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May
28, 2003
David
Vest
DubyaCo.: It's Not So Funny Any More
Dave
Lindorff
My Grandfather's Medal
John
Stanton
America's Dying: Arts and Philosophy Hold the Key
Bernard
Weiner
A PNAC Primer
Robert
Jensen
Texas Dems Set a Standard for the Rest of the Party
Ahmad Faruqui
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Hammond
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Steve Perry
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May
27, 2003
Kurt
Nimmo
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Gancarski
Hillary: a Dem the NeoCons Could Love?
Patrick
Cockburn
Terror, Bush and Joseph Conrad
John Chuckman
an Interpretation of Bush's Character
Kathleen
Christison
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Jeffrey
Blankfort
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Steve
Perry
Trouble in the Hinterlands
May
26, 2003
Franklin
C. Spinney
Test Anxiety: Star Wars, Punctuated
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Elaine
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Supreme Sacrifice
Sam
Hamod
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Stew Albert
The Final Conflict
May
24 / 25, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Philosopher Kings: Leo Strauss
and the Neo-Cons
Uri Avnery
The Hannibal Procedure
Diane
Christian
Who's the Real Enemy?
"Just Cause" or "Kill the Bastards"
Alexander
Cockburn
Derrida's Double Life
William
S. Lind
Is Saddam Really Out of the Game?
William
Cook
Road to Nowhere
David Krieger
Bush's War on the Poor: Economic Justice
Ilan
Pappe
Academic Freedom Under Assault in Israel
Wayne Madsen
American Idle
Noah
Leavitt
Slowing Sowing Justice in the Killing Fields
Walt Brasch
Americans are Liars
Lenni
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John Brown and Dutch Bill
Mickey
Z.
Hope, Crosby & Al Qaeda
Michael
Ortiz Hill
Grievous Harm Here and Abroad
Adam Engel
Towers of Babel
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Guthrie, Alam, Orloski
May
23, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Lifting the Sanctions: Who Benefits?
Ron
Jacobs
Long Live People's Park!
Michael
Greger, MD
Return of Mad Cow: US Beef Supply
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Elaine
Cassel
Tigar to Ashcroft: "Secrecy is the Enemy of Democratic Govt."
Sam
Hamod
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Christopher
Greeder
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Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Weblog 5/23
May
22, 2003
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Gaffney
Christian in Name Only
Carl
Estabrook
Republic of Fear
Carl
Camacho, Jr.
Reason for Hope
Ben
Granby
What Rates a Headline from the Middle
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Vanessa
Jones
Terror Alerts in Australia
Mickey
Z.
Instant Understanding
Don
Monkerud
Snowballs in a Soggy Economy
Barry Lando
The Nether-Nether World of G.W. Bush
Steve
Perry
Total Information
Awareness: Secret Shadow Program?
May
21, 2003
Dave
Lindorff
Ari Fleischer Quits the Scene: The
Liar's Gone, the Enablers Remain
Chris
Floyd
How Blood Money Becomes Business Opportunity
Dr. Gerry
Lower
Graham's God and Bush's Pathology
Patrick
Cockburn
In Post War Iraq, the Signs of Breakdown
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Brian Cloughley
The Fatuous Braintrust: Newt, Rummy and Wolfowitz
Saul
Landau
Shopping, the End of the World and the Politics of Bush
Larry Kearney
Two Morning Poems, May 2003
Steve
Perry
Chaos in Iraq: Just What the US Wanted?
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Justice Comes to Iraq
May
20, 2003
Tariq
Ali
The Empire Advances
Ahmad
Faruqui
Whither American Nationalism?
