INCIDENT AT BASRA: THE ROSETTA STONE OF 'IRAQI INSURGENT' TERRORISM
Few readers can be unaware by now that on Monday, September 19, in the southern,
British-controlled portion of Iraq, Iraqi police apprehended two men, disguised as Arabs
- they were dressed, in fact, as members of Moqtada al Sadr’s militia force,
the Mehdi Army. The matter of their identity remains unsettled. Although Brigadier John Lorimer, the Brigade Commander of the 12 Mechanised Brigade, has acknowledged the men to be British soldiers, the head of Basra police has stated otherwise, and a Basra judge, Raghib Hasan, has called for their re-arrest on that basis. There has been conjecture that they were Israeli, which would indicate Mossad involvement, as well as a report that they were carrying Canadian passports. Since Canada is not officially involved in the Iraq misadventure, it would obviously be a great national scandal in that country if the population were to learn that their government had permitted Canadians to assist the Anglo-American occupation forces in an undercover capacity. Alternatively, operatives from Israel (or another country) may be making use of stolen or fraudulently-obtained Canadian passports, which would be a scandal in itself.
It is impossible to determine precisely the circumstances in which the men were apprehended. In one report, they were caught while escaping by car after firing on a Basra police station where a crowd had gathered demanding the release of a senior Sadr official, Sheikh Ahmad Fartusi, who had been arrested the previous day. (SOURCE) However, there are also reports that they were captured after they attracted suspicion while trying to pass through an Iraqi police checkpoint.
BELOW: The would-be terrorists
(Photo from Prisonplanet.com)
(Photo from Aljazeera.net)
There is general agreement that the men resisted arrest, made an escape, only to be pursued and finally captured by Iraqi police. According to an early BBC World Radio report, the men's getaway vehicle - a Toyota Cressida - was 'full of explosives and bomb making equipment,' suggesting that they were on a terrorist mission. One item found inside the car was a remote control detonator. Another was an anti-tank missile - which helps explain where the so-called 'Iraqi insurgents' have been getting their sophisticated weaponry from.
BELOW: Yahoo News showed a grab from footage of the terrorist arsenal confiscated by Iraqi police (the anti-tank missile is the green tube in the centre of the picture):
It has plausibly been conjectured that the men we are now told were British SAS commandoes were in Basra for the purpose of executing a terrorist attack during the Karbala festival, an important religious festival attracting up to three million pilgrims which was due to begin in a few days' time. Basra police say that the men had been planning to explode their booby-trapped car in the city's central market. (However, it is not known how this conclusion was reached - whether the men confessed this much, or whether evidence inviting this conclusion was found on them or in the car.) Regardless of when and where the car was meant to have been detonated, the discovery by Iraqi police that the men were not Mehdi Army, as they gave themselves out to be, proves what many of us in the antiwar movement have suspected all along, i.e., that the terrorist attacks which have rendered life dangerously insecure in many parts of Iraq were fomented by the occupying forces themselves or their proxies (e.g., foreign mercenaries or Mossad agents).
I came to this conclusion fairly early on because it struck me as suspicious that those killed in such attacks were overwhelmingly innocent Iraqis, people who could never have been classed as collaborators. What's more, there has a been a striking lack of victims among the leaders of the occupying forces, a single casualty among whom would make a far more significant victory for any such insurgency than the deaths of five hundred innocent Iraqi nationals. What the arrest of these two men proves only too well is that a portion of the violence which has been attributed to the Iraqi resistance, if not the greater part of it, is actually being carried out by the occupiers. That such violence involves the complicity of British forces as a whole is self-evident from the fact that, when Iraqi authorities declined to release the two men, they were promptly rescued from the prison in which they had been placed by their Iraqi captors before they could be properly interrogated. The raid - which involved no less than ten tanks breaking down the walls of the prison in which the two men had been incarcerated - proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the men are not 'rogue' operators; they are valuable assets of the British army of occupation who were to be recovered at all costs. Whether or not they are actually British is much less important than the fact that the British occupation forces were obviously obliged to do their utmost to protect them, while the complicity of the British government was made apparent when it asked media outlets to protect the men's identities by pixellating or otherwise obscuring the men's faces.
It will be extremely difficult indeed for the British to spin this incident the way other such incidents have been spun in the past. Although we may never know why Italian secret service agent Nicola Calipari was murdered by American troops, most people have proven willing to accept the official verdict that the killing was an accident, no doubt because they find it extremely difficult to believe that governments which talk so much about liberating the world from the spectre of terrorism would themselves perpetrate terrorist acts. Nonetheless, unless you are so gullible that you would accept a rationale for this episode - such as that the two men had been involved in a practice exercise - it seems to me that the lid has been blown once and for all off the pretence of Iraqi insurgent terrorism.
