Courageous author Anne Cadwallader tours Australia to expose British Government murders in Ireland

Beginning with a public event in Perth last Saturday, and continuing through her final public appearance in Brisbane on 28 June, Irish author Anne Cadwallader is presently touring Australia to promote her book, Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland. The book is a stunning indictment of the British government’s systematic policy of murdering civilians in both Northern Ireland and Ireland itself during “The Troubles” it unleashed beginning in the early 1970s. Although she does not elaborate the point, her book also has enormous implications for the present international “War on Terror”.

Her tour is being jointly sponsored by the Pat Finucane Centre, Cairde Sinn Féin Australia, the Brehon Law Society, the Casement Group Melbourne/Belfast and the Irish National Association. Anne now works for the Pat Finucane Centre in Northern Ireland, but for 30 years she covered the conflict in Northern Ireland as a journalist working for Reuters, the BBC, RTÉ, the Irish Press and the Christian Science Monitor (Boston). She has contributed to the New York Times and was the Northern Editor of the Irish Echo (New York) for 12 years.

According to the release issued for her tour, Lethal Allies, “published in October 2013, has sold more than 20,000 copies in Ireland and has been critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic.” The release also notes, “In March this year, Anne Cadwallader testified on [British Government] collusion in the US Congress’s Helsinki Commission (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe) on Capitol Hill, where she placed declassified British government documents and a copy of ‘Lethal Allies’ on the Congressional record.” The release continues, “Using previously confidential police reports, British declassified documents and eye-witness accounts, the book establishes beyond any doubt that London colluded in the murders of more than 120 Catholic civilians in Ireland. …

“Drawing on incontrovertible evidence from police files, the book gives forensic, ballistic and eye-witness accounts establishing that serving officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and soldiers in the Ulster Defence Regiment colluded with banned loyalist paramilitary groups in dozens of shootings and bombings on both sides of the Irish border. The book’s conclusions remain unchallenged, in detail or in principle, either legally or politically.”

The Guardian acclaimed Lethal Allies as “One of the most important books about the dirty war fought in Northern Ireland during the 30 years between 1968 and 1998”.

Anne’s book has been met with a stony silence by the British government, and her Australian tour “comes at a point when the Irish peace process is in trouble.”

More evidence

Indeed, two explosive documentaries aired in the UK this past month along with accompanying press coverage; both buttress and expand upon Anne’s chronicle. According to a 16 June post on the Irish Centralwebsite:

“A new Irish TV documentary [made by RTÉ News] has claimed that the purpose of the Dublin/Monaghan bombings in 1974 was to start a civil war. The bombings were carried out by Loyalists acting under orders from British Army agents the documentary revealed.

“The bombings of 17 May 1974 were a series of coordinated car bombings in Dublin and Monaghan. Three exploded in Dublin during rush hour and a fourth exploded in Monaghan almost 90 minutes later. They killed 33 civilians and a full-term unborn child, and injured almost 300.

“The bombings were the deadliest attack of the conflict known as the Troubles, and the deadliest terrorist attack in the Republic’s history. Most of the victims were young women, although the ages of the dead ranged from five months to 80 years.

“Following the documentary there have been calls for the Irish government to immediately request all collusion files be made public.

“‘Collusion’ … examined the extent of collusion between security forces and loyalists paramilitaries. It’s available to watch online, worldwide, on RTE Player International.”

Earlier, in an article in the Independent of 29 May, journalist Paul Gallagher recounted how a just-released BBC documentary, “Britain’s Secret Terror Deals”, expanded the story still further:

“The security forces protected ‘state sponsored serial killers’ on both sides of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary groups who are responsible for some of the most notorious unsolved murders of The Troubles, according to a BBC Panorama documentary.

“Britain’s Secret Terror Deals claims it is the first time the scale of the UK’s counter-intelligence efforts have been revealed.

