Announcement

**Gavur** · 08-10-2005, 05:46 PM

Journalist 'not shot by police'

Journalist 'not shot by police'

Thursday August 11, 2005
The Guardian

A senior British official yesterday blamed Islamists for the murder of Steven Vincent, an American journalist, in Iraq last week, writes Ewen MacAskill.
The official rejected speculation that Vincent had been killed by Iraqi police in Basra, angry at his articles which claim they have been carrying out assassinations.

British and Iraqi officials have spoken to Noriya Ita'is, Vincent's interpreter, who was also shot but survived.

Vincent, 49, and Ms Ita'is, 31, were abducted last week in Basra and questioned for five hours. They were told to run and were then shot.

**Gavur** · 08-11-2005, 11:57 PM

Slain writer played key role ....

Slain writer played key role for park and for Pagan

The Villager (New York)
Volume 75, Number 12
August 10 - 16, 2005

By Lincoln Anderson

Steven Vincent of E. 11th St., who was murdered on Aug. 2 in Basra,
will go down in history as the first American journalist killed in
Iraq. But before his tragic end he also carved a place for himself in
East Village history as a core member of the group that brought City
Councilmember Antonio Pagan to power and helped bring about the
cleanup of Tompkins Square Park.

Vincent, 49, an art journalist turned war correspondent, had returned
to Iraq three months ago for his third visit there since the start of
the war. He was planning to come back to the East Village in
mid-August to write a book on the history of the city of Basra. The
Sunday before his murder he had written a column that ran in The New
York Times charging that insurgents had infiltrated the Iraqi police
in Basra and were acting as a death squad.

Speaking last Sunday, Lisa Ramaci, Vincent's widow, said she felt the
Times column probably is what caused his death.

`I'm going to say that was the straw that broke the camel's back,' she
said. `He was going around asking a lot of probing questions,
including to a lot of [radical cleric] Motaq al-Sadr's men. He was
going around with a female translator - that was offensive to
them. Steve was saying Basra had fallen under the control of radical
Shiites - and they want women to walk around in a bag. I think he was
basically killed to shut him up. Steve pulled no punches, he called
them as he saw them, and that's why he's dead,' Ramaci said.

Vincent and his translator were abducted by masked gunmen after he had
left a money-changing business. Vincent was shot once in the head and
four times in the torso, according to Ramaci. His interpreter was shot
three times in the chest, but survived. Ramaci said official sources
told her that the two were taken to a warehouse where their captors
were overheard shouting and cursing at them for five or six hours -
calling Vincent an infidel and his translator a xxxxx - before they
were killed.

Ramaci said the translator is being held at a military hospital and
believes she can identify two of the perpetrators.

Vincent had visited Iraq twice before, in the fall of 2003 and in
early 2004. These trips produced a book, `In the Red Zone.' He also
wrote for the National Review and Christian Science Monitor while in
Iraq.

On 9/11, Vincent had watched from his rooftop as the second hijacked
jet hit the twin towers and then and there decided to write about
political issues.

`He didn't sleep for weeks. He was so freaked out at what he saw,'
Ramaci said. `He didn't want to go back to art journalism.

Ramaci said Vincent, who was of Armenian descent, had become
fascinated with Islam and had read the Koran and tons of books about
the religion.

Before leaving for Iraq this last time, Ramaci said Vincent told her
that if he got killed it should be considered `a casualty of war - and
you can chalk me up as one more victim of the World Trade Center.'

Vincent was from California and hitchhiked his way to New York. He and
Ramaci met while they were smoking in the lobby of a Times Square
movie theater showing `The Road Warrior.'

Ramaci had homesteaded a building on E. 11th St. that the city took
from a derelict landlord, and two years after meeting, Vincent moved
in with her. Concerned at the direction of the neighborhood and
wanting to do something about it, they were among the 13 founding
members, along with Pagan, of the Democratic Action Club. DAC felt
that, after 19 years representing the neighborhood, Councilmember
Miriam Friedlander had to go. Pagan was their candidate.

