British Terrorism In Iraq
Dr. Elias Akleh | 01.10.2005 07:23 | Terror War
It's an old Colonial trick, and the Iraqis are wise to it. All you have to do is watch the media's change in context these past few weeks, switching from blaming the "Insurgency" (the Iraqi Resistance) for the violence, to talking about Sunnis and "al Qaeda" bogeymen.
If that's not enough, search for the leaked UK document "Iraq: Options Paper", written March 8, 2002, by the Overseas & Desnese Secretariat Cabinet Office, which explains how civil war can be achieved.
If that's not enough, search for the leaked UK document "Iraq: Options Paper", written March 8, 2002, by the Overseas & Desnese Secretariat Cabinet Office, which explains how civil war can be achieved.
September 30, 2005
By Dr. Elias Akleh
It had been long known to the Iraqis, to the Arabs, and to all Moslems in countries bordering Iraq that the majority of the terrorist attacks in Iraq, especially car bombing, are perpetrated by covert British, American, and Israeli operatives. It is also well known to them that the terrorist Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and his “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” are just inventions of the coalition forces to justify their existence. More and more evidences are coming out of Iraq to support this fact. The arrest of two undercover British SAS operatives last week, disguised as Arabs trying to plant a car bomb in the middle of Basra during the Karbala Festival, which draws as many as 3 million pilgrims to the city, is just the latest of such revelations.
In previous article - “American Terror Strategy in Iraq”, published first week of last August) I wrote about the American covert terrorist activity in Iraq aimed at inciting civil war and alienating Iraqi resistance. The good citizens of Great Britain and US, including their troops fighting in Iraq, would not believe that their governments would do such terrible acts. After all these two countries are sacrificing the lives of their young troops to liberate Iraqis and not to murder them. The article was criticized harshly by American troops, who served in Iraq, and claimed that they were helping Iraqis re-building their lives. Yet many other Americans and Britons – troops as well as independent reporters – speak loudly about the African, Latin American, American and British mercenaries operating in Iraq and are paid thousands more than the regular troops to perpetrate the terror attacks. British and American leaders had lied their troops into the war in Iraq. Studying history one discovers a long history of these leaders deceiving their people and leading them to terrorize other countries.
The two British operatives, arrested by Basra police and later freed by a British military operation, were identified by the BBC as “members of the SAS elite special forces” (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/424614.stm). They were disguised by wigs and Arab dress. Iraqi sources reported that the Iraqi police were watching the two, and when they tried to approach them they shot two policemen and tried to escape the scene. The Iraqi police chased and captured them, to discover large amount of explosives planted in the car, which apparently was planned to be remotely detonated in the busy market of Basra. The SAS involvement in Iraq was discovered on the 30th of January 2005 when an RAF Hercules plane crashed near Baghdad killing then British servicemen after dropping off fifty SAS members north of Baghdad to fight Iraqi guerillas.
SAS (Special Air Service) is a secret regiment in the British Army. It was formed in 1941 to conduct raids behind the German lines in North Africa. At the present it forms part of the United Kingdom Special Forces alongside the Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. The role of the SAS includes intelligence gathering, behind enemy lines target attacks, counter revolutionary warfare, guarding of senior British dignitaries, conducting military missions without official British Government involvement, training special forces of other nationalities, and counter-terrorism operations.
The SAS conducted many military missions throughout the world. From 1958 – 1959 they fought the anti-sultan rebels in Jebel Akhdar in Oman. They also fought against another insurrection in Dhofar, Oman in 1970 - 1977. They fought Indonesian-supported guerillas during the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation in Borneo in 1963 – 1966. They operated in Aden in 1964 – 1967 before the withdrawal of the British troops. During the Falklands War in 1982 SAS were involved in covert operation in San Carlos before the landing of the main British forces. In the Gulf War of 1991 they were deployed deep behind the Iraqi army lines to destroy Scud missiles launchers and to gather intelligence. It was also reported that they had set fires to the Kuwaiti oil wells.
Some of the SAS had helped Afghani fighters during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s. They also had special training camp in Scotland to train them on shooting down Russian Helicopters.
The SAS was deeply involved in the British conflict in Northern Ireland since its start in 1969. At the beginning they operated openly in their own uniform, and later on they planted moles in the IRA, who were involved in terror bombing. The well known August 15th, 1998 Omagh bombing attack, which killed 29 civilians was done by an SAS double agent as reported by Sunday Herald ( http://www.sundayherald.com/17827). The Paper also reported the confession of another SAS member, who operated as an IRA mole from 1981 to 1994 while on full British army pay. He helped to develop a new type of bomb activated by photographic flashes to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices being signal jammed by army radio units. ( http://www.sundayherald.com/print25646). Another mole, known by his codename “Stakeknife”, was still active in December of 2002 as one of Belfast’s leading provisionals. His military commander “allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA”. ( http://www.sundayherald.com/29997). In late 2002 the paper reported reliable evidence that the British army had used its moles in terrorist organizations to “carry out proxy assassinations”, such as the case of the human rights activist Pat Finucane, who was murdered in 1989 by the Protestant Ulster Defense Association (UDA). The mole supplied the UDA with necessary information to assassinate Finucane. ( http://sundayherald.com/29997).
Car bombings in Iraq started few months after the occupation. The first attacks were directed against the U.N. Headquarters in Iraq prompting the U.N. to withdraw its employees. The Red Cross and the Jordanian Embassy were also initially targeted. Later on car bombing targeted several mosques and religious leaders, and lately the fragile Iraqi Police became the main target. Oddly enough the common denominator in these attacks is that they targeted exclusively Iraqis rather than the occupying forces. It does not make any sense for Al-Qaeda and Al-Zarqawi, allegedly came to Iraq to fight Americans, to attack Iraqi civilians and Iraqi police. In doing so the occupying forces find excuses to stay longer in Iraq. As Bush and Blair continue to remark that since the Iraqi Forces are very week and could not defend the Iraqi against terrorist, it is imperative for the British/American troops to stay in Iraq in order to fight terrorists and help Iraqis defend themselves.