“The murder of Sunday World reporter Martin O’Hagan in 2001 and two massacres, at Sean Graham’s bookmaker’s in 1992 where five people died, and the killings of nine Protestant men returning from work in Kingsmill village in 1976, are among the cases where state and paramilitary collusion is alleged to have been covered up. …

“The programme also said the state paid an agent who helped develop a new IRA bomb that killed 34-year-old married RUC officer Colleen McMurray, before all the evidence surrounding her murder in 1992 went missing. The ombudsman’s report into Mrs McMurray’s death is yet to come out. It is one of dozens of ongoing investigations surrounding unsolved murders where state collusion with paramilitary groups is alleged. …

“Panorama said it had uncovered ‘extraordinary evidence’ to show how the victims were killed and their killers protected.

“Baroness Nuala O’Loan, the former Police Ombudsman Northern Ireland, said: ‘When I first heard about it I didn’t think that could be possible. [The state] were running informants and they were using them and the argument was that by so doing they were saving lives. But hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people died because those people were not brought to justice and weren’t stopped in their tracks… Many of them were killers and some of them serial killers. …

“Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland Programme Director Patrick Corrigan said: ‘The breadth and depth of collusion being alleged here is truly disturbing. Killing people targeted by the state, using intelligence provided by the state and shooting them with guns provided by the state—if all this is proven, we’re not talking about a security policy we’re talking about a murder policy.

“There must now be a full, independent investigation into the scale of the policy where the police, army and MI5 worked with illegal paramilitary groups, resulting in the deaths of perhaps hundreds of people.”

Clearly, intelligence agents had been infiltrated into both the loyalist and republican sides to commit murder and mayhem in order to further stoke the conflict.

The Panorama documentary appeared in the wake of a report in The Times of 16 April by Richard Ford that “A police watchdog is carrying out a special investigation into claims that the security forces failed to stop the IRA murdering alleged informers during the Troubles.

“The inquiry by Northern Ireland’s police ombudsman is looking at whether 20 killings going back to the late 1970s could have been prevented.

“Bereaved families believe that the victims were killed to protect the identities of more important security force informers within the Provisional IRA.”

The role of the Queen’s Brigadier General Frank Kitson

Among its other virtues, Anne Cadwallader’s book provides an invaluable profile of the man at the centre of these dirty operations, British Brigadier Gen. Frank Kitson. He is the universally acknowledged chief exponent and perpetrator, in the post-war period, of the method of fanning internecine strife for purposes of counterinsurgency and population control. Kitson developed and perfected the technique in numerous post-war colonial counterinsurgencies and then employed it in Northern Ireland under his personal direction in 1970-72. Among other heinous crimes, his regiment played a central role in the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre of 30 January 1972, when British military units opened fire on unarmed civilians. Reported The Irish Times on 24 September 2002:

“A leading expert on counter-insurgency operations is due to be the first witness to give evidence to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry when it sits in London for the first time today.

“Sir Frank Kitson, who was commander of the 39th Brigade in Belfast at the time of Bloody Sunday in January 1972, is expected to be the first witness when the inquiry starts in the Central Hall Westminster this morning. At the time of Bloody Sunday, Sir Frank’s brigade reserves were the lst Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, the regiment used in the Bogside area of Derry during the killings of 13 civilians and woundings of 13 others.”

Just before the “Conclusion” chapter with which she ends her book, Ms Cadwallader devotes an entire chapter, “From Dhofar to Armagh”, to Kitson and his murderous methods. She documents how he perfected his strategy of “gangs and pseudo-gangs” in murderous British counterinsurgency wars against nationalist movements in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, Oman and Yemen during the 1950s and 1960s. Kitson himself chronicled some of his methods in his books, Gangs and Counter-gangs and Low Intensity Operations, and in his Memoirs, Bunch of Five, whose title refers to the lessons learned in putting down those five “rebellions”. He had intended to include Northern Ireland in that account, to make it a Bunch of Six, but his work there was deemed “too sensitive” (Lethal Allies, p. 351) to see the light of day.

