Tuesday 13 January 2009

Dirty War in Ireland: British state complicity, collusion, murder

Sinn Fein Publicity Director Danny Morrison has told one of many stories exposing the sometimes incompetent, often uncoordinated, frequently unprincipled fight between the British state/police and the British/Northern Irish Unionist movement, and the Irish/Northern Irish Republican movement.

It was a dirty war. It is a Republican story, and there are other damning stories about the Republican movement's tactics, but this is a true story and needs to be known. All of the violent groups in this struggle for power committed immoral and criminal acts, and "all" includes the British state itself.

Morrison reveals how the British and the Unionists used entrapment, made false charges, committed perjury, used intimidation, conducted kidnappings and cover-ups of attempted murders, conducted cover-ups of murders, even committed murder. Subsequently, they 'block[ed] evidence from trials and inquests in order to cover up state terrorism'.

The British and the Unionists knew that the Republican wanted to meet the informer to arrange a press conference (to expose British state police's shoot-to-kill policy), but they accused the Republican of wanting to assassinate the informer. The "informer" was actually a British agent, who testified in court that 'he agreed to do a Sinn Fein press conference but really believed that he was to be killed'.(1)

In terms of incompetent and uncoordinated action, once, '[t]wo undercover police units,... neither aware of the other's covert presence, had opened fire on each other and killed a colleague.'

As for cold-blooded, shameless complicity in murder, instead of withdrawing a vulnerable agent, 'British intelligence officers... redirected the assassins [away from their agent] to another target, an innocent 66-year-old west Belfast Catholic, Francesco Notarantonio, who was shot dead.' (And in an out-of-control system that increased hatred and prolonged the conflict, the state police in Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), colluded with Unionist/Loyalist extremists in murder - even of human rights lawyers - and its cover-up.)

As for murder itself, the chief Irish Republican Army (IRA) interrogator was actually British state informer "Stakeknife", '[Freddie] Scappaticci... who was allowed by his British military intelligence handlers to capture and kill suspected informers (usually those whose usefulness to the state had expired) in order to maintain his cover within the IRA.'

  1. It's not clear how much control Peter Lynch had at this point. It's possible that his British state bosses were using him rather than employing him. 'Scap[paticci] had offered Lynch the opportunity of appearing at a Sinn Fein press conference and then sent for [Sinn Fein].' But he was the one who kidnapped and attempted to murder Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) fighter Peter Duggan. He was no naive innocent.

7 comments:

  1. So, UK is not much better then Turkey in dealing with separatists insurgents:D. This conflict only got solved because of American involvement.

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  2. Maybe it was solved by a lack of American involvement, after 9/11 made their concerned citizens rather more reluctant to fund terrorism. Maybe it was solved because we made each side's leaders rich and fat, rewarding them for screwing their own communities over by cat-fighting in the Northern Ireland Assembly instead of directing them to bomb each other and us. Even if it were thanks to the Americans, I'm still going to take the opportunity to say my new favourite quote: 'a fat Communist is to be preferred to a thin Communist'.

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  3. Do you reckon Cemil Bayık or Murat Karayılan is a Turkish intelligence officer? If not, we're doing much better than Turkey in dealing with separatist insurgents... We're dealing with ourselves! A few more years and a few more 66-year-old scapegoats and we could have been running the entire IRA! Then we could have given Northern Ireland "complete freedom" and run it as a deep state colony! :D

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  4. "According to his son, Özgür, Mumcu had an appointment with retired prosecutor Baki Tuğ on 27 January to learn more about Abdullah Öcalan's suspected ties with the MİT (the state was officially fighting his militant organization, the PKK).[9] Öcalan was detained on 31 March 1972 while studying political sciences at the University of Ankara. Per clause 16/1 of the Martial Law (№ 1402), he was sentenced to three months in jail for participating in a boycott. He was released on 24 October 1972 after the National Intelligence Organization forwarded a message to the prosecutor handling the case, Tuğ, that one of the suspects was one of their agents. Tuğ later said that he could not remember whether the agent was Öcalan, or one of the other suspects.[10]"
    http://www.milliyet.com.tr/1999/01/24/haber/hab00.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U%C4%9Fur_Mumcu#cite_note-isleyen-9

    According to the Ergenekon file there are relations between PKK and Ergenekon

    ABDULLAH ÖCALAN

    - Veli Küçük, Kenya'da yapılan operasyona karşıydı.
    - Abdullah Öcalan, normalde Moskova’dayken teslim olacaktı. Türkiye’ye gelecekti. Veli Paşa, Öcalan’ın bu şekilde gelişine karşıydı. Hatta Doğan Erbaş "İntihar etsin şerefsiz gelmesin öyle" demiş.
    - PKK Lübnan'da Çevik Bir ile görüştü. Pazarlık yapmışlar ama Bir 1-0 yenilmiş. Çünkü PKK masaya direk hükümet gibi oturmuş.
    - Yakalandıktan sonra İran ve Suriye'deki kampları kapatalım ve gerilla sayısını 3 bine indirilim diye mesaj gönderdi. Avukatıyla ben görüştüm, Veli Küçük'ün örgütteki kod adı Abbas. Mesajı Abbas'a iletirim dedim.
    - Yalçın Küçük Şenkal Atasagun'un hocası, Apo'nun teorisyenidir.
    - Veli Küçük "Apo'nun Avukatı Zeki Okçuoğlu MİT ajanıdır onu tasfiye edin. Gizli bilgileri konuşmayın" dedi. Yerine Doğan Erbaş geldi.
    http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/10777032.asp?gid=229

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  5. You know what Mao said: guerrillas swim in the civilian population like fish in water. So you drain the lake.

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  6. Oookaaay. They're better at dealing with - or, making deals with - separatist insurgents... but we're still better at exploiting then destroying whole societies! Please tell me we're still good at something, even if it's being evil! We have no economic base of our own any more. We have to be able to take other people's, or at least to destroy theirs so they have no economic base either!

    (Here are your links hyperlinked: http://www.milliyet.com.tr/1999/01/24/haber/hab00.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U%C4%9Fur_Mumcu#cite_note-isleyen-9; http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/10777032.asp?gid=229.)

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  7. Yeah, I've been trying to keep up with it all, but I think I might end up like the foreign media.

    It might be just a little over-optimistic, but there is some suggestion that 'exposing [the] Ergenekon-PKK link could solve [the] Kurdish question'. It would help...

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