary Nelson and colluded in the ethnic cleansing hundreds of innocent Irish civilians, as documented in the war crimes of the recently released book, Lethal Allies.

BRITISH & AMERICANS REBEL INFOWARS

Counterinsurgency Has Been Calamitous Doctrine

The misconceptions and disinformation that have birthed and fueled America's wars are well-documented, but the calamitous doctrine used is seldom examined. The United States’ reliance on counterinsurgency (COIN) is a failed policy seen firsthand by Col. Gian Gentile, a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War, and he has published a new book that aims to destroy the persistent myths of conflict. Wrong Turn: America's Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency should be required reading for anyone who still has visions of a US "victory" emerging from the Middle East.

Michael Arria for Truthout: Let's start by talking about the origins of COIN. When does the doctrine emerge, and why?

Counterinsurgency has been around for a long, long time. However, prior to the end of World War II it often was called other things, like guerilla war or small war. The Romans did a form of counterinsurgency in repressing rebellions in their empire, so too did Henry V as his army was harassed by angry French civilians in the days leading up to Agincourt. But modern counterinsurgency, especially being labeled formally as such, really emerged at the end of World War II with the decline of European empires and the rise of nationalist movements like in Vietnam. In fact, American counterinsurgency as codified in the Army's Field Manual 3-24 made famous by Gen. [David] Petraeus and the Surge, is really nothing more than a rehash of the counterinsurgency doctrines developed by the Americans, British and French during the Cold War. It aims to defeat an insurgency in a foreign land by providing infrastructure, governance, security, local security forces and economic improvement to the host population. The idea behind American counterinsurgency is that once these are provided, the counterinsurgent force will then win the trust and allegiance of the local population, which then will allow for the separation of the people from the insurgents. This at least is the theory behind American COIN; unfortunately, in practice by a foreign occupying power, it simply does not work.

In his dissertation, written in 1987, Petraeus wrote that, "The legacy is Vietnam is unlikely to soon recede as an important influence on America's senior military." A couple decades later, he is creating the COIN Center. What is the story behind many supposed "lessons of Vietnam" being discarded by the US military?

Many counterinsurgency experts have misinterpreted the Vietnam War. For example, Andrew Krepinevich, in his widely read book The Army and Vietnam, believes that the US lost the war in Vietnam because its army was stuck in a conventional-war mindset and couldn't break free to a better way of fighting the war by focusing on pacification and winning hearts and minds. Poppycock; there was no better war to be had in Vietnam, and the reason the United States lost it was not because of a mindlessly stupid army that couldn't figure out how to do COIN correctly combined with monster generals like William C. Westmoreland. No, the United States lost the war because it failed at strategy, and strategy should have discerned that the war was unwinnable based on a moral and material price the American people were willing to pay. But this fundamental truth about America's loss in Vietnam was buried in the years after the war by a bevy of misinformed experts and soldiers who believed that the war could have been won if the Army had only fought it differently. Then Iraq rolled around 40 years later, and the choir of COIN experts started singing the same sad song again. The problem with these "lessons" is that they divert attention away from the underlying motives, policies and strategies of American intervention toward the mechanics - or tactics - of doing them.

Many Americans feel that the reasons behind a continued presence in Afghanistan have never been articulated in any definitive way. How do you perceive the Obama administration's current goals in Afghanistan and where do you see this going in the coming years?

The United States has failed at strategy in Afghanistan. Since early 2002, the United States has suffered over 2,000 Americans killed, with many more seriously wounded. Thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed. The United States has spent close to $1 trillion trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern, functioning state. With these costs, what has the United States achieved? The place is more violent today than it was at the height of the Afghan Surge of troops under Stanley McChrystal in 2009; the government is one of the most corrupt in the world, and the ability of the Afghan security forces is dubious at best. Would Afghanistan have been any worse if the US had left after toppling the Taliban and crushing al Qaeda by early 2002? This question becomes more pointed when one considers the fact that the US had by and large accomplished its core political objective in Afghanistan - the destruction of al-Qaeda - by early 2002. This is why American strategy has failed.

