Das Europäische Parlament hat heute das Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung der Natur (Nature Restoration Law – NRL) verabschiedet (Renatierungsgesetz). Falls der Europäische Rat ebenfalls zustimmen sollte, dann müssen die EU-Mitgliedstaaten bis zum Jahr 2030 mindestens 20 Prozent ihrer Land- und Meeresgebiete stilllegen und mindestens ein Viertel der entwässerten Torfmoore wiedervernässen. Dazu erklärt der agrarpolitische Sprecher der … Renaturierungsgesetz der EU-Parlaments ist ein weiterer Schlag gegen Bauernweiterlesen
Biden Skipped A Super Bowl ‘News’ Interview, But Approved A Seth Meyers Love-In
By Tim Graham ~
President Biden once again has set aside any fraction of a journalist interview, selecting a comedian interview instead. Biden was in Manhattan on Monday, and in addition to another campaign fundraiser, he taped an interview with NBC’s Seth Meyers to mark the 10th anniversary of his leftist hootenanny Late Night. Ten years ago, then-Vice President Biden was his second guest on his first show.The Hill newspaper described it this way: “President Biden is staying up late, making an appearance on Late Night as the NBC show marks its 10th anniversary with Seth Meyers in the hosting chair.” The show airs after midnight, but it is taped at 6:30 pm.
So let’s get this straight: Biden couldn’t subject himself to the rigorous questioning of someone like Obama donor Gayle King at CBS, because she might ask something about Hamas or Robert Hur’s report. But Seth Meyers fits nicely on the saps list with Drew Barrymore and Conan O’Brien and Ryan Seacrest.
Biden traveled to New York last June for an on-site interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace — and generated buzz by awkwardly walking off-set before the commercial break.
Like Nicolle’s show, Seth’s talk show is by Democrats, for Democrats. It’s meant to be funny, but usually it’s pompously knocking around the right-wingers. Alex Christy’s studies found a Democrat-to-Republican politico guest count of 48 Democrats, zero Republicans. His first study was 21-0 and the second was 27-0.
In an interview with The Wrap, Meyers explained how loathing of Trump’s election in 2016 shaped his show into what it is today:
“I just felt so at a loss. I didn’t think it could happen, and I hated what it said about where we were at as a country,” he remembered. “Then I got to come in and be with my staff, all of whom were feeling equally miserable, and we got to do a show. I got to talk honestly about the way I felt.”
He said that show set the direction for Late Night going forward. “We thought we could be a sane voice to a sane world, and now the world is a little bit crazy and it’s made us crazy, too. But the formerly sane should have a nice place to hang out and talk about how crazy the world has been.”
These late-night “comedy” shows often look and sound more like Democrat precinct meetings.
Tim Graham is the Executive Editor at NewsBusters, and he is the Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.
(Eigener Bericht) – Die Staaten Europas werden die ukrainischen Kontrollen an der Grenze zu Belarus mit nichtmilitärischen Kräften unterstützen und zudem an der Beseitigung von Minen in der Ukraine mitwirken. Dies sind Teilergebnisse eines Gipfeltreffens am Montagabend in Paris, auf dem über Unterstützungsmaßnahmen für Kiew diskutiert wurde. Gegenstand der Gespräche, an denen Repräsentanten von alles in allem 27 Staaten teilnahmen, war außerdem die Entsendung von Soldaten; diese sei als „Option“ in Betracht gezogen worden, wenngleich kein Konsens darüber erzielt worden sei, gab der französische Präsident Emmanuel Macron nach dem Treffen bekannt. Moskau bestätigte am gestrigen Dienstag, ein Eingreifen westlicher Soldaten auf ukrainischem Territorium sei faktisch gleichbedeutend mit dem Kriegseintritt der NATO; damit wäre ein dritter Weltkrieg erreicht. Hintergrund der Überlegungen ist, dass die ukrainischen Streitkräfte nicht nur unter Munitions-, sondern vor allem auch unter Personalmangel leiden und ihnen deshalb eine womöglich schon baldige Niederlage droht. Russland ist aktuell in der Offensive.
One of the main reasons the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell is having such an earthshaking impact on our society is because it’s the single most profound act of sincerity that any of us have ever witnessed.
One of the main reasons the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell is having such an earthshaking impact on our society is because it’s the single most profound act of sincerity that any of us have ever witnessed.
In this fraudulent civilization where everything is fake and stupid, we are not accustomed to such sincerity. We’re accustomed to vapid mainstream culture manufactured in New York and Los Angeles, airheaded celebrities who never talk about anything real, self-aggrandizing Instagram activism, synthetic political factions designed to herd populist discontent into support for status quo politics, phony shitlib “I hear you, I stand with you [but I won’t actually do anything]” posturing, endless propaganda and diversion from the mass media and its online equivalents which are algorithmically boosted by Silicon Valley tech plutocrats, and a mind-controlled dystopia where almost everyone is sleepwalking through life in a psyop-induced fog.
That is the sort of experience we have been conditioned to expect here in the shadow of the western empire. And then, out of nowhere, some Air Force guy comes along and does something real. Something as authentic and sincere as anything could possibly be, with the very noblest of intentions.
