AMERICANS & BRITISH 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

REBEL DISSIDENTS OF IRELAND

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Electoral politics of democracy in Ireland have become a sham. Two
Lisbon Treaty referendums on the matter of national sovereignty, with
respect to the EU, within a year of each other and different results,
are a good example of it. The Irish media have been debased by
embedded editorial British agents, working alongside global corporate
interests. Ireland's people have been bombarded ceaselessly, with an
alien culture selling the destruction but seductive ideology, of
exclusive self. As a result of the rapes of Empire invasions, the
resulting people of no property, have been impoverished in mind, body
and spirit, like the millions who starved in the Irish famine years,
reduced to a despair of induced mental powerlessness and slavery. The
Irish legal system cannot help, it too has become even more corrupt,
with the exception of serving corporate interests. Unions and  their
associated political parties emasculated, destroyed or paid off by the
corporations. All forms of credible protest, are eliminated or
censored by a secret service police apparatus, that rivals Hitler's
Gestapo. The rising anger and hatred of the Irish body politic makes
violence inevitable. It will be horrifying for most.

Those who will be blamed are immigrants, community activists, gays,
intellectuals, genuine union leaders and those defined as
"dissidents." They will be the ones condemned and blamed for the
decline. The economic collapse, which is not understood by many, as a
result of media dis-information, will be used by demagogues and
hate-preachers on these scapegoats. Random acts of violence which are
already increasing, as a result of poverty, will justify harsh
measures of further state control, that will destroy any remaining
illusions of democracy. The British and fascist corporate forces, that
are destroying Ireland, will use the media they control, to hide their
responsibility. The old British game of blaming the weak and
minorities, a staple of their Empire building, will enable their
sadistic violence within Irish society and deflect attention from the
corporate and gombeen parasites, who have drained the energy and
youthful Spirit out of Ireland.


The platforms of genuine social reform are dead or usurped by
collaborators of dis-information. Apologists, who long ago should have
abandoned the ballot box, continue to make pathetic appeals to John
Bull's other island's deaf corporate client statelets, while the
people of no property are ruthlessly stripped, of their few remaining
rights, income and jobs. Pseudo liberals self-righteously condemn Her
Majesty's imperial wars but not the system that is responsible for
them. The longer the pseudo liberal class speaks in the bloodless
language of policies, the more hated and irrelevant they become. No
one has discredited Irish labour more, than gombeen Labour
representatives themselves. Forget about hope for reform in Ireland,
the whole system is rotten and corrupt to the core in both entities.

So how can we resist? How, if all of the above is inevitable, do we
fight back? Should we resist at all? Should we surrender to cynicism
and despair,  have as comfortable a niche as possible, within the
British corporate statelets and spend our lives satisfying our private
needs and forget about society? The power elite, including most of
those who graduated from our universities, with our pseudo liberal and
intellectual classes, have sold out for their own personal comfort. So
why not us?

The French philosopher Albert Camus argued, that we are separated from
each other, that our lives are meaningless, that we cannot influence
fate, that we will all die and our individual beings will be
obliterated. But Camus also wrote that "one of the only coherent
philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation
between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid
of hope.That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the
resignation that ought to accompany it."

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of
an object," Camus warned. "But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved,
he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature, which
refuses to be classified as an object."
Bobby Sands referred to this, as the Spirit of Freedom, he died
refusing to be enslaved, so did his comrades. So did his comrades
before him, so will his comrades after him.

The dissident for Camus, stood with the oppressed. In Ireland it is
the people of no property, the unemployed workers being thrown into
poverty, slavery and misery in both British corporate statelets in
Ireland, the poor in her inner cities and depressed rural communities,
the forced emigrants and those locked away in a Victorian prison
system. Standing with them does not mean collaborating with parties of
the ballot box, who mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts
of oppression in British occupied statelets, that clearly only serve
the propertied class. It can but mean in Ireland, open and direct
defiance.

The power structures on John Bull's islands, with its pseudo liberal
apologists, dismiss the dissident as impractical and see the
dissident's outsider stance, as counter-productive. They condemn the
dissident for expressing anger at injustice. They call for calm and
patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality,
compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only
alternative is to accept the systems of power and work with it. The
dissident refuses to be bought off with grants, book contracts,
academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The dissident is not
concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The dissident knows
the two beautiful daughters, anger and courage-anger at things as they
are and courage to change the way they are. The dissident is aware,
that virtue is not rewarded. The act of dissidence defines itself.