There is a common belief that these car bombings are orchestrated by foreign forces (Americans, British, and Israelis) in Iraq to spread chaos. Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi-exile physicist, reported of Arab drivers discovering bombs planted in their cars after being stopped and interrogated at an American checkpoint. Baghdad Burning blog reported in May 2005 of eyewitnesses to American patrols planting bombs in Ma’moun area in west Baghdad. Abdel Hadi Al-Daraji, Al-Sadr’s top official in Sadr City, accused Britain of plotting to start an ethnic war by carrying out car bombings targeting Shia civilians and then blaming the attack on Sunni Arabs. He said: “Everyone knows the occupiers’ agenda. They are in bed with the Mossad (the Israeli secret service) and their intention is to keep Iraq an unstable battlefield so they can exploit their interests in Iraq”. Sheik Hassan Al-Zarqani, a spokesman for Mahdi Army militia described the two British SAS operatives as terrorists. He stated that the Iraq police found weapons, explosives and remote control detonators in their car. He explained “We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets”. The quick fierce action of the British army to release the two SAS operatives before being interrogated tends to support the view that this incident has deeper implications beyond what appears on the surface.
The general attitude of many Iraqis could be summarized in a statement made by a Shiite man. He said: “I believe it is the Americans who are doing this, pretending it is Sunnis, so there will be a civil war and they can control our wealth.” International reporters, such as the American journalists Dahr Jamail and Juan Cole, started viewing car bombings through the Iraqi point of view.
When asking the important question of who benefits from these car bombings, we discover that the only beneficiaries are the occupying forces. Blaming car bombings on Iraqi resistance the Americans are trying to drive a wedge between the resistance and the sympathetic Iraqis. By bombing Shiite mosques in one day and Sunni mosques in another they are trying to incite hatred between the two religious factions. Civil war and division of Iraq is the ultimate goal of the occupation. Bush’s and Blair’s speeches are geared towards planting seeds of religious conflict. Corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic seem to cultivate these seeds and repeatedly report that car bombing attacks causing casualties among Iraqi civilians are pushing Iraq towards a civil war between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. To incite more religious hatred between the groups the corporate media report of “alarming ethnic cleansing” of Shiites in the predominantly Sunni Baghdad neighborhoods. To exacerbate the situation the American army has been deploying Kurdish Peshmerga troops and Shiite militias in their attacks on Iraqi cities, lately in Tal Afar and Ramadi, killing Sunnis and destroying their houses in a manner designed to inflame ethnic hatred. The policy is to divide in order to conquer, and the ultimate plan is to partition Iraq into three warring three ethnic sections; Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish. Such division entails civil war and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale to weaken any merging Iraqi government, so that it could not demand the withdrawal of the occupying forces. The division of the Yugoslav Federation in the 1990s into smaller weaker states has been taken as a model to slice Iraq. This plan falls perfectly within the Israeli strategic goal, proposed in 1982, of dividing Iraq, the strongest Arab nation, into three warring ethnic states. The same policy can be seen In Israel’s attempt to incite civil war between PA on one side and the other Palestinian factions on the other side.
http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=55&p=16296&s2=30
British hand over control of Basra
British forces have handed over their main base in the city of Basra to the Iraqi military to allow it to take over the main security duties there.
In Baghdad, US forces raided the homes of two officials from a prominent Sunni Arab organisation, arresting bodyguards and confiscating weapons, Sunni officials said.
The handover by the British took place a week after riots broke out in the city - Iraq's second largest - after troops stormed a jail on September 19 where they believed two British soldiers had been taken after being arrested by Iraqi police. The raid sharply increased tensions between the British forces and Iraqis in the city.
British troops moved to a base 18 miles outside Basra to be able to intervene in a crisis.
It was the third southern city to be handed over to Iraqi forces in the space of a month following the US transfer of security control in the cities of Karbala and Najaf.
Adnan al-Dulaimi, secretary-general of the Conference for Iraq's People, said US soldiers in tanks and Humvees, with two helicopters circling overhead, broke into his home earlier, put him and his family in a guest room and searched the house.
"It was if they were attacking a castle, not the home of a normal person who advises Iraq's interim government and has called for reconciliation and renounced sectarianism," al-Dulaimi told a news conference after the raid in western Baghdad.
The other raid took place at the Baghdad home of Harith al-Obeidi, another senior official in the organisation, said Iraq's largest Sunni political party, the Iraqi Islamic Party.
The US military said it had conducted several raids in those areas of Baghdad today, but could not immediately identify the homes or Iraqis involved. The chief of Iraqi police in the district, Major Moussa Abdul-Karim said he heard reports of the raids after they took place but the US military had not coordinated with the Iraqis.
Sixteen Iraqis were killed in a number of shootings and other attacks in the capital, raising to at least 98 the number of people who have died in violence in Iraq this week, including seven US service members.
© Copyright Press Association Ltd 2005, All Rights Reserved.
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2014112005
By Dr. Elias Akleh
It had been long known to the Iraqis, to the Arabs, and to all Moslems in countries bordering Iraq that the majority of the terrorist attacks in Iraq, especially car bombing, are perpetrated by covert British, American, and Israeli operatives. It is also well known to them that the terrorist Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and his “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” are just inventions of the coalition forces to justify their existence. More and more evidences are coming out of Iraq to support this fact. The arrest of two undercover British SAS operatives last week, disguised as Arabs trying to plant a car bomb in the middle of Basra during the Karbala Festival, which draws as many as 3 million pilgrims to the city, is just the latest of such revelations.
In previous article - “American Terror Strategy in Iraq”, published first week of last August) I wrote about the American covert terrorist activity in Iraq aimed at inciting civil war and alienating Iraqi resistance. The good citizens of Great Britain and US, including their troops fighting in Iraq, would not believe that their governments would do such terrible acts. After all these two countries are sacrificing the lives of their young troops to liberate Iraqis and not to murder them. The article was criticized harshly by American troops, who served in Iraq, and claimed that they were helping Iraqis re-building their lives. Yet many other Americans and Britons – troops as well as independent reporters – speak loudly about the African, Latin American, American and British mercenaries operating in Iraq and are paid thousands more than the regular troops to perpetrate the terror attacks. British and American leaders had lied their troops into the war in Iraq. Studying history one discovers a long history of these leaders deceiving their people and leading them to terrorize other countries.
