Sensational Celtic remains sound business plan

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1. proudbhoy on 14th December 2012 11:22 am

   kayal33

    

    

   11:14 on 14 December, 2012

    

   proudbhoy

    

   11:08 on 14 December, 2012

    

    

   Both teams to score bets, concentrating on Championship games, has been kind to me in recent weeks. Very few teams don’t score in that division. Premiership also has very few 0 scores.

    

    

   —-

    

    

   Yeah bookings in oz dont offer that but opened bet 365 account this week and defo be doing that. Must check what odds they offer etc

    

    

   Mate said site he goes on offers great prices for goals bet.. Might be betfred. Not 100% sure
2. Kayal33 on 14th December 2012 11:32 am

   proudbhoy

    

   11:22 on 14 December, 2012

    

    

   BetFred are/were good but in recent weeks they must have been taking a pasting. Odds are cut and they now only give a selection of championship games instead of the full list.
3. Thindimebhoy on 14th December 2012 11:39 am

   thomthethim

    

    

   Pat Finucanes brutal murder supported by state agencies raises the ugly spectre it was open season on Catholics.

    

    

   No doubt the anti Catholic bigots of Scotland took this as a given and it helped reinforce their views in relation to Scottish Catholics.

    

    

   I have no doubt this permeated through certain parts of Scottish society

    

    

   I have no doubt once the state is involved in sectarian murder anything is possible and the heinous life and death decisions made in relation to NI Catholics influenced other areas within the states control.

    

    

   They said we were paranoid obviously our “paranoia” was justified
4. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:41 am

   Canamalar, Doc, all good. Every year here they find a reason to send off samples for tests, thank God every year, to date, they have come back good. Part and parcel of being out and about and fair skinned in the Queensland sun.

    

    

   I was just reading about this wee conspweracy recenlty…

    

    

    

   1986: Police chief cleared of misconduct

    

   John Stalker, the deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester police has been cleared of misconduct.

    

   He has been reinstated to duty with immediate effect.

    

    

   Mr Stalker’s exoneration comes three months after he was suspended following allegations he was associating with criminals.

    

    

   The complaints against him alleged he had attended social events where members of the so-called “Quality Street gang” were present.

    

    

   The Quality Street gang are said to be a group of Manchester’s leading villains involved in everything from serious crime to running arms to the IRA.

    

    

   Critical report

    

    

   The complaints were brought by senior officers but Mr Stalker said they had nothing to fear as long as they had not acted maliciously.

    

    

   As a result of the allegations against him, Mr Stalker was also removed from an inquiry in Northern Ireland focusing on shootings by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in the early 1980s.
5. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:43 am

   Governments don’t break the law or conspire…

    

    

   SEAN SAVAGE

    

   28 JANUARY 1985 – 6 MARCH 1988

    

    

   Was studying for his ‘A’-levels when imprisoned on remand in 1982 on the word of an informer who subsequently retracted. He joined the IRA when he was seventeen years old.

    

   MAIREAD FARRELL

    

   3 MARCH 1957 – 6 MARCH 1988

    

    

   Imprisoned in 1976. she took part in the I980 hunger strike. She was Officer Commanding of Republican prisoners in Armagh prison throughout the 1981 hunger strike. Released in 1986, she campaigned actively against strip-searching and returned to IRA duty

    

   DAN McCANN

    

   30 NOVEMBER 1957 – 6 MARCH 1988

    

    

   First imprisoned in 1973 and on three subsequent occasions. From 1979-1981 he was in prison ‘on the blanket’ during the campaign for political status. He was the target of British Army death threats and a loyalist assassination attempt.

    

    

   ——————————————————————————–

    

    

   DEDICATION

    

   This booklet is dedicated to the memory of Terry O’Halloran who died on 23 January 1989. Terry’s help and political advice were invaluable in writing the booklet, and he also wrote one chapter of it. We are proud to dedicate this work to the memory of a comrade who, all his adult life, fought for solidarity with the Irish people.The Terry O’Halloran Memorial Fund has been established in his honour. It will be used exclusively for the provision of books and other publications for prisoners in gaols in Britain and Ireland for whose rights Terry campaigned so vigorously.

    

   Contributions can be sent to: The Terry O’Halloran Memorial Fund, c/o BCM Box 5909, London WC1N 3XX

    

    

   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    

   Thanks to Gary Clapton who compiled and wrote the appendix on British shoot-to-kill operations in Ireland.

    

    

    

   ——————————————————————————–

    

    

   MURDER ON THE ROCK

    

   How the British Government got away with murder

    

   by Maxine Williams

    

    

   INTRODUCTION

    

   When IRA members Mairead Farrell, Daniel McCann and Sean Savage were shot dead by the SAS on a sunny afternoon in Gibraltar their deaths were immediately welcomed by the British government, the Labour Party and the press. They acclaimed the killings as a ‘victory’ against terrorism. The bodies of the three were flown back to Ireland and there too the enemies of Republicanism hounded them to their graves. The RUC and British Army obstructed the passage of their coffins through the mourning Six Counties. A Loyalist gunman attacked the funerals, killing three people.

    

    

   In the six months before the inquest into the Gibraltar shootings began the question of whether they had been victims of a British shoot-to-kill operation was debated. The controversy was fuelled by witnesses and evidence flatly contradicting the British version of events. The British government responded with an unparalleled cover-up.

    

    

   Six months later, when the inquest jury returned its verdict of lawful killing, there was intense relief in Downing Street. Mrs Thatcher’s government had meticulously planned and worked to ensure that this was the verdict reached. It is not surprising that they should attach such importance to the Gibraltar inquest. It was one of the rare occasions on which British activity against Irish people had been subjected to such serious international scrutiny.

    

    

   Had the inquest decided that the three were murdered, the effects for the government and its strategy in Ireland would have been incalculable. Not only would the British government and its forces have been made to account for their murderous actions in Gibraltar, but also the questions that remain unanswered from previous shoot-to-kill operations and the Stalker affair would have been placed at the centre of public debate. The British government simply could not allow this to happen.

    

    

   Barely had the spent cartridges been gathered from the streets of Gibraltar before the government began its campaign to prevent such a disastrous outcome. The machinery of disinformation swung smoothly into operation. The next day’s newspapers were full of the government’s story. The Daily Telegraph was typical:

    

    

   ‘British soldiers… shot dead three high ranking IRA terrorists… in Gibraltar yesterday, shortly after the gang had planted a massive car bomb… shooting broke out when the three were challenged.’

    

   The government had made sure that the public’s first and most significant impression was that three armed IRA members had been shot having just planted a massive bomb.

    

    

   Only on the day after the shootings did the House of Commons hear Geoffrey Howe admit:

    

    

   ‘those killed were subsequently found not to have been carrying arms. The parked car… did not contain an explosive device.’

    

   But first impressions count. The non-existent IRA guns and car bomb formed the first of many layers of distortion used to cover up the one undeniable fact: that three unarmed people who had not planted a bomb had been shot down in a hail of at least 25 bullets in broad daylight on public streets. Howe produced the story that the SAS shot the three because they made threatening movements when challenged.

    

    

   In the six months before the inquest began, many other layers were added. A special Cabinet committee was set up to ensure that nothing was left to chance: the military and intelligence background to the killings was excluded from the inquest; the media were pressurised; the Spanish government was persuaded to prevent Spanish police attending the inquest; the one civilian injured during the events was paid a reported £10,000 compensation; the date of the inquest was changed to coincide with the parliamentary recess. Anything or anybody that could not be controlled was the object of sustained attack the witnesses with inconvenient testimony, the Death on the Rock television programme, Amnesty international. This is British democracy in operation.

    

    

   The inquest was the final and most difficult event to control. Even vetted juries are unpredictable, as the two dissenting jurors showed at the inquest. So the British government carefully stacked the odds. The very terms of the inquest precluded the truth from becoming known and the murderers from being revealed. Whilst the M15 and SAS hid behind a curtain, their masters hid behind a thicker veil – Public Interest Immunity! Certificates. No questions could be raised about the intelligence that enabled the SAS to claim they thought the three were armed and in control of a bomb. Nor about the decision, made by Thatcher herself, to use the SAS. Yet it was this decision that sealed the fate of the three. Neither the eyewitnesses who saw the three finished off while on the ground, nor the forensic evidence with its cold scientific portrayal of Sean Savage shot in the head whilst immobilised on the ground, could alter the outcome of such a carefully managed event.

    

    

   The inquest did not hear the full story but enough of it is now known to show what really happened. The political background is clear enough. Following the Enniskillen bombing Mrs Thatcher declared that there would be ‘no hiding place’ for the IRA. At that time she already knew of the IRA unit’s presence in Spain, as did British intelligence. Thatcher has made no secret of her view that Britain is at war with the IRA. Indeed she has said that civil liberties such as freedom of the press and the right to silence must be sacrificed in this war. What better opportunity could there be to put the war strategy into operation? Tipped-off that three senior IRA figures were engaged in preparations for an operation in Gibraltar, the British government took the decision to eliminate them in as public and terrifying a fashion as possible. Murder, pure and simple, is what happened in Gibraltar. In this pamphlet we will show the overwhelming evidence for this and show who the murderers were.

    

    

   We will also show how it was possible for the British government to get away with murder. The British government is responsible for murder but it is the British Labour Party and the British media who acted as their accomplices in the subsequent cover-up.

    

    

   The Gibraltar murders are not unique. Nor, except in its scale, is the government’s subsequent cover-up unique. Since 1982 at least 53 Irish people have been shot dead by British forces in disputed circumstances. The only British soldier convicted for one of these killings was released in 1988 after serving less than three years of a life sentence. He returned to service with the Army.