They were tired of all-night `metal jams' in the park without a curfew
at which people would pound away on fenders or garbage can lids or
anything metal they could get their hands on. After the 1988 riot over
the proposed curfew, the administration left Tompkins Square alone for
four or five years and it became a homeless tent city. Parents had to
clean up hypodermic needles from playgrounds before their children
could play in them. Their were complaints about `aggressive
panhandling.' DAC said enough was enough. Vincent, in particular,
personally took on the squatters who at one point were in as many as
25 buildings, gaining their everlasting enmity.

Vincent, who was first a writer and then editor of the East Villager,
a local newspaper, became the club's main writer. With Howard Hemsley,
Pagan's campaign manager for both of Pagan's elections, Vincent wrote
DAC's `manifesto,' which was printed on the back of the East Villager,
and also their `10 points' flier that was posted around the
neighborhood. The flier asked if people wanted the park back or if
they were tired of Friedlander's policies, with `Join us,' written
after each point. Vincent was more active in Pagan's first campaign.

Pagan, who represented the Second District from 1991-97, now works for
Lower East Side Coalition Housing. He said he rarely speaks to the
press, but that `This is important.'

`He was a man of conviction,' Pagan said of Vincent. `Not only a
dreamer, but a man who transformed things by his actions. You can see
what we call `the liberation of the streets and park.'

`At every step of the way, there was Steven,' Pagan said. `There was a
major team effort, but if you were to separate the few that actually
impacted things, he was there. He was a true renaissance man. He died
fighting for what he felt was the truth. It was a big loss, personally
and collectively.'

Hemsley kiddingly referred to Vincent as DAC's `minister of
propaganda.' He said Vincent did have a particular ax to grind with
squatters, noting that Vincent was adamant about including language
criticizing them in their `manifesto' and other literature.

`I remember working with him on the mission statement of purpose for
our club,' Hemsley said. Part of the statement that Vincent insisted
be included was that DAC would `refuse to glorify poverty.' `Steve was
very big on this,' Hemsley said, `upper-class kids coming down to the
Lower East Side to pretend to be poor for the glamour of poverty. What
the squatters did was jump in before people who were poor, old or
unable to squat.'

One specific point on this theme in the mission statement was: `We
reject the myth that poverty is cool, somehow politically correct or a
way to hide from adult responsibility.'

There were poster wars, in which the squatters would doctor DAC's
posters, Hemsley said.

Vincent served for two years on Community Board 3, appointed by
Pagan. Ramaci served on the board for six years, headed its State
Liquor Authority Committee, and was also elected a Democratic district
leader for two years. But the DAC members eventually went back to
their private lives after they felt their job had been done, Hemsley
said; they weren't professional politicians to begin with, just
concerned citizens. After the park was renovated, they tried to bring
positive uses to it, like the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, he said.

Kate Walter was also appointed by Pagan to C.B. 3 at the same time as
Vincent.

`He was active in getting the park restored to the community so it was
usable,' Walter said. `We were considered conservative on the
community board because we didn't want a tent city in Tompkins Square
Park. The anarchists all thought it should remain that way. I think
a lot of people felt like Steve and me,' Walter said, `but they were
afraid to say it, because nobody wanted to be called a yuppie or a
gentrifier. And nobody wanted to have another riot, either.'

Vincent had a running battle with the East Village's anarchist
newspaper, The Shadow. However, The Shadow's Chris Flash said
hostilities between them had diminished in recent years.

`I will admit, in recent years, we had an amicable,
respect-each-other's-differences sort of relationship,' Flash
said. `There was no animosity.' Recalling their past newspaper wars,
he said, `He had a vehicle to attack and we had a vehicle to attack
back. We didn't draw first blood - they did.'

A memorial will be held in September, Ramaci said, adding that she is
thinking of starting a foundation in his name as a Committee to
Protect Journalists.

`Steven didn't have the money to hire a security guard or a driver,'
Ramaci said. `He had himself, his wits and his translator.'

Ramaci said Vincent's body was still in Basra, where it was being
autopsied, and that it would be autopsied again when it was returned
to America. He will be buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

**Gavur** · 08-23-2005, 11:18 PM

"It's called courage"

Murdoc Online

August 21, 2005
"It's called courage"
I received this as a comment on a post noting Juan Cole's theories about the murder of Steven Vincent. It's from Vincent's wife, and she thinks, well, I'll let you read for yourself. I'm posting it here in its entirety, and it's worth every bit. All emphasis is mine:

I thought you might like to see the email I sent Juan Cole in response to his August 8th post about my husband. Sorry if it runs a little long -

"Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man's honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner."