And what is happening, in fact, is that the story is not being spun so much as being told highly selectively. British authorities have denied neither that the two men were dressed as Mehdi army or that the car was packed full of explosives. But, as in this BBC report, facts indicating that the two men were engaged in a false flag terrorist operation have been omitted, and the impression is given that nothing more important is at issue than whether an Iraqi civilian (or policeman, according to some reports) was killed (or injured, according to some reports) when the two men opened fire on police during their unsuccessful escape bid. In short, when you can't spin a story, you focus on its least incriminating aspect - in this case, collateral damage - and draw a veil over the rest.
The question is now is what motivates Anglo-American terrorism in Iraq. A popular theory is that the occupiers are hoping to foment a civil war. One member of the Iraqi National Assembly. Fatah al-Sheikh, stated, 'It seems that the American forces are trying to escalate the situation in order to make the Iraqi people suffer…. There is a huge campaign for the agents of the foreign occupation to enter and plant hatred between the sons of the Iraqi people, and spread rumors in order to scare the one from the other. The occupiers are trying to start religious incitement and if it does not happen, then they will try to start an internal Shiite incitement.' (SOURCE)
An alternative explanation is that the ongoing terrorism provides the pretext for the continuing Anglo-American presence. Absent terrorism, and there would be no compelling reason for the foreign invaders not to leave. It is entirely possible that the occupiers have no intention of ever leaving Iraq. The capture of the two British terrorists also explains why so many journalists - foreign and Iraqi - have died during the occupation (the count has now risen to 55). Efforts to suppress growing awareness that the occupying countries are behind the most lethal acts of terrorism may explain why a CBS cameraman, Abdul Amir Younes Hussein, 'has been detained by U.S. forces in Iraq for over five months without a shred of evidence being publicly presented against him.' (SOURCE) Hussein was wounded by U.S. forces while filming the aftermath of a car bombing in Mosul on April 5. Is he being detained, perhaps, because he captured evidence implicating the Americans in the the car bombing?
While the causes of suspicious incidents such as the bombing in Mosul have hitherto remained obscure, with this incident in Basra all doubt has vanished and what might formerly have been dismissed as conspiracy theorizing stands revealed once and for all as objective analysis. I agree wholly with blogger 'Rigorous Intuition' (Jeff Wells) that there can no longer be any excuse for failing to recognize the true underlying cause of the violence that has plagued Iraq since Saddam's regime collapsed. 'We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.' Nor can we disagree with Wells that horror is the true face of the man, Tony Blair, the U.K.'s highest elected official, still on the loose after the murders of Princess Diana, David Kelly and countless Iraqis whose names we will never know. This man is truly a monster.
BELOW: A picture sometimes tells a thousand words (from here)
UPDATE: The British media has once again proven its utter servility to the secret British state this week with its incomplete reporting of the Basra incident. The point of view implicitly taken in all mainstream coverage is that the two men could not possibly have been engaged in terrorist activity: this is simply a 'conspiracy theory' favoured by many Iraqis. (Since 'we' are not Iraqis, we are supposed to assume that such an outrageous proposition would never occur to us.) Over the past week, the media seems to have been buying time, deferring any detailed coverage of the incident until such time as a cover story for the mens' activities has been cobbled together.
You can be sure that in the days after the story broke Ministry of Defence officials were working overtime in a bid to come up with a plausible counternarrative to the story that emerged on the ground. That story has now been assembled in its broad outlines, and appears for the first time here, in The Times Online. According to this report, the men were engaged in a legitimate intelligence mission, stopping bombers making their way into Basra from Iran (!). This laughable story - which asks readers to assume that terrorism in Iraq is actually caused by evildoers supported from Tehran - does nothing to explain why, virtually as soon as a crowd demanding the release of Sheikh Ahmad Fartusi had gathered outside the police station, two non-Iraqis dressed as Mehdi Army appeared in a car packed full of explosives. My conclusion is that the two men are the nucleus of a mobile terror unit whose job was to blow up Sadr's supporters while making it look as if Sadr's own men had committed the crime!
Meanwhile, a story in The Independent violates the truth by altering the sequence of events. According to all other reports, the initial protest outside the prison had been entirely peaceful. It was only later, when the tanks, armoured cars and helicopters arrived to liberate the two 'British' terrorists from prison that violence flared, as was captured in a widely-published photo showing a British solider emerging from a tank with his back on fire. In this story, however, history is rewritten and the claim is made that the initial protest had been marred by violence: 'Claims that the crowd was small and the violence minor were quickly belied by photographs of a soldier leaping from the turret of his Warrior armoured vehicle, his uniform burning from a petrol bomb.' The suggestion that the violence occurred first is somehow meant to furnish a rationale for the presence of the two 'British' terrorists at the scene. In fact, of course, the violence was triggered by the subsequent rescue operation. Iraqis were deservedly angry when British forces turned out to rescue men who, whether or not they were actually British, were clearly implicated in terrorist activity of some kind.