The two British operatives, arrested by Basra police and later freed by a British military operation, were identified by the BBC as “members of the SAS elite special forces” (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/424614.stm). They were disguised by wigs and Arab dress. Iraqi sources reported that the Iraqi police were watching the two, and when they tried to approach them they shot two policemen and tried to escape the scene. The Iraqi police chased and captured them, to discover large amount of explosives planted in the car, which apparently was planned to be remotely detonated in the busy market of Basra. The SAS involvement in Iraq was discovered on the 30th of January 2005 when an RAF Hercules plane crashed near Baghdad killing then British servicemen after dropping off fifty SAS members north of Baghdad to fight Iraqi guerillas. SAS (Special Air Service) is a secret regiment in the British Army. It was formed in 1941 to conduct raids behind the German lines in North Africa. At the present it forms part of the United Kingdom Special Forces alongside the Special Boat Service and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. The role of the SAS includes intelligence gathering, behind enemy lines target attacks, counter revolutionary warfare, guarding of senior British dignitaries, conducting military missions without official British Government involvement, training special forces of other nationalities, and counter-terrorism operations.
The SAS conducted many military missions throughout the world. From 1958 – 1959 they fought the anti-sultan rebels in Jebel Akhdar in Oman. They also fought against another insurrection in Dhofar, Oman in 1970 - 1977. They fought Indonesian-supported guerillas during the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation in Borneo in 1963 – 1966. They operated in Aden in 1964 – 1967 before the withdrawal of the British troops. During the Falklands War in 1982 SAS were involved in covert operation in San Carlos before the landing of the main British forces. In the Gulf War of 1991 they were deployed deep behind the Iraqi army lines to destroy Scud missiles launchers and to gather intelligence. It was also reported that they had set fires to the Kuwaiti oil wells.
Some of the SAS had helped Afghani fighters during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s. They also had special training camp in Scotland to train them on shooting down Russian Helicopters.
The SAS was deeply involved in the British conflict in Northern Ireland since its start in 1969. At the beginning they operated openly in their own uniform, and later on they planted moles in the IRA, who were involved in terror bombing. The well known August 15th, 1998 Omagh bombing attack, which killed 29 civilians was done by an SAS double agent as reported by Sunday Herald (
http://www.sundayherald.com/17827). The Paper also reported the confession of another SAS member, who operated as an IRA mole from 1981 to 1994 while on full British army pay. He helped to develop a new type of bomb activated by photographic flashes to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices being signal jammed by army radio units. ( http://www.sundayherald.com/print25646). Another mole, known by his codename “Stakeknife”, was still active in December of 2002 as one of Belfast’s leading provisionals. His military commander “allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA”. ( http://www.sundayherald.com/29997). In late 2002 the paper reported reliable evidence that the British army had used its moles in terrorist organizations to “carry out proxy assassinations”, such as the case of the human rights activist Pat Finucane, who was murdered in 1989 by the Protestant Ulster Defense Association (UDA). The mole supplied the UDA with necessary information to assassinate Finucane. ( http://sundayherald.com/29997). Car bombings in Iraq started few months after the occupation. The first attacks were directed against the U.N. Headquarters in Iraq prompting the U.N. to withdraw its employees. The Red Cross and the Jordanian Embassy were also initially targeted. Later on car bombing targeted several mosques and religious leaders, and lately the fragile Iraqi Police became the main target. Oddly enough the common denominator in these attacks is that they targeted exclusively Iraqis rather than the occupying forces. It does not make any sense for Al-Qaeda and Al-Zarqawi, allegedly came to Iraq to fight Americans, to attack Iraqi civilians and Iraqi police. In doing so the occupying forces find excuses to stay longer in Iraq. As Bush and Blair continue to remark that since the Iraqi Forces are very week and could not defend the Iraqi against terrorist, it is imperative for the British/American troops to stay in Iraq in order to fight terrorists and help Iraqis defend themselves.
There is a common belief that these car bombings are orchestrated by foreign forces (Americans, British, and Israelis) in Iraq to spread chaos. Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi-exile physicist, reported of Arab drivers discovering bombs planted in their cars after being stopped and interrogated at an American checkpoint. Baghdad Burning blog reported in May 2005 of eyewitnesses to American patrols planting bombs in Ma’moun area in west Baghdad. Abdel Hadi Al-Daraji, Al-Sadr’s top official in Sadr City, accused Britain of plotting to start an ethnic war by carrying out car bombings targeting Shia civilians and then blaming the attack on Sunni Arabs. He said: “Everyone knows the occupiers’ agenda. They are in bed with the Mossad (the Israeli secret service) and their intention is to keep Iraq an unstable battlefield so they can exploit their interests in Iraq”. Sheik Hassan Al-Zarqani, a spokesman for Mahdi Army militia described the two British SAS operatives as terrorists. He stated that the Iraq police found weapons, explosives and remote control detonators in their car. He explained “We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets”. The quick fierce action of the British army to release the two SAS operatives before being interrogated tends to support the view that this incident has deeper implications beyond what appears on the surface.
The general attitude of many Iraqis could be summarized in a statement made by a Shiite man. He said: “I believe it is the Americans who are doing this, pretending it is Sunnis, so there will be a civil war and they can control our wealth.” International reporters, such as the American journalists Dahr Jamail and Juan Cole, started viewing car bombings through the Iraqi point of view.
