Wednesday 7 February 2007

Who Are The Real Terrorists In Iraq?

by Steve Watson, Infowars.net

An article in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend pointed towards evidence that an secretive and elite unit of the British army is actively engaged in recruiting and training Iraqi insurgents and terrorists as double agents.

This confirms what many have speculated for a long time, that Britain and the US are deeply involved in bombings and attacks inside Iraq which are subsequently attributed either to Sunni insurgents or shadowy terrorist cells such as "Al Qaeda in Iraq".

The Telegraph article states:

Deep inside the heart of the "Green Zone", the heavily fortified administrative compound in Baghdad, lies one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war in Iraq. It is a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit that goes by the deliberately meaningless name of the Joint Support Group (JSG), and it has proved to be one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror.

Its members - servicemen and women of all ranks recruited from all three of the Armed Forces - are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level. Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents.

A look into the history of the secretive JSG or Force Research Unit (FRU), the cover name it operated under in Northern Ireland, reveals the extent to which the British government supports and engages in acts of terrorism in order to further its agenda in occupied territories. Iraq, as it turns out, is unsurprisingly no exception.

The FRU is the same ultra secret cell of the SAS whose criminal activities in Northern Ireland were under investigation by former Scotland Yard commissioner Sir John Stevens for more than a decade, during which time it emerged that the unit was involved in the murder of civilians in Northern Ireland.

According to Detectives, 'Military intelligence was colluding with terrorists to help them kill so-called "legitimate targets" such as active republicans...many of the victims of these government backed hit squads were innocent civilians.'

“Beginning in the 1980s the highly secretive FRU was sent into Northern Ireland to recruit and train double agents to work inside the paramilitary groups,” writes Michael S. Rose.

“The FRU combated IRA terrorism by the use of paid informers, blackmail, ambushes, and other methods not approved by the Geneva Convention. In the worst case, British officers decided that in cases when it would be difficult to bring suspected IRA terrorists to justice by legitimate means, the FRU would enlist outlawed guerilla groups that possessed both the desire and the means to murder the IRA men. According to Stevens Three, the FRU assisted Protestant terrorists in carrying out what were, in effect, proxy assassinations of Catholics. In order to forge such alliances, the British officers had to overlook the fact that the interests of the Protestant death squads were not those of the United Kingdom and its government.”

The FRU was further exposed by former member turned whistleblower Kevin Fulton.

Fulton worked for the FRU for much of his career as he was infiltrating the IRA. In his role as a British FRU agent inside the IRA, he was told to 'do anything' to win the confidence of the terrorist group. Fulton Told the Sunday Herald:

"I mixed explosive and I helped develop new types of bombs. I moved weapons. If you ask me, 'Did I kill anyone?' then I will say 'no'. But if you ask me if the materials I handled killed anyone, then I will have to say that some of the things I helped develop did kill.

I reiterate, my handlers knew everything I did. I was never told not to do something that was discussed. How can you pretend to be a terrorist and not act like one? You can't. You've got to do what they do. The people I was with were hard-hitters. They did a lot of murders. If I couldn't be any good to them, then I was no use to the army either. I had to do what the man standing next to me did.

I broke the law seven days a week and my handlers knew that. They knew that I was making bombs and giving them to other members of the IRA and they did nothing about it. If everything I touched turned to shit then I would have been dead. The idea was that the only way to beat the enemy was to penetrate the enemy and be the enemy. At the time I'd no problem with this way of thinking."

Fulton revealed that his handlers told him that his operations were 'sanctioned right at the top... this goes the whole way to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister knows what you are doing.'

Every major IRA bombing in England and Northern Ireland has had the fingerprints of the British government and the FRU all over it.

Full story...

Tuesday 6 February 2007

Iran: The war begins

by John Pilger

As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.


The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its dis aster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government." Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neo-con" fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Che- ney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations - until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear programme to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything". They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power - with its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation - Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.

The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions", just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has done yeoman service in facilitating [this]"; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it has been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and south Asian history at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He said: "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all". Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.

Full story...