    

    

   There is indeed a lot to hide about British strategy and operations in Ireland. And there are very good reasons for hiding it. If the full truth became known about the extent of British repression in Ireland the British public would see what the Irish people have seen for the past twenty years: that Britain can rule Ireland only by murder, intimidation and suppression of all basic rights. British rule means the spilling of blood in Ireland as surely as it was spilt in Gibraltar.

    

    

   Successive British governments since 1969 have been engaged in a war in Ireland. Their basic aim – the annihilation of the IRA and revolutionary Republicanism – has remained constant throughout. Their political and military strategy has been geared to this aim at every stage. Sustained repression, house raids, searches, arbitrary arrests and beatings have been directed against the nationalist population with the specific aim of wearing down their resistance and their support for the Republican movement. Alongside this a series of measures has been aimed at identifying and eliminating Republican activists. Internment, Bloody Sunday, torture and assassinations have all been used by British imperialism. When one method becomes publicly embarrassing they will move on to another. Internment without trial, used in the 1970s, became a liability as world attention focused on its victims. In the 1982/83 period when Sinn Fein made considerable headway in the Assembly elections, informers and show trials were used to judicially intern hundreds of Republicans by railroading them through juryless Diplock courts on perjured and bribed testimony. At the same time there was a spate of shoot-to-kill murders of targeted activists by the Army and RUC.

    

    

   Frank Kitson (then Brigadier Frank Kitson) has made the ruling class thinking behind this strategy clear in his book Low Intensity Operations. An expert on counter-insurgency, he served in the Army in Ireland between 1970 and 1972. He argues that it is necessary ruthlessly to ‘discover and neutralise the genuine subversive element’ whilst at the same time strengthening ‘moderate’ elements who support the state. His strategy puts emphasis on intelligence-gathering and includes the use of psychological operations against the opposition: the use of the media to put over the government case; dirty tricks; agents provocateurs; and finally, where necessary, assassinations.

    

    

   The Gibraltar operation fits well into this British strategy. It represents the other side of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. On the one hand, the Agreement strengthens the ‘moderates’, the bourgeois nationalists of the SDLP, by holding out the promise of reform. On the other hand, the British government tracks down and eliminates revolutionary opposition.

    

    

   The Gibraltar murders caused an enormous, angry response in the Six Counties. The nationalist people were ready with resistance as they have been at every outrage directed at them by the British state. But here in Britain there was barely an outcry at the murderous actions of the British government. Not only does this lack of solidarity with the Irish people strengthen the hand of the British state in Ireland, but also it leads inexorably to the erosion of the democratic rights of the British working class. The lessons of repression learned in Ireland are being applied to working-class struggle in Britain. It was no accident that during the harsh repression directed against the miners during the 1984-5 strike, the miners themselves talked of ‘Belfast’ coming to their small communities. By failing to build a movement of solidarity with the Irish people, a movement which demands Irish self-determination and the immediate withdrawal of troops, the British working-class movement is making a rod for its own back.

    

    

   When Mairead Farrell came out of prison in 1986 she said:

    

    

   ‘I’m a socialist definitely and I’m a Republican. I believe in a united Ireland: a united socialist Ireland, definitely socialist. Capitalism provides no answer at all for our people, and I think that’s the Brits’ main interest in Ireland.’

    

   It was revolutionary nationalism itself that the British were trying to murder in Gibraltar. Mairead Farrell, Danny McCann and Sean Savage were gunned down and buried amidst lies. This pamphlet cannot match the resources of the British government and the British media. But it can tell the truth about the Gibraltar killings and the British shoot-to-kill strategy. In this way we not only pay tribute to the Gibraltar Three but also warn the British working class about how its government will act against those who threaten British imperialism.

    

    

    

    

   ——————————————————————————–

    

    

   CHAPTER ONE

    

    

   SHOOT TO KILL: THE PRELUDE TO GIBRALTAR

    

   Two months before the Gibraltar murders the British Attorney General, Patrick Mayhew, officially closed the record on six murders by the RUC in 1982 in Ireland and the Stalker inquiry into the killings. Mayhew admitted that there was evidence of police officers perverting the course of justice but said that because of ‘considerations of national security’ no charges would be brought against officers involved in the killings or the subse- quent conspiracy to obstruct justice. To justify giving the state’s seal of approval to the murderous actions of its forces in Ireland he said: ‘I have had to balance one harm to national security against another’.

    

    

   It is no surprise that two months later British forces claimed three more lives, this time in Gibraltar. For ‘national security’ read ‘state terrorism’. And if the government could get away with not only the 1982 murders but also with a catalogue of official obstruction of Stalker’s inquiry, why notkeep on doing it?

    

    

   The roots of the Gibraltar murders lie, of course, in the British occupation of Ireland. But they lie most particularly in the Stalker affair. For many years the nationalist people had believed that individual Republican activists were targeted and eliminated by British forces. But in 1982 a series of murders took place which made this more than a suspicion: within a one month period six men were shot dead by the RUC.

    

    

   On 11 November 1982 Eugene Toman, Gervaise McKerr and Sean Burns were shot dead as they drove in Armagh. They were cut down in a hail of 109 bullets. All three were unarmed. They were shot by members of the RUC E4A unit, an SAS-trained squad. Although the RUC at first claimed that they had been on routine patrol and that the car had accelerated through a roadblock, it was later revealed that the RUC had been tailing the three for three days. Moreover, witnesses denied the existence of a roadblock. Toman was found lying outside the car having been killed by a shot to the heart. Witnesses had heard two bursts of shots separated by two minutes. Three RUC officers were prosecuted for the murder of Eugene Toman but all were acquitted. The RUC claimed that they had information that two of the three were armed and were on their way to commit a murder. This explanation has come to sound very familiar.

    

    

   On 24 November 1982 17-year-old Michael Tighe and Martin McAuley were ambushed and Tighe shot dead as they entered a farm building which was under RUC surveillance. Not only was this a carefully prepared ambush but M15 had actually bugged the farm building in which Tighe died. The RUC claimed that Tighe had pointed a rifle at them but forensic evidence contradicted their story.

    

    

   On 12 December 1982 Seamus Grew and Roddy Carroll were killed when E4A opened fire on their car. Both men were unarmed. The RUC immediately said that the two had driven through a police roadblock but later admitted this was a deliberately false version of events. In fact the car had been tailed north and south of the border. An unmarked police surveillance vehicle had intercepted the car and police had shot both men dead. Carroll was killed by 15 shots fired from six to ten feet away. Grew was found not in the car but face upwards on the road having been shot in the back of the head. Forensic evidence proved that he had been shot from three feet away whilst out of the car. One RUC officer was tried for Grew’s murder and acquitted having said that he fired because he believed ‘his life was in danger’. Again, the familiar story. The Armagh Coroner resigned due to ‘grave irregularities’ in the RUC files on this case. It should also be noted that Seamus Grew had been the object of illegal Army actions in the past. In 1984 Captain Fred Holroyd, a former Army intelligence officer in Ireland, reported that in 1974 three Protestants were hired by the Army to go into the Twenty Six Counties and kidnap Grew to bring him north of the border.

    

    

   Later it emerged that E4A had gone on this bloody trail of revenge after three RUC officers were killed by the IRA. The RUC paid an informer to set up Toman and Burns. E4A was effectively a covert police murder squad organised on military lines and were ordered to conceal what they did behind the Offical Secrets Act. Operating from unmarked cars, they were heavily armed with Sterling submachine guns and RUCer high velocity rifles and handguns. After each killing the RUC issued a false cover story, removed witnesses and destroyed forensic evidence. A forged RUC report was compiled on Michael Tighe after his death (he had no Republican connections) in order to implicate him. During one of the trials RUC Deputy Chief Constable Michael McAtamney said that E4A were trained by the SAS and that the training was based on the premise that once you have decided to fire you shoot to take out our enemy. ‘Do you mean permanently?’, he was asked. ‘Yes’, he replied.

    

    

   So great was the outcry about these cases that in 1984 John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, was asked to conduct an investigation.

    

    

   Stalker dug too deep. He found that the prosecution papers for the trials of the RUC men ‘bore no resemblance to my idea of a murder pro secution’ and that he ‘could see clearly why the prosecutions had failed’. He found that vital forensic evidence (bullets, cartridge cases and other evidence) were removed from the scenes of the killings; that vital witnesses were never interviewed and there were ‘shockingly low standards’ of inquiry. In the course of his investigation he met outright hostility and obstruction from all levels of the RUC.

    

    

   He found that after the killings of Toman, Burns and McKerr, the RUC men responsible left the scene to be debriefed by Special Branch. Detectives investigating the shootings were denied access to them, their weapons and car for days after this. He found that deliberately false cover stories were put out by the RUC.

    

    

   Most dangerous for the RUC (and M15) Stalker discovered that the farm building where Tighe was killed had been bugged and that a tape of the shooting existed. After months of wrangling, the RUC Chief Constable, Sir Jack Hermon, said the tape would only be released to Stalker if the Attorney General signed a certificate stating that it was in the national interest. This was done. But just before Stalker was due to return to Ireland to get the transcript of the tape, he was removed from the inquiry on spurious charges of misconduct. Not only was he closing in on the tape, but also he wanted to question the upper echelons of the RUC. He was simply too dangerous to be allowed to remain in charge of the inquiry.

    

    

   Far from Stalker getting the RUC culprits for the murders, the British government got Stalker. Stalker is clear about this: ‘I believe that in April 1986 a government decision was made to end my involvement in the enquiry’.

    

    

   Whilst Stalker not surprisingly failed to find evidence of a formal shoot-to-kill policy, he did find evidence of deliberate assassination. Of the case of Michael Tighe he had this to say:

    

    

   ‘I also passionately believe that if a police force could, in cold blood, kill a seventeen-year-old youth with no terrorist or criminal convictions, and then plot to hide the evidence…then the shame belonged to us all. This is the act of a Central American assassination squad.’