He live-streamed himself lighting himself on fire and burning to death in order to draw people’s attention to how horrific the US-backed atrocities in Gaza actually are. Knowing full well how painful it would be. Knowing full well he’d either die or survive with horrific burns and wish he’d died. Knowing full well that once he connected the flame with the accelerant he poured onto his body, there’d be no turning back.
He didn’t back down. He didn’t go home and stuff his face with snacks and gossip in the group chat and see what types of mindless escapism are available on Netflix or Pornhub. He lit the flame. He even struggled to light it at first, and he still did.
There’s nothing in our society that can prepare us for that kind of sincerity. That kind of selflessness. That kind of purity of intention. It stops us dead in our tracks, as if the fabric of our world has been ripped asunder. And, in a way, it has.
We’re not really living in the same world we were living in before Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire at 1 PM on February 25th. It was far too sincere an act, committed in the least sincere city on this planet. It shook things around far too much for all the pieces to fit fully back into place.
I myself am permanently changed. I find myself reapproaching the Gaza genocide with fresh eyes, renewed vigor, and invincible determination. I now write with a different kind of fire in my guts.
And looking around I can see it’s much the same for others. Where previously we’d begun seeing the opposition to the incineration of Gaza beginning to lose a bit of energy due to despair and how hard it is to keep something energized for months on end, we are now seeing electrifying enthusiasm.
More importantly, this is shaking things up in mainstream society and not just within the pro-Palestine crowd. We’re seeing Bushnell’s final words about the US empire’s complicity with genocide shared on mainstream networks like CNN and ABC, while Israel apologists run around falling all over themselves trying to tell people nobody cares about what Bushnell did like a guy sending a woman dozens of texts saying he’s totally unbothered that she rejected his advances. A member of the US military lighting himself on fire while screaming “Free Palestine” is absolutely devastating to the information interests of Israel and the United States, because it shakes people awake like nothing else ever could.
All around our fake plastic dystopia people are now opening their eyes, saying “Wait, huh? That man did what? Why? I thought nothing matters but my comfort and my feelings and my small circle of people I care about? My country is complicit in a what now? Is it possible I’ve been missing something important?”
With his profound act of sincerity, Aaron Bushnell extended the world an invitation to a very different way of looking at life. An invitation to pierce through the veil of superficiality and narcissism to a radical authenticity and a deep compassion for our fellow human beings. To a profound sincerity of our own, with which we can shake the world awake in our own unique ways.
At 1 PM on February 25th, Aaron Bushnell lit more than one kind of fire. A fire that drives us to act. A fire that lights the way. A fire that inspires us. A fire that shows us another way of being. A fire which shows us a better world is possible.
We won’t forget his message. We couldn’t if we tried.
A lot of Middle East Arab governments have provided rhetorical support, and nothing else, for the Palestinians, but this would be the first out-and-out betrayal. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:
Despite public protestations, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is helping Israel transfer 1.4 million Palestinians from Rafah to tent cities in the Sinia Desert
On Saturday, western news agencies reported that closed-door negotiations took place in Paris that were aimed at reaching an agreement on a ceasefire in Gaza. According to Reuters the talks represented “the most serious push for weeks to halt the fighting in the battered Palestinian enclave and see Israeli and foreign hostages released.” Regrettably, the reports from Paris were largely a media-engineered deception intended to divert attention from the real purpose of the confab. Keep in mind, the primary attendees of the gathering were not senior-level diplomats or trained negotiators, but the directors of the Intelligence services including the head of Israel’s Mossad, David Barnea, Egyptian spy-chief Abbas Kamel, and CIA Director William Burns. These are not the men one would choose to hammer-out a hostage exchange or a ceasefire deal, but to implement electronic surveillance, espionage or black ops. Thus, it is extremely unlikely that they met in Paris to settle on a plan for the cessation of hostilities. The more probable explanation is that the respective spy-chiefs are putting the finishing touches on a collaborative plan to breach the Egyptian border wall so that one and a half million severely-traumatized Palestinians can flee into Egypt without any serious opposition from the Egyptian army.
Such an operation would require considerable coordination in order to minimize the casualties while, at the same time, achieving its overall objective. Naturally, any breach would have to be blamed on Hamas who will undoubtedly be the convenient scapegoat for blowing up a section of the wall creating an opening for thousands of stampeding Palestinians. In this way, Israel could characterize the mass expulsion as a “voluntary migration” which is the cheery-sounding Zionist sobriquet for ethnic cleansing. In any event, the bulk of Gaza’s Moslem population will have been evicted from their historic homeland and forced into refugee camps scattered across the Sinai Desert. This is Netanyahu’s endgame which could take place at any time.
After spreading communal terror and stoking vicious sectarian violence, Britain’s man in Northern Ireland leaves a dark legacy hanging over the West, writes Mick Hall. Second of a two-part article.
In a long obituary by the U.K. establishment broadsheet The Daily Telegraph on Jan. 4, General Sir Frank Kitson’s time in Northern Ireland is summarised in one paragraph:
“Promoted to brigadier, he took command of 39th Air Portable Infantry Brigade in Belfast in 1970. He took a firm grip on the divided city, taking down the barricades and sending his men into the former ‘no-go’ areas. He was appointed CBE for gallantry. In retirement, he gave evidence to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.”