Ben Tripp
Dialysis with Osama
Linda
Heard
The Cage of Occupation
Cynthia
McKinney
Toward a Just and Peaceful World
Edward
Said
The Arab Condition
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Why Ari Should Have Resigned in Protest Long Ago
Stew
Albert
Yale Men
Steve Perry
The New Face of Al-Qaeda
May
19, 2003
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Letter to Kofi Annan on Powell's Missing
Evidence
CounterPunch
Wire
"Terror" Slut Steve Emerson
Eats Crow
John
Chuckman
Blair's Awkward Lies
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Vidal
Corporate Media and the Myth of the Free Market
Michael
S. Ladah
The Fine Print to Bush's Road Map
Robert
Fisk
Bush's Eternal War Backfires
Elaine
Cassel
Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
Jonathan
Freedland
Ann Coulter's Appalling Magic
Steve Perry
Play It Again, O-Sam-a
May
17 / 18, 2003
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Avnery
The Children's Teeth
Peter
Linebaugh
An American Tribute to Christopher
Hill
Gary
Leupp
Nepal Today
Rock and
Rap Confidential
The Republican Plot Against the Dixie Chicks
Walter
Sommerfeld
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Ron Jacobs
Condy Rice's Yipping Tirades
Thomas
P. Healy
Dubya Does Indy
Tarif Abboushi
Bush, Sharon and the Roadmap
Francis
Boyle
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Mark Davis
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Lichtman
American Mourning
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Ortiz Hill
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Adam
Engel
Uncle Sam is YOU!
Alan Maas
The Best News Show on TV
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Cassel
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the Weekend
Talkin' Sounds Just Like Joe McCarthy Blues
May
16, 2003
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Smith
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Hamod
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Phil Reeves
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Robert
McChesney
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Mark Engler
Those Who Don't Count
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Perry
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Energy Future
May
15, 2003
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Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How
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Hilden
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Reinhart
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Laura Carlsen
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Rapoza
The New Fakers: State Dept. Undercuts
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Stew Albert
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Perry
Bush's Little
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of the Day
Strip-o-Rama
May
14, 2003
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Chuckman
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McCarthy
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de Rooij
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What? Me Worry?
Steve Perry
More on Saudi Arabia Bombings
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May
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My Meeting with Arafat
Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing
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Lind
The Hippo and the Mongoose: a Question of Military Theory
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Sy Hersh: War and Intelligence
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12, 2003
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Lindorff
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Benziman
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Jason
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Going to Israel? Sign or Else
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/12
Book
of the Day
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Marty Peretz
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of the Day
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Corrie
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Watch
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Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
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Arrogant
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Gore Vidal
The
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Impeach
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May
29, 2003
"Stakeknife"
The
Story of Britain's Army Spy at the Top of the IRA
By HARRY BROWNE
Editors' Note: On Thursday, May 29, elections to the Northern
Ireland Assembly should have taken place. However, earlier this
month Tony Blair decided to postpone the elections because,
he said, of the failure of the IRA to come up with a statement
that declared an end to all paramilitary activity. He said it
would be pointless to go ahead with elections to an Assembly
that was incapable of forming a power-sharing government. Many
people in Ireland believed the decision was coloured by the
likely 'centre cannot hold' outcome of the election: gains for
Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley's DUP, and further damage to former
'First Minister' David Trimble from uncompromising elements
in his own UUP. (Is this a preview of 'democracy' in Iraq?)
At present Northern Ireland is again being ruled directly by
British ministers, to the consternation mainly of the local
politicians missing out on salaries and limousines. Harry Browne
visited Belfast, where the talk is not of elections but of informers.
AC/JSC
Belfast.
The 'war on terrorism'? Northern Ireland knows
something about that particular concept, and is learning more
and more about how easily 'on' mutates into 'of'.
The other day an apologist for the security
forces said on radio what a tough job cops and soldiers had,
working through all the years of the Troubles to "control
terrorists". Someone pointed out to him just how terribly
apt that verb, 'control', had turned out to be.
It would be unfair to say that Belfast
is reeling from the news that the British Army had a highly placed
informer in the IRA. "If you had asked me 10 years ago if
there were informers, I would have said 'of course there are',"
one senior republican told me in a Falls Road coffee-shop. "And
the Brits were hardly going to bother putting them in black taxis."
So Sinn Fein tries to wax philosophical
and even 'optimistical' -- the same republican insisted that
the revelations were simply a sign of the British security apparatus
disintegrating sloppily in the post-war context, and said they
were not affecting morale locally. In public the party even tries
to throw a veil of doubt over the particular claim that Freddie
Scappaticci, formerly a central figure in the IRA's 'internal
security' unit, was 'Stakeknife', a key British agent.
