Sunday Herald, January 28, 2007
By Neil Mackay
Since the Sunday Herald was founded in 1999, it has led the way in exposing the “dirty war” in Northern Ireland. Today, we report on the most shocking revelations to date. Our investigations show that far from merely “turning” terrorists to work for the state, British military intelligency actually created loyalist murder gangs to operate as proxy assassins. They even cleared areas in which the gangs were operating of police and army, to allow them to carry out their hits and escape.
ON MONDAY, the world was stunned by the release of a report by Nuala O'Loan, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, which stated that Special Branch officers in Belfast had "colluded" with loyalist terrorists working for the British state as informers. According to O'Loan, police failed to stop these paramilitary gangs, part of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) from killing an estimated 15 people in the 1990s. While this was seized upon by republicans as proof that security forces had aided a loyalist campaign of sectarian assassination, in reality O'Loan's findings barely scratched the surface of a 30-year history of criminality and murder orchestrated by the British army and the Ulster police. ...Read more
Sunday Business Post, January 28, 2007
By Colm Heatley
When British Army brigadier Frank Kitson proposed establishing ‘‘counter-gangs'' to defeat Northern nationalists in 1971, his influential recommendations were supposed to be a short-term measure to defeat the rapidly developing ‘‘insurgency'' in the North.
When British Army brigadier Frank Kitson proposed establishing ‘‘counter-gangs'' to defeat Northern nationalists in 1971, his influential recommendations were supposed to be a short-term measure to defeat the rapidly developing ‘‘insurgency'' in the North.
Relying on his experience in British colonial wars in Africa and the Middle East, his philosophy was simple and brutal - terrorise the nationalist community through the use of security force-controlled loyalist gangs, whose activities could not be traced back to Whitehall.
For years, his plans were hidden from the public by successive British governments. ...Read more
Sunday Business Post, January 28, 2007
By Tom McGurk
There is, of course, another version of all of this and with the week that's in it, it would do no harm to give it an outing.
From the very beginning of the war in the North, the British decided that their counter-insurgency strategy against the IRA dictated that they could not tolerate two paramilitary armies conducting their own war, besides the one being fought between the IRA and the British army.
There were a number of important political, strategic and military reasons for this. For a start, the loyalists were potentially a far more serious threat to British policy in the North than the IRA.
They represented the majority and they constituted a huge segment within both the RUC and the UDR- critical to the ongoing security situation. Further, since their rationale was entirely sectarian, if allowed run amok, they could very quickly tip the North into civil war. ...Read more
