SS UK TAILS WAG US WASP DOGS OF WAR

Frontline: Top Secret America by Info4uAndMe
THE POLITICAL TEST LABORATORY OF BRITISH OCCUPIED IRELAND

The Guineapigs

The Guineapigs were fourteen Irish political prisoners on whom the British Army experimented with sensory deprivation torture in 1971. It still continues 40 years later, on Marian Price who is experimented on, in a British military Hospital in Belfast today after her sister Dolours died as a result of drug experiments carried out on her while being forced fed 40 years ago. These 'techniques' were outlawed, following Britain's conviction at the International Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, but were exported by SS UK and used by their WASPs in the USA. 

In Ireland in 1971, there was a deliberate and careful use of modern torture techniques, not just to get information but to perfect the SS UK system of Sensory Deprivation for use against civilians. An ex-internee John McGuffin spent two years researching a book he wrote, following his release from where he had been held without charge or trial. The book called 'The Guineapigs"  was dedicated to the blanket men in Long Kesh concentration camp and the women political prisoners in Armagh jail. 'Na reabhloidi Abu.'

The CIA operates under orders from British

intelligence and was created by British intelligence 

in 1947. The CIA today is still loyal to the 

international bankers based in the city of London

and the global elite aristocratic families like the 

Rothschild’s and the Windsor’s. Since it was first 

started, MI6 has always brought drugs into Britain. 

They do not bring ‘some’ of the drugs into Britain but

 I would estimate MI6 bring in around ninety

percent of the drugs in. They do this by pulling the

 strings of many organised crime and terrorist 

groups and these groups like the IRA are full of MI6

agents...  James Casbolt


Web: http://www.jamescasbolt.com

Project Mannequin, UK cloning, Mind Control and Genetic Enhancement Program By James Casbolt

[2006] Underground Bases, Missing Children and Extra-Terrestrials  By James Casbolt,

[2006] Global drug trade is controlled and run by the intelligence agencies by James Casbolt

Clones, bio-plasmics and world leaders by James Casbolt

Friends and Star Kids
http://www.movie3mai.net/dnKLolaw3Pe4.html

[2006] Whistleblower dies in suspicious circumstances on stage at UFO conference

BookAgent Buried Alive, The Autobiography of Commander James Casbolt (2008)

http://www.jamescasbolt.com/mi6.htm

It may be a revelation to many people that the global drug trade is controlled and run by the intelligence agencies. In this global drug trade British intelligence reigns supreme. As intelligence insiders know MI5 and MI6 control many of the other intelligence agencies in the world (CIA, MOSSAD etc) in a vast web of intrigue and  corruption that has its global power base in the city of London, the square mile.  My name is James Casbolt, and I worked for MI6 in ‘black ops’ cocaine trafficking with the IRA and MOSSAD in London and Brighton between 1995 and 1999. My father Peter Casbolt was also MI6 and worked with the CIA and mafia in Rome, trafficking cocaine into Britain. My experience was that the distinctions of all these groups became blurred until in the end we were all one international group working together for the same goals. We were puppets who had our strings pulled by global puppet masters based in the city of London. Most levels of the intelligence agencies are not loyal to the people of the country they are based in and see themselves as ‘super national’.

It had been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the CIA has been bringing in most of the drugs into America for the last fifty years (see ex LAPD officer Michael Rupert’s ‘From the wilderness’ website for proof). The CIA operates under orders from British intelligence and was created by British intelligence in 1947. The CIA today is still loyal to the international bankers based in the city of London and the global elite aristocratic families like the Rothschild’s and the Windsor’s. Since it was first started, MI6 has always brought drugs into Britain. They do not bring ‘some’ of the drugs into Britain but I would estimate MI6 bring in around ninety percent of the drugs in. They do this by pulling the strings of many organised crime and terrorist groups and these groups like the IRA are full of MI6 agents.

