British “Pseudo-Gang” Terrorists Exposed in Basra
Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire



September 20, 2005

Baghdad Dweller reports two British soldiers held by “Iraqi authorities” in 
Basra (also described as “Shiite militiamen” in the corporate media), and 
subsequently freed after the British stormed a police jail, were working 
undercover as bombers. Baghdad Dweller includes a link to the Washington 
Post, where the following appears: “Iraqi security officials on Monday 
variously accused the two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces 
or trying to plant explosives. Photographs of the two men in custody showed 
them in civilian clothes.” The Herald notes the following: “Sources say the 
British soldiers, possibly members of the new Special Reconnaissance 
Regiment formed earlier this month to provide intelligence for SAS 
operations, were looking at infiltration of the city’s police by the 
followers of the outspoken Shi’ite cleric, Moqtada al Sadr,” thus admitting 
the soldiers worked undercover.

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.



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