Remember, this administration has hired 100,000 mercenary soldiers, who is not accountable to the rule of law, their name is Blackwater USA. They kill and blame the Iraq's, or whom ever suits them. The blood-shed, murders of innocents, is from a illegal occupation. Not to mention the lies, that got us there. www.blackwaterusa.com (source)
al-Qaida in Iraq
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Peace To AllUlster on the Euphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War In Iraq
Chris Floyd
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
t r u t h o u t
Paint It Black
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 were killed, maimed, and tortured by the many Irish Republican Army double-agents controlled by the unit. What's more, the man who commanded the FRU during the height of its depredations - Lt. Col. Gordon Kerr - is in Baghdad now, heading the hugger-mugger Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), a large counter-terrorism force made up of unnamed "existing assets" from the glory days in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.
This despite the fact that a 10-year, $100 million investigation by Britain's top police officer, Lord Stevens, confirmed in 2003 that the Kerr-led FRU "sanctioned killings" through "institutionalized collusion" with both Protestant and Catholic militias during the 1980s and 1990s. Stevens sent dossiers of evidence against Kerr and 20 other security apparatchiks to the Blair government's Director of Public Prosecutions, in the expectation that the fiery Scotsman and the others would be put on trial.
But instead prosecuting Kerr, Blair promoted him: first to a plum assignment as British military attaché in Beijing - effectively the number two man in all of UK military intelligence, as Scotland's Sunday Herald notes, then, with the SRR posting to Baghdad, where Kerr and his former FRU mates now apply the "methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles," as the Telegraph breathlessly relates.
The Telegraph puff piece is naturally coy about revealing these methods, beyond the fact that, as in Ireland, the JSG uses "a variety of inducements ranging from blackmail to bribes" to turn Iraqi terrorists into Coalition agents. So, to get a better idea of the techniques employed by the group in Baghdad, we must return to those "mean streets of Ulster" and the unit's reign of terror and collusion there, which has been thoroughly documented not only by the exhaustive Stevens inquiries, but also in a remarkable series of investigative reports by the Sunday Herald's Neil Mackay, and in extensive stories by the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and others.
We will also see how the operations of the JSG and "Task Force Black" dovetail with U.S. efforts to apply the lessons of its own dirty wars - such as the "Salvador Option" - to Iraq, as well as long-running Bush Administration initiatives to arm and fund "friendly" militias while infiltrating terrorist groups in order to "provoke them into action." It is indeed a picture painted in black, a glimpse at the dark muck that lies beneath the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and civilization forever issuing from the lips of the war leaders.
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."
A wrong person like 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 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 - as 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.
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.
"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 agents.
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.
Source:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021307J.shtml
Our Mercenaries In Iraq
The President Relies On Thousands Of Private Soldiers With Little Oversight, A Disturbing Example Of The Military-Industrial Complex.
The Los Angeles Times
By Jeremy Scahill
January 25, 2007
AS PRESIDENT BUSH took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina — Blackwater USA.
The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja — two charred, lifeless bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day.
Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company's helicopters was brought down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. The men who were killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater's $300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the company's initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view the men's bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of "the fog of war."
Bush made no mention of the downing of the helicopter during his State of the Union speech. But he did address the very issue that has made the war's privatization a linchpin of his Iraq policy — the need for more troops. The president called on Congress to authorize an increase of about 92,000 active-duty troops over the next five years. He then slipped in a mention of a major initiative that would represent a significant development in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps.
"Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.
Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll.
The president's proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince — a major bankroller of the president and his allies — pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."
And Prince is not just a man with an idea; he is a man with his own army. Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing." Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world, a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready.
From Iraq and Afghanistan to the hurricane-ravaged streets of New Orleans to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about responding to disasters in California, Blackwater now envisions itself as the FedEx of defense and homeland security operations. Such power in the hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the president, embodies the "military-industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned against in 1961.