Mr. Cole -
(I refuse to call you professor, because that would ennoble you. And please change the name of your blog to "Uninformed Comment", because that is precisely what the above paragraph is.)

I would like to refute this shameful post against a dead man who can no longer defend himself against your scurrilous accusations, a dead man who also happened to be my husband. Steven Vincent and I were together for 23 years, married for 13 of them, and I think I know him a wee bit better than you do.

For starters, Steven and Nour were not "romantically involved". If you knew anything at all about the Middle East, as you seem to think you do, then you would know that there is no physical way that he and she could have ever been alone together. Nour (who always made sure to get home before dark, so they were never together at night) could not go to his room; he could not go to her house; there was no hot-sheet motel for them to go to for a couple of hours. They met in public, they went about together in public, they parted in public. They were never alone. She would not let him touch her arm, pay her a compliment, buy her a banana on the street, hyper-aware of how such gestures might be interpreted by the misogynistic cretins who surrounded her daily. So for you brazenly claim that she was "sleeping around," when there is no earthly way you could possibly know that, suggests to me that you are quite the misogynist as well. Cheap shot, Mr. Cole, against a remarkable woman who does not in any wise deserve it.

This is not to say that Steven did not love Nour - he did. And he was quite upfront about it to me. But it was not sexual love - he loved her for her courage, her bravery, her indomitable spirit in the face of the Muslim thugs who have oppressed their women for years. To him she represented a free and democratic Iraq, and all of the hopes he had for that still-elusive creature. And he loved her for the help she gave him - endangering herself by affiliating with him because she wanted the truth to come out about what was happening in her native city of Basra and the surrounding area. Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that it is possible to love someone in a strictly platonic way, but I assure you, it can happen - even between men and women.

And yes, he was planning to to convert to Islam and marry Nour, but only to take her out of the country to England, where she had a standing job offer, set her up with the friends she had over there, divorce her, and come back to New York. He had gotten her family's permission to do so (thereby debunking the "honor killing" theory), but more importantly, he had gotten mine. He called one night to say that it had been intimated to him that Nour's life was essentially going to be worthless after he left; since he was an honorable man (a breed you might want to familiarize yourself with), he then asked what I thought he might do to help her. I told him to get her out of the country and bring her here to New York. However, the only way she could have left Iraq was with a family member or husband. Since her family had no intention of going anywhere, Steven was her only recourse, and it would have been perfectly legal for him to convert, marry her, then take her out of Iraq to give her a chance at a real life. (Now that that avenue is closed to her, I have made inquiries to the State Department about the possibility of my sponsoring her in America. Do you perhaps labor under the misapprehension I am such a spineless cuckold that I would put myself out thusly for the woman you believe my husband was traducing me with? If so, I'm guessing you don't know much about the Sicilian female temperament.)

As to your claim that "In Mediterranean culture, a man's honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men", it may perhaps have escaped your notice that Iraq does not abut, in any way, shape or form, the Mediterranean Sea. Italy is a Mediterranean culture, as are Spain, Greece, Southern France. In none of them is "honor killing" an accepted form of "protecting womanhood". As to the southerly lands like Morocco and Algeria, they are not, in the general scheme of things, considered Mediterranean cultures - they are considered Arabic, a whole different beast. For you to seemingly be unaware of this, and then to say that my husband "did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture" again begs the question, just where do you get off? If you cannot differentiate between Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, how is it you feel qualified to pontificate so pompously?
How often have you been to the Middle East, Mr. Cole? In 2000 Steven and I spent almost a month in Iran on vacation. In 2003 we spent 10 days over Christmas in Jordan. In the last 2 years he had made not one, not two, but three trips to Iraq, and at the time of his death had about 7 months of daily living there under his belt. Can you offer comparables?

How much Arabic do you speak, Mr. Cole? Steven had been learning Arabic for the last two years, and was able to converse simply but effectively with the people he came into contact with. He had many expatriate friends in the Muslim world from whom he was always learning. As I sit here writing this at what was his desk, I can look at the literally dozens of books he devoured about Islam and the Middle East - each one thick with Post-It notes and personal observations he made in the pages - as he sought to comprehend and absorb the complexities of the culture and the religion he felt, and cared, so deeply about. If you would like a list of them, please email me back and I will be happy to send you a comprehensive accounting.