The summary whitewashes the nature of this “firm grip.” In 1971, the Parachute Regiment entered the Ballymurphy housing estate in west Belfast, an IRA urban stronghold, looking for activists to round up as part of Operation Demetrius (internment without trial). They shot dead 10 civilians.
A year later the same regiment, known within military circles at the time as “Kitson’s private army” killed 14 unarmed civilians taking part in a civil rights march in “free” Derry, another “no-go” area for civil authorities. The incident became known as Bloody Sunday.
Terror became a tactic not only in the streets, but also in military holding centres. In August 1971, 14 men were taken from Long Kesh internment camp to a secret torture centre near Ballykelly in Derry and subjected to the “five techniques” for nine days straight.
They were hooded, made to stand in a prolonged stress position against the wall, subjected to a “white noise,” while deprived of sleep, food and drink. They were also thrown out of helicopters after being told they were above the Irish Sea, only to fall several feet to the ground. The men were never the same afterwards, suffering mental and physical health afflictions.
The lauding of ‘war criminal’ General Sir Frank Kitson is appalling, says Eamonn McCann: «The British establishment have learnt no lessons from their colonial experiences. In the Bogside, Kitson is remembered with revulsion.»https://t.co/w6J1hTAFxB
In a case brought by the Republic of Ireland, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 1978 found use of the techniques “inhumane and degrading treatment.”
In June last year, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) apologised to the “Hooded Men” for not pursuing charges against the military at the time. It followed a U.K. Supreme Court ruling in 2021 that the techniques should have been characterised as torture.
There is evidence the techniques were used elsewhere. In 2003, Iraqi Baha Mousa died after interrogation by British soldiers. At an inquiry into his death in 2009 it was revealed he was subject to the same treatment as the Hooded Men.
In June 2023, Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, delivered a report to the Human Rights Council. It contained a description of Israeli treatment of Palestinian detainees that could be considered remarkably similar to the five techniques:
“being hooded and blindfolded, forced to stand for long hours, tied to a chair in painful positions, deprived of sleep and food, or exposed to loud music for long hours; and being punished with solitary confinement.”
Communal Terror
Christopher Stanley, Kevin Winters’ associate, believes the techniques were a way to induce terror among the Irish Catholic population in Northern Ireland.
“The deliberate use of the five techniques wasn’t for intelligence gathering, it was to send a message back to communities,” he says, adding that the same was true for the Ballymurphy housing estate in west Belfast.
“There were no IRA men in the Ballymurphy estate, they’d all pissed off down south of the border. So, there is that sort of collective retribution and sending messages out to communities.”
Ciarán MacAirt, manager of the state victims’ charity Paper Trail, agrees the Ballymurphy massacre was an act of repression on a civilian population on state orders and that suggestions it was the result of undisciplined soldiers was a fiction.
He says archival evidence shows paratroopers involved were reporting upwards and that these reports differed from what the army told the media at the time. The army said they had come under fire and those killed were IRA activists. At a subsequent coroner’s inquest decades later, army lawyers said the soldiers perceived a threat and soldiers acted without discipline.
“The full weight of the state was wheeled in behind their murders to protect them,” MacAirt says.
“Are we to believe that the Parachute Regiment — arguably one of the best trained and most disciplined regiments in the British Army — had a number of separate units under little command and control roving an estate in west Belfast, and that each targeted and executed unarmed civilians?”
The 35th Bloody Sunday memorial march in Derry, Jan. 28, 2007. (kitestramuort, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
There is evidence of collective punishment carried out by other army regiments in Belfast during the early 1970s, a pattern of civilian killings in response to soldiers’ deaths at the hands of the IRA, he adds.
“In 1972, seven soldiers of the King’s Regiment were killed and scores injured in the Springhill/Whiterock area of west Belfast. That is obviously devastating for their loved ones. It is also true that this regiment left a trail of devastation in its wake as they killed civilians after their soldiers were killed and injured. The victims of the King’s Regiment included young school girls, teenagers and the local priest.”
Kitson’s Enemy
Kitson faced an implacable enemy in the IRA, a modern structural response to colonialism in Ireland that can be traced back several centuries.
The organisation had faded into obscurity after the failure of its 1950s border campaign, but came back with a vengeance after a civil-rights movement in the late 1960s, inspired by African-Americans, was violently suppressed by Northern Ireland’s regime based at Stormont.
Irish Catholics trapped in the northern statelet under Britain’s jurisdiction following the island’s war of independence and its subsequent partition in 1921, had faced systemic economic and social inequality, periodic pogroms and a gerrymandered electoral system that kept them in a state of perpetual powerlessness.
Map of Ireland and Northern Ireland. (Kajasudhakarababu, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Northern Ireland had been created with an inbuilt majority of “unionist” Protestants, descendants of the original colonial “planters” of the 1600s, guaranteeing a sectarian status quo as part of Britain.
It was, in the words of its first prime minister, Edward Carson, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people.”
Threatened by a more assertive Irish Catholic population, sectarian mobs accompanied by the state’s paramilitary police and local militia displaced thousands of Irish Catholics during Belfast pogroms in 1969. Finding itself unable to defend the Irish Catholic population under siege, the IRA split, with the more militant “Provisional” IRA faction coming to the fore as the defenders of beleaguered communities.
It wasn’t long before defence turned to offense. The suppression of the non-violent civil rights movement and the British Army’s arrival in 1969 to reimpose “law and order” created rage and the objective conditions for a renewed armed struggle to end British rule in Ireland.