Scappaticci is one of hundreds of people
of Italian descent in Northern Ireland and one of several of
them known to have been involved with the IRA. Second generation,
Belfast-accented and unable to speak Italian, he insists he was
not baptised 'Alfredo' and resents the media for making Mafia
noises with his name. On May 15 he made a monkey of those mediosi
who had been reporting he was in hiding in Britain, when he appeared
at a Belfast press conference to deny that he was Stakeknife.
Since then, he has given a long interview with a local republican-leaning
paper, the Andersonstown News, painting a fuller picture of himself
as a granddad with a bad back just trying to get on with his
life.
Be that as it may, most people here believe
he was indeed Stakeknife, and that now he is 'toughing it out'
because he has done a deal with the IRA. The IRA, observers suggest,
could not afford the political fallout of such an obvious ceasefire-breach
as the murder of Scappaticci, and so is playing along with his
story in the hopes that the confusion and finger-pointing does
more to embarrass the state than to divide the republican movement.
That remains to be seen. The British
state may be beyond shame in the wake of the report by English
cop John Stevens into its widespread collusion with and manipulation
of loyalist terrorists, especially in the Ulster Defence Association
(UDA) -- watch out for some intriguing prosecutions -- but there's
little doubt that the publicity about Stakeknife has opened up
old internecine furies between different elements of that state.
One feature of the subsequent media frenzy has been the way army
and police sources have been taking turns to claim that their
agents had better information, more clout and/or cleaner hands
than the other guys'. Even before the Stakeknife revelations,
investigative journalists at Phoenix magazine had discerned the
battle lines: "the Foreign Office, supported by MI6 (the
Secret Intelligence Service), the SAS, and the PSNI [formerly
RUC] intelligence section plus ODSC (ordinary decent service
cops) versus MI5 (the security service) and the Defence Intelligence
Staff, which controls the various military intelligence groups."
Stakeknife belonged to army intelligence
(the original information about him came, it seems, from a disaffected
army source, which adds another twist to the spin, as it were)
and his hands are filthy: some reports link him to 40 killings.
His IRA 'internal security' role meant he knew a great deal about
the work and identities of his colleagues; ironically, he was
involved in investigating and killing alleged informers, putting
him in a useful position to direct speculation away from himself.
His army 'handlers' not only let him go on killing, but on one
occasion apparently protected him from loyalist assassination
by redirecting a UDA murder squad to another man of Italian descent,
Francisco Notarantonio, a senior citizen who had abandoned republican
paramilitarism long before.
Still, Fred Scappaticci was not a key
player in the Sinn Fein 'peace strategy', something conspiracy
theorists, out in full force since the codename first began to
circulate publicly a few years ago, have reckoned Stakeknife
must have been. Writer Danny Morrison, no longer a Sinn
Fein official but still 'republican-minded', claims Scappaticci
was one of three people under suspicion for leaking details that
led to Morrison's own arrest in what appeared to be an IRA 'kangaroo
court' in 1990; and so 'Scap' was kept away from sensitive information
and operations after that date. This is somewhat contradicted
by another ex-agent who claims he was interrogated by 'internal
security' in the form of Scappaticci in 1994 after an IRA operation
went wrong. On the other hand, a newspaper report that he was
also more recently providing information to the US DEA about
'narco-terrorism' links between the IRA and the Colombian FARC
is probably just so much hyped-up spy-spin.
Efforts to dull the edge of the Stakeknife
story won't stop the speculation in republican areas that some
sort of cooperation with Britain ran to the very top of the Sinn
Fein/IRA organisation. For some dissidents, the presence of one
or more 'touts' at a high political level is all that can explain
the movement's abandonment of 'armed struggle' with a settlement
that falls so far short of traditional objectives, however 'transitional'
Gerry Adams says it is.
If the current clatter of skeletons tumbling
from closets is bad for the Provos, it should be worse for the
Brits. It is increasingly clear that commitment to extra-legal
means of fighting the IRA -- commitment, that is, to directing
terrorism-- reached to the very top of the British government.