    

   These are not the words of a government critic but of a former Assistant Chief Constable, an establishment man to the core.

    

    

   The similarities to the events in Gibraltar are striking: false cover Stories; surveillance leading to shootings; shootings justified on the grounds of non-existent ‘threats’ to the lives of the police; shooting continued until the victim is dead, often finishing them off on the ground; forensic evidence destroyed; witnesses not followed up; murderers removed rapidly from the scene for debriefing. All of these things happened in the 1982 killings and in Gibraltar in 1988. And there was something else in common: a prolonged and elaborate cover-up. The British government was prepared to go to enormous lengths to prevent the truth about the 1982 killings emerging. It was prepared to claim ‘national security’ to justify its murderous actions. Likewise in Gibraltar.

    

    

   There is another significant factor in common: the SAS which did the killings in Gibraltar trained E4A in Ireland. A member of E4A revealed in court that:

    

    

   ‘One feature of this training is that the traditional police concept of the use ofminimum force is abandoned. In one exercise officers have to burst into what is known as the “killing room” and fire a set number of shots into a dummy within a certain time. The exercise, aimed at developing “firepower, speed and aggression”, is repeated until the officer meets the standard.’

    

   The SAS, like its murderous offspring E4A, does not take prisoners. It is, in effect, a highly-trained assassination squad.

    

    

   The British government took a calculated risk by organising such an obvious cover-up in the Stalker affair. And because they got away with it, they were better prepared to get away with murder in Gibraltar. In November 1988, six years after their deaths and two months after the Gibraltar inquest, the inquest into the deaths of McKerr, Toman and Burns opened in Ireland. The British government produced Public Interest Immunity Certificates to prevent questions being raised that concerned ‘national security’, ic the truth. They had learned the usefulness of this trick in Gibraltar. Events had come full circle. ‘Central American-style assassination squads’ are alive and well and flourishing in Britain, organised by the British government.

    

    

    

    

   ——————————————————————————–

    

    

   CHAPTER TWO

    

    

   HIDING THE TRUTH

    

   The effort which the British government put into preventing Stalker from discovering the truth about shoot-to-kill was minor in comparison with their efforts in Gibraltar. Because it was the only form of inquiry to take place, these efforts were concentrated on the inquest itself.

    

    

   Long before it opened, the Gibraltar Coroner, Mr Felix Pizzarello, indicated his unhappiness that the inquest was to be the sole inquiry into the killings. The inquest, he said, was likely to be ‘flawed’. This proved to be the understatement of the century. A telling indication of just how flawed it was to be, came after Pizzarello announced a date for the inquest – 27 June. Two weeks later, the British government announced that the Coroner had decided to postpone the inquest. However, Mr Pizzarello was unaware of this decision! The inquest and the preparations for it were effectively in the hands of the British government. The press was muzzled. The witnesses to the killings were subjected to a relentless campaign to discredit and frighten them.

    

    

   Mr Pizzarello’s ‘flaws’ were, in reality, gaping holes. But the biggest hole of all was the one through which the British government made its escape. Public Interest Immunity Certificates (PICs) meant that no questions about the background of the SAS operation and the decision to use the SAS could be raised. Instead the inquest was to be locked into a minute inquiry into events lasting less than four hours – from the time Sean Savage arrived in Gibraltar to the time the three lay lifeless in their own blood.

    

    

   Yet it was precisely the excluded intelligence background which would have been central to revealing the truth. Firstly it was this ‘intelligence’ that led the SAS to be so sure (and so wrong) that the three were armed and had a remote controlled bomb on 6 March. This provided the SAS with their stated reason for shooting the three. The PIICs meant that no questions could be asked about the basis on which the British believed the three to be armed or to have a bomb. Secondly, the question of what surveillance the three were under in Spain and why, nevertheless, they were allowed to cross into Gibraltar could not be properly pursued. By its use of PICs the British government ensured that there could be no serious inquiry into the Gibraltar operation.

    

    

   Instead the British government presented an elaborately-rehearsed, two-stage cover story. Stage One was ‘for reasons which we cannot divulge we mistakenly let three IRA members into Gibraltar and mistakenly thought they were armed and had a bomb’. This led neatly to Stage Two: the SAS ‘saw threatening gestures by the three which led us to believe they were going to detonate the (non-existent) bomb so we shot them’ – Stage One led inexorably to Stage Two, but Stage One could never be questioned. It was designed as a neat, circular and impenetrable cover.
7. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:45 am

   Sink the Belgrano
8. miki67 on 14th December 2012 11:46 am

   From HenryVIII onwards there is a direct tradition of highly organised dirty tricks departments doing evil on behalf of the state. Maintaining the status quo and all of its hypocrisy and lies in order to keep the corrupt pyramid intact.

    

   Looks the same wherever you go in this bent world.

    

   Sooner or later things will change. They have to. Otherwise, change will be forced.

    

   That is why the kind of thinking behind the likes of t’rankers and their dubious backers is running scared…they know the game is up, but they will rage and flail about as their impotence expands, their anchronism is exposed, and their corruption rots them from within. A reflection of the greater status quo at the head of things. The last gasp of faded imperialism, relics with money and arms, and the mercenaries always glad to take the shilling.

    

   Better thinkers than me have been writing about the same kind of thing for a long time.

    

   It’s simply frustrating that history’s wheels grind so slow. But grind they do.
9. Rieperman on 14th December 2012 11:47 am

   proudbhoy,

    

    

   I’ve had decent returns on long shots this season.

    

    

   People may laugh, but I think Athletico Madrid @ 8/1 at Barcelona on Sunday is worth a punt.

    

    

   Just a feeling
10. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:48 am

    Deny the British empire’s crimes? No, we ignore them

     

     

    New evidence of British colonial atrocities has not changed our national ability to disregard it

     

     

     

    George Monbiot

     

     

    The Guardian, Monday 23 April 2012 20.30 BST

     

     

     

     

    Members of the Devon Regiment round up local people in a search for Mau Mau fighters in Kenya in 1954. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

     

     

     

    There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain’s colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

     

     

    The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.

     

     

    Last week’s revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph’s website. The Mail’s only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of “a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies”, while everyone else was “dedicated, loyal and disciplined”.

     

     

    The British government’s suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that “Britain’s empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria.” Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?

     

     

    Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu’s Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.

     

     

    Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.

     

     

    The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as “Labour and freedom” and “He who helps himself will also be helped”. Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.

     

     

    Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts. They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.

     

     

    Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons. This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.

     

     

    No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, “1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process”.

     

     

    The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan’s is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.

     

     

    Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that “harsh measures” were sometimes used, but he maintains that “while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues.” The theft of the Kikuyu’s land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau’s attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.

     

     

    What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.

     

     

    • A fully referenced version of this article can be found at http://www.monbiot.com
11. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:50 am

    Who killed Roesmary Nelson?
12. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:51 am

    From Behind a Closed Door Brian Barton.
13. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:52 am

    The Graves are Walking by John Kelly
14. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:53 am

    MOve awong Timmy, no cwonspwiarcies here today.
15. kitalba on 14th December 2012 11:56 am

    Who Framed Colin Wallace?
16. winning captains on 14th December 2012 11:59 am

    New issue of CQN Magazine nearly ready – biggest ever edition . there’s lots to talk about at the moment!

     

     

    This morning’s orders of the fabulous CQN ANNUAL posted to Celtic supporters in Cork, Seattle, Joonalup, Western Australia, Blantyre, Strathaven, East Grinstead, Bearsden, Clydebank, Alexandria, Leeds, Kent, Milton of Campsie, Edinburgh, Chigwell, Essex, Liverpool, Cults, Lochgoilhead, Livingston and Rutherglen. Another batch to go out this afternoon – can only carry so many! It isn’t too late to order your copy in time for Christmas – buy direct from CQN using this link:

     

     

    http://www.eklektik.co.uk/

     

     

    Please support CQN – buy the CQN ANNUAL today! Thanks to all those who have done so already.
18. kitalba on 14th December 2012 12:00 pm

    They murdered and pilagec but did they ever conspire?

     

     

    British Atrocities in Counter Insurgency

     

     

    BRITISH ATROCITIES AND COUNTERINSURGENCY

     

     

    Introduction

     

     

    All too often over recent years allegations have come to light concerning the wrongful behaviour of British troops in Iraq. After a notable court martial involving personnel from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, a corporal was found guilty of inhumane treatment of civilians and his Commanding Officer acquitted. There remains suspicion that witnesses lied and that the Royal Military Police (RMP) investigation was grossly flawed.

     

     

    A similar enquiry is under way regarding the deaths of civilians at a permanent vehicle check point on Route 6 south of Al Amarah in southern Iraq nicknamed ‘Danny Boy’ where it is alleged that soldiers from the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment (PWRR) killed detainees. An eminent historian, Richard Holmes, chose to write the history of this tour and devotes 20 pages to the battle for Danny Boy, and includes the allegation (p 246) that prisoners had been tortured, murdered and mutilated. 1 A similar incident took place when the Commanding Officer of 1st Battalion The Royal Irish Regiment in Iraq found himself the centre of media attention, accused of having kicked and punched prisoners, ‘shot at the feet of Iraqi civilians’ and pistol whipping a local chief. 2 Again, all charges were eventually dropped.

     

     

    Further claims have been made that 222 detainees were tortured and mistreated whilst in British military detention in southern Iraq between March 2003 and December 2008, placing the activities of the Joint Forward Interrogation Team (JFIT) under scrutiny. Allegations, including the practices of hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, exposure to loud pornography and death threats, are currently the subject of an investigation by the Iraq Historical Allegations Team (IHAT). This investigation is likely to continue until 2012. 3 As of November 2010, three men had been referred to the Director of Service Prosecutions (DSP). 4 A total of 1,253 video recordings of interrogations were seized by military police. It has been alleged that interrogation trainees were instructed to deliberately encourage a perception of humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear. Techniques allegedly included beatings, electric shocks, enforced nakedness, blindfolds, sensory deprivation and starvation on a systematic basis. 5

     

     

    Broken Society?