When asking the important question of who benefits from these car bombings, we discover that the only beneficiaries are the occupying forces. Blaming car bombings on Iraqi resistance the Americans are trying to drive a wedge between the resistance and the sympathetic Iraqis. By bombing Shiite mosques in one day and Sunni mosques in another they are trying to incite hatred between the two religious factions. Civil war and division of Iraq is the ultimate goal of the occupation. Bush’s and Blair’s speeches are geared towards planting seeds of religious conflict. Corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic seem to cultivate these seeds and repeatedly report that car bombing attacks causing casualties among Iraqi civilians are pushing Iraq towards a civil war between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. To incite more religious hatred between the groups the corporate media report of “alarming ethnic cleansing” of Shiites in the predominantly Sunni Baghdad neighborhoods. To exacerbate the situation the American army has been deploying Kurdish Peshmerga troops and Shiite militias in their attacks on Iraqi cities, lately in Tal Afar and Ramadi, killing Sunnis and destroying their houses in a manner designed to inflame ethnic hatred. The policy is to divide in order to conquer, and the ultimate plan is to partition Iraq into three warring three ethnic sections; Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish. Such division entails civil war and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale to weaken any merging Iraqi government, so that it could not demand the withdrawal of the occupying forces. The division of the Yugoslav Federation in the 1990s into smaller weaker states has been taken as a model to slice Iraq. This plan falls perfectly within the Israeli strategic goal, proposed in 1982, of dividing Iraq, the strongest Arab nation, into three warring ethnic states. The same policy can be seen In Israel’s attempt to incite civil war between PA on one side and the other Palestinian factions on the other side.
http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=55&p=16296&s2=30 British hand over control of Basra
British forces have handed over their main base in the city of Basra to the Iraqi military to allow it to take over the main security duties there.
In Baghdad, US forces raided the homes of two officials from a prominent Sunni Arab organisation, arresting bodyguards and confiscating weapons, Sunni officials said.
The handover by the British took place a week after riots broke out in the city - Iraq's second largest - after troops stormed a jail on September 19 where they believed two British soldiers had been taken after being arrested by Iraqi police. The raid sharply increased tensions between the British forces and Iraqis in the city.
British troops moved to a base 18 miles outside Basra to be able to intervene in a crisis.
It was the third southern city to be handed over to Iraqi forces in the space of a month following the US transfer of security control in the cities of Karbala and Najaf.
Adnan al-Dulaimi, secretary-general of the Conference for Iraq's People, said US soldiers in tanks and Humvees, with two helicopters circling overhead, broke into his home earlier, put him and his family in a guest room and searched the house.
"It was if they were attacking a castle, not the home of a normal person who advises Iraq's interim government and has called for reconciliation and renounced sectarianism," al-Dulaimi told a news conference after the raid in western Baghdad.
The other raid took place at the Baghdad home of Harith al-Obeidi, another senior official in the organisation, said Iraq's largest Sunni political party, the Iraqi Islamic Party.
The US military said it had conducted several raids in those areas of Baghdad today, but could not immediately identify the homes or Iraqis involved. The chief of Iraqi police in the district, Major Moussa Abdul-Karim said he heard reports of the raids after they took place but the US military had not coordinated with the Iraqis.
Sixteen Iraqis were killed in a number of shootings and other attacks in the capital, raising to at least 98 the number of people who have died in violence in Iraq this week, including seven US service members.
© Copyright Press Association Ltd 2005, All Rights Reserved.
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2014112005
Dr. Elias Akleh
Comments
Hide the following 19 comments
more baseless paranoid crap
01.10.2005 14:09
one man & his dog
prove it!
01.10.2005 16:43
Arthur
Arthur
01.10.2005 17:01
Jordan is our saviour. And all we have to do to join him on the path to true freedom is wail and gnash your teeth and cry "Forgive me Jordan. I am a sheeple that needs a shepherd"... and buy a few books & DVDs at prisonplanet.
Amen brother! AH-MEN!!
Jordan's breast enlargements.
the iraq document
01.10.2005 18:30
The paper, produced by the Cabinet Office on July 21, 2002, is incomplete because the last page is missing. The following is a transcript rather than the original document in order to protect the source.
PERSONAL SECRET UK EYES ONLY
IRAQ: CONDITIONS FOR MILITARY ACTION (A Note by Officials)
Summary
Ministers are invited to:
(1) Note the latest position on US military planning and timescales for possible action.
(2) Agree that the objective of any military action should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD.
(3) Agree to engage the US on the need to set military plans within a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action, which might include an ultimatum for the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. This should include a call from the Prime Minister to President Bush ahead of the briefing of US military plans to the President on 4 August.
(4) Note the potentially long lead times involved in equipping UK Armed Forces to undertake operations in the Iraqi theatre and agree that the MOD should bring forward proposals for the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements under cover of the lessons learned from Afghanistan and the outcome of SR2002.
(5) Agree to the establishment of an ad hoc group of officials under Cabinet Office Chairmanship to consider the development of an information campaign to be agreed with the US.
Introduction
1. The US Government's military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework. In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.
2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.
3. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly Zones. This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action. Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support.
4. In order to fulfil the conditions set out by the Prime Minister for UK support for military action against Iraq, certain preparations need to be made, and other considerations taken into account. This note sets them out in a form which can be adapted for use with the US Government. Depending on US intentions, a decision in principle may be needed soon on whether and in what form the UK takes part in military action. The Goal
5. Our objective should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or to international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD. It seems unlikely that this could be achieved while the current Iraqi regime remains in power. US military planning unambiguously takes as its objective the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, followed by elimination if Iraqi WMD. It is however, by no means certain, in the view of UK officials, that one would necessarily follow from the other. Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD, it is certainly not a sufficient one.
US Military Planning
6. Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq. In a 'Running Start', military action could begin as early as November of this year, with no overt military build-up. Air strikes and support for opposition groups in Iraq would lead initially to small-scale land operations, with further land forces deploying sequentially, ultimately overwhelming Iraqi forces and leading to the collapse of the Iraqi regime. A 'Generated Start' would involve a longer build-up before any military action were taken, as early as January 2003. US military plans include no specifics on the strategic context either before or after the campaign. Currently the preference appears to be for the 'Running Start'. CDS will be ready to brief Ministers in more detail.
7. US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia. This means that legal base issues would arise virtually whatever option Ministers choose with regard to UK participation.
The Viability of the Plans
8. The Chiefs of Staff have discussed the viability of US military plans. Their initial view is that there are a number of questions which would have to be answered before they could assess whether the plans are sound. Notably these include the realism of the 'Running Start', the extent to which the plans are proof against Iraqi counter-attack using chemical or biological weapons and the robustness of US assumptions about the bases and about Iraqi (un)willingness to fight.