Yes, Steven was aggressive in criticizing what he saw around him and did not like. It's called courage, and it happens to be a tradition in the history of this country. Without this tradition there would have been no Revolutionary War, no Civil War, no civil rights movement, no a lot of things that America can be proud of. He had made many friends in Iraq, and was afraid for them if the religious fundamentalists were given the country to run under shari'a. You may dismiss that as naive, simplistic, foolish, but I say to you, as you sit safely in your ivory tower in Michigan with nothing threatening your comfy, tenured existence, that you should be ashamed at the depths to which you have sunk by libeling Steven and Nour. They were on the front lines, risking all, in an attempt to call attention to the growing storm threatening to overwhelm a fragile and fledgling experiment in democracy, trying to get the world to see that all was not right in Iraq. And for their efforts, Steven is dead and Nour is recuperating with three bullet wound in her back. Yes, that's right - the "honorable" men who abducted them, after binding them, holding them captive and beating them, set them free, told them to run - and then shot them both in the back. I've seen the autopsy report.

You did not know him - you did not have that honor, and you will never have the chance, thanks to the murderous goons for whom you have appointed yourself an apologist. He was a brilliant, erudite, witty, charming, kind, generous, silly, funny, decent, honorable and complex man, who loved a good cigar, Bombay Sapphire gin martinis, Marvel Silver Age comic books, Frank Sinatra, opera and grossing me out with bathroom humor. And if he was acting in a dangerous manner, he had a very good excuse - he was utterly exhausted. He had been in Basra for 3 months under incredibly stressful conditions, working every day, and towards the end enduring heat of 135 degrees, often without air conditioning, which could not have helped his mental condition or judgment. He was yearning to come home, as his emails to me made crystal clear. But on August 2nd, two days before my birthday, he made the fatal mistake of walking one block - one - from his hotel to the money exchange, rather than take a cab, and now will never come back to me. I got a bouquet of flowers from him on August 4th, which he had ordered before he died, and the card said he was sorry to miss my birthday, but the flowers would stand in his stead until he made it home. They are drying now in the kitchen, the final gift from my soulmate.

I did not see your blog until tonight. I was busy doing other things - fighting the government to get Steven's body returned from Basra days after I was told he would be sent home, planning the funeral, buying a cemetery plot, choosing the clothes to bury him in, writing the prayer card, fending off the media, dealing with his aging parents, waking and then burying him - but I could not let the calumnies you posted so freely against two total strangers go unchallenged.

You strike me as a typical professor - self-opinionated, arrogant, so sure of the rightness of your position that you won't even begin to consider someone else's. I would suggest that you ought to be ashamed of yourself for your breathtaking presumption in eviscerating Steven in death and disparaging Nour in life, but, like any typical professor, I have no doubt that you are utterly shameless.

Sincerely,

Lisa Ramaci-Vincent

**Gavur** · 10-03-2005, 07:14 PM

Were British SAS Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra?

Tuesday, 4 October 2005, 12:18 pm

Suspicions Strengthened by Earlier Reports
by Michael Keefer
September 25, 2005
GlobalResearch.caDoes anyone remember the shock with which the British public greeted the revelation four years ago that one of the members of the Real IRA unit whose bombing attack in Omagh on August 15, 1998 killed twenty-nine civilians had been a double agent, a British army soldier?

That soldier was not Britain�s only terrorist double agent. A second British soldier planted within the IRA claimed he had given forty-eight hours advance notice of the Omagh car-bomb attack to his handlers within the Royal Ulster Constabulary, including "details of one of the bombing team and the man�s car registration." Although the agent had made an audio tape of his tip-off call, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, chief constable of the RUC, declared that "no such information was received" (http://www.sundayherald.com/17827).