Cadwallader reports of Kitson’s exploits:

“If Palestine was Britain’s first post-war colonial conflict, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was the bloodiest. It was there that Frank Kitson (then a young captain) redefined the concept of surrogacy. As a military intelligence officer in Kenya from 1953-1955, he organised ‘counter-gangs’, as he called them. They consisted of former Mau Mau members, or sympathisers, persuaded to change allegiance and become intelligence-gatherers and later agents provocateurs mounting offensive operations. They were ‘captured rebels who were prepared to change sides, pretending to be still loyal to the revolutionary movement in order to make contact with the surviving rebel bands so they could be broken down and eliminated. Kitson believed this to be the most effective way to kill rebels.’

“Kitson later wrote in his memoirs, Bunch of Five, ‘Most soldiers [regarded the] finding and disposing of [Mau Mau] in the same way they would regard the hunting of a dangerous wild animal.’ Still, Kitson complains in Gangs and Counter-gangs, British forces ‘had firmly fastened one of their hands behind their backs with the cord of legal difficulties’. Oxford University historian David Anderson, in his history of the Kenyan colonial war, says Kitson produced ‘remarkable results’. The country, he says, became ‘a police state in the fullest sense of that term’, while British justice in 1950s Kenya was ‘a blunt, brutal and unsophisticated instrument of oppression’. Over 30,000 Mau Mau were killed in combat; 1.5 million of its supporters were interned, captives were routinely tortured—sometimes to death—and 1,090 Kenyans were hanged on a portable gallows that toured villages and towns.”

Kitson applied the same tactics in Malaya. There, “Of the 4,000 Malayan rebels who surrendered or were captured, 2,700 became informers”, a technique he further refined in Cyprus and then in the British colony of Aden (Yemen)—the ‘cornerstone of British military policy in the Gulf region’, according to British author and intelligence specialist Mark Curtis—and in Oman.

Cadwallader continued, “Frank Kitson, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. By 1958 he held a post in the War Office, having argued successfully for the deployment of the SAS to Oman. [As it was also to Northern Ireland –ed.] The following June he was awarded an MBE. In all these conflicts—especially Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus and Oman—his name crops up repeatedly. He did not invent, and does not claim to have invented, the concept of pseudo-gangs. But he certainly elevated it into an established, if grubby, British military tactic. … he indubitably had a malign influence on security policies in Northern Ireland, particularly at the start of the three decades of conflict. Follow his career and a pattern emerges: dispatch Kitson to various parts of the globe to quell anti-colonial forces, then on his return home heap honours on him. He was promoted to brigadier before his deployment to Northern Ireland in spring 1970 as Commander of the 39th Brigade area—the youngest at that rank in the British Army.”

Nor was his method confined to merely “military” operations, dirty as they were. “In Low Intensity Operations, Kitson himself has defined counter-insurgency as ‘military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions taken by a government to defeat subversion and insurgency’.”

He was awarded an OBE for his work in Northern Ireland despite his responsibility for Bloody Sunday and countless other atrocities, and obviously in recognition of those atrocities. He mooted the dropping of “defoliating chemicals to force insurgents out into the open” in Northern Ireland, but ultimately decided against it only because it would have “a far greater adverse effect on world and domestic opinion in relation to the advantages gained.” As for his main tactic, “The use of surrogate or proxy forces is invaluable, wrote Kitson: ‘there are innumerable ways in which the principle [of counter-gangs] can be applied and it is up to those involved to invent or adapt such methods … as may be relevant to the situation.’” He also wrote that the law should be “used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public … For this to happen efficiently, the activities of the legal services have to be tied into the war effort in as discreet a way as possible, which in effect means that the member of the government responsible for law either sits in the supreme council or takes his orders from the head of the administration.” Indeed, Cadwallader says, Caroline Elkins, author of Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, “wrote in Atlantic Magazine that Kitson’s pseudo-gangs could not have succeeded in Kenya, Northern Ireland or anywhere else without the use of ‘severe and overarching measures’ which she characterises as ‘police-state control’.”

And, in Northern Ireland as in Kenya, “The imperative for secrecy was paramount—a special unit was set up in Britain to destroy the trail of evidence leading to those responsible for outrages in Kenya: ‘Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed’.” Researchers on The Troubles in Ireland report that that same destruction or removal of crucial documents—even those which had already come to light one way or another—is proceeding apace.