MI6 bring in heroin from the middle east, cocaine from south America and cannabis from morocco as well as other places. British intelligence also designed and created the drug LSD in the 1950′s through places like the Tavistock Institute in London. By the 1960′s MI5, MI6 and the CIA were using LSD as a weapon against the angry protestors of the sixties and turned them into ‘flower children’ who were too tripped out to organise a revolution.

Dr Timothy Leary the LSD guru of the sixties was a CIA puppet. Funds and drugs for Leary’s research came from the CIA and Leary says that Cord Meyer, the CIA agent in charge of funding the sixties LSD counter culture has ”helped me to understand my political cultural role more clearly”. In 1998, I was sent 3000 LSD doses on blotting paper by MI5 with pictures of the European union flag on them. The MI5 man who sent them told my father this was a government ‘signature’ and this LSD was called ‘Europa’.

This global drugs trade controlled by British intelligence is worth at least 500 billion a year. This is more than the global oil trade and the economy in Britain and America is totally dependent on this drug money. Mafia crime boss John Gotti exposed the situation when asked in court if he was involved in drug trafficking. He replied “No we can’t compete with the government”. I believe this was only a half truth because the mafia and the CIA are the same group at the upper levels. In Britain, the MI6 drug money is laundered through the Bank of England, Barclays Bank and other household name companies. The drug money is passed from account to account until its origins are lost in a huge web of transactions. The drug money comes out ‘cleaner’ but not totally clean. Diamonds are then bought with this money from the corrupt diamond business families like the Oppenheimers. These diamonds are then sold and the drug money is clean. MI6 and the CIA are also responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in Britain and America.  In 1978, MI6 and the CIA were in south America researching the effects of the natives smoking ‘basuco’ cocaine paste. This has the same effect as crack cocaine. They saw that the strength and addiction potential was far greater than ordinary cocaine and created crack cocaine from the basuco formula. MI6 and the CIA then flooded Britain and America with crack [see Gary Webb--ed]. Two years later, in 1980, Britain and America were starting to see the first signs of the crack cocaine epidemic on the streets. On august 23, 1987, in a rural community south of Little Rock in America, two teenage boys named Kevin Ives and Don Henry were murdered and dismembered after witnessing a CIA cocaine drop that was part of a CIA drug trafficking operation based at a small airport in Mena, Arkansas. Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas at the time. Bill Clinton was involved with the CIA at this time and $100 million worth of cocaine was coming through the Mena, Arkansas airport each month. For proofsee the books ‘Compromise’ and ‘Dope Inc’.

On my father’s international MI6 drug runs, whatever fell off the back of the lorry so to speak he would keep and we would sell it in Britain. As long as my father was meeting the speedboats from Morocco in the Costa del Sol and then moving the lorry loads of cannabis through their MI6, IRA lorry business into Britain every month, British intelligence were happy. As long as my father was moving shipments of cocaine out of Rome every month, MI5 and MI6 were happy. If my father kept a bit to sell himself no one cared because there was enough drugs and money to go round in this £500 billion a year global drugs trade. The ones who were really paying were the people addicted. Who were paying with suffering. But karma always catches up and both myself and my father became addicted to heroin in later years and my father died addicted, and poor in prison under very strange circumstances. Today, I am clean and drug-free and wish to help stop the untold suffering this global drugs trade causes. The intelligence agencies have always used addictive drugs as a weapon against the masses to bring in their long term plan for a one world government, a one world police force designed to be NATO and a micro chipped population known as the New World Order. As the population is in a drug or alcohol-induced trance watching ‘Coronation Street’, the new world order is being crept in behind them.