Further privatizing the country's war machine — or inventing new back doors for military expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps — will represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy.*
Source:
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/faireno...latimes769.html
*JEREMY SCAHILL is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of the forthcoming "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
/Peace To AllThe Salvador Option In Iraq: The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led
assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq--
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated 5:59 p.m. PT Jan 14, 2005
Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is.
"What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing."
Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s.
Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.
Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time.
The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions.
It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation.
The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone.
But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)
RELATED STORY CHRISTOPHER DICKEY
Are there parallels between El Salvador in the ‘80s and Iraq today? Maybe. But the ‘lessons learned’ by Washington are the wrong ones
• Debating 'Death Squads' NEWSWEEK's Michael Hirsh on a possible Pentagon strategy to target Iraqi insurgents .
NEWSWEEK Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand the involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in intelligence-gathering missions.
Historically, Special Forces’ intelligence gathering has been limited to objectives directly related to upcoming military operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in military lingo. But, according to intelligence and defense officials, some Pentagon civilians for years have sought to expand the use of Special Forces for other intelligence missions.
Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA civilian managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning and executing the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces soldiers believe they can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are believed to be adamantly opposed to ceding any authority to the Pentagon.
Until now, Pentagon proposals for a capability to send soldiers out on intelligence missions without direct CIA approval or participation have been shot down. But counter-terrorist strike squads, even operating covertly, could be deemed to fall within the Defense department’s orbit.
Alaa Al-Raya / AP
Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, center, was ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan years.
The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days.
Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."
Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in.
One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency.
"The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
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Our readers respond to “The Salvador Option” and “ Death-Squad Democracy ”: "...It is a certain, proven prescription for failure..."
Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the entire military strategy there.
But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This report, initially published on Jan. 8, was updated on Jan. 10 to include Negroponte's comments to NEWSWEEK. And at a news conference on Jan. 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the idea of a Salvador option was "nonsense" and denied that U.S. Special Forces were going into Syria. But when asked whether such a policy was under consideration, he replied, "Why would I even talk about something like that?"
Source:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek
/Peace To AllThe Lavon Affair
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lavon Affair refers to the scandal over a failed Israeli covert operation in Egypt known as Operation Suzannah, in which Egyptian, American and British-owned targets in Egypt were bombed in the summer of 1954. It became known as the Lavon Affair after the Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon, who was forced to resign because of the incident, or cryptically as The Unfortunate Affair (Hebrew: עסק הביש Esek HaBish).
Operation Suzannah:
In the early 1950s the United States began pressuring the British to withdraw from the Suez Canal[citation needed], and thereby abandon two operative treaties, the Convention of Constantinople and the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 that made the canal a neutral zone under British control. Israel was strongly opposed to the British withdrawal, as it feared that it would remove a moderating effect on Nasser's military ambitions, especially toward Israel, but diplomatic methods failed to sway the British.
In the summer of 1954 Colonel Binyamin Gibli, the chief of Israel's military intelligence, Aman, initiated Operation Suzannah in order to reverse that decision. The goal of the Operation was to carry out bombings and other acts of sabotage in Egypt with the aim of creating an atmosphere in which the British and American opponents of British withdrawal from Egypt would be able to gain the upper hand and block the withdrawal.[1]
The top-secret cell, Unit 131, which was to carry out the operation, had existed since 1948 and under Aman since 1950. At the time of Operation Suzannah, Unit 131 was the subject of a bitter dispute between Aman and Mossad over who should control it.
Unit 131 operatives had been recruited several years before, when the Israeli intelligence officer Avram Dar arrived in Cairo under a British cover. He had recruited several Egyptian Jews who had previously been active in illegal emigration activities and trained them for covert operations.
Aman decided to activate the network in the spring of 1954. On July 2, a post office in Alexandria was firebombed, and on July 14, the U.S. Information Agency libraries in Alexandria and Cairo, and a British-owned theater were bombed. The homemade bombs, consisting of bags containing acid placed over nitroglycerine, were inserted into books, and placed on the shelves of the libraries just before closing time. Several hours later, as the acid ate through the bags, the bombs would explode.