UK Military Contribution
9. The UK's ability to contribute forces depends on the details of the US military planning and the time available to prepare and deploy them. The MOD is examining how the UK might contribute to US-led action. The options range from deployment of a Division (ie Gulf War sized contribution plus naval and air forces) to making available bases. It is already clear that the UK could not generate a Division in time for an operation in January 2003, unless publicly visible decisions were taken very soon. Maritime and air forces could be deployed in time, provided adequate basing arrangements could be made. The lead times involved in preparing for UK military involvement include the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements, for which there is no financial provision.
The Conditions Necessary for Military Action
10. Aside from the existence of a viable military plan we consider the following conditions necessary for military action and UK participation: justification/legal base; an international coalition; a quiescent Israel/Palestine; a positive risk/benefit assessment; and the preparation of domestic opinion.
Justification
11. US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful. We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council. A detailed consideration of the legal issues, prepared earlier this year, is at Annex A. The legal position would depend on the precise circumstances at the time. Legal bases for an invasion of Iraq are in principle conceivable in both the first two instances but would be difficult to establish because of, for example, the tests of immediacy and proportionality. Further legal advice would be needed on this point.
12. This leaves the route under the UNSC resolutions on weapons inspectors. Kofi Annan has held three rounds of meetings with Iraq in an attempt to persuade them to admit the UN weapons inspectors. These have made no substantive progress; the Iraqis are deliberately obfuscating. Annan has downgraded the dialogue but more pointless talks are possible. We need to persuade the UN and the international community that this situation cannot be allowed to continue ad infinitum. We need to set a deadline, leading to an ultimatum. It would be preferable to obtain backing of a UNSCR for any ultimatum and early work would be necessary to explore with Kofi Annan and the Russians, in particular, the scope for achieving this.
13. In practice, facing pressure of military action, Saddam is likely to admit weapons inspectors as a means of forestalling it. But once admitted, he would not allow them to operate freely. UNMOVIC (the successor to UNSCOM) will take at least six months after entering Iraq to establish the monitoring and verification system under Resolution 1284 necessary to assess whether Iraq is meeting its obligations. Hence, even if UN inspectors gained access today, by January 2003 they would at best only just be completing setting up. It is possible that they will encounter Iraqi obstruction during this period, but this more likely when they are fully operational.
14. It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject (because he is unwilling to accept unfettered access) and which would not be regarded as unreasonable by the international community. However, failing that (or an Iraqi attack) we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal base for military action by January 2003.
An International Coalition
15. An international coalition is necessary to provide a military platform and desirable for political purposes.
16. US military planning assumes that the US would be allowed to use bases in Kuwait (air and ground forces), Jordan, in the Gulf (air and naval forces) and UK territory (Diego Garcia and our bases in Cyprus). The plans assume that Saudi Arabia would withhold co-operation except granting military over-flights. On the assumption that military action would involve operations in the Kurdish area in the North of Iraq, the use of bases in Turkey would also be necessary.
17. In the absence of UN authorisation, there will be problems in securing the support of NATO and EU partners. Australia would be likely to participate on the same basis as the UK. France might be prepared to take part if she saw military action as inevitable. Russia and China, seeking to improve their US relations, might set aside their misgivings if sufficient attention were paid to their legal and economic concerns. Probably the best we could expect from the region would be neutrality. The US is likely to restrain Israel from taking part in military action. In practice, much of the international community would find it difficult to stand in the way of the determined course of the US hegemon. However, the greater the international support, the greater the prospects of success.
A Quiescent Israel-Palestine
18. The Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank has dampened Palestinian violence for the time being but is unsustainable in the long-term and stoking more trouble for the future. The Bush speech was at best a half step forward. We are using the Palestinian reform agenda to make progress, including a resumption of political negotiations. The Americans are talking of a ministerial conference in November or later. Real progress towards a viable Palestinian state is the best way to undercut Palestinian extremists and reduce Arab antipathy to military action against Saddam Hussein. However, another upsurge of Palestinian/Israeli violence is highly likely. The co-incidence of such an upsurge with the preparations for military action against Iraq cannot be ruled out. Indeed Saddam would use continuing violence in the Occupied Territories to bolster popular Arab support for his regime.
Benefits/Risks
19. Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks. In particular, we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective as set out in paragraph 5 above. A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired endstate would be created, in particular what form of Government might replace Saddam Hussein's regime and the timescale within which it would be possible to identify a successor. We must also consider in greater detail the impact of military action on other UK interests in the region.
Domestic Opinion
20. Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action.
Timescales
21. Although the US military could act against Iraq as soon as November, we judge that a military campaign is unlikely to start until January 2003, if only because of the time it will take to reach consensus in Washington. That said, we judge that for climactic reasons, military action would need to start by January 2003, unless action were deferred until the following autumn.
22. As this paper makes clear, even this timescale would present problems. This means that:
(a) We need to influence US consideration of the military plans before President Bush is briefed on 4 August, through contacts betweens the Prime Minister and the President and at other levels;
more:
cw
More of this
01.10.2005 20:49
Humpty Dumpty
arthur
02.10.2005 11:28
What other jailbird has had tanks break him out of jail? Will the UK allow this in the UK?
this and more demands investigation. But it does not bespeak the innocence of the UK agents.
brian
"planting bombs in Basra"
02.10.2005 18:43
Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra?
Suspicions Strengthened by Earlier Reports
by Michael Keefer
September 25, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca
Does anyone remember the shock with which the British public greeted the revelation four years ago that one of the members of the Real IRA unit whose bombing attack in Omagh on August 15, 1998 killed twenty-nine civilians had been a double agent, a British army soldier?