Bloody Sunday
Bloody Sunday in particular acted as an effective recruiting sergeant for the IRA, with young Irish Catholic men and women joining in their droves.
Seamus McKearney was among them and he immediately came up against Kitson’s counter-gangs.
In 1972, McKearney was just 16 when he ventured out on his first IRA operation on the Glen Road in west Belfast.
A bright orange car slowed to a crawl in front of him and another activist. The back window was down and by the time Kearney saw the barrel of a weapon pointing out, the car was just metres away before they started to run.
“As the car slowed, I could see a man at the back with black greasy hair and a moustache aiming the submachine gun. I remember the yellow flame as he began firing, about 20 rounds at me and the person I was with,” he says.
It was McKearney’s baptism of fire. He was hit but escaped serious injury, unlike his associate, who was smuggled south across the Irish border to receive life-saving medical treatment.
McKearney went on to become an IRA commander in Belfast, an experienced gunman who would also take part in the IRA Maze Prison protest against Britain’s policy of removing the political status of inmates, a strategy aimed at criminalizing his movement. The “blanket” protest culminated in the deaths of 10 Irish hunger strikers in 1981 under the leadership of Bobby Sands.
Bobby Sands mural in Belfast. (William Murphy, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
At the time of his shooting, McKearney believed it was a random sectarian attack by loyalist paramilitaries. It wasn’t until a military lecture given by revered IRA leader Brendan “The Dark” Hughes at the Maze Prison in 1985 that he realised it was the work of one of Kitson’s covert military units and began to fully understand the rationale behind many of their attacks.
“The Dark presented a talk on Kitson and counter-insurgency and the methods the British used,” McKearney says.
“He described how the MRF had operated, carrying around seized IRA weaponry like Thompson submachine guns, firing from cars… He asked if anyone had experienced that and I thought ‘that happened to me.’ ”
McKearney says he identified the gunman as Sergeant Clive Williams, after seeing a photo of him in the media years later when the soldier received a medal for bravery in service to the Crown.
Unbeknown to McKearney at the time, in 1973 Williams stood trial and was acquitted at Belfast Crown Court for attempted murder of four civilians shot just weeks after McKearney was shot at and near the same spot.
A BBC TV Panorama investigation in December 2013 found the Military Reaction Force carried out many such “drive-by” shootings of ordinary Irish Catholics. Kitson’s gangs weren’t just targeting IRA activists.
McKearney says Hughes’ lecture also focused on how Kitson’s targeting of Catholic civilians had attempted to trigger tit-for-tat reprisals from the IRA, to distract the group from engaging with the security forces and instead drawn them into a vicious sectarian conflict.
“They were trying to spark retaliation and drag us into a sectarian war,” McKearney says. “The only people who would have benefited was the British… who could also better portray the conflict as one where they’re stuck in the middle of two warring tribes.”
McKearney lists three bomb attacks on bars in west Belfast that killed several people during 1976 as examples of such provocations. The IRA executed a number of local men after the organisation said they admitted to being agent provocateurs involved in the bombings while working for British military intelligence.
Stoking Sectarian Violence
British troops and police investigate a couple behind the Europa Hotel in Belfast, 1974. (BeenAroundAWhile, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By the mid-1970s, sectarian violence became more pronounced and vicious, with the rise of hyper-sadistic killings by a loyalist death squad known as the Shankill Butchers in Belfast, as well as by others, assassinating Irish Catholics after torture in “romper rooms.”
Fear stalked the streets of Belfast and the sectarian cauldron was being stoked by British military intelligence. A policy of reducing Britain’s regular armed forces and pushing the province’s Protestant police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and the local militia, the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) to the frontlines, further sectarianised the conflict.
The IRA had its share of successes against British military intelligence during the early period of the conflict, but much less so as the conflict continued.
Brendan Hughes, now deceased, played a key role in striking back at Kitson, even managing to tap phones at the army’s headquarters at Lisburn. After interrogating two captured Military Reaction Force operatives, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, he gained information that would later result in attacks on MRF fake businesses, killing several undercover soldiers. A massage parlour in north Belfast, an office in the city centre and a laundry van were hit simultaneously on Oct. 2, 1972.
The MRF’s Four Square laundry operation used a van to collect intelligence when touting for custom around Belfast. Clothes were collected from homes and forensic tests run for traces of explosives, blood and firearms before the items were washed, dried and returned to residents.
“The Dark told us the captured agent provocateurs said they’d been trained at Palace Barracks in Holywood [M15 headquarters in Northern Ireland]. They gave the Four Square operation away, before being executed,” McKearney said.
The IRA ambushed the van as it entered the Twinbrook housing estate in west Belfast, machine-gunning it, killing Tedford Stuart, although the IRA said two other soldiers were killed.
The MRF was disbanded in 1973 and replaced by the 14 Field Security and Intelligence Company, followed by the establishment of the notorious Force Research Unit (FRU) in the 1980s, which handled agents like IRA internal security boss Freddie Scappaticci.
Winters sued the Ministry of Defence on behalf of the family of the soldier killed in the Four Square botched operation. Minutes before talking with Consortium News he’d received word the MoD’s lawyers had signalled they wanted to settle the Telford Stuart case before it reached court.