To properly expose this global intelligence run drugs trade we need to expose the key players in this area:

1- Tibor Rosenbaum, a MOSSAD agent and head of the Geneva based Banque du Credit international. This bank was the forerunner to the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce international (BCCI) which is a major intelligence drug money laundering bank. ‘Life’ magazine exposed Rosenbaum’s bank as a money launderer for the Meyer Lanksky American organised crime family and Tibor Rosenbaum funded and supported ‘Permindex’ the MI6 assassination unit which
was at the heart of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

2- Robert Vesco, sponsored by the Swiss branch of the Rothchilds and part of the American connection to the Medellin drug cartel in Columbia.

3- Sir Francis de Guingand, former head of British intelligence, now living in south Africa (and every head of MI5 and MI6 has been involved in the drug world before and after him).

4- Henry Keswick, chairman of Jardine Matheson which is one of the biggest drug trafficking operations in the world. His brother John Keswick is chairman of the bank of England.

5- Sir Martin Wakefield Jacomb, Bank of England director from 1987 to 1995, Barclays Bank Deputy Chairman in 1985, Telegraph newspapers director in 1986 ( This is the reason why this can of worms doesn’t get out in the mainstream media. The people who are perpetrating these crimes control most of the mainstream media. In America former director of the CIA William Casey was, before his death in 1987, head of the council of the media network ABC. Many insiders refer to ABC as ‘The CIA network.)

6- George Bush, Snr, former President and former head of the CIA and America’s leading drug baron who has fronted more wars on drugs than any other president. Which in reality is just a method to eliminate competition. A whole book could be written on George Bush’s involvement in the global drug trade but it is well-covered in the book ‘Dark Alliance’ by investigative journalist Gary Webb.

Gary Webb was found dead with two gunshot wounds to the back of his head with a revolver. The case was declared a ‘suicide’. You figure that out. Gary Webb as well as myself and other investigators, found that much of this ‘black ops’ drug money is being used to fund projects classified ab ove top secret. These projects include the building and maintaining of deep level underground bases in Dulce in New Mexico, Pine gap in Australia, Snowy mountains in Australia, The Nyala range in Africa, west of Kindu in Africa, next to the Libyan border in Egypt, Mount Blanc in Switzerland, Narvik in Scandinavia, Gottland island in Sweden and many other places around the world (more about these underground bases in my next issue). The information on this global drugs trade run by the intelligence agencies desperately needs to get out on a large scale. Any information, comments or feedback to help me with my work would be greatly welcomed.

TALES OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE BRITISH OCCUPIED IRELAND

From the Guardian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Belfast during "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland? Or a picture of Baghdad today? It is both; and in both cases, one of Britain's most secret – and most criminally compromised – military units has plied its trade in the darkness, "turning" and controlling terrorist killers in a dangerous bid to wring actionable intelligence from blood and betrayal. And America's covert soldiers are right there with them, working side-by-side with their British comrades in the aptly named "Task Force Black," the UK's Sunday Telegraph reports.

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

What the story fails to mention is the fact that in its Ulster incarnation, the JSG – then known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) –actively colluded in the murder of at least 15 civilians by Loyalist deaths squads, and an untold number of victims killed, maimed and tortured by the many Irish Republican Army double-agents controlled by the unit. What's more, the man who commanded the FRUduring the height of its depredations – Lt. Col. Gordon Kerr – is in Baghdad now, heading the hugger-mugger Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), a large counter-terrorism force made up of unnamed "existing assets" from the glory days in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

This despite the fact that a 10-year, $100 million investigation by Britain's top police officer, Lord Stevens, confirmed in 2003 that the Kerr-led FRU "sanctioned killings" through "institutionalized collusion" with both Protestant and Catholic militias during the 1980s and 1990s. Stevens sent dossiers of evidence against Kerr and 20 other security apparatchiks to the Blair government's Director of Public Prosecutions, in the expectation that the fiery Scotsman and the others would be put on trial.

But instead prosecuting Kerr, Blair promoted him: first to a plum assignment as British military attaché in Beijing – effectively the number two man in all of UK military intelligence, as Scotland's Sunday Herald notes – then with the SRR posting to Baghdad, where Kerr and his former FRU mates now apply the "methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles," as the Telegraph breathlessly relates.