This second double agent went public in June 2002 with the claim that from 1981 to 1994, while on full British army pay, he had worked for "the Force Research Unit, an ultra-secret wing of British military intelligence," as an IRA mole. With the full knowledge and consent of his FRU and MI5 handlers, he became a bombing specialist who "mixed explosive and � helped to develop new types of bombs," including "light-sensitive bombs, activated by photographic flashes, to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices having their signal jammed by army radio units." He went on to become "a member of the Provisional IRA�s �internal security squad��also known as the �torture unit��which interrogated and executed suspected informers" (http://www.sundayherald.com/print25646).

The much-feared commander of that same "torture unit" was likewise a mole, who had previously served in the Royal Marines� Special Boat Squadron (an elite special forces unit, the Marines� equivalent to the better-known SAS). A fourth mole, a soldier code-named "Stakeknife" whose military handlers "allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA," was still active in December 2002 as "one of Belfast�s leading Provisionals" (http://www.sundayherald.com/29997).

Reliable evidence also emerged in late 2002 that the British army had been using its double agents in terrorist organizations "to carry out proxy assassinations for the British state"�most notoriously in the case of Belfast solicitor and human rights activist Pat Finucane, who was murdered in 1989 by the Protestant Ulster Defence Association. It appears that the FRU passed on details about Finucane to a British soldier who had infiltrated the UDA; he in turn "supplied UDA murder teams with the information" (http://www.sundayherald.com/29997).

Recent events in Basra have raised suspicions that the British army may have reactivated these same tactics in Iraq.

Articles published by Michel Chossudovsky, Larry Chin and Mike Whitney at the Centre for Research on Globalization�s website on September 20, 2005 have offered preliminary assessments of the claims of Iraqi authorities that two British soldiers in civilian clothes who were arrested by Iraqi police in Basra on September 19�and in short order released by a British tank and helicopter assault on the prison where they were being held�had been engaged in planting bombs in the city

A further article by Kurt Nimmo points to false-flag operations carried out by British special forces troops in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and to Donald Rumsfeld�s formation of the P2OG, or Proactive Preemptive Operations Group, as directly relevant to Iraqi charges of possible false-flag terror operations by the occupying powers in Iraq

These accusations by Iraqi officials echo insistent but unsubstantiated claims, going back at least to the spring of 2004, to the effect that many of the terror bombings carried out against civilian targets in Iraq have actually been perpetrated by U.S. and British forces rather than by Iraqi insurgents.

Some such claims can be briskly dismissed. In mid-May 2005, for example, a group calling itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" accused U.S. troops "of detonating car bombs and falsely accusing militants" (LINK). For even the most credulous, this could at best be a case of the pot calling the kettle soot-stained. But it�s not clear why anyone would want to believe this claim, coming as it does from a group or groupuscule purportedly led by the wholly mythical al-Zarqawi�and one whose very name affiliates it with terror bombers. These people, if they exist, might themselves have good reason to blame their own crimes on others.

Other claims, however, are cumulatively more troubling.

The American journalist Dahr Jamail wrote in April 20, 2004 that the recent spate of car bombings in Baghdad was widely rumoured to have been the work of the CIA:

"The word on the street in Baghdad is that the cessation of suicide car bombings is proof that the CIA was behind them. Why? Because as one man states, �[CIA agents are] too busy fighting now, and the unrest they wanted to cause by the bombings is now upon them.� True or not, it doesn�t bode well for the occupiers� image in Iraq." (countercurrents.org)Two days later, on April 22, 2004, Agence France-Presse reported that five car-bombings in Basra�three near-simultaneous attacks outside police stations in Basra that killed sixty-eight people, including twenty children, and two follow-up bombings�were being blamed by supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on the British. While eight hundred supporters demonstrated outside Sadr�s offices, a Sadr spokesman claimed to have "evidence that the British were involved in these attacks" (http://www.inq7.net/wnw/2004/apr/23/wnw_3_1.htm).

An anonymous senior military officer said on April 22, 2004 of these Basra attacks that "It looks like Al-Qaeda. It�s got all the hallmarks: it was suicidal, it was spectacular and it was symbolic." Brigadier General Nick Carter, commander of the British garrison in Basra, stated more ambiguously that Al Qaeda was not necessarily to blame for the five bombings, but that those responsible came from outside Basra and "quite possibly" from outside Iraq: "�All that we can be certain of is that this is something that came from outside,� Carter said" (http://www.inq7.net/wnw/2004/apr/23/wnw_4_1.htm). Moqtada al-Sadr�s supporters of course believed exactly the same thing�differing only in their identification of the criminal outsiders as British agents rather than as Islamist mujaheddin from other Arab countries.