Prime minister Margaret Thatcher took a particular interest in
Irish 'counter-terror' from her election in 1979, and especially
after the bruising hunger strikes in 1980-81. The army's Force
Research Unit (FRU), cited by the Stevens Report for its direction
of the UDA through agent Brian Nelson (and also the very same
spooks who 'ran' Stakeknife) was a pet project of hers; she allegedly
met personally and privately with its officers in Northern Ireland.
The longstanding myth of Britain as a neutral party standing
between two atavistic Irish factions -- shockingly popular among
the Dublin media classes as well as in middle England -- is has
taken a lethal hit.
Nonetheless, to some extent all this
is water under the bridge. While most elements of Ulster unionism
still have an instinctual aversion to sharing political power
with Irish republicans, that aversion is no longer shared by
the British government (or, indeed, by the US government). For
the British state, a successfully co-opted republican movement
constitutes at least as good a 'partner' for governing Northern
Ireland as John Hume's once-beloved, now-neglected Social Democratic
and Labour Party. The short-lived Northern Ireland executive
included Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness as education minister,
while he was alleged to be still a senior member of the IRA.
(Unlike Adams, McGuinness has acknowledged his earlier role in
the IRA in his native Derry.) Another Sinn Fein assembly member,
Bairbre de Brun, was health minister, and neither she nor McGuinness
was notable for the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracies
they were assigned to oversee.
Nonetheless, there are new tensions that
arise with each revelation. Republicans enjoyed only a brief
period of "I told you so" over Stevens's report on
collusion between the state and loyalists before a Stakeknife
was driven into its own community-- whether the code-name refers
to one person, a number of people or a whole operation that included
electronic surveillance as well as agents. All over republican
areas there are people whose family members were killed as alleged
informers; there are others who lost loved-ones in operations
that must have been betrayed by highly placed double-agents.
While their discontent bubbles under the surface, the Sinn Fein
leadership has to worry. An IRA source told the Sunday Tribune
that there was a danger of Scappaticci being killed by the dissident
'Real IRA'; it seems unlikely, given the discomfort his survival
causes to their rivals in the Provisionals. (Further danger to
Sinn Fein arises because of the terminal-looking tailspin in
Northern Ireland's political process; the only way for the Northern
parties to pull up and restore devolved government appears to
be some sort of potentially humiliating act of disarmament by
the IRA.)
For the moment, all the organizations
involved are left to conduct the usual round of bureaucratic
finger-pointing and ass-covering. University of Ulster sociology
professor Bill Rolston is something of an international specialist
in how communities and societies unearth the truth after a conflict
situation he warns sharply against the idealization of
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- and when
CounterPunch met him in the Lisburn Road he threw up his hands
in despair at the notion that, given the state's interest, its
evident capacity for cruelty and its self-protective instincts,
an unspun truth about the actions of all combatants in the Troubles
can be discerned.
With the official tribunal of inquiry
into a single set of events, the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings
in Derry, now in its fourth expensive year, it's not surprising
that Rolston has written in Race and Class 44: "If a truth
commission is open to manipulation by the same state forces that
it seeks to bring to task, if trials cans find individuals but
not systems guilty, and if tribunals become over-legalized, surely
the odds are stacked against the community that is seeking truth."
The latest revelations will further demoralize such communities:
how much truth can they stand about the duplicitous roles played
by some of their own?
Harry Browne
lectures in the school of media at Dublin Institute of Technology
and writes a weekly column in the Irish Times. He can be reached
at harrybrowne@eircom.net
Today's
Features
May
28, 2003
David
Vest
DubyaCo.: It's Not So Funny Any More
Dave
Lindorff
My Grandfather's Medal
John
Stanton
America's Dying: Arts and Philosophy Hold the Key
Bernard
Weiner
A PNAC Primer
Robert
Jensen
Texas Dems Set a Standard for the Rest of the Party
Ahmad Faruqui
The Oil Business of Regime Change:
the CIA and Iran
Hammond
Guthrie
Disarming Conundrums
Steve Perry
What If There's No Such Thing as Al-Qaeda?
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