Such systematic destruction or removal of key documents of the sort upon which Cadwallader compiled her book constitutes clear evidence that Kitson and his methods are not some “rogue element” in British policy, but are the very core of it. Indeed, following his being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his work in Northern Ireland, he was promoted still further in 1980 to be a Knight Commander of the ultra-elite Order of the Bath (headed by the Queen herself, who nominates its members; the Grand Master of the Order is Prince Charles), and the same year was appointed Deputy Commander-in-chief UK Land Forces. He ended his career as Commander-in-Chief, UK Land Forces (1982), was appointed Aide-de-Camp General to the Queen the following year, and in 1985 promoted to the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE). In his late eighties, he is still alive.

The Kincora child abuse connection

Kitson’s dirty operations are also at the centre of one of the most notorious cases of child abuse in history, that of the present, ever-escalating scandals now erupting in the UK. For decades now, a handful of courageous individuals including several Members of Parliament at Westminster, have attempted to expose an ongoing, vicious paedophile ring which has pervaded the British Establishment. It has reportedly involved dozens of members of Parliament with historical deep tentacles into No. 10 Downing Street itself. According to a summary in The Telegraph of 20 May 2015, “Some 261 celebrities and politicians, including sports, TV and music stars, are being investigated for alleged child sex abuse, police have revealed.

“They are among more than 1,400 men suspected by police of being sex predators as the Home Secretary warned it is only the ‘tip of the iceberg’. …

“Hundreds of schools, religious institutions, children’s homes and sports clubs are also implicated.” Indeed, those already known to be abusers show that it strikes to the heart of the British Establishment, and there is abundant evidence that all three of Britain’s major intelligence agencies, MI5, MI6, and Cheltenham HQ are deeply penetrated by this ring; if not actually involved in running it, certainly in covering it up. Moreover, even public press accounts demonstrate that it reaches into Buckingham Palace itself—not surprising given the intimate associations of the Royals with the late, infamous Sir Jimmy Savile, now suspected of having abused as many as 1,000 children over decades. Savile was a close friend of Lord Mountbatten throughout that time, and also, since the late 1970s, of Mountbatten’s protégé and favourite great-nephew, Prince Charles.

One of the most notorious child abuse cases involved the Kincora Boys Home in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Despite pleas from many quarters to do so, British Home Secretary Theresa May has staunchly refused to include the Kincora case in the new child abuse inquiry to be headed by New Zealand Judge Lowell Goddard, even though the present, local inquiry in Northern Ireland into Kincora under Anthony Hart QC lacks the legal powers to compel crucial witnesses to testify. Why the steadfast refusal to include Kincora? Because there is abundant evidence now even in the public domain that MI5, MI6 and other British intelligence agencies know that not only was one of Kitson’s paramilitary “pseudo-gangs” (Tara) at the centre of that affair, but that other, leading members of the British establishment were personally involved in the abuse, including Lord Mountbatten himself, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures Sir Anthony Blunt, and numerous other high society figures from Ireland and England.

The Kincora Boys Home was headed by William McGrath, head of the loyalist paramilitary gang Tara. And although McGrath and two of his subordinates were convicted and imprisoned in 1981 for child abuse going back to the early 1970s, the entire affair has been the subject of an extensive, ongoing cover-up. Indeed, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland program director Patrick Corrigan recently stated, “By excluding Kincora from the only inquiry which has the power to establish the truth about the role the intelligence services may have played in the paedophile ring, the Home Secretary risks looking like she is now playing her part in a decades-long cover-up.

“The Home Secretary says that child protection is a devolved matter. She is neatly ignoring the fact that the Northern Ireland Assembly unanimously supports the inclusion of Kincora in the Westminster inquiry, because it knows that the local inquiry has no powers to compel evidence from MI5 and the Ministry of Defence and that it does not have the confidence of victims or potentially crucial witnesses.

“Kincora should be investigated alongside claims of establishment involvement in child abuse rings in other parts of the UK. With new allegations emerging of links between Kincora and paedophile rings elsewhere in the UK, the case for inclusion has never been stronger.”