In May 2005 �Riverbend�, the Baghdad author of the widely-read blog Baghdad Burning, reported that what the international press was reporting as suicide bombings were often in fact "car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs." After one of the larger recent blasts, which occurred in the middle-class Ma�moun area of west Baghdad, a man living in a house in front of the blast site was reportedly arrested for having sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman. But according to �Riverbend�, his neighbours had a different story:

"People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb. Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away."
(Baghdad Burning � May 18, 2005 )
Also in May 2005, Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi-exile physicist whose writings helped to discredit American and British fabrications about weapons of mass destruction, reported a story that in Baghdad a driver whose license had been confiscated at an American check-point was told "to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license." After being questioned for half an hour, he was informed that there was nothing against him, but that his license had been forwarded to the Iraqi police at the al-Khadimiya station "for processing"�and that he should get there quickly before the lieutenant whose name he was given went off his shift.

"The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him. He stopped the car and inspected it carefully. He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors. The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated �hideous attack by foreign elements�."
(Albasrah.Net � 16th May 2005)
According to Khadduri, "The same scenario was repeated in Mosul, in the north of Iraq." On this occasion, the driver�s life was saved when his car broke down on the way to the police station where he was supposed to reclaim his license, and when the mechanic to whom he had recourse "discovered that the spare tire was fully laden with explosives."

Khadduri mentions, as deserving of investigation, a "perhaps unrelated incident" in Baghdad on April 28, 2005 in which a Canadian truck-driver with dual Canadian-Iraqi citizenship was killed. He quotes a CBC report according to which "Some media cited unidentified sources who said he may have died after U.S. forces �tracked� a target, using a helicopter gunship, but Foreign Affairs said it�s still investigating conflicting reports of the death. U. S. officials have denied any involvement."

Another incident, also from April 2005, calls more urgently for investigation, since one of its victims remains alive. Abdul Amir Younes, a CBS cameraman, was lightly wounded by U.S. forces on April 5 "while filming the aftermath of a car bombing in Mosul." American military authorities were initially apologetic about his injuries, but three days later arrested him on the grounds that he had been "engaged in anti-coalition activity"
( huffingtonpost.com).

Arianna Huffington, in her detailed account of this case, quite rightly emphasizes its Kafkaesque qualities: Younes has now been detained, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, for more than five months�without charges, without any hint of what evidence the Pentagon may hold against him, and without any indication that he will ever be permitted to stand trial, challenge that evidence, and disprove the charges that might at some future moment be laid. But in addition to confirming, yet again, the Pentagon�s willingness to violate the most fundamental principles of humane and democratic jurisprudence, this case also raises a further question. Was Younes perhaps arrested, like the Iraqi whose rumoured fate was mentioned by �Riverbend�, because he had seen�and in Younes� case photographed�more than was good for him?

Agents provocateurs?

Spokesmen for the American and British occupation of Iraq, together with newspapers like the Daily Telegraph, have of course rejected with indignation any suggestion that their forces could have been involved in false-flag terrorist operations in Iraq.

It may be remembered that during the 1980s spokesmen for the government of Ronald Reagan likewise heaped ridicule on Nicaraguan accusations that the U.S. was illegally supplying weapons to the �Contras��until, that is, a CIA-operated C-123 cargo aircraft full of weaponry was shot down over Nicaragua, and Eugene Hasenfus, a cargo handler who survived the crash, testified that his supervisors (one of whom was Luis Posada Carriles, the CIA agent responsible for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner) were working for then-Vice-President George H. W. Bush.

The arrest�and the urgent liberation�of the two undercover British soldiers in Iraq might in a similar manner be interpreted as casting a retrospective light on previously unsubstantiated claims about the involvement of members of the occupying armies in terrorist bombing attacks on civilians.

The parallel is far from exact: in this case there has been no dramatic confession like that of Hasenfus, and there are no directly incriminating documents like the pilot�s log of the downed C-123. There is, moreover, a marked lack of consensus as to what actually happened in Basra. Should we therefore, with Juan Cole, dismiss the possibility British soldiers were acting as agents provocateurs as a "theory [that] has almost no facts behind it" (http://www.juancole.com)?