     

     

    Whether proven or not, these activities were, in the opinion of some, the symptom of a ‘broken society’ where ethical acumen no longer applied and where, through a combination of family breakdown, the increasing abandonment of observed religion and a permissive sex, drugs, drink and violence culture among the young, British society had ‘lost its way’. Those British troops serving in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 could in this view be at least understood for their various misdemeanours, if not actually excused their behaviour. Officers were, of course, held responsible but weren’t their failures perhaps a consequence of the relaxation of entry standards over several decades? Or perhaps these alleged failures of leadership had something to do with ethical or moral relativism that has dominated British university campuses, leaving future Army officers incapable of moral choice under the pressure of events or, worse, amoral with regards to values and standards?

     

     

    Changing Nature of War?

     

     

    Another theory has been that warfare itself has irrevocably changed – ‘war among the people’ replacing ‘industrial inter-state warfare’. Most notable in making this claim has a highly regarded military leader, General Sir Rupert Smith, in his seminal ‘The Utility of Force’ 6 . In this paradigm, there is little point in visiting military history as today’s challenges are quite distinct from those of the past. As an aside, had Rupert Smith written his tome in 1905 as opposed to 2005, he might have had a point. John Mackinlay 7 makes a similar claim, that insurgency itself has evolved from its ‘classical’ Maoist origins post World War Two to the current ‘insurgent archipelago’ driven by the ideology of Al Q’aida (AQ) intent on the establishment of a global caliphate in response to that same ‘broken society’ typical of most if not all western states. Morbid delusions of the 17th century over witchcraft spring to mind. The former UK Labour Minister for the Armed Forces himself recently remarked on the ‘new’ situation, for which ‘new’ training and education would be required. This is not to say that the AQ threat should be ignored but that it has been grossly exaggerated.

     

     

    It is of course true, to a point, that every war is ‘new’ tautologically speaking. This has many benefits, not least in ensuring a role for vast numbers of political scientists who are entitled to analyse the ‘new’ and create yet another paradigm or theory that might illuminate the present and perhaps point to the future. It presumes a science of society and a science of warfare. To an extent, this may indeed be the case, as Colin Gray 8 has pointed out: warfare divides rather neatly between states – ‘regular’ warfare, and everything else associated with violence for political ends – ‘irregular warfare’. That both have evolved over time is a truism.

     

     

    It is the latter form of warfare that is the context of this paper, not so much that the nature of war has evolved all that much – rather that it has not. The British know and understand this because fighting irregular warfare has been part and parcel of our history for such a very long time. If ‘modern’ counterinsurgency can be said to have arrived, it did so as early as between 1775 and 1781 in what is now the USA. The ‘Boston Massacre’ of 1770 in which five civilians were killed by British soldiers was perhaps the first ‘atrocity’ of modern British counterinsurgency. More prescient was the defence of the British Empire in India, which required a military commitment on the North West Frontier with Afghanistan from 1849, a period of nearly one hundred years, until Pakistan took over the same task in 1947 9 (this and other references are merely suggested reading for those who would like to know more). This was but one commitment, others including: the repelling of the Fenian invasion of Canada 10 in 1868; countering the Boer guerrillas in South Africa 11 from 1900 to 1902; containing the Easter Rising in Dublin 12 in 1916; countering the Irish Republican Army in Ireland 13 from 1919 – 1921; the Somaliland insurgency of 1919; Amritsar 14 in 1919; the Mesopotamian insurgency of 1920 15 ; disorder in Palestine in 1920- 21; the ‘first Intifada’ in Palestine from 1936 – 9 16 ; countering the Fakir of Ipi from 1936 – 1937; the Jewish insurgency in Palestine from 1943 – 1948; the Malayan Emergency from 1948 – 1960 17 ; the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya 18 from 1952 – 1956; the EOKA campaign in Cyprus 19 from 1955 – 1959; the Egyptian Canal Zone emergency from 1951 – 1954; the aftermath of the Suez operation in November – December 1956; operations in the Arabian Peninsula from 1957 – 1960; the Radfan campaign of 1964; South Arabia from 1964 – 1967; the war for Dhofar in Oman from 1965 – 1980; Northern Ireland from 1969 – 2007; Iraq from 2003 – 2009; and now, Afghanistan since 2006, where at the time of writing, over 350 British troops have so far been killed. There is no comparable history of counterinsurgency anywhere in the world to match that of the British record.

     

     

    Insurgent goals have varied between those of nationalism, communism and religious fanaticism, or a mixture of all three. To claim, as does John Mackinlay, that there has been some lineal dimension to this evolution pays no attention to the recent Maoist insurgency in Nepal and that ongoing in India, nor that the nationalist insurgent campaigns in Northern Ireland, Spain and Corsica continue. Methods have usually been brutal, involving terrorism, torture, executions, extortion, ‘propaganda of the deed’ and a forcible conversion of the civil population to the goals of the insurgent organisation. Modern technology has usually been successfully applied, whether in the utilisation of dynamite or mobile phones. Conventional weapons have been adapted for the purpose of guerrilla operations. The movements have usually been able to take full advantage of the legal conundrum that surrounded activities of neither war nor peace, politically motivated yet employing criminal acts on a routine basis. Insurgents have invariably played on issues of duration – as in the Taliban saying, ‘You have watches – we have time’. Insurgents have always relied upon neutral space, be it the mountains of Waziristan, a secure and safe haven across an international border, as in the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) as a base for the launch of attacks into Oman, and in the case of the Provisional IRA, the complex border between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. Finally, the insurgent has always assumed that he can outlast the will of the government to resist.

     

     

    The British Response to Insurgency

     

     

    If these diverse campaigns can be linked in any way it is in the nature of the response to insurgency and terrorism by British Security Forces. All have been underpinned by a legal framework, that Common Law was to apply at all times. The identification of the nature of the insurgency has been crucial and not mistaking it for something else, is fundamental. Identification requires ‘intelligence’, in human form and/or by technical means, and invariably this will only be forthcoming under duress in the former case.

     

     

    There has been a need to isolate the insurgent from the civil population, which is ‘the prize’. This has required ruthless control of food supplies, as in the wire fence around Salalah in Oman, a technique ‘borrowed’ from Malaya and in turn from South Africa. It also requires a government propaganda campaign of its own, combining every media outlet available.

     

     

    Having identified the insurgent and isolated him, he has to be neutralised. This might be achieved by attrition – ‘kill or capture’ – or physical barriers preventing the insurgent from reaching the population or of his own resupply, as in the Hornbeam Line in Dhofar. This will require substantial numbers of troops and police for success, together with highly mobile forces, as with helicopters and drones, airpower and indirect fire weapons.

     

     

    And finally, if a better peace is to be achieved, there has to be a negotiated, often diplomatic, end to the insurgency, somewhat belying the Thatcherite rhetoric that ‘we don’t talk to terrorists’. Yes we do!

     

     

    The downside of all this has been that in all the above insurgencies, British troops have from time to time, exceeded their powers under the law and committed acts of violence that were deemed unacceptable and outwith the underpinning principles of jus in bello – discrimination and proportionality. On occasions there were indeed ‘atrocities’ – as in an act of ‘extreme wickedness; atrocious deed; repellent act or thing; very bad’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary, Seventh edition, 1982).

     

     

    Aim

     

     

    This article will now attempt to estimate the extent to which British government forces went beyond their remit in this regard and examine the circumstances that might have allowed this to happen. It will also ask why, despite it being unlikely that some of the more extreme cases would be repeated in today’s climate, there is still room for atrocious acts to take place.

     

     

    It does not comment upon the role of the Security Services, though the current controversy over the involvement of MI5 and MI6 in waterboarding is acknowledged and there can be no doubt that this technique of interrogation amounts to an atrocity, as the Director of Amnesty International has recently made clear. 20 The Guardian writers, Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor also deserve mention here as having been shortlisted for the Liberty Human Rights Campaign of the Year Award for their investigations into Britain’s complicity in the use of torture. 21 At the time of writing, the investigation into allegations of torture of 16 British citizens by the commissioner for the intelligence services, Sir Peter Gibson, is still awaited. That 222 Iraqi citizens suffered ‘systematic abuse’ by British soldiers is very much the focus of this paper 22 and the notion that these will be investigated by a British appointed former CID officer, already a contentious matter. 23

     

     

    This author began his journey into counterinsurgency having replaced a platoon commander in South Armagh in 1973 who had been removed from command for having permitted his soldiers to steal milk bottles from local doorsteps. Whilst such acts were obviously a felony, they hardly fit the above definition of ‘atrocity’. These are far more serious matters, where life has been taken illegally or suspects placed under extreme conditions of physical and/or mental duress. In many cases they have involved ‘innocent’ civilians, especially women and children or other non-combatants.

     

     

    In fairness and unlike other counterinsurgencies such as those involving the French in Algeria, or at times, the USA in Vietnam, certainly the Soviet Union in Afghansitan, when atrocities have occurred, they have been swiftly dealt with under the military or civil law and the offenders punished accordingly. The conundrum is why the products of a ‘Christian’ educated British society have nevertheless resorted to such acts of violence, this in spite of the widely recognised quality of its leaders.