They did little damage to the targets and caused no injuries or deaths. Egyptian authorities arrested one suspect, Robert Dassa, when his bomb accidentally ignited prematurely in his pocket. Having searched his apartment, they found incriminating evidence and names of accomplices to the operation. Several suspects were arrested, including Egyptian Jews and undercover Israelis.
The trial against those arrested lasted until January 27, 1955, when two of the accused (Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar) were condemned to execution by hanging, two were acquitted, and the rest received lengthy prison terms. One suspect was tortured to death in prison, and another one had committed suicide. Israeli agent Avraham Seidenberg (Avri Elad, alias Paul Frank) had managed to escape.
The trial was criticized as a show trial, and there were credible allegations that evidence had been extracted by torture.
The imprisoned operatives were eventually freed in 1967, in a secret addendum to a prisoner of war exchange.
Soon after the affair, Mossad chief Isser Harel expressed suspicion to Aman concerning the integrity of Avri Elad. Despite his concerns, Aman continued using Elad for intelligence operations until 1956, when he was caught trying to sell Israeli documents to the Egyptians.
Elad was tried and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. In 1980, Harel publicly revealed evidence that Elad had been turned by the Egyptians even before Operation Suzannah. If true, this would imply that Egyptian Intelligence was aware of the operation from the beginning.
Political Aftermath:
In meetings with prime minister Moshe Sharett, secretary of defense Pinhas Lavon denied any knowledge of the operation. When intelligence chief Gibli contradicted Lavon, Sharrett commissioned a board of inquiry consisting of Israeli Supreme Court Justice Isaac Olshan and the first chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Yaakov Dori that was unable to find conclusive evidence that Lavon had authorized the operation. Lavon tried to fix the blame on Shimon Peres, who was the secretary general of the defense ministry, and Gibli for insubordination and criminal negligence. Sharett resolved the dilemma by siding with Peres, after which Lavon resigned. Former prime minister David Ben-Gurion succeeded Lavon as minister of defense.
In April of 1960, a review of minutes from the inquiry found inconsistencies and possibly a fraudulent document in Gibli's original testimony that seemed to support Lavon's account of events. During this time, it also came to light that Seidenberg (the Israeli agent running Operation Suzannah in Egypt), had committed perjury during the original inquiry.
Seidenberg was also suspected of betraying the group to Egyptian authorities; though the charges were never proven, he was eventually sentenced to a jail term of 10 years. Ben-Gurion scheduled closed hearings with a new board of inquiry chaired by Chaim Cohen, a supreme court justice.
This inquiry found that the perjury indeed had been committed, and that Lavon had not authorized the operation. Sharett and Levi Eshkol tried to issue a statement that would placate both Lavon and those who had opposed him. Ben-Gurion refused to accept the compromise and viewed it as a divisive play within the Mapai party.
After another investigative committee sided with the Cohen inquiry, Ben-Gurion resigned from his post as defense minister. This led to the expulsion of Lavon from the Histadrut labor union and an early call for new elections which changed the political structure in Israel.
It should be noted that the specifics of Operation Suzannah were not public at the time of the political upheaval.
Legacy:
While Israeli concerns about Nasser's military ambitions turned out to have some merit, Operation Suzannah and the Lavon Affair turned out to be disastrous for Israel in several ways:
The Egyptian government used the trial as a pretext for a series of efforts to punish Egyptian Jews culminating in 1958 when, following the Suez Crisis, 25,000 Jews were expelled by Egypt and at least 1,000 ended up in prisons and detention camps.
Israel lost significant standing and credibility in its relations with the United Kingdom and the United States that would take years to repair.
The tactics of the operation led to deep-seated suspicion of Israeli intelligence methods, such as agent provocateurs and false flag operations.