**Gavur** · 10-03-2005, 07:15 PM

Members of Britain's Elite SAS Forces

Members of Britain's Elite SAS Forces

It appears that when on September 19 suspicious Iraqi police stopped the Toyota Cressida the undercover British soldiers were driving, the two men opened fire, killing one policeman and wounding another. But the soldiers, identified by the BBC as "members of the SAS elite special forces" (BBC News), were subdued by the police and arrested. A report published by The Guardian on September 24 adds the further detail that the SAS men "are thought to have been on a surveillance mission outside a police station in Basra when they were challenged by an Iraqi police patrol" (Guardian Unlimited).

As Justin Raimondo has observed in an article published on September 23 at Antiwar.com, nearly every other aspect of this episode is disputed.

The Washington Post dismissively remarked, in the eighteenth paragraph of its report on these events, that "Iraqi security officials variously accused the two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or trying to plant explosives" (SF Gate). Iraqi officials in fact accused them not of one or the other act, but of both.

Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, told Al-Jazeera TV on September 19 that the soldiers opened fire when the police sought to arrest them, and that their car was booby-trapped "and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market" (quoted by Chossudovsky). A deliberately inflammatory press release sent out on the same day by the office of Moqtada al-Sadr (and posted in English translation at Juan Cole�s Informed Comment blog on September 20) states that the soldiers� arrest was prompted by their having "opened fire on passers-by" near a Basra mosque, and that they were found to have "in their possession explosives and remote-control devices, as well as light and medium weapons and other accessories" (http://www.juancole.com).

What credence can be given to the claim about explosives? Justin Raimondo writes that while initial BBC Radio reports acknowledged that the two men indeed had explosives in their car, subsequent reports from the same source indicated that the Iraqi police found nothing beyond "assault rifles, a light machine gun, an anti-tank weapon, radio gear, and medical kit. This is thought to be standard kit for the SAS operating in such a theater of operations" (http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7366).

One might well wonder, with Raimondo, whether an anti-tank weapon is "standard operating equipment"�or what use SAS men on "a surveillance mission outside a police station" intended to make of it. But more importantly, a photograph published by the Iraqi police and distributed by Reuters shows that�unless the equipment is a plant�the SAS men were carrying a good deal more than just the items acknowledged by the BBC.

Image from Albasrah.netI would want the opinion of an arms expert before risking a definitive judgment about the objects shown, which could easily have filled the trunk and much of the back seat of a Cressida. But this photograph makes plausible the statement of Sheik Hassan al-Zarqani, a spokesman for Al-Sadr�s Mahdi Army militia:

"What our police found in their car was very disturbing�weapons, explosives, and a remote control detonator. These are the weapons of terrorists. We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets�" (quoted by Raimondo) The fierce determination of the British army to remove these men from any danger of interrogation by their own supposed allies in the government the British are propping up�even when their rescue entailed the destruction of an Iraqi prison and the release of a large number of prisoners, gun-battles with Iraqi police and with Al-Sadr�s Mahdi Army militia, a large popular mobilization against the British occupying force, and a subsequent withdrawal of any cooperation on the part of the regional government�tends, if anything, to support the view that this episode involved something much darker and more serious than a mere flare-up of bad tempers at a check-point.

US-UK Sponsored Civil War

There is reason to believe, moreover, that the open civil war which car-bomb attacks on civilians seem intended to produce would not be an unwelcome development in the eyes of the occupation forces.

Writers in the English-language corporate media have repeatedly noted that recent terror-bomb attacks which have caused massive casualties among civilians appear to be pushing Iraq towards a civil war of Sunnis against Shiites, and of Kurds against both. For example, on September 18, 2005 Peter Beaumont proposed in The Observer that the slaughter of civilians, which he ascribes to Al Qaeda alone, "has one aim: civil war" (Observer).

But H. D. S. Greenway had already suggested on June 17, 2005 in the Boston Globe that "Given the large number of Sunni-led attacks against Shia targets, the emerging Shia-led attacks against Sunnis, and the extralegal abductions of Arabs by Kurdish authorities in Kirkut, one has to wonder whether the long-feared Iraqi civil war hasn�t already begun" (Bodton Globe).