The Telegraph puff piece is naturally coy about revealing these methods, beyond the fact that, as in Ireland, the JSG uses "a variety of inducements ranging from blackmail to bribes" to turn Iraqi terrorists into Coalition agents. So to get a better idea of the techniques employed by the group in Baghdad, we must return to those "mean streets of Ulster" and the unit's reign of terror and collusion there, which has been thoroughly documented not only by the exhaustive Stevens inquiries, but also in a remarkable series of investigative reports by the Sunday Herald's Neil Mackay, and in extensive stories by the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and others.

We will also see how the operations of the JSG and "Task Force Black" dovetail with U.S. efforts to apply the lessons of its own dirty wars – such as the "Salvador Option" – to Iraq, as well as long-running Bush Administration initiatives to arm and fund "friendly" militias while infiltrating terrorist groups in order to "provoke them into action." It is indeed a picture painted in black, a glimpse at the dark muck that lies beneath the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and civilization forever issuing from the lips of the war leaders.

(Continued after the jump.)

II. Whacking for the Peelers
Gregory Burns had a problem. He was one of Gordon Kerr's FRU informers planted deep inside the IRA, along with two of his friends, Johnny Dignam and Aidan Starrs. But as Mackay noted in a February 2003 story, the already-partnered Burns had acquired a girlfriend on the side, Margaret Perry, 26, a "civilian" Catholic with no paramilitary ties. Forbidden fruit is sweet, of course – but pillow talk is dangerous for an inside man. "Burns didn't keep his mouth shut and [Perry] found out he was working for British intelligence," an FRU officer told Mackay. "He tried to convince her he was a double-agent the IRA had planted in the [British] army – but she didn't buy it."

Burns called his FRU handlers and asked to come in from the cold. He'd been compromised, he said, and now he and his friends needed to get out, with new identities, relocation, good jobs – the usual payoff for trusted agents when the jig was up. But Kerr refused: "He said [Burns] should silence Perry," the FRU man told Mackay. Burns, panicking at thought of the IRA's horrific retributions against informers, insisted: he would have to kill the woman if they didn't bring him in, he told Kerr. Again Kerr refused.

And so Burns arranged a meeting with his lover, to "talk over" the situation. His friends, Aidan and Johnny, volunteered to drive her there: "On the way, they pulled into a forest, beat her to death and buried her in a shallow grave," Mackay notes. Two years later, when her body was found, the IRA put two and two together – and slowly tortured Burns and his two friends to death, after first extracting copious amounts of information about British intelligence operations in Ireland.

'In Kerr's eyes, Burns just wasn't important enough to resettle," the FRU source told the Sunday Herald. "So we ended up with four unnecessary deaths and the compromising of British army intelligence officers, which ultimately put soldiers' lives at risk. To Kerr, it was always a matter of the ends justifying the means."

Then again, Kerr could well afford to sacrifice a few informers here and there to the wrath of the IRA's dreaded "security unit" – because his own prize double agent was the head of that security unit. Codenamed "Stakeknife," Kerr's man presided over, and sometimes administered, the grisly torture-murders of up to 50 men during his tenure in the IRA's upper ranks. The victims included other British double agents who were sacrificed in order to protect Stakeknife's cover, as the Guardian and many other UK papers reported when the agent's work was revealed in 2003. ("Stakeknife" was later identified in the press as Alfredo Scappaticci – an Irishman despite the Italian name, although he continues to deny the charge.)

The FRU also "knowingly allowed soldiers, [police] officers and civilians to die at the hands of IRA bombers in order to protect republican double agents," the Sunday Herald's investigations found. As Mackay reports: "FRU sources said around seven police and army personnel died as a result of military intelligence allowing IRA bombs to be placed during Kerr's time in command of the FRU. They estimate that three civilians also died this way, with casualties in the hundreds."