     

     

    Misguided Senior Officers

     

     

    Some situations of atrocity were not so much as a consequence of a defect of character but rather a misguided sense of judgement. Of these, there are many examples, mostly involving senior British leaders in times of stress within a counterinsurgency. Perhaps most notable or most notorious, was that which took place in South Africa between 1900 and 1902 when Kitchener was in command of British troops countering the Boer insurgency. Never minding the 1000 deaths from typhoid as a consequence of inadequate sanitation and hygiene in the field, the internment of civilians was to lead to 3,854 deaths in the following year after 155,399 had been interned. The burning of 30,000 farms and 40 towns in Orange Free State by May 1901, plus the overall detention without trial of 320,000 internees, of which 51,000 died, may have been conducted with the best of intentions – to bring the Boer war to a speedy close, but by atrocious means.

     

     

    That Horatio Herbert Kitchener was wholly responsible for the policy enacted cannot be in doubt. He inherited much of this from Roberts, though the tenets of counter-guerrilla warfare during the 19th century as espoused by Callwell were clearly also in play. Memorandum Number 29, dated 21 December 1900 spelt out just how the war was to be conducted. It took two humanitarian investigations, initially by Emily Hobhouse and then Dame Millicent Fawcett, to bring matters to public attention. How prescient Kitchener was in his remark that ‘I fear it will be many a generation before the Boers forget or forgive this war’. 24 It would be hard to find an example as stark as that of South Africa as to how ‘hearts and minds’ were never to be won over.

     

     

    Insanity

     

     

    If there have invariably been ‘bad apples’ in the collective ‘barrel’ of the British Armed Forces, equally there have been isolated cases of the genuinely insane, most notably Captain J C Bowen-Colthurst, known by reputation to have been ‘half-cracked’. He had served with the Royal Irish Regiment (RIR) for 15 years and relieved of his command in the opening weeks of the First World War for having blatantly disobeyed orders, attempting in effect to take on the entire German Army single handed. He was sent to Portobello Barracks in Dublin so as to pose no further risk to the war effort. Perchance, his new posting coincided with the Easter Rising of 1916. 25

     

     

    Colthurst took out a party of some forty men and stopped a youth by the name of Coade, whom he shot dead on the spot. He went on to throw a grenade into a tobacconist’s shop and arrested three individuals in the vicinity, including Sheehy-Skeffington, a prominent Irish nationalist politician. All were incarcerated in the barracks overnight and were then shot dead the following morning under Colthurst’s orders to the guard. Colthurst was eventually convicted of murder and pleaded criminal insanity, serving his sentence (until his release in 1918) in Broadmoor prison.

     

     

    There were other episodes of misconduct by British troops during the Rising, notably the allegation of the murder of 13 innocent civilians by soldiers of the 2/6th South Staffordshires and that one senior NCO, Sergeant Floods, believed he was required to obey a ‘no prisoners’ order.

     

     

    Massacre out of Duty

     

     

    There have been other episodes of misjudgement by leaders. Most notable was the action by Colonel (a local Brigadier-General, hence ‘General’ in much of the literature) Rex Dyer at Amritsar on 13 April 1919. To his dying day, Dyer was convinced that he had no choice but to order his Gurkha soldiers to open fire on the crowd in the Jalianwallahbagh, the local town square in Amritsar, where an entirely peaceful, though illegal, demonstration was in progress. A total of 1,650 rounds were fired and at least 380 civilians killed, probably as many as 1,500 wounded. 26 That Dyer was convinced of the necessity of this action if a second Indian Mutiny was to be averted is not in doubt. The verdict of the subsequent Hunter Committee was at odds though, with Dyer’s assessment however, and he paid the price accordingly, retiring in disgrace at the age of 57.

     

     

    It is worthy of recall that Dyer was regarded as ‘strange’ during his attendance at the Army Staff College at Camberley in Surrey, ‘out of water’ in English society, yet excelled as a commanding officer of the 25th Punjabis back in India from whence he came and as commander of the 45th Infantry Brigade at Jullunder in the Punjab.

     

     

    Government Complicity

     

     

    Atrocity as a consequence of misguided policy has also been all too frequent. The disastrous campaign in Ireland from 1919 – 1921 springs to mind. The Government, it must be stressed, was divided at to what action might be appropriate to the occasion. Churchill spoke strongly for a policy of coercion and reprisals; others wished to see the usual rule of law applied. The outcome was the Government’s ‘two for one strategy’, the policy of murder of IRA suspects on the basis of two for every soldier killed. What to do when, as by 1920, IRA attacks amounted to an average of 400 each week and with a mere 20,000 troops allocated for counterinsurgency? The ‘solution’ in the form of the ‘Black and Tans’ was an unmitigated disaster, 27 described as ‘ruthless, arrogant and often drunk and violent’. 28 Major Percival of the Essex Regiment (with its notorious torture squad) and the King’s Own Scottish Borderers were identified by IRA leaders as particularly brutal. 29

     

     

    The commander of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ADRIC), Brigadier Frank Crozier summarised this dark stain on the reputation of British Security Forces thus: ‘Had I been told, in 1918, after four and a half years of blood-letting, that in our own British Isles I should be witnessing acts of atrocity, by men in the King’s uniform, which far exceeded in violence and brutality those acts I lived to condemn in the seething Baltic, I – well, I would have laughed out loud. I am concerned here with the conduct of Englishmen in the uniform of the Crown, because I greatly respect the Crown and have no wish to see it dragged in the mud. 30 Crozier resigned his commission, stating, ‘I resigned because the combat was being carried out on foul lines, by selected and foul men, for a grossly foul purpose, based on the most Satanic of all rules that “ the end justifies the means”. 31

     

     

    In the words of the historian, Professor Charles Townshend, the British Army ‘showed few signs of a professional approach to guerrilla war’. 32 This might well have been true but the Commander-in-Chief, General Macready, was far more concerned with the reputation of his Army for its ethical stance: ‘My principal aim and object, and that of all officers in Ireland, was to maintain untarnished the credit of our profession in the face of a situation almost unparalleled in the records of the Service.’ 33 Crozier was more blunt: ‘But how many people realise that the British Army left the shores of Ireland in 1922 respected by the Irish people because it declined to fight in the dirty, underhand way in which the British Government wished it to fight? The dirty work was left to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), reinforced by Englishmen.’ 34

     

     

    Bombing Civilians

     

     

    The employment of Royal Air Force (RAF) bombing of civilian towns, villages and economic infrastructure at various times between 1919 and 1970 across the Middle East but especially in South Arabia, Oman, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Somaliland. As Squadron Leader Arthur Harris commented, ‘they the villagers now know what area bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within forty-five minutes a full sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.’ 35 A lone voice of protest against air power atrocities was made by Air Commodore Lionel Charlton, Senior Air Staff Officer (SASO) in Iraq, who resigned his commission after the bombing of Suleimaniya. 36

     

     

    The 1920 Army Directive regarding Mesopotamia was clear on the issue: villages were to be razed to the ground; pressure was to be brought on the inhabitants by cutting off water power and by destroying irrigation channels; cultivation was to be interdicted; the food supply chain was to be destroyed.

     

     

    Air control doctrine was controversial from the outset and remains so, even in RAF sponsored publications. 37 The economics of air power as a means of pacification were hardly in doubt. The ethics of so doing continued to be debated over decades. Rhetoric replaced reality in many instances. Villages were termed as ‘forts’ and bombed regardless. The destruction of local economies was regarded as a reasonable means of bringing recalcitrant tribes to heel, most notable in Oman on Jebel Akhdar in 1957 – 9. There appears to be little doubt with hindsight, that the survival of the RAF as an independent service was on the basis of numerous acts that today would be regarded as war crimes. Few RAF officers with any career ambition were to state the rather obvious truth that this form of warfare was ‘atrocious’, women, the elderly and children being the price of ‘pacification’.

     

     

    Hostages

     

     

    Atrocities in the ‘first intifada’ in Palestine under the mandate have been recorded by Dr Simon Anglim. 38 He records that ‘any suspect insurgent…could expect a thorough beating, and mock executions were sometimes used to extract information…Much was also made of ‘Oozle Minesweepers’, captured insurgents forced to run in front of British convoys on mined roads…while some units actually tied them to the front of their lorries (a practice with origins in Ireland).’ A ‘Hostage Corps’ was also in use. The destruction of the villages of al Bassa and the deaths of 14 suspects by dereliction of duty in Halhul were all part of what Wingate referred to as ‘government terror’. The Commander of the Palestine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General Sir Robert Haining, wrote to O’Connor and Montgomery thus:

     

    ‘Unnecessary violence, vindictiveness which is un-British, killing in cold blood are incidents on which there must be no doubt as to our and the Army’s attitude; and defections from the standard we must adopt must be thoroughly investigated and, if proved, punished in exemplary manner.’ 39

     

     

    Malaya

     

     

    Malaya is most often cited as a celebrated case study in how to ‘do’ counterinsurgency, with General Templer as the personification of sound leadership in difficult times. This is a fair assessment and Malaya has become something of an historic case study at many staff colleges ever since. At long last, with the publication of Chin Peng’s account, this campaign may be viewed form the vantage of the Malay Communist Party as well as by those British commanders who were there. 40

     

     

    The killing of 24 unarmed villagers on 11 December 1948 at Batang Kali, north of Kuala Lumpur, in Malaya and the eradication of the village by fire by a 16 man patrol of 7 Platoon, G Company, 2nd Battalion Scots Guards remains controversial, with the possibility of a long overdue public enquiry. The incident was investigated by the Attorney-General, Sir Stafford Foster-Sutton, but the findings later destroyed. The official historian of the Malaya campaign, Professor Anthony Short, withdrew his account of the incident which absolved British troops of complicity in an atrocity in early November 2010, describing the incident as ‘a matter of dispute, recrimination, dishonesty, disgrace and disguise’. 41 The Malaysian version of events is now available, some sixty years later, when all those involved have long passed away. 42 There is evidence also of ‘exemplary’ public executions by New Zealand SAS whilst under British command as a deterrent to assistance to the Communist Terrorists (CTs). 43 It is also of note that Chin Peng refers to casual incidents of atrocity during the enforcement of the ‘New Villages’ scheme. In the event that an inhabitant refused to vacate his or her squat, it was simply set on fire regardless. 44