NB: The latest radio programme by experts on false flag terrorism, Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, will be of interest to anyone seeking detailed independent commentary on the Basra affair. See "Caught in the Act: Staged Terror in Iraq" here.
Also of interest is this webpage here. Even if you don't buy the claim that the two men were Israeli agents, the page provides links to most of the major news reports concerning the incident.
It is impossible to determine precisely the circumstances in which the men were apprehended. In one report, they were caught while escaping by car after firing on a Basra police station where a crowd had gathered demanding the release of a senior Sadr official, Sheikh Ahmad Fartusi, who had been arrested the previous day. (SOURCE) However, there are also reports that they were captured after they attracted suspicion while trying to pass through an Iraqi police checkpoint.
BELOW: The would-be terrorists
(Photo from Prisonplanet.com)
(Photo from Aljazeera.net)
There is general agreement that the men resisted arrest, made an escape, only to be pursued and finally captured by Iraqi police. According to an early BBC World Radio report, the men's getaway vehicle - a Toyota Cressida - was 'full of explosives and bomb making equipment,' suggesting that they were on a terrorist mission. One item found inside the car was a remote control detonator. Another was an anti-tank missile - which helps explain where the so-called 'Iraqi insurgents' have been getting their sophisticated weaponry from.
BELOW: Yahoo News showed a grab from footage of the terrorist arsenal confiscated by Iraqi police (the anti-tank missile is the green tube in the centre of the picture):
It has plausibly been conjectured that the men we are now told were British SAS commandoes were in Basra for the purpose of executing a terrorist attack during the Karbala festival, an important religious festival attracting up to three million pilgrims which was due to begin in a few days' time. Basra police say that the men had been planning to explode their booby-trapped car in the city's central market. (However, it is not known how this conclusion was reached - whether the men confessed this much, or whether evidence inviting this conclusion was found on them or in the car.) Regardless of when and where the car was meant to have been detonated, the discovery by Iraqi police that the men were not Mehdi Army, as they gave themselves out to be, proves what many of us in the antiwar movement have suspected all along, i.e., that the terrorist attacks which have rendered life dangerously insecure in many parts of Iraq were fomented by the occupying forces themselves or their proxies (e.g., foreign mercenaries or Mossad agents).
I came to this conclusion fairly early on because it struck me as suspicious that those killed in such attacks were overwhelmingly innocent Iraqis, people who could never have been classed as collaborators. What's more, there has a been a striking lack of victims among the leaders of the occupying forces, a single casualty among whom would make a far more significant victory for any such insurgency than the deaths of five hundred innocent Iraqi nationals. What the arrest of these two men proves only too well is that a portion of the violence which has been attributed to the Iraqi resistance, if not the greater part of it, is actually being carried out by the occupiers. That such violence involves the complicity of British forces as a whole is self-evident from the fact that, when Iraqi authorities declined to release the two men, they were promptly rescued from the prison in which they had been placed by their Iraqi captors before they could be properly interrogated. The raid - which involved no less than ten tanks breaking down the walls of the prison in which the two men had been incarcerated - proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the men are not 'rogue' operators; they are valuable assets of the British army of occupation who were to be recovered at all costs. Whether or not they are actually British is much less important than the fact that the British occupation forces were obviously obliged to do their utmost to protect them, while the complicity of the British government was made apparent when it asked media outlets to protect the men's identities by pixellating or otherwise obscuring the men's faces.
It will be extremely difficult indeed for the British to spin this incident the way other such incidents have been spun in the past. Although we may never know why Italian secret service agent Nicola Calipari was murdered by American troops, most people have proven willing to accept the official verdict that the killing was an accident, no doubt because they find it extremely difficult to believe that governments which talk so much about liberating the world from the spectre of terrorism would themselves perpetrate terrorist acts. Nonetheless, unless you are so gullible that you would accept a rationale for this episode - such as that the two men had been involved in a practice exercise - it seems to me that the lid has been blown once and for all off the pretence of Iraqi insurgent terrorism.
And what is happening, in fact, is that the story is not being spun so much as being told highly selectively. British authorities have denied neither that the two men were dressed as Mehdi army or that the car was packed full of explosives. But, as in this BBC report, facts indicating that the two men were engaged in a false flag terrorist operation have been omitted, and the impression is given that nothing more important is at issue than whether an Iraqi civilian (or policeman, according to some reports) was killed (or injured, according to some reports) when the two men opened fire on police during their unsuccessful escape bid. In short, when you can't spin a story, you focus on its least incriminating aspect - in this case, collateral damage - and draw a veil over the rest.