"You do not become a ‘dissident' just because you decide one day to
take up this most unusual career," Vaclav Havel said when he battled
the Stalinist Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia. "You are thrown into it
by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set
of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures
and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an
attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of
society. ... The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine
power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and
does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He
offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only
his own skin-and he offers it solely because he has no other way of
affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his
dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost."

The British and the corporate media in Ireland, have disarmed the
liberal class, they have in the wake of the Stalinist soviet,
convinced liberals, that there is no alternative. Dissidents on the
other hand are not slaves. Dissidents have a choice. Dissidents refuse
to be either a victim or an executioner. Dissidents have the moral
capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate. Dissidents who boycott or
seriously demonstrate, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act
of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any
popular movement and any act of civil disobedience, ignites the soul
of the dissident and exposes ultimately the fickleness of corrupt
authority. As Irish socialist revolutionary James Connolly put it;
"The great appear great to us only because we are on our knees: Let us
rise".

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even
passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears
and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and
you've got to make it stop," Mario Savio said in 1964. "And you've got
to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that
unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at
all."

The capability to exercise moral independence, to refuse to cooperate,
offers us the only route left for personal freedom and self
determination in Ireland, with a life of meaning. Rebellion is its own
justification. Those of us out of the spiritual left, have no problem
with Camus. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence in a life
such as contemporary Ireland, right about finding worth in the act of
rebellion, rather than some pie in the sky. We differ with Camus in
that we have faith that rebellion allows us to be free and independent
human beings, balanced with social responsibilities. Our rebellion
chips away imperceptibly, at the illusions of the powerful oppressor
and sustains the Spirit of freedom and love. In moments of deep human
despair this Spirit  of Freedom is critical. It keeps alive our
capacity to be human. We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely
free, that "existence is an act of rebellion." Those who do not rebel
in our time of British and Corporate fascist Empire, who buy or sell
the lie that there is no alternative to collaboration, are complicit
not just in the enslavement of the plain people of Ireland but their
own spiritual and moral suicide.



The article below concerns a recent example of a well known Irish dissident.


Bobby Sands
Died May 5th, 1981

The revolutionary spirit of freedom

Portions of this article were first published anonymously in
'Republican News', December 16th, 1978. The smuggled out article
recalls how the spirit of republican defiance grew within him, and is
a semi-autobiographical account.

BOBBY SANDS was born in 1954 in Rathcoole, a predominantly loyalist
district of north Belfast. His twenty-seventh birthday fell on the
ninth day of his sixty-six-day hunger strike. His sisters Marcella,
one year younger, and Bernadette, were born in April 1955 and November
1958, respectively. All three lived their early years at Abbots Cross
in the Newtownabbey area of north Belfast. A second son, John, now
nineteen, was born to their parents John and Rosaleen, now both aged
57, in June 1962.

The sectarian realities of ghetto life materialised early in Bobby's
life when at the age of ten his family were forced to move home owing
to loyalist intimidation even as early as 1962. Bobby recalled his
mother speaking of the troubled times which occurred during her
childhood; 'Although I never really under stood what internment was or
who the 'Specials' were, I grew to regard them as symbols of evil '.

Of this time Bobby himself later wrote: ''I was only a working-class
boy from a Nationalist ghetto, but it is repression that creates the
revolutionary spirit of freedom. I shall not settle until I achieve
liberation of my country, until Ireland becomes a sovereign,
independent socialist republic. ''

When Bobby was sixteen years old he started work as an apprentice
coach builder and joined the National Union of Vehicle Builders and
the ATGWU. In an article printed in 'An Phoblacht/Republican News' on
April 4th, 1981, Bobby recalled: ''Starting work, although frightening
at first became alright, especially with the reward at the end of the
week. Dances and clothes, girls and a few shillings to spend, opened
up a whole new world to me.''

Bobby's background, experiences and ambitions did not differ greatly
from that of the average ghetto youth. Then came 1968 and the events
which were to change his life. Bobby had served two years of his
apprenticeship when he was intimidated out of his job. His sister
Bernadette recalls: "Bobby went to work one morning and these fellows
were standing there cleaning guns. One fellow said to him, 'Do you see
these here, well if you don't go you'll get this' then Bobby also
found a note in his lunch-box telling him to get out."