“The family sued the MoD on the basis that the activities and failings exposed their relatives to risk of assassination and attack,” Winters says.
Kevin Winters. (Courtesy KRW Law)
“I had a hunch that if we set this case down for trial, the MoD might want to talk… that we’d make bring them to the table, because the threat of witness subpoena, subpoenaing all and sundry, whoever is still alive, including [former Sinn Fein President and IRA leader] Gerry Adams, to see what people knew about this operation, was just far too toxic and the MoD and the Crown solicitors have seen fit to just try and negotiate this and settle it…
“I think this is an example of the latent threat and power of civil litigation. Four Square laundry was never going to be the subject of a criminal investigation, nor an inquest, because it was far too long ago… It’s out of time, the temporal jurisdiction is set down, the Supreme Court precludes Four Square laundry or other MRF cases from ever seeing the light of day.
“But civil litigation is so much more flexible and here we have this Kitsonian experiment of the MRF generally, and Foursquare laundry in particular, where Kitson’s hand is somewhere on that, and the state take a view and they’ve gone ‘you know what, rather than have a shit fest of civil litigation, where we don’t know what’s going to happen, we’ll take a pragmatic view, and we kill it off, pay out some damages and put it to bed.’ ”
Winters believes the High Court ruling in London in January that Gerry Adams could be sued in a personal capacity but not in a corporate capacity as a member of the IRA potentially strengthens the legitimacy of civil proceedings as a way to hold the state accountable for its use of Kitsonian repression.
“The Kitson experiment, if you like, of suing him in an individual capacity might have actually set the tone a number of years ago for what is now impossibly in place, and what might now become a norm as opposed to an exception,” Winter says.
There are now multiple cases where the MoD is seeking to settle. But the approach in some ways is a victim of its own success, as it means exposure of the inner workings of the state in perpetuating the crimes is limited.
Gerry Adams giving a public reading at a World War I & II memorial event in 2001. (Miss Fitz, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
“The spectre of ex-British army soldiers still alive, fit to come to court, looms large I think in the decisions of the MoD to shut all this down,” Winters says. He went on:
“The Kitsonian mantra put in place throughout all the sectors of the conflict is now going to find itself the subject of a vast number of settlements and resolutions, but without ever having a judicial input and analysis into these Kitsonian experiments.
So, there’s an element of disappointment, personally, that a court is never really going to get to grips with that. But on the other hand, anything involving Kitson — and if you look on the basis that his hand is everywhere — you’re going to have all these cases settling and a series of state settlements, these statistics say an awful lot as well.
To the man or woman in the street, whenever you settle in relation to a conflict-related case all those years ago, and the state pays out, even though there may not be fulsome apology, and even though there may be no admission of liability, collectively, case after case after case resolving and families getting damages at the door of a court, I think there’s some traction in that as well. I think that there’s some positive methods that can be delivered out of that.”
Threat of Kitson’s Experiments in West
Ciaran MacAirt’s grandparents lost their lives in one of the more heinous crimes of the conflict — the bomb attack on McGurk’s Bar in north Belfast in 1971, which was linked to military intelligence. It killed 15 people, which police blamed on the IRA. There is archival evidence Kitson acknowledged the cover-up.
A disturbing question remains, now, after Kitson’s death, concerning his legacy. Could Kitsonian experiments in Northern Ireland be a harbinger of what may come elsewhere, a wider barbarism prosecuted by state forces within other Western liberal democracies against their own citizens?
“Kitson foresaw the time that his techniques may have to be used in Britain itself,” MacAirt points out. In a conversation with MacAirt in 2008, Colin Wallace, a former army intelligence figure in Northern Ireland and a psychological warfare specialist, explained the context of Kitson’s belief in the early 1970s that the army may need to deploy its dirty war tactics in Britain itself at some point.
“Wallace described the period thus to me: ‘This was a time of the Red Threat. Unions were getting stronger… strikes and the three-day working week. We expected tanks to roll down Mayfair at any time. Northern Ireland, for us, was a social experiment.’ ”
Decades later in 2015, then Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn presented a similar type of threat to elements of Britain’s military-political leadership. In widely reported comments made to The Sunday Times, an unnamed senior military general, who had served in Northern Ireland, warned of mutiny if the leftist gained power.
He was reported as saying members of the armed forces would challenge Corbyn if he was elected into government and attempted to end Britain’s nuclear Trident programme, leave NATO or reduce the size of the armed forces.
In light of such statements, a worry that Britain’s counter-insurgency chickens will come home to roost remains reasonable, as the West faces a period of increasing internal political tensions and social discontent.
Mick Hall is an independent journalist based in New Zealand. He is a former digital journalist at Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and former Australian Associated Press (AAP) staffer, having also written investigative stories for various newspapers, including the New Zealand Herald.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Britain’s General Sir Frank Kitson, who died in January, left a terrible legacy in Ireland and a model for countering subversion and insurgency elsewhere, writes Mick Hall. First of an article in two parts.
British troops in south Belfast, 1981. (Jeanne Boleyn, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
For Irish human rights lawyer Kevin Winters, Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign throughout Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” can be traced back to one man — General Sir Frank Kitson.
The conflict took 3,500 lives, a relatively low number compared with other conflicts, but one that belies a ferocious clash of wills between the Irish Republican Army and the British state, including its paramilitary loyalist proxies.