The question is now is what motivates Anglo-American terrorism in Iraq. A popular theory is that the occupiers are hoping to foment a civil war. One member of the Iraqi National Assembly. Fatah al-Sheikh, stated, 'It seems that the American forces are trying to escalate the situation in order to make the Iraqi people suffer…. There is a huge campaign for the agents of the foreign occupation to enter and plant hatred between the sons of the Iraqi people, and spread rumors in order to scare the one from the other. The occupiers are trying to start religious incitement and if it does not happen, then they will try to start an internal Shiite incitement.' (SOURCE)
An alternative explanation is that the ongoing terrorism provides the pretext for the continuing Anglo-American presence. Absent terrorism, and there would be no compelling reason for the foreign invaders not to leave. It is entirely possible that the occupiers have no intention of ever leaving Iraq. The capture of the two British terrorists also explains why so many journalists - foreign and Iraqi - have died during the occupation (the count has now risen to 55). Efforts to suppress growing awareness that the occupying countries are behind the most lethal acts of terrorism may explain why a CBS cameraman, Abdul Amir Younes Hussein, 'has been detained by U.S. forces in Iraq for over five months without a shred of evidence being publicly presented against him.' (SOURCE) Hussein was wounded by U.S. forces while filming the aftermath of a car bombing in Mosul on April 5. Is he being detained, perhaps, because he captured evidence implicating the Americans in the the car bombing?
While the causes of suspicious incidents such as the bombing in Mosul have hitherto remained obscure, with this incident in Basra all doubt has vanished and what might formerly have been dismissed as conspiracy theorizing stands revealed once and for all as objective analysis. I agree wholly with blogger 'Rigorous Intuition' (Jeff Wells) that there can no longer be any excuse for failing to recognize the true underlying cause of the violence that has plagued Iraq since Saddam's regime collapsed. 'We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.' Nor can we disagree with Wells that horror is the true face of the man, Tony Blair, the U.K.'s highest elected official, still on the loose after the murders of Princess Diana, David Kelly and countless Iraqis whose names we will never know. This man is truly a monster.
BELOW: A picture sometimes tells a thousand words (from here)
UPDATE: The British media has once again proven its utter servility to the secret British state this week with its incomplete reporting of the Basra incident. The point of view implicitly taken in all mainstream coverage is that the two men could not possibly have been engaged in terrorist activity: this is simply a 'conspiracy theory' favoured by many Iraqis. (Since 'we' are not Iraqis, we are supposed to assume that such an outrageous proposition would never occur to us.) Over the past week, the media seems to have been buying time, deferring any detailed coverage of the incident until such time as a cover story for the mens' activities has been cobbled together.
You can be sure that in the days after the story broke Ministry of Defence officials were working overtime in a bid to come up with a plausible counternarrative to the story that emerged on the ground. That story has now been assembled in its broad outlines, and appears for the first time here, in The Times Online. According to this report, the men were engaged in a legitimate intelligence mission, stopping bombers making their way into Basra from Iran (!). This laughable story - which asks readers to assume that terrorism in Iraq is actually caused by evildoers supported from Tehran - does nothing to explain why, virtually as soon as a crowd demanding the release of Sheikh Ahmad Fartusi had gathered outside the police station, two non-Iraqis dressed as Mehdi Army appeared in a car packed full of explosives. My conclusion is that the two men are the nucleus of a mobile terror unit whose job was to blow up Sadr's supporters while making it look as if Sadr's own men had committed the crime!
Meanwhile, a story in The Independent violates the truth by altering the sequence of events. According to all other reports, the initial protest outside the prison had been entirely peaceful. It was only later, when the tanks, armoured cars and helicopters arrived to liberate the two 'British' terrorists from prison that violence flared, as was captured in a widely-published photo showing a British solider emerging from a tank with his back on fire. In this story, however, history is rewritten and the claim is made that the initial protest had been marred by violence: 'Claims that the crowd was small and the violence minor were quickly belied by photographs of a soldier leaping from the turret of his Warrior armoured vehicle, his uniform burning from a petrol bomb.' The suggestion that the violence occurred first is somehow meant to furnish a rationale for the presence of the two 'British' terrorists at the scene. In fact, of course, the violence was triggered by the subsequent rescue operation. Iraqis were deservedly angry when British forces turned out to rescue men who, whether or not they were actually British, were clearly implicated in terrorist activity of some kind.
NB: The latest radio programme by experts on false flag terrorism, Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, will be of interest to anyone seeking detailed independent commentary on the Basra affair. See "Caught in the Act: Staged Terror in Iraq" here.
Also of interest is this webpage here. Even if you don't buy the claim that the two men were Israeli agents, the page provides links to most of the major news reports concerning the incident.