That soldier was not Britain’s only terrorist double agent. A second British soldier planted within the IRA claimed he had given forty-eight hours advance notice of the Omagh car-bomb attack to his handlers within the Royal Ulster Constabulary, including "details of one of the bombing team and the man’s car registration." Although the agent had made an audio tape of his tip-off call, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, chief constable of the RUC, declared that "no such information was received" (
This second double agent went public in June 2002 with the claim that from 1981 to 1994, while on full British army pay, he had worked for "the Force Research Unit, an ultra-secret wing of British military intelligence," as an IRA mole. With the full knowledge and consent of his FRU and MI5 handlers, he became a bombing specialist who "mixed explosive and … helped to develop new types of bombs," including "light-sensitive bombs, activated by photographic flashes, to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices having their signal jammed by army radio units." He went on to become "a member of the Provisional IRA’s ‘internal security squad’—also known as the ‘torture unit’—which interrogated and executed suspected informers" (
The much-feared commander of that same "torture unit" was likewise a mole, who had previously served in the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Squadron (an elite special forces unit, the Marines’ equivalent to the better-known SAS). A fourth mole, a soldier code-named "Stakeknife" whose military handlers "allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA," was still active in December 2002 as "one of Belfast’s leading Provisionals" (
Reliable evidence also emerged in late 2002 that the British army had been using its double agents in terrorist organizations "to carry out proxy assassinations for the British state"—most notoriously in the case of Belfast solicitor and human rights activist Pat Finucane, who was murdered in 1989 by the Protestant Ulster Defence Association. It appears that the FRU passed on details about Finucane to a British soldier who had infiltrated the UDA; he in turn "supplied UDA murder teams with the information" (
Recent events in Basra have raised suspicions that the British army may have reactivated these same tactics in Iraq.
Articles published by Michel Chossudovsky, Larry Chin and Mike Whitney at the Centre for Research on Globalization’s website on September 20, 2005 have offered preliminary assessments of the claims of Iraqi authorities that two British soldiers in civilian clothes who were arrested by Iraqi police in Basra on September 19—and in short order released by a British tank and helicopter assault on the prison where they were being held—had been engaged in planting bombs in the city
See:
A further article by Kurt Nimmo points to false-flag operations carried out by British special forces troops in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and to Donald Rumsfeld’s formation of the P2OG, or Proactive Preemptive Operations Group, as directly relevant to Iraqi charges of possible false-flag terror operations by the occupying powers in Iraq (
These accusations by Iraqi officials echo insistent but unsubstantiated claims, going back at least to the spring of 2004, to the effect that many of the terror bombings carried out against civilian targets in Iraq have actually been perpetrated by U.S. and British forces rather than by Iraqi insurgents.
Some such claims can be briskly dismissed. In mid-May 2005, for example, a group calling itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" accused U.S. troops "of detonating car bombs and falsely accusing militants" (
Other claims, however, are cumulatively more troubling.
The American journalist Dahr Jamail wrote in April 20, 2004 that the recent spate of car bombings in Baghdad was widely rumoured to have been the work of the CIA:
"The word on the street in Baghdad is that the cessation of suicide car bombings is proof that the CIA was behind them. Why? Because as one man states, ‘[CIA agents are] too busy fighting now, and the unrest they wanted to cause by the bombings is now upon them.’ True or not, it doesn’t bode well for the occupiers’ image in Iraq." (
Two days later, on April 22, 2004, Agence France-Presse reported that five car-bombings in Basra—three near-simultaneous attacks outside police stations in Basra that killed sixty-eight people, including twenty children, and two follow-up bombings—were being blamed by supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on the British. While eight hundred supporters demonstrated outside Sadr’s offices, a Sadr spokesman claimed to have "evidence that the British were involved in these attacks" (
An anonymous senior military officer said on April 22, 2004 of these Basra attacks that "It looks like Al-Qaeda. It’s got all the hallmarks: it was suicidal, it was spectacular and it was symbolic." Brigadier General Nick Carter, commander of the British garrison in Basra, stated more ambiguously that Al Qaeda was not necessarily to blame for the five bombings, but that those responsible came from outside Basra and "quite possibly" from outside Iraq: "’All that we can be certain of is that this is something that came from outside,’ Carter said" (
In May 2005 ‘Riverbend’, the Baghdad author of the widely-read blog Baghdad Burning, reported that what the international press was reporting as suicide bombings were often in fact "car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs." After one of the larger recent blasts, which occurred in the middle-class Ma’moun area of west Baghdad, a man living in a house in front of the blast site was reportedly arrested for having sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman. But according to ‘Riverbend’, his neighbours had a different story:
"People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb. Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away."
(
Also in May 2005, Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi-exile physicist whose writings helped to discredit American and British fabrications about weapons of mass destruction, reported a story that in Baghdad a driver whose license had been confiscated at an American check-point was told "to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license." After being questioned for half an hour, he was informed that there was nothing against him, but that his license had been forwarded to the Iraqi police at the al-Khadimiya station "for processing"—and that he should get there quickly before the lieutenant whose name he was given went off his shift.
"The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him. He stopped the car and inspected it carefully. He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors. The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated ‘hideous attack by foreign elements’."
(
According to Khadduri, "The same scenario was repeated in Mosul, in the north of Iraq." On this occasion, the driver’s life was saved when his car broke down on the way to the police station where he was supposed to reclaim his license, and when the mechanic to whom he had recourse "discovered that the spare tire was fully laden with explosives."
Khadduri mentions, as deserving of investigation, a "perhaps unrelated incident" in Baghdad on April 28, 2005 in which a Canadian truck-driver with dual Canadian-Iraqi citizenship was killed. He quotes a CBC report according to which "Some media cited unidentified sources who said he may have died after U.S. forces ‘tracked’ a target, using a helicopter gunship, but Foreign Affairs said it’s still investigating conflicting reports of the death. U. S. officials have denied any involvement."
Another incident, also from April 2005, calls more urgently for investigation, since one of its victims remains alive. Abdul Amir Younes, a CBS cameraman, was lightly wounded by U.S. forces on April 5 "while filming the aftermath of a car bombing in Mosul." American military authorities were initially apologetic about his injuries, but three days later arrested him on the grounds that he had been "engaged in anti-coalition activity"
(
Arianna Huffington, in her detailed account of this case, quite rightly emphasizes its Kafkaesque qualities: Younes has now been detained, in Abu Graib and elsewhere, for more than five months—without charges, without any hint of what evidence the Pentagon may hold against him, and without any indication that he will ever be permitted to stand trial, challenge that evidence, and disprove the charges that might at some future moment be laid. But in addition to confirming, yet again, the Pentagon’s willingness to violate the most fundamental principles of humane and democratic jurisprudence, this case also raises a further question. Was Younes perhaps arrested, like the Iraqi whose rumoured fate was mentioned by ‘Riverbend’, because he had seen—and in Younes’ case photographed—more than was good for him?