The political aftermath caused considerable political turmoil in Israel that affected the influence of its government.
In March 2005, Israel publicly honored the surviving operatives, and President Moshe Katsav presented each with a certificate of appreciation for their efforts on behalf of the state, ending decades of official denial by Israel.[2]
References:
I. Black and B. Morris, "Israel's Secret Wars". Futura, 1992.
S. Teveth, "Ben-Gurion's Spy". Columbia University Press, 1996.
Ostrovsky, Victor and Hoy, Claire. By Way of Deception. St. Martin's Press, 1991. ISBN 0-312-92614-6
According to historian Shabtai Teveth, who wrote one of the more detailed accounts, the assignment was "To undermine Western confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime by generating public insecurity and actions to bring about arrests, demonstrations, and acts of revenge, while totally concealing the Israeli factor. The team was accordingly urged to avoid detection, so that suspicion would fall on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Communists, 'unspecified malcontents' or 'local nationalists'." (Ben-Gurion's Spy, Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 81)
"Israel Honors Egyptian Spies 50 Years After Fiasco", Reuters, March 30, 2005
External links:
The Lavon Affair - Israel and Terror in Egypt
About the Lavon affair
The Lavon Affair by Doron Geller, JUICE, The Jewish Agency for Israel.
Retrieved from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
/Peace To AllMore On State-Sponsored Terrorism/Facilitating Terrorists:
Source:
http://alternet.org/story/12073
Peace To AllUS Actions Fuelling International Terrorism: Sulu Could Become Another Iraq, Mayor
Courtesy Of: SunStar.com.ph
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The island province of Sulu could become another Iraq with the continued presence of American soldiers in the area and the drive to wipe out the Aby Sayyaf organization by force.
Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte issued this observation as he again lambasted the US for their actins that contribute to the deterioration of the security and order in many countries.
He said contrary to US claims, they are "fuelling" international terrorism because of their inclination to enforce their will on other peoples and governments.
"US is hypocrite. They are fuelling terrorism all over the world. It would be possible that Jolo would become another Iraq because of them," Duterte said.
Complete Article:
http://sunstar.com.ph/static/dav/2006/10/03/news/sulu.could.become.another.iraq.mayor.html
Ninth_Scribe
IB Expert
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Yes, I know about this company and several others who have turned war into a very profitable business. Despite Mtaffi's insistance that such firms do not exist in Iraq and were never supplied AK47s (one of the two most popular weapons in the audit I posted), I'll take the word of the generals themselves.
My question is... how long has this business been going on? There is also another troubling concern. If this information is correct and American businessmen have been given the green light to operate these types of businesses, then it appears they have a win/win situation. In other words, they stand to profit regardless of who wins the war(s)... plural.
Also, from a very spiritual perspective, they appear to be covered. In other words, if Mohammed (PBUH) decreed that the covenant of Islam must not divide, but rather stand united, and the Muslims fight against each other... the loss of their holy lands is by their own hand. To put it simply, if the Muslims stopped fighting against themselves and they all united against the invasions, this would have been finished ages ago. Thus far, this has not been the case. The Askyara mosque was destroyed and the Shia automatically suspected Al Qaeda in Iraq and attacked the Sunnis in retaliation. A matter I personally found weird since Al Qaeda in Iraq did not attack the Jewish shrine in Al Uzayr.
In my book, the Muslims are being played against each other and the people who manufacture and stock-pile weapons are the ones who will reap a tidy profit from it all. President Reagan once said: "Yes, there could be a limited nuclear war in Europe." and this was interpreted by several European groups (such as the CND) as meaning America intended to exploit the European countries. In other words, the Soviet Union and Europe would suffer from a war that would never touch American soil, even though the war was between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
I believe Bush is probably working along those same lines, but with a new twist... to keep the war away from American soil and, much like the Numb3rs episode (The O.G.), use the same strategic formula to create circumstances in which their named enemies destroy each other.