In June 1972, the family were intimidated out of their home in Doonbeg
Drive, Rathcoole and moved into the newly built Twinbrook estate on
the fringe of nationalist West Belfast. Bernadette again recalled: We
had suffered intimidation for about eighteen months before we were
actually put out. We had always been used to having Protestant
friends. Bobby had gone around with Catholics and Protestants, but it
ended up when everything erupted, that the friends he went about with
for years were the same ones who helped to put his family out of their
home.

As well as being intimidated out of his job and his home being under
threat Bobby also suffered personal attacks from the loyalists.

At eighteen Bobby joined the Republican Movement. Bernadette says: ..
'he was just at the age when he was beginning to become aware of
things happening around him. He more or less just said right, this is
where I'm going to take up. A couple of his cousins had been arrested
and interned. Booby felt that he should get involved and start doing
something. '

Bobby himself wrote. "My life now centered around sleepless nights and
stand-bys dodging the Brits and calming nerves to go out on
operations. But the people stood by us. The people not only opened the
doors of their homes to lend us a hand but they opened their hearts to
us. I learned that without the people we could not survive and I knew
that I owed them everything.

In October 1972, he was arrested. Four handguns were found in a house
he was staying in and he was charged with possession. He spent the
next three years in the cages of Long Kesh where he had political
prisoner status. During this time Bobby read widely and taught himself
Irish which he was later to teach the other blanket men in the
H-Blocks.

Released in 1976 Bobby returned to his family in Twinbrook. He
reported back to his local unit and straight back into the continuing
struggle: 'Quite a lot of things had changed some parts of the ghettos
had completely disappeared and others were in the process of being
removed. The war was still forging ahead although tactics and strategy
had changed. The British government was now seeking to 'Ulsterise' the
war which included the attempted criminalisation of the IRA and
attempted normalisation of the war situation.'

Bobby set himself to work tackling the social issues which affected
the Twinbrook area. Here he became a community activist. According to
Bernadette, 'When he got out of jail that first time our estate had no
Green Cross, no Sinn Fein, nor anything like that. He was involved in
the Tenants' Association... He got the black taxis to run to Twinbrook
because the bus service at that time was inadequate. It got to the
stage where people were coming to the door looking for Bobby to put up
ramps on the roads in case cars were going too fast and would knock
the children down.'

Within six months Bobby was arrested again. There had been a bomb
attack on the Balmoral Furniture Company at Dunmurry, followed by a
gun-battle in which two men were wounded. Bobby was in a car near the
scene with three other young men. The RUC captured them and found a
revolver in the car.

The six men were taken to Castlereagh and were subjected to brutal
interrogations for six days. Bobby refused to answer any questions
during his interrogation, except his name, age and address.

In a ninety-six verse poem written in 1980, entitled 'The Crime of
Castlereagh', Bobby tells of his experiences in Castlereagh and his
fears and thoughts at the time.

They came and came their job the same
In relays N'er they stopped.
'Just sign the line!' They shrieked each time
And beat me 'till I dropped.
They tortured me quite viciously
They threw me through the air.
It got so bad it seemed I had
Been beat beyond repair.
The days expired and no one tired,
Except of course the prey,
And knew they well that time would tell
Each dirty trick they laid on thick
For no one heard or saw,
Who dares to say in Castlereagh
The 'police' would break the law!
He was held on remand for eleven months until his trial in September
1977. As at his previous trial he refused to recognise the court.

The judge admitted there was no evidence to link Bobby, or the other
three young men with him, to the bombing. So the four of them were
sentenced to fourteen years each for possession of the one revolver.

Bobby spent the first twenty-two days of his sentence in solitary
confinement, 'on the boards' in Crumlin Road jail. For fifteen of
those days he was completely naked. He was moved to the H-Blocks and
joined the blanket protest. He began to write for Republican News and
then after February 1979 for the newly-merged An Phobhacht/Republican
News under the pen-name, 'Marcella', his sister's name. His articles
and letters, in minute handwriting, like all communications from the
H-Blocks, were smuggled out on tiny pieces of toilet paper.

He wrote: 'The days were long and lonely. The sudden and total
deprivation of such basic human necessities as exercise and fresh air,
association with other people, my own clothes and things like
newspapers, radio, cigarettes books and a host of other things, made
my life very hard.'