But some of the worst excesses came from the FRU's handling of operatives on the other side, in the fiercely pro-British Protestant militia the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). Here, among the Loyalists, Kerr's top double agent was Brian Nelson, who became head of intelligence for the UDA. As John Ware put it in the Guardian: "Kerr regarded Nelson as his jewel in the crown… For the next three years [from 1987], Nelson colluded with murder gangs to shoot IRA suspects. Month after month, armed and masked men crashed into homes. Sometimes they got the wrong address or shot the wrong person."

Such as Gerald Slane, a 27-year-old Belfast man shot down in front of his three children. A gun had been found dumped on his property; this, and his Catholicism, was enough to get him assassinated at the order of Kerr's man Nelson. Afterwards, it was found that Slane had no IRA connections.

Another "wrong person" killed by the FRU's agents was the Belfast attorney Pat Finucane, who was shot 14 times in front of his wife and children. Finucane was a civil rights activist who had defended both Catholics and Protestants, but was considered an IRA sympathizer by Loyalists – and a thorn in the side by British authorities. He was killed at Nelson's order by a fellow FRU informer in the UDA, Ken Barrett, who was convicted of the murder but freed last year after as part of an amnesty program in the Northern Ireland peace process. Barrett was unapologetic about his FRU "wetwork" on Finucane. "The peelers [authorities] wanted him whacked," he told a BBC documentary team after his release. "We whacked him and that is the end of the story."

Kerr gave Nelson packages of intelligence files to help facilitate the assassination of UDA targets, including at least four "civilians" with no IRA ties, the Stevens inquiry found. The FRU also obtained "restriction orders" from other British security and military units in Northern Ireland, whereby they would pull their forces from an area when Kerr's UDA agents were going to make a hit there, allowing the killers to get in and get out without hindrance, investigator Nick Davies reports.

Yet the FRU was wary of sharing its own intelligence with other security services – which was the ostensible reason for running the double-agents in the first place. Instead, Kerr engaged in fierce turf wars with other agencies, while "stovepiping" much of his intelligence to the top circles of the UK government, including the cabinet-level Intelligence Committee chaired by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, when Nelson was finally exposed and brought to trial on five counts of conspiracy to commit murder, Kerr testified in his behalf, noting for the court that Nelson's intelligence "product and his reporting was passed through the intelligence community and at a high level, and from that point of view he has to be considered a very important agent."

As one FRU man told Mackay: "Under Kerr's command…the mindset was one of 'the right people would be allowed to live and wrong people should die.'"

This is the "mindset" now operating in the heart of the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the JSG is carrying out – we are told in glowing terms – precisely the same mission it had in Ulster. a unit which has allowed its agents to torture, murder and commit acts of terrorism, including actions that killed local civilians and the soldiers and intelligence operatives of their own country.

III. The White House Green Light
Of course, Kerr and his Baghdad black-op crew are not alone in the double-dealing world of Iraqi counterinsurgency. The Pentagon's ever-expanding secret armies are deeply enmeshed in such efforts as well. As Sy Hersh has reported ("The Coming Wars," New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005), after his re-election in 2004, George W. Bush signed a series of secret presidential directives that authorized the Pentagon to run virtually unrestricted covert operations, including a reprise of the American-backed, American-trained death squads employed by authoritarian regimes in Central and South America during the Reagan Administration, where so many of the Bush faction cut their teeth – and made their bones.

"Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” a former high-level intelligence official said to Hersh. "We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it." A Pentagon insider added: "We’re going to be riding with the bad boys." Another role model for the expanded dirty war cited by Pentagon sources, said Hersh, was Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups to confuse and discredit the insurgency, and killed thousands of innocent civilians in quashing the uprising.

Bush's formal greenlighting of the death-squad option built upon an already securely-established base, part of a larger effort to turn the world into a "global free-fire zone" for covert operatives, as one top Pentagon official told Hersh. For example, in November 2002 a Pentagon plan to infiltrate terrorist groups and "stimulate" them into action was uncovered by William Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times. The new unit, the "Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group," was described in the Pentagon documents as "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that brings "together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception."

