Kurt Nimmo | September 23 2005

Jarlath Kearney, writing for the Daily Ireland, draws a crucial comparison that will of course be completely ignored by the larger corporate media. The incident in Basra, where two SAS undercover operatives were captured, dressed as Arabs and driving a car loaded with weapons and explosives, is similar to an earlier incident in Northern Ireland, where the SAS operated for years. “The incident drew parallels with the March 1988 attack on the funeral of IRA volunteer Caoimhghin Mac Bradaigh,” writes Kearney. “During that incident, two armed and undercover army intelligence operatives drove directly at the cortege in west Belfast. After firing a shot, both soldiers were subsequently captured, beaten and shot dead by the IRA.” Lucky for the British intelligence operatives in Basra, they were not murdered, although apparently beaten.

Kearney also mentions that Brigadier (in the Intelligence Corps) Gordon Kerr, who “played a key role in the activities of covert British activities in the North [of Ireland],” is “now stationed with British forces in Iraq.” Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor of the Sunday Herald, characterizes Kerr as “the archetypal spy; a spook’s spook and a master of dirty tricks and dirty wars,” on the same level “as pond life” (according to “regular squaddies and military brass”), “[h]ighly effective, immensely powerful and very dangerous pond life, but pond life nevertheless.” Kerr and his Force Research Unit (FRU) not only “handed packages of photographs and military reports detailing the movements and addresses of potential targets, which in turn were passed to loyalist murder gangs” in Northern Ireland (essentially organizing targeted assassinations), but also “carried out more ‘flag tours’—secret intelligence missions [in Berlin, circa 1983-85]—than the French and US military intelligence put together” and were thus described by an “officer who served with Kerr in Berlin” as “pointlessly aggressive and confrontational.” An intelligence officer who knew Kerr portrayed him as “the perfect advocate of the ends justifying the means.”

In Britain, as in America, criminals and terrorists are rewarded for their murderous behavior. In February, 2003, Kerr was “sent to the Gulf to head up British spying activities in the Middle East as part of preparations for action in Iraq,” Mackay reported for the Sunday Herald. “The move has been described as a ‘get out of jail free card’ for Kerr.” Prior to this assignment, Kerr was rewarded with a military attache position in Beijing. “The fact that Kerr seems to be playing a key role in the coming war suggests that all the activities that he was involved in were sanctioned at the highest level,” remarked Jane Winter, the director of British Irish Rights Watch.

A FRU source told Mackay in 2000 that what “was happening [in Northern Ireland] may have been occurring outside the law but the establishment [at the time, Secretary of State for Defense, George Younger, Ulster Secretary, Tom King, PM Margaret Thatcher, and General Sir John Waters, the general officer commanding in Northern Ireland] knew what was happening.” Likewise the “establishment” knows what is happening in Iraq—no doubt the sort of “dirty war” launched by the likes of Gordon Kerr and FRU is confirmed British policy (a collaborative effort with American intelligence and Rumsfeld’s Pentagon), well “outside the law.”

Naturally, all of this is simply irrelevant because the corporate media will not report it—instead, in the wake of the embarrassing revelations of SAS undercover agents posing as Arabs, the media has turned its attention toward Iran, accused (as usual) of organizing and funding the murder of British and American occupation soldiers in Iraq. In the period of a day or so, all reference to the SAS and its “dirty tricks and dirty wars,” more alluded to than actually investigated, have disappeared down the memory hole, replaced by archetypal terrorists of the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sort.

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