The “Special Reconnaissance Regiment,” according to Regiments.org, “formed with HQ at Hereford from volunteers of other units to support international expeditionary operations in the fight against international terrorism, absorbing 14th Intelligence Company (formed for operations against Ulster terrorists), Intelligence Corps, and releasing the SAS and SBS for the ‘hard end’ of missions.” Is it possible the “hard end” of the “mission” in Iraq is to discredit the resistance and sow chaos in the country by fronting pseudo-gang terrorist groups (or the variant “pseudo-guerilla operations”), as the British have ample experience with elsewhere, notably in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising and in Malaya? “Pseudo operations are those in which government forces disguised as guerrillas, normally along with guerrilla defectors, operate as teams to infiltrate insurgent areas,” writes Lawrence E. Cline for the U.S. Army War College External Research Associates Program. “This technique has been used by the security forces of several other countries in their operations, and typically it has been very successful.” Indeed, one long running pseudo op, Gladio, was so successful it managed to render a nominal Italian terrorist group, the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), into an excuse (after proper infiltration by agents provocateurs) to increase the power of reactionary forces in Italy and discredit socialist, communist, and even labor movements.

The British SAS honed its “counter-insurgency” techniques in Northern Ireland and there is no reason to believe it has refrained from doing so in Iraq. “Formed to perform acts of sabotage and assassination behind enemy lines during World War 2, the SAS evolved into a counter-insurgency regiment after the war,” writes Sean Mac Mathuna. Mathuna cites a 1969 Army Training manual (British Army Land Operations Manual, volume 3, counter-revolutionary operations) that enumerates several “tasks,” including:

the ambush and harassment of insurgents, the infiltration of sabotage, assassination and demolition parties into insurgent-held areas, border surveillance … liaison with, and organization of friendly guerrilla forces operating against the common enemy.

Examples “were found during the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya during the mid-fifties,” Mathuna explains, “when SAS officers commanded some of the infamous ‘pseudo gangs’ that terrorized the civilian population,” and...

in Borneo, where they used cross-border operations to attack and destroy guerrilla bases; and in Aden in 1967, where they dressed as Arabs and would use an Army officer to lure Arab gunmen into a trap and kill them. To defeat the insurgents counter-terror must be deployed back at them—described by Ken Livingstone as “subverting the subverters”….

In order to “subvert the subverters” and discredit the IRA in Northern Ireland, the SAS formed the Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF), a covert pseudo-gang. “During the 1972 [IRA] ceasefire the MRF shot civilians from unmarked cars using IRA weapons,” writes Mathuna. “In November 1972 the Army admitted that the MRF had done this one three occasions. One of these incidents happened on 22nd June 1972—the day the IRA announced its intention to introduce a ceasefire. The shootings appear to have been done to discredit the IRA…”

It is clear now, that because elements within the security forces did not want a political deal with the IRA in the mid-seventies, and the military solution was only possible with a change at the top of the Labour leadership, MI5 and the SAS were prepared to use the same methods the IRA are condemned for - civilian deaths, assassinations, bombings and black propaganda—to bring this about.

In fact, so effective were these “military solution” pseudo-gang terrorist techniques the French employed them in Algeria and Vietnam. “The most widespread use of pseudo type operations was during the ‘Battle of Algiers’ in 1957,” explains Lawrence E. Cline. “The principal French employer of covert agents in Algiers was the Fifth Bureau, the psychological warfare branch.” The Fifth Bureau “planted incriminating forged documents, spread false rumours of treachery and fomented distrust among the [FLN, the National Liberation Front] … As a frenzy of throat-cutting and disemboweling broke out among confused and suspicious FLN cadres, nationalist slaughtered nationalist from April to September 1957 and did France’s work for her,” notes Cline, quoting Martin S. Alexander and J. F. V. Kieger (“France and the Algerian War: Strategy, Operations, and Diplomacy,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 6-7).

Even though the Washington Post mentions two Brits were detained, apparently caught red-handed shooting Iraqi police and planting explosives, it does not bother to mention the SAS or its long and sordid history of engaging in covert pseudo-gang behavior and conclude the obvious: Britain, and the United States—the latter having admitted formulating the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) in 2002, a brain child of neocons staffing the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, designed to “stimulate reactions” on the part of “terrorists” (in Iraq, that would be the resistance)—are intimately involved in sowing chaos and spreading violence in Iraq and more than likely soon enough in Iran and Syria.

Of course, this unfortunate and embarrassing incident in Basra will fall off the front page of corporate newspapers and websites soon enough, replaced with more appropriate, if fantastical, propaganda implicating the Iraqi resistance and intel ops such as al-Zarqawi for the violence, obviously engineered to create a civil war in Iraq and thus divide the country and accomplish the neocon-Likudite plan to destroy Islamic culture and society.

Addendum

It is not surprising the corporate media in the United States and Britain would omit crucial details on this story. In order to get the whole story, we have to go elsewhere—for instance, China’s Xinhuanet news agency. “Two persons wearing Arab uniforms [see the M.O. cited above] opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers,” an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. “The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.”

So, the next time you read or hear about crazed “al-Qaeda in Iraq” terrorists blowing up children or desperate job applicants, keep in mind, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, the perpetrators may very well be British SAS goons who cut their teeth killing Irish citizens.