Agents provocateurs?
Spokesmen for the American and British occupation of Iraq, together with newspapers like the Daily Telegraph, have of course rejected with indignation any suggestion that their forces could have been involved in false-flag terrorist operations in Iraq.
It may be remembered that during the 1980s spokesmen for the government of Ronald Reagan likewise heaped ridicule on Nicaraguan accusations that the U.S. was illegally supplying weapons to the ‘Contras’—until, that is, a CIA-operated C-123 cargo aircraft full of weaponry was shot down over Nicaragua, and Eugene Hasenfus, a cargo handler who survived the crash, testified that his supervisors (one of whom was Luis Posada Carriles, the CIA agent responsible for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner) were working for then-Vice-President George H. W. Bush.
The arrest—and the urgent liberation—of the two undercover British soldiers in Iraq might in a similar manner be interpreted as casting a retrospective light on previously unsubstantiated claims about the involvement of members of the occupying armies in terrorist bombing attacks on civilians.
The parallel is far from exact: in this case there has been no dramatic confession like that of Hasenfus, and there are no directly incriminating documents like the pilot’s log of the downed C-123. There is, moreover, a marked lack of consensus as to what actually happened in Basra. Should we therefore, with Juan Cole, dismiss the possibility British soldiers were acting as agents provocateurs as a "theory [that] has almost no facts behind it" (
Members of Britain's Elite SAS Forces
It appears that when on September 19 suspicious Iraqi police stopped the Toyota Cressida the undercover British soldiers were driving, the two men opened fire, killing one policeman and wounding another. But the soldiers, identified by the BBC as "members of the SAS elite special forces" (
As Justin Raimondo has observed in an article published on September 23 at Antiwar.com, nearly every other aspect of this episode is disputed.
The Washington Post dismissively remarked, in the eighteenth paragraph of its report on these events, that "Iraqi security officials variously accused the two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or trying to plant explosives" (
Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, told Al-Jazeera TV on September 19 that the soldiers opened fire when the police sought to arrest them, and that their car was booby-trapped "and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market" (quoted by Chossudovsky). A deliberately inflammatory press release sent out on the same day by the office of Moqtada al-Sadr (and posted in English translation at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog on September 20) states that the soldiers’ arrest was prompted by their having "opened fire on passers-by" near a Basra mosque, and that they were found to have "in their possession explosives and remote-control devices, as well as light and medium weapons and other accessories" (
What credence can be given to the claim about explosives? Justin Raimondo writes that while initial BBC Radio reports acknowledged that the two men indeed had explosives in their car, subsequent reports from the same source indicated that the Iraqi police found nothing beyond "assault rifles, a light machine gun, an anti-tank weapon, radio gear, and medical kit. This is thought to be standard kit for the SAS operating in such a theater of operations" (
One might well wonder, with Raimondo, whether an anti-tank weapon is "standard operating equipment"—or what use SAS men on "a surveillance mission outside a police station" intended to make of it. But more importantly, a photograph published by the Iraqi police and distributed by Reuters shows that—unless the equipment is a plant—the SAS men were carrying a good deal more than just the items acknowledged by the BBC. (
I would want the opinion of an arms expert before risking a definitive judgment about the objects shown, which could easily have filled the trunk and much of the back seat of a Cressida. But this photograph makes plausible the statement of Sheik Hassan al-Zarqani, a spokesman for Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia:
"What our police found in their car was very disturbing—weapons, explosives, and a remote control detonator. These are the weapons of terrorists. We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets…" (quoted by Raimondo)
The fierce determination of the British army to remove these men from any danger of interrogation by their own supposed allies in the government the British are propping up—even when their rescue entailed the destruction of an Iraqi prison and the release of a large number of prisoners, gun-battles with Iraqi police and with Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, a large popular mobilization against the British occupying force, and a subsequent withdrawal of any cooperation on the part of the regional government—tends, if anything, to support the view that this episode involved something much darker and more serious than a mere flare-up of bad tempers at a check-point.
US-UK Sponsored Civil War
There is reason to believe, moreover, that the open civil war which car-bomb attacks on civilians seem intended to produce would not be an unwelcome development in the eyes of the occupation forces.
Writers in the English-language corporate media have repeatedly noted that recent terror-bomb attacks which have caused massive casualties among civilians appear to be pushing Iraq towards a civil war of Sunnis against Shiites, and of Kurds against both. For example, on September 18, 2005 Peter Beaumont proposed in The Observer that the slaughter of civilians, which he ascribes to Al Qaeda alone, "has one aim: civil war" (
"’Civil war today is closer than any time before,’ said Hazim Abdel Hamid al Nuaimi, a professor of politics at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. ‘All of these explosions, the efforts by police and purging of neighbourhoods is a battle to control Baghdad.’"
(
Whether or not it has already begun or will occur, the eruption of a full-blown civil war, leading to the fragmentation of the country, would clearly be welcomed in some circles. Israeli strategists and journalists proposed as long ago as 1982 that one of their country’s strategic goals should be the partitioning of Iraq into a Shiite state, a Sunni state, and a separate Kurdish part. (See foreign ministry official Oded Yinon’s "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," Kivunim 14 [February 1982]; a similar proposal put forward by Ze’ev Schiff in Ha’aretz in the same month is noted by Noam Chomsky in Fateful Triangle [2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999], p. 457).
A partitioning of Iraq into sections defined by ethnicity and by Sunni-Shia differences would entail, obviously enough, both civil war and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. But these considerations did not deter Leslie H. Gelb from advocating in the New York Times, on November 25, 2003, what he called "The Three-State Solution". (
Gelb, a former senior State Department and Pentagon official, a former editor and columnist for the New York Times, and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, is an insider’s insider. And if the essays of Yinon and Schiff are nasty stuff, especially in the context of Israel’s 1981 bombing attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, there is still some difference between speculatively proposing the dismemberment of a powerful neighbouring country, and actively advocating the dismemberment of a country that one’s own nation has conquered in a war of unprovoked aggression. The former might be described as a diseased imagining of war and criminality; the latter belongs very clearly to the category of war crimes.