And on September 21, 2005 Nancy Youssef and Mohammed al Dulaimy of the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau wrote that the ethnic cleansing of Shiites in predominantly Sunni Baghdad neighbourhoods "is proceeding at an alarming and potentially destabilizing pace," and quoted the despairing view of an Iraqi expert:

"�Civil war today is closer than any time before,� said Hazim Abdel Hamid al Nuaimi, a professor of politics at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. �All of these explosions, the efforts by police and purging of neighbourhoods is a battle to control Baghdad.�"
(Realcities.com)

Whether or not it has already begun or will occur, the eruption of a full-blown civil war, leading to the fragmentation of the country, would clearly be welcomed in some circles. Israeli strategists and journalists proposed as long ago as 1982 that one of their country�s strategic goals should be the partitioning of Iraq into a Shiite state, a Sunni state, and a separate Kurdish part. (See foreign ministry official Oded Yinon�s "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," Kivunim 14 [February 1982]; a similar proposal put forward by Ze�ev Schiff in Ha�aretz in the same month is noted by Noam Chomsky in Fateful Triangle [2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999], p. 457).

A partitioning of Iraq into sections defined by ethnicity and by Sunni-Shia differences would entail, obviously enough, both civil war and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. But these considerations did not deter Leslie H. Gelb from advocating in the New York Times, on November 25, 2003, what he called "The Three-State Solution". (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/iraq/three.htm).

Gelb, a former senior State Department and Pentagon official, a former editor and columnist for the New York Times, and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, is an insider�s insider. And if the essays of Yinon and Schiff are nasty stuff, especially in the context of Israel�s 1981 bombing attack on Iraq�s Osirak nuclear reactor, there is still some difference between speculatively proposing the dismemberment of a powerful neighbouring country, and actively advocating the dismemberment of a country that one�s own nation has conquered in a war of unprovoked aggression. The former might be described as a diseased imagining of war and criminality; the latter belongs very clearly to the category of war crimes.

Gelb�s essay proposes punishing the Sunni-led insurgency by separating the largely Sunni centre of present-day Iraq from the oil-rich Kurdish north and the oil-rich Shia south. It holds out the dismembering of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s (with the appalling slaughters that ensued) as a "hopeful precedent."

Gelb�s essay has been widely interpreted as signaling the intentions of a dominant faction in the U.S. government. It has also, very appropriately, been denounced by Bill Vann as openly promoting "a war crime of world-historic proportions" (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/no...elb-n26.shtml).

Given the increasing desperation of the American and British governments in the face of an insurgency that their tactics of mass arbitrary arrest and torture, Phoenix-Program or "Salvadoran-option" death squads, unrestrained use of overwhelming military force, and murderous collective punishment have failed to suppress, it comes as no surprise that in recent military actions such as the assault on Tal Afar the U.S. army has been deploying Kurdish peshmerga troops and Shiite militias in a manner that seems designed to inflame ethnic hatreds.

No one, I should hope, is surprised any longer by the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi�that fictional construct of the Pentagon�s serried ranks of little Tom Clancies, that one-legged Dalek, that Scarlet Pimpernel of terrorism, who manages to be here, there, and everywhere at once�should be so ferociously devoted to the terrorizing and extermination of his Shiite co-religionists.

Should we be any more surprised, then, to see evidence emerging in Iraq of false-flag terrorist bombings conducted by the major occupying powers? The secret services and special forces of both the U.S. and Britain have, after all, had some experience in these matters.

*************
Global Research Contributing Editor Michael Keefer is Prfoessor of English at the University of Guelph. He is a former President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. His most recent writings include a series of articles on electoral fraud in the 2004 US presidential election published by the Centre for Research on Globalization

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles in their entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text & title are not modified. The source must be acknowledged and an active URL hyperlink address to the original CRG article must be indicated. The author's copyright note must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: [email protected]

To express your opinion on this article, join the discussion at Global Research's News and Discussion Forum
For media inquiries: [email protected]

� Copyright Michael Keefer, GlobalResearch.ca, 2005

Announcement

Forum Rules (Everyone Must Read!!!)

Steven Vincent, 1956-2005

Steven Vincent, 1956-2005

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment