A high level failure - by Richard... Thursday, June 17, 2010

A high level failure - by Richard... Thursday, June 17, 2010

Too quickly it seems, Dannatt is getting his way: the media is moving on from the Saville Report – although the Sundays may return to the issue. But, with over £190 million spent on the damn thing, the very least we should do is get our money's worth from it.

Thus, before we leave the issue for the time being – doubtless to return at some time in the future – I feel impelled to offer a few more observations, not least a suggestion that too many of the current pundits seem to be missing the point, the very point I made in my original piece about 1st Para, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things".

But, by no means all of the pundits are missing the point. In The Independent there is Robert Fisk, who writes:

We knew the First Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. "Tough" was the word we reporters used if the soldiers were beating up rioters. Brutal was the word we should have used. But sometime towards the end of 1971, I think we all realised that the Parachute Regiment was being prepared for some pretty nasty confrontations. They were the hard men, the reserve battalion at Palace Barracks, Holywood, a boring seaside town on the south side of Belfast Lough, a unit that spent most of its time waiting for trouble.

If that is from one end of the political spectrum, though, we also have Max Hastings, writing in The Daily Mail, who was in Derry on Bloody Sunday. From him we get:

An English reporter friend of mine that day in Derry found himself trapped among demonstrators and rioters. He asked a soldier manning a barricade if he could squeeze past their line to find safety behind the troops. "No, you bastard!", snarled the squaddy. "You stay there and take what's coming to you."

At that stage, mid-afternoon, only CS gas and rubber bullets were being used. But I myself met Paras preparing to conduct the planned "scoop-up" operation to arrest rioters, who were obviously spoiling for action. The Paras are a great military institution, but quite unsuited to peacekeeping. They are a fighting regiment, and that day they expected and wanted to fight.

Hastings, the terribly grand former Daily Telegraph editor, is the man who writes with the authority of "being there", and is therefore treated with great respect. But he nevertheless talks a great deal of tosh, as when he tells us: "The Army, enraged by terrorist killings, was in a savage mood, and still relatively new to the restraints essential for counterinsurgency."

Here the point is that, virtually since the end of World War II, the British Army had been doing little else but counterinsurgency, and no more so than 1 Para. Formed on 15 September 1941, the battalion operated in Haifa during the Palestine Mandate until British troops withdrew in 1948. It was then temporarily disbanded on return to the UK but reconstituted in 1949.

From mid 1951 to 1954, it saw active service in Cyprus, the Canal Zone in Egypt and during counter-terrorist operations against EOKA in Cyprus in 1956. It participated in the Suez landings during the crisis in November, before being back in Cyprus in 1958. Between 1962-3, the battalion served in Bahrain, in early 1964 undertook a UN peace-keeping in Cyprus and in 1965 and 1966 was back in Bahrain. The battalion covered the eventful withdrawal from Aden in 1967 after 127 years of British rule.

The first of its 12 Northern Ireland Op Banner emergency tours began at the end of 1969, two years after it had left Aden – at which time the use of firearms in riot control was standard procedure. 


Much is made (not least by The Independent of the evidence of General Ford, commander, land forces in Northern Ireland (pictured above). He revealed to the inquiry that in 1971 he was "coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary … is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued".

In other words, wrote Ford, "we would be reverting to the methods of IS [internal security] found successful on many occasions overseas" – precisely the methods 1 Para would have been trained to use in Palestine, Egypt, Cyprus and Aden. Thus, with its reputation, background, experience and training, it would have been entirely predictable that committing 1 Para to the pressure cooker of Londonderry in January 1971 would have produced a violent outcome.

And "pressure cooker" it was. On 8 July 1971 in Derry's Bogside two rioters, Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie, had been shot dead by soldiers in disputed circumstances.

The military had claimed the pair were armed, which had been denied by local people. Moderate nationalists including John Hume and Gerry Fitt walked out of the parliament of Northern Ireland in protest. A British Army memorandum stated that as a result of this, the situation "changed overnight". The Provisional IRA's campaign in the city beginning at that time after previously being regarded as "quiescent"

In January 1972, to all intents and purposes, violence is what the Army and the media expected, as indeed did the politicians. Heath apparently told his cabinet committee on Northern Ireland that: "As to Londonderry, a military operation to re-impose law and order would be a major operation necessarily involving numerous civilian casualties."

Where the failure came, therefore, was in not realising the political implications of such violent scenes, spread over the pages of the newspapers and on the TV screens. 1 Para would have done much worse in Aden and elsewhere, but not in the full glare of the media.

Journalist Kevin Cullen was later to write (now two years ago): "Over the years, I met dozens of men who joined the IRA because a British soldier harassed or humiliated them or their families." He went on:

Thirty-six years ago this week, the army rounded up hundreds of Catholic men and teenagers, few of whom were actually in the IRA. Far from smashing the IRA, the army's overzealous policy of internment without trial infuriated the entire nationalist community.

And in 1972, when British paratroopers killed 14 unarmed demonstrators in Derry on Bloody Sunday, the IRA was flooded with recruits. Half of the more than 3,500 people killed in the Troubles died in the fury of the five years that followed Bloody Sunday.

From General Michael Rose, we get confirmation of this. On Bloody Sunday, he says, it was absolutely clear that in exchanging fire with the terrorists, the British Army had fallen into the trap laid for them by the IRA, who had set out that day to commit murder and mayhem, caring nothing for the lives of their own republican supporters. Claims Rose:

Indeed, I believe it was their specific aim to get as many people killed as possible. For the deaths would serve as a ruthlessly cynical recruiting tool. As the news of the dead in Londonderry that day spread around the world, the result was much the same as Irish people everywhere rallied to the nationalist cause. In Northern Ireland, in the Irish Republic and in the US, thousands of young men and women joined the IRA.

And all of this puts the focus up the chain of command, into the high level military and political arenas, where – clearly – tactical and strategic errors were made in terms of the conduct of the campaign. 

The other day, I wrote about the battle of Dien Bien Phu being lost not in the little valley in Viet-Nam's highland jungles but in the air-conditioned map room of the French commander-in-chief. 

By the same token it seems to me, the slaughter of Bloody Sunday happened through the failures of the military brass and the politicians to appreciate the special demands of a counterinsurgency campaign in Northern Ireland. One has to marvel at the political naïvety. 

What did the Army really think would happen, with the media camped on the doorstep and TV cameras on permanent standby, if they started shooting rioters and demonstrators? Were they really so stupid or so isolated from the political realities that they did not realise that images of dead bodies plastered all over the TV screens and the newspapers might have an adverse effect on public sentiment?

But, as always, the BPI are in the frame. That much I wrote earlier but, with even greater clarity, the idea of a high level failure stands up. This is where we should be looking to lay the blame.

Saville Inquiry thread

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Not his finest hour - by Richard... Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Neither Your Freedom and Ours norAutonomous Mind seem terribly impressed by the speech Obama delivered last night.

Jonathan Adler over at The Corner was glad he missed it. He went to the movies to see something more realistic and believable. This is a president, he says, who likes to assert his authority but remains unwilling to accept responsibility.

The full text of the speech is here. The "one approach I will not accept is inaction," the man says, then talking of "our determination to fight for the America we want for our children ... even if we're unsure exactly what that looks like." 

"Even if we don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there," he concludes, "We know we'll get there." His critics might just have a point here! Even HuffPuff was disappointed: "And yet, basically what we got, in spades, was sentiment. To be sure, it was no doubt deeply felt ... ".

The idiot is definitely losing it.

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Let's not - by Richard...

Move along there, nothing to see here, writes Richard Dannatt: "We must not dwell on the errors of the past". The fact that the Saville Inquiry has taken nearly 38 years to arrive at the truth means that its lessons are of limited use, Dannatt then asserts. "How we view things in 2010 is inevitably different from how we viewed them in 1972."

Well, that may be the case, although the assertion is highly debatable - even if there is a great deal of revisionism going on. But we are certainly not always doing things differently. British soldiers are still murdering people, with officers turning a blind eye, and Ministers still lie about events. 

Furthermore, the Paras are still slaughtering civilians in the mistaken belief that they are being fired upon – although if only brown people in faraway places get killed it doesn't seem to matter so much.