Well, that's my thought. Proving it all is another story, but given the circumstances, if I were a Muslim, I would definately set out to unite the tribes. All other issues between you guys (like whether or not a tattooed guy is a true Muslim) would become back burner bs.
The Ninth Scribe
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/Peace To AllIRA Human Bombs 'Brainchild Of British Intelligence'
Courtesy Of: IrelandOn-Line
29/08/2006
Britain's intelligence services may have masterminded an IRA human bomb strategy which killed soldiers and civilians in Northern Ireland in 1990, a lobby group claimed.
The British Irish Rights Watch (BIRW) said counter-terrorism agencies may have been behind the lethal strategy, which saw six soldiers and one civilian die after civilians linked to the security force were made to drive explosives into army facilities.
The pressure group has sent a dossier to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI)'s Historical Enquiries Team about the October 1990 bombing of three Army installations and checkpoints, two of which exploded.
An official report from BIRW said:
"It is known that at least two security force agents were involved in these bombings and allegations have been made that the human bomb strategy was the brainchild of British Intelligence."
"Questions arise as to whether the RUC, An Garda Siochana and the Army's Force Research Unit had prior and/or subsequent intelligence about the bombings."
"These questions in turn lead to concerns about whether these attacks could have been prevented and why no-one has been brought to Justice."
A worker at a Derry Army base, Patsy Gillespie, was used by the IRA as the first human bomb and forced to drive a large explosive device to a military checkpoint at Coshquin near Derry, where it exploded.
The bomb was set off while he was still in the driver's seat, killing him and five soldiers--Stephen Burrows, Stephen Beacham, Vincent Scott, David Sweeney and Paul Worral.
Another soldier, Ranger Cyril Smith, was killed the same night in a similar attack on a permanent checkpoint at Killeen near Newry. Civilian James McEroy, 68, was injured after being ordered to drive the van and its deadly cargo or see his two sons shot.
An attempt to bomb Lisanelly Army barracks in Omagh, Co Tyrone, was foiled when explosives failed to ignite.
The claims may be linked to allegations made by an unknown Army agent, who said the RUC's Special Branch had three IRA agents involved in three separate attacks in South Down in 1989 and 1990.
Source:
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=193693218&p=y936939z4
Peace To AllUK Agents 'Did Have Role In IRA Bomb Atrocities'
Courtesy Of: The Observer
By Henry McDonald,
Ireland Editor
Sunday September 10, 2006
The controversy over claims that Britain allowed two IRA informers to organise 'human bomb' attacks intensified this weekend.
A human rights watchdog has handed a report to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which concludes that two British agents were central to the bombings of three army border installations in 1990.
Meanwhile the Police Ombudsman's Office in Belfast confirmed it is investigating allegations by the family of one victim that the bomb in Newry on 24 October 1990 could have been prevented.
The British Irish Rights Watch report will also put the focus back on the alleged MI6 agent 'J118.' Army intelligence officer turned whistleblower Martin Ingram has alleged 'J118 was Sinn Fein's chief negotiator Martin McGuinness.
...The 'human bomb' tactic involved forcing civilians to drive vehicles laden with explosives into army checkpoints and included deadly sorties near Newry and Coshquin outside Derry. Six British soldiers and a civilian worker at an army base died in the simultaneous blasts on either side of Northern Ireland.
British Irish Rights Watch said:
"This month BIRW sent a confidential report to the Historical Enquiries Team on the three incidents that occurred on 24th October 1990...At least two security force agents were involved in these bombings, and allegations have been made that the "human bomb" strategy was the brainchild of British intelligence.'
'Questions arise as to whether the RUC, Garda Siochana and the Army's Force Research Unit had prior and/or subsequent intelligence about the bombings. These questions in turn lead to concerns about whether these attacks could have been prevented and why no one has been brought to Justice."
Although British Irish Watch has made no reference to the identities of the informers they allege were involved in the 'human bomb' plot, the group's intervention in the controversy is a significant development.