Bobby became PRO for the blanket men and was in constant confrontation
with the prison authorities which resulted in several spells of
solitary confinement. In the H-Blocks, beatings, long periods in the
punishment cells, starvation diets and torture were commonplace as the
prison authorities, with the full knowledge and consent of the British
administration, imposed a harsh and brutal regime on the prisoners in
their attempts to break the prisoners' resistance to criminalisation.

The H-Blocks became the battlefield in which the republican spirit of
resistance met head-on all the inhumanities that the British could
perpetrate. The republican spirit prevailed and in April 1978 in
protest against systematic ill-treatment when they went to the toilets
or got showered, the H-Block prisoners refused to wash or slop-out.
They were joined in this no-wash protest by the women in Armagh jail
in February 1980 when they were subjected to similar harassment.

On October 27th, 1980, following the breakdown of talks between
British direct ruler in the North, Humphrey Atkins, and Cardinal O
Fiaich, the Irish Catholic primate, seven prisoners in the H-Blocks
began a hunger strike. Bobby volunteered for the fast but instead he
succeeded, as O/C, Brendan Hughes, who went on hunger-strike.

During the hunger-strike he was given political recognition by the
prison authorities. The day after a senior British official visited
the hunger-strikers, Bobby was brought half a mile in a prison van
from H3 to the prison hospital to visit them. Subsequently he was
allowed several meetings with Brendan Hughes. He was not involved in
the decision to end the hunger-strike which was taken by the seven men
alone. But later that night he was taken to meet them and was allowed
to visit republican prison leaders in H-Blocks 4, 5 and 6.

On December 19th, 1980, Bobby issued a statement that the prisoners
would not wear prison-issue clothing nor do prison work. He then began
negotiations with the prison governor, Stanley Hilditch, for a
step-by-step de-escalation of the protest.

But the prisoners' efforts were rebuffed by the authorities: 'We
discovered that our good will and flexibility were in vain,' wrote
Bobby. It was made abundantly clear during one of my co-operation'
meetings with prison officials that strict conformity was required.
which in essence meant acceptance of criminal status.

In the H-Blocks the British saw the opportunity to defeat the IRA by
criminalising Irish freedom fighters but the blanketmen, perhaps more
than those on the outside, appreciated before anyone else the grave
repercussions, and so they fought.

Bobby volunteered to lead the new hunger strike. He saw it as a
microcosm of the way the Brits were treating Ireland historically and
presently, Bobby realised that someone would have to die to win
political status.

He insisted on starting two weeks in front of the others so that
perhaps his death could secure the five demands and save their lives.
For the first seventeen days of the hunger strike Bobby kept a secret
diary in which he wrote his thoughts and views, mostly in English but
occasionally breaking into Gaelic. He had no fear of death and saw the
hunger-strike as something much larger than the five demands and as
having major repercussions for British rule in Ireland. The diary was
written on toilet paper in biro pen and had to be hidden, mostly
carried inside Bobby's own body. During those first seventeen days
Bobby lost a total of sixteen pounds weight and on Monday, March 23rd,
he was moved to the prison hospital.

On March 30th, he was nominated as candidate for the Fermanagh and
South Tyrone by-election caused by the sudden death of Frank Maguire,
an independent MP who supported the prisoners' cause.

The next morning, day thirty-one, of his hunger-strike, he was visited
by Owen Carron who acted as his election agent. Owen told of that
first visit 'Instead of meeting that young man of the poster with long
hair and a fresh face, even at that time when Bobby wasn't too bad he
was radically changed. He was very thin and bony and his hair was cut
short.'

Bobby had no illusions with regard to his election victory. His
reaction was not one of over-optimism. After the result was announced
Owen visited Bobby. "He had already heard the result on the radio. He
was in good form alright but he always used to keep saying, 'In my
position you can't afford to be optimistic.' In other words, he didn't
take it that because he'd won an election that his life would be
saved. He thought that the Brits would need their pound of flesh. I
think he was always working on the premise that he would have to die."

At 1.17 a.m. on Tuesday, May 5th, having completed sixty-five days on
hunger-strike, Bobby Sands MP, died in the H-Block prison hospital at
Long Kesh. Bobby was a truly unique person whose loss is great and
immeasurable. He never gave himself a moment to spare. He lived his
life energetically, dedicated to his people and to the republican
cause, eventually offering up his life in a conscious effort to
further that cause and the cause of those with whom he had shared
almost eight years of his adult life. In his own words: "of course can
be murdered but I remain what I am, a political POW and no-one, not
even the British, can change that."