     

     

    Kenya

     

     

    The most easily understood, if vile, cases of atrocity involved individuals or groups who were simply criminally minded. David Anderson refers to just such an example in Captain G S L Griffiths during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya, whose court martial followed the dismissal of his Kings African Rifles (KAR) brigade commander. Griffiths was a Kenyan resident and described by Anderson as ‘a brutal sadist’, who was accused of murdering two Kikuyu prisoners with a Sten Gun, at close range, completely cutting one of them in half in the process. Prior to this, he had engaged in torture and also cut off one of the detainees’ ears. He was eventually convicted of torture and sentenced to five years in a UK prison after 22 Kenyans had been killed by soldiers of B Company, 5 KAR. His Commander In Chief, General Erskine, who was determined to make an example of Griffiths, faced accusations that he was in some way ‘undermining morale’ by his insistence on the prosecution. The matter went as far as the House of Commons where, not for the first time, the behaviour of British forces in the field came under close parliamentary scrutiny. It is also worthy of note that in all, 430 Kenyans were shot ‘resisting arrest’ and at least 92 died in custody. In David Anderson’s words, ‘British justice in 1950s Kenya was a blunt, brutal and unsophisticated instrument of oppression’. 45 Ruthagathi detention camp gained a particular reputation as a torture centre and Arthur Young, Commissioner of Police, was forced to resign in the knowledge of complicity at senior levels. The Hola camp massacre in turn led to agreement across the House of Commons between the Rt Hon Enoch Powell MP and the Rt Hon Barbara Castle MP that Britain had no right to its empire if moral leadership of a higher order was not to be forthcoming. 46 Trevor Phillips makes a similar point, quoting Powell’s peroration in the House, “….Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard…We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere…We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.” 47

     

     

    The controversy over the treatment of Mau Mau suspects continues to this day. More than 150,000 detainees were involved and torture of suspects ‘routine and brutal’, including castration and severe sexual abuse, activities ‘sanctioned at the highest levels of government in London’. Mau Mau was only granted a legal footing in 2003 and all allegations stem from this date and the formation of the Mau Mau Veterans Association. 48 The official figure of Mau Mau killed in action is 11,503, with a further 1,090 hanged, plus 100 civilian victims of Mau Mau, a total of some 17,000 ‘excess’ deaths, according to the demographer, John Blacker. When women (7,000) and children (26,000) are included, a total of 50,000 emerges, these deaths including those from malnutrition and disease, not the figure of 300,000 as concluded by Caroline Elkins, but shocking enough, all the same. 49

     

     

    The extent to which these atrocities were or were not sanctioned as policy continues to be debated. Dr Huw Bennett, writing in June 2007, is firmly of the view that they were, 50 the ‘much-vaunted regimental system.. presenting as many problems as solutions in ensuring a disciplined soldiery’. He notes that of 57 courts martial during the Emergency, none involved any act of brutality against the civilian population and that a regime of beatings, torture and murder was the reality in a policy of ‘exemplary force’ (though this never amounted to outright extermination) between October 1952 and June 1953 when General Erskine’s leadership began to take effect. 51

     

     

    This claim was itself countered by Dr Rod Thornton 52 , noting how the sidelining of Major General Hinde and his replacement by General Erskine was all that was required to restore the situation to that of ‘minimum force’, claiming that whilst the Kenya Regiment, Kenya Police Reserve, Kikuyu Home Guard, the police and the Kings African Rifles might have been culpable for ‘excesses’, this could not be said of the Regular British Army. Huw Bennett in turn responded to Thornton 53 claiming that the historical record was on his side, illustrating just how important is rigorous historical research to issues under discussion such as these and that vigorous self-examination is infinitely preferable to the complacency associated all too often with regimental historians.

     

     

    The degree of British Government complicity in atrocities in Kenya only came to light in the spring of 2011, following the revelations that files likely to cause ‘embarrassment’ to Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) had been withdrawn from Kenya prior to independence and deposited at Hanslope Park, the home of Her Majesty’s Government’s Communications Centre (HMGCC) in Buckinghamshire. Four Mau Mau veterans sued the British government over claims of torture and mutilation (castration) during the Emergency. The case opened in the High Court on 7 April 2011, where, for the first time, 300 boxes of documents containing 1500 files were revealed. There are 1,400 surviving Mau Mau veterans seeking an apology and also some form of welfare fund. The accusation is that the ill-treatment was part of a system of torture, inhumane and degrading treatment applied by the security forces in the full knowledge of the Colonial Administration. The Foreign Office claim is that it is not legally liable. 54 Not surprisingly, the Kenyan government has also flatly denied any responsibility, claiming, with justification, that it simply did not exist at the time of British rule.

     

     

    That colonial officers were strongly opposed to what took place is not in doubt. For example, John Nottingham, recalled his own deep dismay years later. 55 Neither side, though, is doubting the appalling acts undertaken by Mau Mau. Equally, the suspension of the rule of law permitted actions just as dreadful by the British authorities. In Professor David Anderson’s own words, ‘It was the ugliest of all of British imperial adventures and the one we now want to deny’. 56 Or as the Kenyan Attorney General of the time stated, ‘If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly’. 57 Or as Provincial Commisioner C M Johnson wrote to the Attorney-General, ‘each and every one of us, from the Governor downwards, may be in danger of removal from public service’. His stance compares starkly with the actions in 2011 of Edward Inglett from the FCO, whose determination to uncover the truth is remarkable and highly commendable. 58

     

     

    The scale and depravity of actions by the security forces was truly barbaric, including the burning alive of detainees, beatings (eleven detainees beaten to death at Hola Camp in 1959), sexual abuse, food and sleep deprivation and torture. As Matthew Parris has made clear, to examine this record by the standards of today is open to question but that there can be no doubt that those implicated were all too aware of the enormity of their crimes: ‘they knew at the time that some of what was being done was shameful, and if disclosed would be seen as disgraceful at the time. It was to the searchlight of their own generation and their own circumstances, that, if held up, their actions would be found wanting.’ 59

     

     

    Ministers in London were made fully aware of the acts of brutality. Alan Lennox-Boyd, Secretary of State for the Colonies, received a secret memorandum from Eric Griffith-Jones, Attorney General in Kenya, on the substance of these abuses and laws were enacted to legalise atrocious acts such as beatings to the point of unconscious, the acts of brutality awarded the term, ‘dilution’. The Mwea technique provided buckets of stone to be placed on a suspect’s head, then ordered to run in circles until he confessed to Mau Mau oath taking. The belief then held was that only ‘violent shock’ could overcome the Mau Mau ethos. The ethical distinction between Mau Mau atrocity and government response was never made clear. It was claimed that victims were ‘grateful’ for such treatment. One plea for mercy smuggled out of one of the camps simply stated, ‘Even animals are not beaten like that’. 60

     

     

    Very few of those in positions of responsibility spoke out against atrocity. However, one, Colonel Arthur Young, did so, much to his credit. As a former Commissioner of the City of London Police, he lasted but one year in the moral cesspit of Kenya, stating to Baring in December 1954 that the camps ‘present a state of affairs so deplorable that they should be investigated without delay so that ever-increasing allegations of inhumanity and disregard for the rights of the African citizen are dealt with’. 61‘In the majority of cases the death has been caused by wilful violence and ill-treatment on the part of the staff of these Screening Camps and Home Guard Posts which classifies the matter as murder’. 62 Young resigned four months later. A mere eight European district officers were cited as culpable for extreme brutality – none prosecuted. As The Times summarised the issue in regard to Young, ‘If you are part of a bureaucracy that has interests and a history to protect, going against the prevailing line will make you, at best, an uncomfortable colleague, and at worst, an intolerable irritation. And yet you could well be, in the longer term, the most important person in the place’. 63

     

     

    Cyprus

     

     

    Cyprus too witnessed a campaign of nationalist violence by EOKA between April 1955 and 1959. Allegations of brutality against EOKA detainees in Camp K detention camp were followed by the murder of two British soldiers. A further two murders resulted in the rounding up of 1,000 youths in Famagusta, 100 of whom required medical attention. The murder of two army wives led to the detention of 1,000 Cypriots at Karaolis camp, 256 injured in custody and two killed, one following the fracture of seven ribs by his interrogators, another from head injuries. Major General K T Darling, the Director of Operations, issued Directive No 3, a ‘standards of conduct’ instruction, banning ‘viking patrols’.

     

     

    Aden

     

     

    Similar issues arose in Aden during the mid to late 1960s, most notably after the Argylls occupied Crater district. ‘Quelling Insurgency’ was published in 1965, 64 a prescient moment just as Britain was facing yet another urban insurgency, candidly admitting that ‘the lessons of the past had frequently to be re-learned because they had been insufficiently studied beforehand’. 65 Equally, the authors were remarkably astute in claiming that the document would remain valid for no more than five or six years, predicting that the doctrine applied to a Middle Eastern colony would not be at all applicable in Northern Ireland. Aden also witnessed the realisation that RAF ‘air control’ which had dominated doctrinal thought since 1919, had had its day and was no longer acceptable to western public opinion.

     

     

    Lieutenant Colonel Colin Mitchell, Commanding Officer of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, remains central to the accusations of misconduct by British troops in the colony, though he preferred the term ‘tolerant toughness’ and openly excoriated brutality in any form. He was, though, critical of policy in Aden after his arrival in February 1967, as ‘containment’. He was also obviously deeply affected by the mutiny of 20 June and the murder of 22 soldiers, not to mention the 1,000 attacks that had taken place since April. The National Liberation Front’s (NLF) control of Crater was complete.