But, most of all, the cover-ups still go on and, as Raedwald points out, there are still plenty of bent inquiry chairmen and whitewashers, obedient to the political class rather than to truth and to honour.

It is, thus, all very well Cameron apologising to the relatives and friends of the Bloody Sunday victims, but what about an apology to us, for being lumbered with a bill of £191 million to remedy the cover-up? What happened on Bloody Sunday, he says, "was both unjustified and unjustifiable." But what happened afterwards was also "unjustified and unjustifiable."

Equally "unjustified and unjustifiable" is the assertion by Gen Sir David Richards, current CGS – ranking alongside Dannatt's claims – his insistence that the Army had changed greatly over the 38 years since Bloody Sunday.

But it is just over 100 years since the Army failed so egregiously in the Boer War, following which Kipling published his poem, The Lesson. "Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, we have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good," he wrote.

Yet we are dealing with an Army which, 100 years later failed in Iraq and has since refused publicly to examine the lessons of that failure, only to repeat its mistakes in Afghanistan.

So, no Mr Dannatt, I don't think we should move on just yet. We should dwell on the errors of the past, long enough at least to learn the lessons from them, otherwise, as the Army seems so keen to do, we are doomed to repeat them, again and again and again.

Saville Report thread

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The master race? - by Richard...

A German student, we are told, made a rude gesture at a group of Hells Angels and hurled a puppy at them before trying to escape on a stolen bulldozer. He was picked up by police after complaints that his getaway vehicle was causing a three-mile traffic jam on the road into Munich.

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The second one is "off" - by Richard...

Announcing a complete review of how "Britain" collects and disposes of rubbish, Caroline Spelman, the Cleggeron environment secretary, has promised to make the country a "zero waste economy".

She says biodegradable waste like food could "no longer be allowed" to just rot in landfill. This is likely to mean that all councils have to introduce slop buckets so that food waste can be collected separately.

But "allowed" by whom, she does not reveal ... and this is the administration that wants to be "in Europe but not ruled by Europe". Thus does she say on behalf of her EU masters, "We need a new approach to waste ... We cannot keep putting recyclable and biodegradable material into landfill."

So, we already have a waste bin, another bin for paper, an insert for glass and tin cans, a woven bag for cardboard and another for garden waste. And now we have to have another waste container, making six in all?

We have two words for Caroline "slop-bucket" Spelman. The second one is "off". Following that, we have some extremely detailed instructions on where she can put her slop buckets, the results of which would be extremely painful.

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And now for the Saville Report - by Richard... Tuesday, June 15, 2010

As The Boy stands up to make a statement on the £191-million Saville Report, news comes in that two soldiers from 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment have been shot dead in separate incidents in Afghanistan. They died while on patrol in the Nad Ali district of Helmand province. 

Their deaths bring the total number of UK troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 298. Two more and we have a magic round number, so we can have another media blut-fest. It may just beat the historical account of the Paras slaughtering 14 innocent civil rights demonstrators and bystanders, an event which was to rack up the intensity of the "Troubles" and cost many more lives.

It is axiomatic that crowd control requires very special skills and discipline. Putting poorly-trained troops under the command of inexperienced officers on the front line, with rifles and live ammunition, is asking for a disaster. We did not need a report costing £191 million to tell us that. 

The disaster happened on 30 January 1972, so-called "Bloody Sunday", when the gung ho* 1st Para manned the line, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things", for which purposes it was designed, trained and equipped. 

The resultant carnage, therefore, was not the fault of the soldiers (the Army was to lose over 100 troops that year), any more than the failures in Afghanistan are the fault of individual soldiers of the line. For that, we must look to the politicians who put them there and their senior officers. Talk of prosecution of the soldiers who fired the shots is misplaced.

But, as so often when innocent people get killed, the PBI takes the shit and we pay the bills. The lawyers walk away with the dosh (in this case, several of them have "earned" millions in fees), the officers get gongs and more sewing badges and the politicians get honours and awards. Then as now, nothing really changes.

* Saville Report: Chapter 4, para 4.8: "... a force with a reputation for using excessive physical violence". 

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