The group has issued several detailed reports previously outlining cases of collusion between loyalist terrorists and the security forces. These include the Pat Finucane murder and the killing of Raymond McCord Jr by the Ulster Volunteer Force.
In both cases, British Irish Rights Watch claim many of the loyalists involved in these murders were agents for the security forces--Allegations that were later substantiated.
Speaking from a secret location in Europe this weekend, Ingram (not his real name) said that while the latest report was not decisive proof over his claim about 'J118,' it raised questions about the role of informers in the 'human bomb' killings.
'This report from a very credible source brings up the question of informers working at the top tier of the IRA who were allowed to commit crimes up to murder while working for the state. I stand by what I have said in the past about "J118" and challenge anyone to debate it with me in a public forum.'
Ingram, a former NCO with the Army's highly secretive Force Research Unit, said he was prepared to expose his own identity in public in any such debate.
Source:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,1869019,00.html
The following link on the British Army's "Force Research Unit," has been provided by me:
1. Force Research Unit (Wikipedia):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Research_Unit
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Keltoi
IB Legend
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- 5,061
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- 463
IRA Human Bombs 'Brainchild Of British Intelligence'
Courtesy Of: IrelandOn-Line
29/08/2006
Britain's intelligence services may have masterminded an IRA human bomb strategy which killed soldiers and civilians in Northern Ireland in 1990, a lobby group claimed.
The British Irish Rights Watch (BIRW) said counter-terrorism agencies may have been behind the lethal strategy, which saw six soldiers and one civilian die after civilians linked to the security force were made to drive explosives into army facilities.
The pressure group has sent a dossier to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI)'s Historical Enquiries Team about the October 1990 bombing of three Army installations and checkpoints, two of which exploded.
An official report from BIRW said:
"It is known that at least two security force agents were involved in these bombings and allegations have been made that the human bomb strategy was the brainchild of British Intelligence."
"Questions arise as to whether the RUC, An Garda Siochana and the Army's Force Research Unit had prior and/or subsequent intelligence about the bombings."
"These questions in turn lead to concerns about whether these attacks could have been prevented and why no-one has been brought to Justice."
A worker at a Derry Army base, Patsy Gillespie, was used by the IRA as the first human bomb and forced to drive a large explosive device to a military checkpoint at Coshquin near Derry, where it exploded.
The bomb was set off while he was still in the driver's seat, killing him and five soldiers--Stephen Burrows, Stephen Beacham, Vincent Scott, David Sweeney and Paul Worral.
Another soldier, Ranger Cyril Smith, was killed the same night in a similar attack on a permanent checkpoint at Killeen near Newry. Civilian James McEroy, 68, was injured after being ordered to drive the van and its deadly cargo or see his two sons shot.
An attempt to bomb Lisanelly Army barracks in Omagh, Co Tyrone, was foiled when explosives failed to ignite.
The claims may be linked to allegations made by an unknown Army agent, who said the RUC's Special Branch had three IRA agents involved in three separate attacks in South Down in 1989 and 1990.
Source:
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=193693218&p=y936939z4
What exactly does this have to do with anything? A lobby group in 2006 claims that British intelligence was involved with IRA bombing...a lobby group known to sympathize with the IRA. Was this supposed to convince people that there is no Al-Qaeda and it is all a U.S. conspiracy?
/Peace To AllUK State Sponsored Terrorism:
The intelliegence services and the Northern Ireland Conflict
Courtesy Of: FreedomFiles.org
FreedomFiles has compiled a massive list of links that contain: articles, documents and press releases from various sources about Britains war of terror which was waged by its security forces and loyalists against individuals & organisations, who opposed British rule.
1. A chronology from the UK Printed Press:
a ) The Sunday Herald.
b ) The Guardian.
c ) The Independent.
2. World Socialist Website:
Fresh revelations on secret British terror organisations in Northern Ireland.