Later, in August 2004, then deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz appeared before Congress to ask for $500 million to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" to serve as U.S. proxies for "counter-insurgency and "counterterrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" and hot spots around the world, Agence France Presse (and virtually no one else) reported at the time. These hired paramilitaries were to be employed in what Wolfowitz called an "arc of crisis" that just happened to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.

By then, the Bush Administration had already begun laying the groundwork for an expanded covert war in the hot spot of Iraq.  In November 2003, it created a "commando squad" drawn from the sectarian militias of five major Iraqi factions, as the Washington Post reported that year. Armed, funded and trained by the American occupation forces, and supplied with a "state-of-the-art command, control and communications center" from the Pentagon, the new Iraqi commandos were loosed on the then-nascent Iraqi insurgency – despite the very prescient fears of some U.S. officials "that various Sunni or Shiite factions could eventually use the service to secretly undermine their political competitors," as the Post noted.

And indeed, in early 2005 – not long after Bush's directives loosed the "Salvador Option" on Iraq – the tide of death-squad activity began its long and bloody rise to the tsunami-like levels we see today. Ironically, the first big spike of mass torture-murders, chiefly in Sunni areas at the time, coincided with "Operation Lightning," a much ballyhooed effort by American and Iraqi forces to "secure" Baghdad. The operation featured a mass influx of extra troops into the capital; dividing the city into manageable sectors, then working through them one by one; imposing hundreds of checkpoints to lock down all insurgent movements; and establishing a 24-hour presence of security and military forces in troubled neighborhoods, the Associated Press reported in May 2005. In other words, it was almost exactly the same plan now being offered as Bush's "New Way Forward," the controversial "surge."

But the "Lightning" fizzled in a matter of weeks, and the death squads grew even bolder. Brazen daylight raids by "men dressed in uniforms" of Iraqi police or Iraqi commandos or other Iraqi security agencies swept up dozens of victims at a time. For months, U.S. "advisers" to Iraqi security agencies – including veterans of the original "Salvador Option" – insisted that these were Sunni insurgents in stolen threads, although many of the victims were Sunni civilians. Later, the line was changed: the chief culprits were now "rogue elements" of the various sectarian militias that had "infiltrated" Iraq's institutions.

But as investigative reporter Max Fuller has pointed out in his detailed examination of information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents, the vast majority of atrocities then attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets. As Fuller puts it: "If there are militias in the Ministry of Interior, you can be sure that they are militias that stand to attention whenever a U.S. colonel enters the room." And perhaps a British lieutenant colonel as well

With the Anglo-American coalition so deeply embedded in dirty war – infiltrating terrorist groups, "stimulating" them into action," protecting "crown jewel" double-agents no matter what the cost, "riding with the bad boys," greenlighting the "Salvador Option" – it is simply impossible to determine the genuine origin of almost any particular terrorist outrage or death squad atrocity in Iraq. All of these operations take place in the shadow world, where terrorists are sometimes government operatives and vice versa, and where security agencies and terrorist groups interpenetrate in murky thickets of collusion and duplicity. This moral chaos leaves "a kind of blot/To mark the full-fraught man and best indued/With some suspicion," as Shakespeare's Henry V says.

What's more, the "intelligence" churned out by this system is inevitably tainted by the self-interest, mixed motives, fear and criminality of those who provide it. The ineffectiveness of this approach can be seen in the ever-increasing, many-sided civil war that is tearing Iraq apart. If these covert operations really are intended to quell the violence, they clearly have had the opposite effect. If they have some other intention, the pious defenders of civilization – who approve these activities with promotions, green lights and unlimited budgets – aren't telling.
This article was first published at Truthout.org


Politics, parapolitics, history

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