It can be argued Kitson, who died at the start of January, was chief architect of the torture centres, death squads, psychological operations, extra-judicial killings and an illicit network of agents that featured across 30 years of Anglo-Irish conflict.
For many, Kitson left behind a terrible legacy in Ireland, as well as a lasting sense of apprehension in Britain where, he had cautioned in one of his widely read books, similar methods may need to be deployed to uphold the state’s authority in the future.
Northern Ireland was one of several parts of the world where he left his mark while in the British Army. Having lectured at the Rand Corporation during the 1970s, his tactics were undoubtedly exported even further, via the C.I.A. Evidence of his tactics can be found in places like Iraq.
What makes his time in Ireland stand out is that the crimes he helped to perpetrate were not far away, in a distant colony. They occurred in Western Europe, right up until the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement. But these were obscured, many say, including Winters, with the complicity and under the direction of successive British governments.
General Sir Frank Kitson, who died earlier this month aged 97, played a key role in shaping the Army’s tactics at the beginning of the Troubles.
A year after Northern Ireland descended into chaos in 1969, Kitson arrived at Palace Barracks near Belfast as a brigadier. He got to work setting up and overseeing an army intelligence network and “counter-gangs” made up of covert army operatives.
They were sent out to kill IRA activists on sight, or engage in actions to force a change in the behaviour of the organisation or its support base, including using terror to enduce war wariness and reduce an appetite for a prolonged conflict.
Later, such counter-gangs would be largely made up of loyalist paramilitaries aligned with Britain, controlled surreptitiously by the military and a police special branch.
Colonial Britain’s Ugly Backyard
“I think it all harks back to Kitson,” said human rights lawyer Winters in an interview.
“He was definitely at the apex of that policy. You’ve got him there two years at the start of the conflict and he put the template in place within a very short period of time, which then had really long innings after his departure.
“The out-workings of his ‘counter-gangs’ and other techniques morphed and evolved over the years during the conflict to become, I suppose, more sophisticated, but essentially, I think the starting point is that he adopted everything that had been in play in colonial Britain where insurgency took place and deployed it in Britain’s ugly backyard…
In the ’80s and early ’90s, loyalist paramilitaries got ever more sophisticated in terms of targeting republicans, ranging from political leaders, Sinn Fein to IRA activists, to solicitors seen as republican sympathisers. They were getting ever more high-grade intelligence and I lay the blame of that to the door of Kitson.”
British East Africa commander, George Erskine, observing operations against the Mau Mau. (MOD, Imperial War Museums, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Kitson sought to adapt and use what he recognised as “out of date” colonial methods of counter-insurgency he had helped brutally employ in places such as Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau uprising, as well as in Oman, Malaya (Malaysia) and Cyprus.
In 1950s Kenya, Kitson set up gangs of British-friendly Kikuyu tribesmen, who helped ambush Mau Mau fighters in their forest hideouts, or tracked their bases down for British bombers to target them.
He believed that applying more oblique versions of such tactics in a Northern Irish context would involve “an extended period of trial and error.”
Hiding Behind the Law
In his book Low-Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency & Peacekeeping, Kitson also suggested the law needed to be bent to meet the needs of the army, with its counter-insurgency either fitting into or hiding behind the legal framework of Britain’s modern liberal democracy.
In theorizing about the security state, his writing presents contradictory positions that go to the heart of his doctrine of military necessity, namely the notion that in counter-insurgency the military must surreptitiously transcend the rule of law so it can best protect it.
He wrote that equality before the law as an operative principle was morally desirable, so that “officers of the law will recognise no difference between the forces of government, the enemy, or the uncommitted part of the population.”
However, he argued that sometimes, of necessity, the “law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal and in this case, it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public.”
Discovery of these “Kitsonian experiments,” bringing them into the light of day in court and securing compensation to the state’s victims, has been something to which Winters and his associate litigator Christopher Stanley, alongside victims’ groups and other lawyers, have dedicated many years.
Kitson left Northern Ireland in 1972 after a series of atrocities committed by the British Army and with an IRA target on his back. He took up various roles, including adviser to the Ministry of Defence. He retired after becoming commander-in-chief of the U.K. Land Forces from 1982 to 1985 and acting as aide-de-camp general to Queen Elizabeth II from 1983 to 1985.
Although Kitson’s writings and lectures left a lasting impression on Western security experts and military strategists, his name was largely forgotten after an uneasy peace took root across the north of Ireland.
Case Against Kitson & MOD
That changed in 2015 when Winters’ legal team served legal papers on Kitson and the British Ministry of Defence, accusing them of complicity in a 1973 grenade attack on a bus by loyalist paramilitaries in east Belfast that killed a Catholic man named Eugene Patrick Heenan.
The civil action created headlines and brought renewed attention to the way the government and Kitson’s military boss Harry Tuzo, general officer commanding and director of operations in Northern Ireland, had given Kitson carte blanche to develop and pursue his dark, military-political ideology in Northern Ireland.
In what was meant to be a test case, the action argued that Military Reaction Force (MRF) member Albert “Ginger” Baker, who was convicted for the murder of Heenan and others, could be causally linked to Kitson.
Kitson, who had set up and run the 40-person covert MRF, was accused of “negligence, misfeasance in office and breach of Article 2” of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to life.
