AIDS Action Cosies Up to Bush; British State Involved in Terrorism. posted by Richard Seymour

Yes, I know I said I would shut up, but this is unbelievable. Once again, Doug Ireland has the scoop :

It's mind-boggling: Marsha Martin, the executive director of AIDS Action--the AIDS community's largest, most visible, and wealthiest Washington lobby, with a multi-million dollar budget--has jumped into bed with the Bush-Rove Republicans with both feet. In a perfectly scandalous act of betrayal of the AIDS community, Martin is one of a small committee sponsoring a pricey celebration of Bush's November victory, and that of the Republicans in Congress. And guess who gets the money from this orgy of felicitations to the GOP? A front group for Big Pharma that crusades against giving cheap, generic AIDS-fighting meds to the world's poorest victims of the AIDS pandemic.

Mind-boggling? They may as well have proffered their buttocks to the Republicans with a slab of butter melting in the crevice.

While I'm here, let me just choke on my bacon sarnie over this :

Special Branch link to Omagh atrocity

...

The six year long investigation into the Omagh bombing - the worst single atrocity of the Troubles - took an extraordinary turn yesterday when it was revealed that a Special Branch officer is to be questioned for allegedly telephoning through an anonymous warning.
The officer, who has not been identified, is now the chief suspect for making the call received by detectives in the County Tyrone town 11 days before the outrage.

...

The Guardian has been told the anonymous call, made at 10am on August 4 to a CID officer in Omagh, contained detailed information, including the names of five republican suspects. The information was never passed on to police on the ground.

The fact that the call was made has been known for some time but the source of the call has never been traced. The Special Branch officer is to be asked if he made the call, and if so, why.

We know, of course, that the British state has had a long history of involvement with terrorism (more below), particularly in association with the UDA. But that was Loyalist terrorism, aimed at prominent enemies of the British state (which is not to say that civilians were not frequent and intentional targets). This suggests that the British state was involved in a Republican terrorist campaign, which killed only civilians. Much worse, they knew 11 days before the attack occurred that it would happen, who would do it and how. And they knew because one of their own Special Branch operatives was able to tell them.

Special Branch's response to this info from one of their own was to say that there was nothing in it, while the police "ignored warnings, failed to act on crucial intelligence or question key suspects" and evidence was covered up. Now, the cover-up job wasn't particularly sophisticated. The information sheet on which the details of the call were recorded was simply never accounted for in the RUC investigation after the bombing - instead, some genius scribbled across it: "NOTHING TO DO WITH OMAGH".

Fantastic. For what its worth, my guess is that they allowed the attack to happen precisely because the effect was to finally break the back of militant Republicanism. The atrocious nature of the attack, the fact that it killed 29 civilians (even though there were warnings, the police didn't act on them), that put an end to any remote sympathy among Catholics with the insurgency strategy.

Note, by the way, that one man was put away for involvement in this attack, despite the fact that the police had inserted false notes into an interview given by the suspect, Colm Murphy. Why was he imprisoned? What level was his involvement? He allegedly lent two mobile phones to the guys who were going to carry out the attack. The prosecution acknowledged that their case rested on confessions allegedly beaten out of made by Mr Murphy, which he claimed were bogus.

A few quick notes on state terror, then...

The use of death squads is unsual in stable democracies, but two countervailing examples are those of Spain and Britain. In Spain, the GAL carried out terrorist attacks, killing 27 people between 1983 qand 1987. It was later discovered that the GAL was a combination of police officers and mercenaries, organised and funded by government ministers and leading Socialist Party politicians. The British state's involvement with the Ulster Defense Association, or UDA (which also operated as the Ulster Freedom Fighters, UFF) grew out of a tradition of loyalist paramilitarism. In particular, it drew on the legacy of the "B-Specials", a part-time police reserve notorious for its brutality and anti-Catholic bigotry. Membership of the Ulster Defense Regiment, a 'legitimate' army, overlapped significantly with the UDA. Many of the soldiers in the UDR moonlighted in the UDA; the UDR actually allowed dual membership, presumably because the activities of the loyalist group dove-tailed with the security goals of the state. In fact, the UDR was quite a remarkable institution - it was perhaps the only state institution in United Kingdom territory that had a recorded crime rate that was double that of the population as a whole.

The main axis of interaction between the British state and the UDA, however, was in the relationship between the Force Research Unit (FRU), and the Shankill Road based 'C' Company of the UDA (Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair's stomping ground). The FRU was a special body of British military intelligence, which recruited members of the UDA - notably Brian Nelson - and drip-fed information on people they wanted targetted. Pat Finucane, the civil rights lawyer, was their most prominent hit. The man who pleaded guilty to killing Finucane was Ken Barrett an intelligence agent. As investigations revealed , this was not an accidental alliance, but a systematic process of collusion that lasted for decades. One small irony of history is that the RUC is credited with having expended a great deal of effort in covering up these crimes, while its members were often themselves targets of the UDA. And that's just the information the government will allow us to have, since ten pages of the report have been blanked out. The collusion did not end, either, when the UDA was finally made illegal in 1992. Some writers like to claim that the loyalist spate of extreme violence in the early nineties was due to Special Branch being unable to direct their charges any more, but the Cory report noted that there was substantial evidence of collusion in the car-bomb murder of Rosemary Nelson in October 1997, but this time it was believed to have been carried out by a minute ultra-fanatic schism known as the Red Hand Defenders. This group, 20 members strong, has issued warnings against Catholic postal workers and staff working in Catholic schools. It has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks which were later discovered to be the actions of the UDA, and it is believed that the RHD is used as a cover name by elements within the UDA and the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).

All of which indicates that the British state has been prepared to work through any old bload-soaked hand in Ulster, planning, inciting and colluding in the killing of civilians. And some people claim to just know that the British government would never kill civilians to meet its own political objectives.