3. Relatives for Justice - Documents & Press Releases.
4. Committee on the Rights of the Child.
5. For God and Ulster - A guide to the Orange Order.
6. Amnesty - Political killings in Northern Ireland.
7. Consultation Paper on a Victim's Strategy.
8. Submission to Patten Commission - Part One.
9. Collusion 1990-1994 - Loyalist paramilitary murders in the North of Ireland.
10. Press Releases.
Source (A Massive Listing Of References With Links):
http://freedomfiles.org/war/ireland/nireland.htm
Keltoi
IB Legend
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Blackwater does not use Ak-47s. A big budget company like that would have no reason to arm its employees with an obsolete weapon. All the Blackwater employees I've seen are using modern American military equipment. Ak-47s are highly inaccurate. The Soviet Union sold these weapons to their third world allies because they were cheap and fairly easy to maintain. The U.S. supplies the Iraqi security forces with these weapons for the same reason, they are cheap and easy to maintain.
As for contractors in general, as I've mentioned before, their jobs revolve around escorting VIPs and convoys. They do not participate in the overall mission of the U.S. military. They get paid alot of money, which makes sense because of the danger involved with their job.
It means that a lot of these groups were infiltrated, manipulated and misguided by prominent Western intelligence services.
It also shows that much of these bombings have Western security fingerprints behind them. Either the bombings were conducted by the security services/special forces directly, or they were hatched by those services and carried out by their proxy agents (local people or Mercs).
Didn't our government train and supply the Afghans and their Arab foreign fighters during the Soviet invasion of that beleagured nation?
We were in bed with many of these groups...
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/Peace To AllIsraeli Air Force Detonated Car Bomb In Lebanon
Courtesy Of: Haaretz.com
By The Associated Press
15/06/2006
Beirut--An Israeli aircraft detonated the car bomb that killed two officials of a Palestinian militant group in South Lebanon last month, Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr said Thursday.
The government has decided to complain to the UN Security Council about Israeli attacks in Lebanon, Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said following a Cabinet meeting that heard the defense minister's report.
Murr briefed the Cabinet on the May 26 car bombing that killed Mahmoud Majzoub, a senior Islamic Jihad official, and his brother as they walked out of their home in the Southern coity of Sidon. Both men were Lebanese citizens.
Earlier Thursday, Murr told reporters at his office that the state's investigation had found an aircraft was looking out for the Majzoub's via a camera on the ground.
"The bomb was detonated from this aircraft," he said.
Murr said the main suspect had received "bags filled with explosives" delivered by Israeli sea-borne commandos North of Beirut.
On Saturday, the Lebanese Army said it had arrested Mahmoud Rafeh, 59, a retired police officer, for the killing of the Majzoubs. Rafeh "had links to Israeli Intelligence," the Army said in a statement.
On Tuesday, the Army said Rafeh had confessed to killing the Majzoub brother's as well as to other operations--including the killing of officials of the militant Hezbollah group in 1999 and 2003, and the slaying of the son of Ahmed Jibril, leader of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. in 2002.
Murr told reporters that Rafeh's group was the most dangerous to be discovered in Lebanon in 30 years.
Lebanon has detained many people on charges for spying for Israel. The country considers itself at war with its Southern neighbor and bans its citizens from having any contact with the Jewish State.
Source:
http://press.jrc.it/NewsExplorer/cl...tzdaily-c43e4b4401b4e4596a04dea81c5a0d81.html
Cognescenti
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:rollseyes That's right. Every untoward event South or East of the Dardenelles is the fault of the Mossad or the CIA
Cognescenti
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Attention all Gladio operatives and closet Free-Mason stay-behind soldiers!
Tune your decoder rings to Krypton Oglala Ophelia Krypton on my mark.....mark!
Klaatu Barada Nicto
Tune your decoder rings to Krypton Oglala Ophelia Krypton on my mark.....mark!
Klaatu Barada Nicto