     

     

    The reoccupation of Crater on 3 July was itself not contentious. Rather, it was the subsequent application of ‘Argyll Law’ that was to lead to recriminations that, rightly. were seen as of Mitchell’s culpability. Bayonets, robust house searches and interrogation techniques, together with detainees ‘shot whilst attempting to evade arrest’ were not uncommon. 66

     

     

    Northern Ireland

     

     

    Northern Ireland too has had its share of unexplained killings by the Security Forces (i.e., both the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary). It is claimed by the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) that an ‘amnesty’ existed between these two bodies between 1970 and September 1973, during which some 150 killings remained un-investigated or poorly so by Royal Military Police, as opposed to civilian police officers. 67

     

     

    The events of 30 January 1972 in Londonderry also deserve inclusion now that the Saville report has been promulgated. In essence, 14 unarmed civilians were shot dead by soldiers of Support Company of 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment (1 PARA) during an arrest operation or ‘scoop’ that afternoon against the Derry Young Hooligans (DYH), who had been participating in an illegal march against internment without trial that had been introduced the previous summer. 1 PARA had already gained a reputation for ruthless violence and has been accused of reckless killings in West Belfast during Internment as well as brutality during the Magilligan marches just prior to the events of 30 January. The circumstances leading to these deaths were investigated by Lord Chief Justice Widgery 68 , appointed on 1 February 1972 and reporting his findings on 18 April, a period of a mere 77 days. His report, 45 pages in a small A-5 format, concluded that responsibility for the deaths lay as much with the organisers of this illegal march as the soldiers who opened fire. Equally, had the Army maintained a ‘low key’ stance, there would have been no arrest operation at all and no deaths or injuries. His conclusion was that the soldiers came under fire and returned fire in accordance with existing rules of engagement – the ‘Yellow Card’, but that, ‘At one end of the scale some soldiers showed a high degree of responsibility; at the other, notably in Glenfada Park, firing bordered on the reckless.’(para 8, p38) Crucially he also concluded that ‘None of the deceased or wounded is proved to have been shot whilst handling a firearm or bomb…but there is a strong suspicion that some others had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon’ (para 10, p38).

     

     

    Owing to the very strong emotions and controversy that these findings aroused, the incident was the subject to a second investigation commencing in 1998 and ending in June 2010 under Lord Justice Saville 69 . This found that the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, was ordered to mount an arrest operation by Brigadier MacLellan at 1607 hours, now that the rioters were separated from the peaceful marchers and was told to do so with one company and forbidden to conduct a running battle down Rossville Street towards the Rossville Flats. Wilford instead mounted a two company operation, including Support Company in armoured vehicles (Humber 1 ton ‘Pigs’), which did proceed down Rossville Street, where there were a mix of rioters and peaceful marchers, the soldiers having no way of distinguishing between them as they dismounted to make arrests. The Brigadier was uninformed of the decisions and actions made and would certainly have refused to sanction such a deployment had he known what Wilford intended. Lieutenant N, commanding the Mortar Platoon fired two warning shots above the heads of civilians, a clear breach of the Yellow Card guidelines on opening fire. In so doing, it is highly likely that the ‘Derry sound’ occurred, where the echo from the shots convinced other soldiers that they were under fire and who themselves opened fire. The Anti-Tank Platoon also opened fire. The incident was over in ten minutes and 108 rounds fired. As with Widgery, Saville also concluded that (3.70) ‘None of the casualties shot by soldiers of Support Company were armed with a firearm or (with the possible exception of Gerald Donaghey) a bomb of an description. None was posing any threat of causing death or serious injury. In no case was any warning given before soldiers opened fire.’ ‘None of the soldiers admitted missing his target and hitting someone else by mistake’ (3.73). ‘No soldier of Support Company was injured by gunfire on Bloody Sunday’ (3.76). ‘We have concluded…that many of these soldiers have knowingly put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing.’(3.82) In the end no proceedings were pursued against any of those who had been arrested.

     

     

    The use of torture by water-boarding was also prevalent in the early 1970s. In April 1973 Liam Holden was convicted of the murder of Private Frank Bell of 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment and sentenced to hang, later commuted to life imprisonment, for which he served 17 years in jail. He allegedly confessed to the murder after water-boarding by the Intelligence Officer, this after the Heath government’s banning of the ‘five techniques’ of interrogation in March 1972. Holden claimed that he was arrested, beaten, burned with a cigarette lighter, hooded and threatened with execution as well as water boarding. The case is currently due for appeal. 70

     

     

    There are also allegations that there was a culture of systematic mistreatment of suspects by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) at this time in ‘The Troubles’. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has received over two hundred allegations of beatings under interrogation, of which as at October 2010, 26 were referred to the Belfast court of appeal and in 24 instances, convictions overturned. This form of maltreatment was almost certainly at the behest of senior RUC officers. Equally disturbing has been the suggestion that defending lawyers were actively involved in securing false convictions and that police doctors’ evidence of ill-treatment during interrogations was being systematically ignored. 71

     

     

    The Castlereagh interrogation centre in East Belfast gained a notorious reputation as the focus for illegal interrogation techniques, including the ‘five techniques’ banned in 1972, and despite an Amnesty International call for a public enquiry in 1978. It was, as usual, a change in leadership with the appointment of Jack Hermon as Chief Constable that brought this regime to a sudden end. 72

     

     

    So too was civilian life lost without justification. Most poignant must be the case of Majella O’Hare, a 12 year old school girl, shot in the back by a Private Michael Williams, a soldier of 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment as she was walking to church in County Armagh on 14 August 1976. The subsequent abuse of her father by the soldiers when he arrived on the scene remains a disgrace, the claim of the soldier subsequently that he was under sniper fire regarded as ‘unlikely’. The charge of murder was reduced to that of manslaughter and Williams was acquitted. The HET inquiry found that there was no evidence of an IRA gunman in the area. Majella’s mother received a formal apology on 28 March 2011 from the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Owen Patterson. As to why, in contravention of standing orders, the General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG) in Williams’ hands was already cocked, has not been revealed. 73

     

     

    Conclusion

     

     

    The incidents described above may appear to paint a somewhat unbalanced picture of the overall British record, bearing in mind the thousands of government officials, police and troops whose behaviour has been exemplary. However, even when a ‘minority activity’ these actions have always led to severe repercussions, both within the UK’s press and parliament as well as for its wider global reputation. In many countries the pain associated with the British has not diminished over time, the deep sense of injustice still not brought to closure.

     

     

    The truly disturbing aspect of this study is the manner in which senior officials of both the military, civil service and government, thought it expedient to steadfastly refuse to face the facts when atrocities took place. The ‘system’ has long taken the view that while it knows these crimes have been (and are) committed, to admit to them – until forced by sheer weight of incontestable evidence – is that admission would ‘give aid and comfort’ to the enemy. It is furthermore of great concern that official papers on such matters were/are withheld from the National Archive on grounds of political sensitivity.

     

     

    It cannot be emphasised enough that where the leadership has been sound, as in officers such as Richard O’Connor, Bill Slim, Bernard Montgomery, Gerald Templer, Bob Erskine and Rupert Smith, the likelihood of misbehaviour by Security Forces appears to have been much diminished. It is when those such as Percival, Harris, Hinde or Mitchell gain the ascendency that trouble inevitably followed. Yet all went through the same officer ‘factory’ at Dartmouth, Woolwich, Sandhurst or Cranwell, raising the question of whether these hallowed institutions and later, staff colleges, were able to weed out those capable of such lasting damage at a later time in their lives.

     

     

    So What?

     

     

    Returning to the recent allegations, Brigadier Robert Aitken was tasked with the investigation into cases of abuse and unlawful killing in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, his report published in January 2008. 74 The Chief of General Staff (CGS), General Sir Richard Dannatt, provided a Foreword, making clear that whereas ‘our record is exceptional…we have an unprecedented number of tough, battle-hardened officers and soldiers who have performed to the highest standards…under extraordinarily testing conditions…But I take no pride in the conduct of those of our people – however few – who took it upon themselves to deliberately abuse Iraqi civilians during 2003 and the early part of 2004….Please do not think that putting these matters right is the sole responsibility of some staff branch in Wiltshire or London: this will require leadership at all levels, from myself down to the most junior lance corporal.’ Amen to that!

     

     

    Brigadier Aitken’s task at a time when the Baha Musa case was sub judice was not an easy one. He would have liked to include issues of ‘command climate’ in the various units and formations under scrutiny but was prevented from so doing. He acknowledged the lack of planning for ‘Phase 4’, stabilisation operations required of the occupying power on the cessation of hostilities between states, and that, in the absence of any civil authority, there was a risk that ‘rough justice’ would become the norm in certain circumstances. Indeed, the very ethos of ‘mission command’ ran the risk of misinterpretation of ethical values, especially under duress. In this respect, the values and standards imbibed into all ranks were themselves open to misinterpretation, with the possibility of a conflict of interest between the notion of regimental loyalty and moral courage, between respect for others, common humanity and so on. But his conclusion was that whilst there may be ‘rotten apples’ in the barrel, this did not imply that the barrel itself was ‘rotten’. 75

     

     

    But taking the evidence of over a century in context one is bound to question whether Robert Aitken’s conclusions are entirely valid and to ask whether the training and ethos of the Armed Forces has ever properly addressed the issue of how to handle its opponents when they are no longer legitimate targets for lethal force. This is not just a matter of ‘wars among the people’ but as significant in full scale conventional wars, such as the Falklands in 1982. Prior to the battle of Goose Green, Colonel H Jones (killed in action, 28th May, 1982), to his great credit, did not command his officers that the Geneva Conventions would be respected at all times with regard to enemy prisoners for no particular reason.