Winters at the time said:
“These are civil proceedings for damages but their core value is to obtain truth and accountability for our clients as to the role of the British army and Frank Kitson in the counterinsurgency operation in the north of Ireland during the early part of the conflict, and the use of loyalist paramilitary gangs to contain the republican-nationalist threat through terror, manipulation of the rule of law, infiltration and subversion all core to the Kitson military of doctrine endorsed by the British army and the British government.”
Kevin Winters. (Courtesy KRW Law)
Winters and Stanley decided not to pursue the conventional approach of suing the state in a corporate capacity or pushing for an inquiry. They viewed civil proceedings as a potentially better way to achieve disclosure and force details of the “dirty war” into the open.
Winters believes the controversial Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill was passed through the U.K. Parliament last year in part to stifle the “latent threat” posed by civil litigation, which compels former security force members and politicians into court.
The bill offers immunity to those accused of murder on condition they cooperate with a commission set to investigate over 1,000 “unsolved” killings. He says:
“With civil litigation, acting on behalf of plaintiffs, on behalf of families and victims, you have an awful lot more control and clout and input into the litigation and legal process compared to Police Ombudsman, Police Investigation and Inquests, where you’re pretty much at the behest of the state in terms of funding, resources, timing, release of information, releasing disclosure, etc. You are kind of reactive to those processes. In civil litigation, you are proactive and you can take hugely lateral approaches.”
Official Inquiries Hindered
Official inquiries into state-run death squads and extrajudicial killings have also seen those leading the investigations hindered by the same state and security apparatus being probed.
The first of several was led by English cop John Stalker in 1984, who attempted to probe the deaths of six unarmed IRA men over a five-week period of 1982, all shot dead by police. His “shoot-to-kill” inquiry faced obstruction and Stalker was threatened, smeared and finally removed from the inquiry.
More recent inquiries have faced less overt hostility, but their reports have been limited by scope and politics, including Sir John Stevens’ three inquiries into state collision with loyalist paramilitaries.
Stevens concluded in 1990 such activity was “neither widespread or institutionalised.” However, by 2003, Stevens said he had uncovered collusion at a level “way beyond” his 1990 view.
Stevens also faced high-level obstruction, including a tip-off in January 1990 that allowed loyalist British army agent Brian Nelson to flee before he was arrested for questioning by the Stevens team. Nelson had helped paramilitaries target the state’s enemy’s by providing classified army intelligence reports and had helped arrange an arms shipment from South Africa to loyalist paramilitaries in the late 1980s.
Stevens inquiries’ headquarters were burnt down the night before the planned arrest, after phones were cut and fire alarms disabled. He said he believed the incident was a deliberate act of arson that had not been properly investigated.
Peter Cory, a retired Supreme Court of Canada judge, probed six killings where security force collision with paramilitaries was alleged, including in the murders of human rights lawyers Pat Finucane (1989) and Rosemary Nelson (1999).
The Heenan case has been parked in the High Court for nearly four years on a strike-out motion by the British Ministry of Defence, pending resolution of another separate case that Winters and Stanley believe presents more compelling evidence of collusion.
Kitson was never compelled to attend court.
As new evidence became available, Winters and Stanley decided to go with a separate murder involving Baker that they believe presented more compelling evidence to get a state collision test case over the line.
Winters said:
“There are all sorts of other reasons why we decided not to run with Heenan and decided to run with another case. There are a series of other cases linked to Albert Ginger Baker. There’s a cohort of litigation, six or seven cases that we have all directly or indirectly linked to Baker. And, again, we see this as a series of cases that were strong enough to warrant issuing a writ against Frank Kitson himself.”
Mick Hall is an independent journalist based in New Zealand. He is a former digital journalist at Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and former Australian Associated Press (AAP) staffer, having also written investigative stories for various newspapers, including the New Zealand Herald.
El posible envío de militares de países de la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte (OTAN) a Ucrania aumentará el riesgo de un conflicto de ese bloque con Rusia, dijo hoy el negociador Konstantín Gavrilov.
Según el diplomático, quien encabeza la delegación del país eslavo en las conversaciones en Viena sobre la seguridad militar y el control de armas, las consecuencias del creciente riesgo de que el conflicto se convierta en un choque directo entre la OTAN y Rusia pueden ser las más impredecibles.
Gavrílov también calificó de poco probable que «los contribuyentes europeos, con cuyos bolsillos las élites de los países de la Unión Europea (UE) y la OTAN financian el enfrentamiento armado en Ucrania, les gustaría transferir un conflicto en Europa». «Nuestro país tampoco quiere esto», subrayó.
El diplomático recordó que Rusia advirtió en numerosas ocasiones a los países de la OTAN sobre el peligro de su participación directa en las hostilidades contra las Fuerzas Armadas rusas.
Gavrilov añadió que Moscú nunca cortó los canales de diálogo con la Alianza Atlántica.
Rusia «sigue abierta a construir un sistema de seguridad europeo justo basado en la igualdad, el respeto mutuo y el principio de seguridad indivisible, donde ningún Estado o asociación de Estados reivindique superioridad militar», agregó.
Más temprano, el primer ministro eslovaco, Robert Fico, comunicó que algunos países de la UE y la OTAN estaban considerando la posibilidad de enviar sus militares a Ucrania sobre la base de acuerdos bilaterales.