Gelb’s essay proposes punishing the Sunni-led insurgency by separating the largely Sunni centre of present-day Iraq from the oil-rich Kurdish north and the oil-rich Shia south. It holds out the dismembering of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s (with the appalling slaughters that ensued) as a "hopeful precedent."
Gelb’s essay has been widely interpreted as signaling the intentions of a dominant faction in the U.S. government. It has also, very appropriately, been denounced by Bill Vann as openly promoting "a war crime of world-historic proportions" (
Given the increasing desperation of the American and British governments in the face of an insurgency that their tactics of mass arbitrary arrest and torture, Phoenix-Program or "Salvadoran-option" death squads, unrestrained use of overwhelming military force, and murderous collective punishment have failed to suppress, it comes as no surprise that in recent military actions such as the assault on Tal Afar the U.S. army has been deploying Kurdish peshmerga troops and Shiite militias in a manner that seems designed to inflame ethnic hatreds.
No one, I should hope, is surprised any longer by the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—that fictional construct of the Pentagon’s serried ranks of little Tom Clancies, that one-legged Dalek, that Scarlet Pimpernel of terrorism, who manages to be here, there, and everywhere at once—should be so ferociously devoted to the terrorizing and extermination of his Shiite co-religionists.
Should we be any more surprised, then, to see evidence emerging in Iraq of false-flag terrorist bombings conducted by the major occupying powers? The secret services and special forces of both the U.S. and Britain have, after all, had some experience in these matters.
Global Research Contributing Editor Michael Keefer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Guelph. He is a former President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. His most recent writings include a series of articles on electoral fraud in the 2004 US presidential election published by the Centre for Research on Globalization
ENOUGH
get real!
02.10.2005 19:01
Arthur
Arthur
03.10.2005 05:16
Nadia
Arrest warrant
03.10.2005 09:25
It looks like a clash between British forces and rogue elements of the Iraqi police to me, Nadia, surely if they were caught planting bombs Al Jazeera would say so. The other website globalresearch.ca is full of speculation and not evidence at all, use Al Jazeera that global research bollocks is little more than a blog!
Arthur
Arthur that is not evidence
03.10.2005 18:43
Any person disguised in civilian Arab clothes sitting in a car full of weapons in Iraq should be put on trial, it they are innocent and were just on their way to a masquerade they will be set free and if not well then they should be charged under the same law Iraqis and Arabs in Iraq are charged with these days.
What would you want the British police to do if two Indonesian men were disguised as two football supporters sitting in a car full of weapons in London? Set them free, because Jazera did not say they were planning something criminal?
What would you want the Iraqi police to do if two Egyptian men were disguised in a car full of weapons? Set them free?
You come down to earth.
Dressing up in clothes to look like "sunni arabs" in a car full of weapons in Iraq is NOT acceptable.
Nadia
nadia-they were disguised as Arabs because they were on surveillance!
03.10.2005 23:59
Arthur
They should have been charged in an Iraqi court.
04.10.2005 19:13
However Basra government say they have evidence they killed a police. They should have been charged in an Iraqi court, not freed by smashing down an Iraqi police station. Your views are as Saddam, some people are always above the law. You are free to believe what ever you want and I find it astonishing how you think and analyze this incident. But then again the world was told no torture was happening by occupation troops on Iraqis for months yet we Iraqis knew it was/is happening and now the world knows that too. The same goes for many other things in Iraq too.
As for Kenya you seem not to know the history, when did the British government confess to its atrocities? 50 years ago? 40 years ago? 30 years ago?
What the British did in Kenya is just one of many other things that prove that the British government are capable of committing crimes against other people and denying it with manipulations and lies for years and having a system setup that can make them get away with it for decades. I have seen no proof that Blair government is any different.
Nadia
You agree therefore they were not on a bombing mission?
04.10.2005 23:35
Arthur
Nadia
05.10.2005 09:04
If they were passing themselves off a insurgents they would be carrying an AK-47, whatever this weeks favoured method of IED is and CERTAINLY none of the coalition equipment.
There are no reliable accounts of explosives. There are no accounts of who fired on whom first. You have no idea if the police fired on them and they did what anyone would do and fire back.
The most significant point however is: if they UK were staging terrorist attack to provoke civil war (a strange tactic since there is mounting pressure for disengagement) they certainly wouldn't be so stupid as to use two white blokes and load their car up with UK militray equipment.
The assertions of staging insurgent attacks are truly the work of a moron out his depth. They are about as plausible as suggesting Militray Intelligence would think spraying "Insurgent" on the side of a Humvee would make a good disguise.
Quartermaster
That's Not True
06.10.2005 06:03
The photos were posted to the website listed.
Don't Fall for the PsyOps
Homepage:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
Can any one troll answer this...
06.10.2005 10:06
Didn't happen that way, though. There was nothing actually genuine about them.
Balanced minds have noted this, whilst the others apparently not.
Over to the trolls.
mick
Mick
it's already been explained!
06.10.2005 12:19
Arthur
Mick & Jordan
06.10.2005 18:08
You raise a good point... then spoil it by going off to Jordan/PsyOps Lalaland.
There are no accounts of the encounter between the UK soldiers and the Basra police. So, that tells us nothing in itself about the sequence of events. But, how do you explain them having a UK flag that they apparently waved at the police? How do you explain the fact they were carrying UK special forces standard equipment? Does that sound like an credible attempt at passing yourself off as insurgents?
Jordan chooses for some inexplicable reason to totally overlook that fact their equipment bears NO resemblance to anything a so-called insurgent would use. None at all.
Jordan, if the car was wired to explode, then why was their boot full of forward recon equipment? Were they going to go set a laser target then just eat all that equipment before they blew the car up somewhere??? Were they really going to turn up at some market place with an M16 and pretend to be "insurgents"??? You have to be either way out your depth or bloody stupid to not see that.
You really can't go on ignoring their kit.
non troll thank you very much