The article appreciates the help of Chris Hedges  author. - Calling All Rebels

The Wolfe Tones - Protestant Men

British propaganda paints the conflict in the north of Ireland to the world as a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. This is false. The British occupation of Ireland is the root cause of the conflict, not religion. This video details some of the many Protestant Irish republicans who founded Irish Republicansim and fought against British rule in Ireland.

This song is about the United Irishmen rebellion in 1798 when Protestants and Catholics joined forces to try to free Ireland from British rule. Many Protestants throught the centuries have played important roles in the Republican movment, right from its foundation. The Orange in the Irish tricolour represents Protestants, The founding father of Irish Republicanism, Wolfe Tone was a Protestant. Pics also include some of the many protestant republicans throughout the centuries.

Pics of Protestant Republicans (in order) -

James Napper Tandy- United Irishmen

Robert Erskine Childers- Sinn Féin

Henry Joy McCracken- United Irishmen

Theobald Wolfe Tone- United Irishmen
(and founder of Irish republicanism)

John Mitchell - Young Irelanders

Charles Stewart Parnell - Irish
Parlimentary Party

Noel Lyttle- INLA

Jack White - IRA

George Plant- IRA

Ronnie Bunting - INLA

John Martin - Young Irelanders

Lord Edward FitzGerald - United Irishmen

Robert Emmet - United Irishmen



The IRA had many protestant members.

The IRA in Belfast had Protestant commanders nicknamed 'The Prod Squad' This included Billy Smith, Rex Thompson and John Graham.

Jack White was another protestant IRA member from Broughshane, Co. Antrim who had previously founded the Irish Citizen Army. Erskine Childers was a protestant IRA member, as was George Plant and George Gilmore from Portadown. Bulmer Hobson from Holywood Co. Down was a leading member of the Irish Volunteers and IRB. He also helped to found the Fianna na hEireann youth movement.

Protestants from the loyalist shankill road also were invloved in the Republican Congress in the 1930's.

Ronnie Bunting was a protestant IRA member who went on to found the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) Noel Lyttle was also a Protestant member of the INLA

Sinn Féin have an protestant ex-orangeman, Billy Leonard who is elected in Coleraine, Co. Derry.

In 1905 the Sinn Fein party was co-founded by Edward Martyn, who served as its first President.

The Sam Maguire Cup, the biggest prize in Gaelic Football, is named after another famous protestant Irish Republican. Sam Maguire was the man who recruited Michael Collins into the IRB


Protestant Men (Lyrics)

It was back in history's page, the story's told of Napper Tandy brave and bold
With his scarlet and green, he then was seen with his big long gun and his fighting men
They did beat upon the drum, they fired their gun and shook the English establishment
And the Lords and the Peers they then took fears and Grattan got his Parliament

So here's to those brave Protestant Men
Who gave their lives to free our land
All the people they sang their praises then
For the brave United Irishmen

In Belfast town there lived a man and his name was Samuel Neilson
A minister's son, Presbyterian, and the paper called the Northern Star
There was Henry Joy, the Green Volunteers and Thomas Russell and McCabe and McTeir
And to them was known a man Wolfe Tone and they formed the first United Men

So here's to those brave Protestant Men
Who gave their lives to free our land
All the people they sang their praises then
For the brave United Irishmen

So your laws with dragons teeth and then you'll see you've sowed the seeds of bigotry
Be Englands fool divide they'll rule so they set to break the United Men
And they killed them in the fields and some in jail and some upon the Gallows high
When Willie Orr did die his very last cry was "Unite and fight brave Irishmen"

So here's to those brave Protestant Men
Who gave their lives to free our land
All the people they sang their praises then
For the brave United Irishmen

Cast dissensions to the wind let all men lend to the common name of an Irishman
For across historys page to rant and rage men crossed the pails of bigotry
There was the men of '98 no sadder fate, Lord Edward, Tone and the brothers Sheres
It was Emmet's plea in 18 and 3 when he tried to set our country free

So here's to those brave Protestant Men
Who gave their lives to free our land
All the people they sang their praises then
For the brave United Irishmen