In 2008 you wrote a polarizing piece for World Politics Review called, "Misreading the Surge," in which you detected an undeserved amount of optimism for the military's tactics. Years later, how do you think the celebration of The Surge impacted our policy in Iraq and beyond?

For sure it did. It is entirely possible that if President [George W.] Bush had never appointed Gen. Petraeus as commander in Iraq, but had kept Gen. [George] Casey in command, violence would have declined in the same way that it actually did by the end of 2007. This conclusion is based on extending the trajectory of the conditions that were already developing - the Sunni Awakening and the climax of sectarian violence in December 2006. Because Casey was not advocating a quick withdrawal from Iraq and because the operational framework for the military in Iraq before 2007 was and continued to be counterinsurgency, it is certainly possible that the level of violence would have fallen in the same way as it did after the actual Petraeus Surge. Extending this hypothetical to Afghanistan, it is also entirely possible that without the surge triumph narrative constructed around Petraeus' surge and the mythical belief that COIN worked in Iraq, the discussions surrounding "Surge II" in the Hindu Kush in 2009 might have been tempered by focusing on other, more limited options. Had these options been seriously presented to President Obama in fall 2009 by his military, a different course of action might have been taken. But the reality was that in 2008 and 2009, the surge triumph narrative arrived in full force, dominated thinking on what had happened in Iraq, and convinced key policy makers and military planners that something similar could be applied in Afghanistan.

There is a growing chorus, from a variety of political camps, calling for an American response to the chaos in Syria. What do you make of the analysis you have heard from some in the west, and does it trouble you?

In my personal view, to be sure the United States has interests in what happens in Syria. But I do not believe that those interests are vital, nor do I believe that the United States needs to apply military force to get after the interests that it does have in Syria. The situation there is complex, and there is no clear moral choice for the United States to throw its weight on one side or the other. Moreover, if we have learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan, it should be that it is quite easy to get involved in a civil war in a foreign land but quite another thing to get out of it. Wars of all type have a momentum all their own, and they become very difficult to end.

Ulster on the Euphrates
The Anglo-American Dirty War in Iraq 

By Chris Floyd

Imagine a city torn by sectarian strife. Competing death squads roam the streets; terrorists stage horrific attacks. Local authority is distrusted and weak; local populations protect the extremists in their midst, out of loyalty or fear. A bristling military occupation exacerbates tensions at every turn, while offering prime targets for bombs and snipers. And behind the scenes, in a shadow world of double-cross and double-bluff, covert units of the occupying power run agents on both sides of the civil war, countenancing -- and sometimes directing -- assassinations, terrorist strikes, torture sessions, and ethnic cleansing.
Is this a portrait of Belfast during "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland? Or a picture of Baghdad today? It is both; and in both cases, one of Britain's most secret – and most criminally compromised – military units has plied its trade in the darkness, "turning" and controlling terrorist killers in a dangerous bid to wring actionable intelligence from blood and betrayal. And America's covert soldiers are right there with them, working side-by-side with their British comrades in the aptly named "Task Force Black," the UK's Sunday Telegraph reports.

Last week, the right-wing, pro-war paper published an early valentine to the "Joint Support Group," the covert unit whose bland name belies its dramatic role at the center of the Anglo-American "dirty war" in Iraq. In gushing, lavish, uncritical prose that could have been (and perhaps was) scripted by the unit itself, the Telegraph lauded the team of secret warriors as "one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror," running "dozens of Iraqi double-agents," including "members of terrorist groups."

What the story fails to mention is the fact that in its Ulster incarnation, the JSG – then known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) –actively colluded in the murder of at least 15 civilians by Loyalist deaths squads, and an untold number of victims killed, maimed and tortured by the many Irish Republican Army double-agents controlled by the unit. What's more, the man who commanded the 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