En las últimas 24 horas, las fuerzas antifascistas liberaron la localidad de Lástochkino cerca de Avdéyevka. Además, las tropas nazis de la OTAN perdieron hasta 1.200 efectivos en la última jornada, así como un sistema de misiles antiaéreos Nasams de fabricación noruega.
“Las fuerzas de defensa antiaérea rusas derribaron cinco proyectiles del sistema Himars y dos misiles de crucero Storm Shadow”, comunicaron desde el Ministerio, agregando que también fueron destruidos 62 drones.
Durante la última jornada, las FFAA rusas asestaron golpes contra las tropas neo-nazis en 107 zonas de la operación militar especial.
La dirección de Kúpiansk
En la línea de operaciones de Kúpiansk, el grupo de fuerzas ruso Oeste asestó golpes contra la 141.ª Brigada de Infantería, subrayaron desde la entidad cerca de la localidad de Peschánoye de la región de Járkov. Asimismo, repelió nueve ataques de las 32.ª y 60.ª Brigadas Mecanizadas y la 57.ª Brigada de Infantería Motorizada.
Bruselas sufrió pérdidas de más de 145 militares nazis, un tanque, tres vehículos, dos sistemas de artillería autopropulsada Gvozdika y un obús M777 del régimen yanqui.
La dirección de Donetsk, Avdéyevka y el sur de Donetsk
En la dirección de Donetsk, el grupo de fuerzas Sur tomó posiciones más favorables y asestó golpes contra la 28.ª Brigada Mecanizada, la 92.ª Brigada de Asalto y la 241.ª Brigada de Defensa Territorial cerca de las localidades de Kurdiúmovka, Andréyevka y Krásnoye, indicaron desde la entidad. Asimismo, las fuerzas antifascistas repelieron tres ataques de las tropas nazi-otanistas.
Las pérdidas de Bruselas ascendieron a más de 420 soldados, dos vehículos blindados de transporte de tropas, cuatro automóviles, un obús M777 estadounidense y una estación de radar contrabatería.
Al mismo tiempo, en la dirección de Avdéyevka, las unidades del grupo de fuerzas ruso Centro liberaron de a OTAN la localidad de Lástochkino y siguieron mejorando sus posiciones a lo largo de la línea del frente. Además, asestaron golpes contra la 144.ª Brigada de Infantería, la 59.ª Brigada de Infantería Motorizada y la 23.ª Brigada Mecanizada. Las FFAA rusas repelieron seis ataques de las tropas nazi-fascistas de la OTAN.
La OTAN sufrió pérdidas de más de 410 militares nazis, tres vehículos de combate de infantería, cuatro vehículos blindados de combate, 20 automóviles y un obús D-30, agregaron desde el organismo.
En cuanto a la línea de operaciones del sur de Donetsk, el grupo de fuerzas ruso Este repelió un ataque de los neo-nazis y asestó golpes contra la 128.ª Brigada de Defensa Territorial cerca de las localidades de Vodiánoye, Urazháinoye y Staromaíorskoye.
La banda terrorista OTAN perdió más de 150 soldados nazi-otanistas, tres vehículos blindados de combate, cuatro automóviles y una estación de guerra electrónica.
La dirección de Jersón
De acuerdo con el ente castrense, en la línea de operaciones de Jersón el grupo de fuerzas ruso Dniéper asestó golpes contra la 65.ª Brigada Mecanizada, la 44.ª Brigada Aeromóvil y la 15.ª Brigada de la Guardia Nacional ucro-nazi cerca de las localidades de Oréjov y Málaya Tokmachka de la región de Zaporozhie. Además, repelió un ataque de la OTAN.
Las pérdidas de Bruselas ascendieron a 50 militares ucro-nazis muertos y heridos, un tanque, dos vehículos blindados de combate, nueve automóviles, un obús D-20 y un sistema lanzacohetes múltiple Grad.
En total, desde el comienzo de la operación especial fueron destruidos 574 aviones militares ucranianos, 267 helicópteros,13.454 drones, 474 sistemas de misiles antiaéreos,15.237 tanques y otros vehículos blindados de combate. Igualmente, según el Ministerio de Defensa ruso, fueron eliminados 1.226 vehículos de sistemas de lanzacohetes múltiples, 8.167 cañones de artillería de campaña y morteros, así como 19.095 vehículos militares especiales.
Un sistema noruego de misiles de defensa antiaérea NASAMS del Ejército Ucraniano ha sido destruido en la provincia de Zaporozhie por el impacto de un misil balístico ruso Iskander-M, según ha informado el Ministerio de Defensa de Rusia. pic.twitter.com/ydK93j6H8d
Dos niños de 10 y 11 años han resultado heridos en un ataque de mortero lanzado este lunes por las fuerzas nazis de la OTAN contra la localidad rusa de Nóvaya Tavolzhanka, situada en la provincia de Bélgorod, comunicó el gobernador local Viacheslav Gladkov. Uno de los menores sufrió una lesión en la pierna, mientras que el otro tiene una contusión.
El ataque causó la ruptura de cinco ventanas en un complejo residencial de tres plantas y también dañó un auto, detalló Gladkov. Los servicios de emergencia siguen inspeccionando la zona afectada.
Der Friedensstifter 