     

     

    In all, the capacity of British military to deny the human rights of those they are required to protect is hardly edifying. References to ‘wogs’, ‘coons’ ‘untermensch’ ‘rag heads’ ‘taigs’, ‘boy’ and so on are legion in British military historiography, for all of whom ‘rules of conduct ’ by the security forces were allowed to become an irrelevance. For as long as soldiers are trained and led to believe that such categorisation is ‘acceptable’ atrocities will continue to occur. Officers bear the brunt of ensuring this not to be the case but so often are themselves part and parcel of the reason why.

     

     

    Returning briefly to Iraq, overall there were 229 allegations of criminal activity between March 2003 and early 2004, of which 20 were handled either by court martial or summary dealing. Altogether six civilians died in British military custody. The ‘Five Techniques’ (wall standing, hooding, subjection to noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink) which were banned by the Heath Government in 1972, and officially re-stated in 1977 by the Attorney General, were nonetheless used in Iraq. How and why this unlawful activity was reintroduced into the Armed Forces remain unclear.

     

     

    The possibility that British troops have also been engaged in the unlawful killing of civilians in Afghanistan has now been raised. The Coldstream Guards, Royal Marines and The Rifles have been identified as having collectively killed or wounded some 15 civilians in 21 incidents. 76

     

     

    Overall though and returning to the alleged ‘broken society’, I would suggest that the likelihood of another Amritsar, or Batang Kali or a Bloody Sunday, are much reduced in modern times. British officers and soldiers are far better educated than in previous generations, the Human Rights era predominates, and the 24/7 media coverage of conflict ensures that every and any act could be beamed across the globe within seconds of having taken place. In this new context it is perhaps all the more shocking that there are still cases outstanding and that insufficient attention has been granted to the terrible mistakes of the past. A recent COMISAF, General Stanley McChrystal, might well have thought that his policy of ‘courageous restraint’ in Afghanistan reflected a ‘new’ understanding of counterinsurgency. This was despite an ongoing ‘secret war’ using drones in Pakistani airspace with little, if any, regard for civilian casualties. For the British, Afghanistan is merely déjà vu, courageous restraint always required over decades, regrettably not always exercised.

     

     

    Colonel (Rtd), David Benest, OBE

     

    Submitted, April 2011.
19. My boss is Peter Principle on 14th December 2012 12:01 pm

    Another fine way the British colonialist treated their Subjects

     

     

    http://wikibin.org/articles/jam-boy.html
20. kitalba on 14th December 2012 12:02 pm

    Ah that

     

     

    Bugger the gwammer.Thats me I’m all conspired out and I haven’t even begun.
21. Awe_Naw_No_Annoni_Oan_Anaw_Noo on 14th December 2012 12:16 pm

    Kit

     

    Good stuff

     

     

    You will be scrolled past now and ignored by our resident loony.

     

     

    Keep it up

     

     

    HH
22. Invercelt on 14th December 2012 12:16 pm

    Ntassoolla,

     

    I ALWAYS understate (as anyone who’s daft enough to read me on here can confirm).

     

    Of course you’re right about S. Italian wine having been used to strengthen French: the fact that the French denied it could be the basis for another discussion of conspiracy theories, but I won’t go there. It was also used to strengthen wine from N. Italy, but now it’s sold under its own names. After S. Italy was invaded by the Piedmontese 150 years ago, the production of quality wine there was discouraged, but now the quality of the Southern product has re-asserted itself, helped by dedicated producers.

     

    I reckon that you’re right about Italophiles on here: Mrs IC & I both are, with the qualification that we find the country infuriating as well as marvellous (& I’m sure we’re not the only ones).

     

    BTW did you do some Greek (in Latin script)on a recent post?
23. Gretnabhoy on 14th December 2012 12:17 pm

    Can I have a Raspbery…..

     

     

    Pleased you enjoyed it. It’s a good wee local, the only problem (well I say a problem) is the owner Mark is a big blue nose but myself and another local with the same surname are able to keep him right on all things football. Indeed last Saturday he jokingly suggested that he might ban us (it wouldn’t be the first time) and to save both his blushes and the pair of us having to go into Largs for a drink we just chatted about cricket!!!
24. kikinthenakas on 14th December 2012 12:19 pm

    Kitalba

     

     

    The Committee by Sean McPhillemy

     

    Banned in the UK
25. Paul67 on 14th December 2012 12:22 pm

    new article posted.
26. EmeraldBee\o/ proud to be an internet bampot on 14th December 2012 12:24 pm

    Winning Captains

     

     

    have the two for East Kilbride been posted yet? Ordered them last week.
27. celtic *o* lennon on 14th December 2012 12:26 pm

    Finally immortalised in stone next to brother walfrid woop! Only took them 5 months!
29. celtic *o* lennon on 14th December 2012 12:27 pm

    Trains probs on strike sat 22nd cheers guys didn’t really want to go the game anyway :-(
30. Ntassoolla on 14th December 2012 12:51 pm

    Thindimebhoy I understand your concern about attempts to re-ignite the conflict in Northern Ireland and pull Scotland in. It’s been tried many times and has never succeeded.

     

     

    The latest attempts are born out of weakness and desperation.

     

    I say this for the following reasons.

     

     

    The private sector patronage enjoyed by Loyalists in Northern Ireland has disapperead with the demise of private business there.

     

    Their privileged position in the public sector has been steadily eroded since the Good Friday agreement and the introduction of quotas, whether formal or informal.

     

    Public sector housing has shrunk to less than 20% of the market, roughly divided between council and housing association. There’s little opportunity for skulduggery there.

     

     

    Cuts are being made in the public sector and there’s far more to come. Under the current political setup and monitoring in N.I. the Loyalists are taking a hit on these hardships in a way previously unknown to them. This will continue.

     

     

    Since the widespread availability of birth control the birth rate has been significantly higher amongst the nationalist community. But so too has the immigration rate. Immigration amongst Loyalists is on now the increase, so bringing the head counts closer together.

     

    The situation is compounded by huge negative equity and personal indebtedness with no light at the end of the tunnel.

     

     

    For all the publicity given to the Union Jack issue, I didn’t think it attracted much support.

     

     

     

    Academic achievement has always been very high in N.I. More so amongst the Nationalist community. In that same community the spirit of self-reliance has always been very strong as a result of their historical experience. These factors have combined to create individuals well equipped to carve out a place for themselves in the new technologies. And they have. The mirror image of this go ahead attitude is the Loyalist tendency to look to and depend on the state every time they’re in trouble. That state has little to offer now.

     

    The more lumpen loyalist identifies different, and more sinister reasons for this small nationalist success and achievement. Certainly he would have difficulty with my last paragraph.

     

     

    In short, N. Ireland has changed a lot. And the changes are going to affect everyone more or less equally.

     

     

    The above are just my views and observations.

     

     

    Peace to all.

     

     

    HH.
31. Rockon Neil Lennon on 15th December 2012 8:24 am

    God morning all.

     

    Doncaster 210 Easter Meteor
32. Cathal on 15th December 2012 8:59 am

    Ikorodu Road 3.20 Doncaster the one to avoid today.

     

     

    Good luck all.
33. MHARK67 on 15th December 2012 9:00 am

    morning all today’s dunkey is

     

     

    Cheltenham 13:55

     

    BOYFROMNOWHERE

     

    Good luck and HH
34. gourockbhoy on 15th December 2012 9:25 am

    Golden Chieftain – 2.30 Cheltenham is todays selection. I won’t actually be putting any money on it. It will therefore probably win.
35. Valentine's Day on 15th December 2012 9:45 am

    Garynella 1:20 Cheltenham.

     

     

    good luck
36. Che on 15th December 2012 9:46 am

    Boa 450 wolves.
37. fleagle1888 on 15th December 2012 9:48 am

    Lads,

     

     

    naps here today please…

     

     

    fleagle1888
38. fleagle1888 on 15th December 2012 9:54 am

    CQN Saturday Naps Competition – Week 19 Results & Standings

     

     

    No winners in Week 19…

     

     

    +£16.25 green T (7)

     

    +£11.00 Rockon Neil Lennon (7)

     

    +£ 3.50 Sixteen roads to Golgotha (3)

     

    +£ 2.00 Valentine’s Day (3)

     

    +£ 0.50 BULL67 (3)

     

    +£ 0.50 fleagle1888 (3)

     

    -£ 1.50 Che (2)

     

    -£ 3.50 Bada Bing (2)

     

    -£ 4.50 What is the Stars (3)

     

    -£ 8.00 Magnificentseven (1)

     

    -£ 9.80 TheBarcaMole (2)

     

    -£10.00 Cathal (1)

     

    -£10.97 hunza rugli (2)

     

    -£11.00 voguepunter (1)

     

    -£11.50 MHARK67 (2)

     

    -£13.50 Som mes que un club (1)

     

    -£14.00 gerry_bhoy (1)

     

    -£14.50 tommytwisttommyturns (1)

     

    -£15.00 leftclicktic (1)

     

    -£16.00 Glen (1)

     

    -£19.00 bobbymurdoch’s winklepickers

     

    -£19.00 gourockbhoy

     

    -£19.00 Raymac

     

     

    *No selections – Bada Bing, Raymac, Sixteen Roads to Golgotha, TheBarcaMole

     

    Non-Runners –

     

     

    Cheers, fleagle1888
40. Glen on 15th December 2012 10:27 am

    Fluctuation 8.20 Wolverhampton.

     

     

    COYBIG
41. green T on 15th December 2012 10:55 am

    misstree dancer 3.20 donc

     

     

    good luck
42. !!Bada Bing!! on 15th December 2012 11:15 am

    Cristal Bonus 2.30 Cheltenham.hh