A Kitson legacy: “Islamic” terrorism

The classic British imperial methods of promoting terror and counter-terror as methods of large-scale population control and the establishment of police states as per Kitson’s methods, have now been expanded onto the world stage as the “fight against Islamic terrorism”. A useful case study of this Kitsonian strategy is reported by Dr Nafeez Ahmed, Executive Director of the UK-based Institute for Policy Research and Development, in his 27 February 2015 article, “The circus: How British intelligence primed both sides of the ‘terror war’”. But that article reports merely the tip of the iceberg of a much deeper reality: that British intelligence has systematically promoted the creation of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other international terrorist gangs for decades now. This reality is so notorious among honest European and US intelligence specialists that they routinely refer to Britain as “Londonistan” for the number of terrorist groups harboured and protected there, as documented in the LaRouche movement’s Executive Intelligence Review for decades now. And the more terrorism, the more new police state laws, precisely as Kitson calls for.

Just as Kitson’s career and numerous awards granted him by the Crown demonstrate that he is not some “lone wolf”, but that his methods are those embraced by the Crown itself, EIR and the Citizens Electoral Council have documented the personal role of Prince Charles over decades in creating and protecting this international “Islamic” terrorist apparatus. Not only has Charles personally intervened to stop British police from investigating “Islamic” terrorism in the UK, but virtually the entire board of his Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies is composed of leading international financiers or promoters of terrorism, including Saudi princes Bandar bin Sultan and Turki bin Faisal, two of only eight foreign royal guests Charles invited to his wedding to Camilla. Bandar and Turki helped create al-Qaeda in the first place, and both have been named as principal organisers and financiers of 9/11 by family members of those who died in that atrocity. (For fuller details of the role of “Charles of Arabia” in international terrorism see Glen Isherwood’s 28-29 March 2015 CEC conference presentation, “Who is Sponsoring International Terrorism?”)

The solution: Glass-Steagall, National Banking, and a BRICS-centred new world order

For months now, leading international figures have openly warned that the world is on the brink of a new global financial crash, one far worse than that of 2007-08. This reality, as depicted even on the cover of the 13-19 June Economist magazine, The City of London’s flagship publication, would wipe out the power of London and Wall Street to continue to loot much of the world, including through the “austerity” measures now being so ruthlessly applied in the UK, the US, Australia, and throughout Europe; this even as the Too Big To Fail banks have been and continue to be bailed out to the tune of almost $30 trillion.

Even as the families and supporters of those killed or brutalised in such atrocities as The Troubles and 9/11 continue their struggle for justice, to which Anne Cadwallader’s book is a notable contribution, the only way to actually defeat this brutal Anglo-American imperial system, this “invisible empire of finance” as the British themselves have sometimes termed it, is to implement those measures which strike at its heart. Chief among these are: 1) Glass-Steagall legislation to separate legitimate commercial banking for the benefit of the population and the physical economy, from the speculative “merchant banking” universally favoured by The City and Wall Street, in which the derivatives trade is now estimated at some $1.5 quadrillion; 2) to establish publicly-controlled national banks in each nation to direct credit uniquely into the physical economy, beginning with massive infrastructure and other needed projects; and 3) to ally with the BRICS group of nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which are rapidly constructing a new world economic order dedicated to raising the standard of living of the entire world’s population, a “win-win” outcome for all, in the words of China’s President Xi Jinping. For more on the rapid emergence of the BRICS as the centre of a new world economic order, see the CEC’s magazines, “Do You Want to Defeat Terrorism? Establish a New, Just World Economic Order!”, and “The World Land-Bridge: Peace on Earth, Good Will towards All Men”, the proceedings of the CEC’s 28-29 March 2015 international conference under that title.

Anne Cadwallader’s remaining public events in Australia
Melbourne: Friday, 26 June, 4pm, Celtic Club, Cnr La Trobe and Queen Sts.
Brisbane: Sunday, 28 June, 4pm, University of Qld, Bldg 14, Room 132
All events are free and open to the public without prior booking.