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Showing posts with label Declassified UK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Declassified UK. Show all posts
Declassified UK ✒ Written by Richard Norton-Taylor. Recommended by Christy Walsh.

The famous ‘who dares wins’ regiment finally faces serious scrutiny over its Afghan night raids, even as those involved in a cover up are promoted to highest office. 

At last the lid is coming off special forces operations, revealing specific and detailed accusations that senior British military figures have been desperate to suppress.

It is alleged that troops from the elite Special Air Service (SAS) took the law into their own hands and committed “multiple murders” that were “deliberately covered up”.

This was how Sir Charles Haddon-Cave, an appeal court judge, last week described evidence he had heard from British special forces officers.

Haddon-Cave made the comments at the inquiry he chairs into 80 suspicious deaths on SAS counter-terrorism raids in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013.

So far, the evidence has been heard mostly in secret. But despite the best efforts of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to block it, damning details are becoming public.

And the repercussions in one of the most secret corners of the British state should be huge.

‘Unacceptable’

The inquiry was forced on a reluctant MoD after increasingly credible claims of cold-blooded murder . . .  

Continue reading @ Declassified UK.

Wall Of Secrecy Around SAS ‘Murders’ Begins To Crumble

Declassified UK ✒ Written by Anne Cadwallader. Recommended by Christy Walsh.

Veterans of undercover operations claim that colluding with terrorists is sometimes necessary for the greater good. Now a new report shatters that myth.

Over decades of bloody conflict in Northern Ireland, a near sacred mystique grew up around the intelligence services. Spoken of in reverential tones, largely unaccountable and unscrutinised, they were depicted by the media as an omniscient elite.

A description, for example, selected at random online, of a book on the “intelligence war”, turns this up: “The men and women who work in this field are a special breed who undertake hazardous risks with unflinching tenacity and professionalism”.

With publication of the interim report of “Operation Kenova” on Friday, that myth crashed to earth. It revealed a squalid, boastful yet tragic reality – more Keystone Cops than James Bond.

Operation Kenova, led by police chief Jon Boutcher, has spent the last seven years, and £40m, investigating 101 murders and abductions linked to the British military double-agent known by the code “Stakeknife” – aka Freddie Scappaticci.

He was a Belfast man of Italian extraction who headed up the IRA’s “Internal Security Unit” (or “nutting squad”).

Continue reading @ Declassified UK. 

Stakeknife ❥ Britain’s Spy In Ireland Who Got Away With Murder

John McEvoy ðŸ”¦ writing in Declassified UK. 

John Woodcock, the government’s man urging MPs to stop engaging with pro-Palestine groups, has accepted Israel lobby funding amid the Gaza genocide.

5-March-2024

John Woodcock, or Lord Walney, is the UK government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption.

In 2021, he was tasked with producing a report “into the extreme fringes on both ends of the political spectrum” in Britain, and with making recommendations to the prime minister.

Woodcock has now completed his report, and is urging Britain’s political leaders to take a “zero-tolerance approach” to pro-Palestine and climate protesters.

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, says Woodcock, should “instruct their MPs and councillors not to engage with anyone” from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign “until they get their house in order and cut the hate from their marches”.

In addition, Woodcock is suggesting that pro-Palestine protesters should be forced to pay towards policing costs and be treated like “sectarian parades in Northern Ireland”.

Yet Woodcock can hardly be considered independent. He has previously worked with the Israel lobby and has even accepted funding from it amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Declassified has found.

Continue reading @ Declassified UK. 

UK Extremism Adviser Has Been Funded By Israel Lobby

Richard Norton Taylor ✒ writing in Declassified UK . Recommended by Christy Walsh. 


Johnny Mercer changed the law to protect soldiers from “vexatious” prosecutions. Now the minister admits he always thought some were guilty of war crimes. 

Britain’s most senior military figures took part in a concerted attempt to suppress allegations that SAS troops committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

And a government minister who successfully campaigned to protect soldiers from prosecution believed some of the allegations were true.

This is the remarkable evidence about a “culture of omerta” – a code of silence, originally attributed to the Italian mafia – within Britain’s Special Forces that emerged this week at an independent inquiry in London.

It is examining the conduct of elite SAS troops in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013, including the killing of 33 people in eleven night raids in 2011.

The inquiry has already heard from one senior unidentified British Special Forces soldier who believed SAS troops deliberately falsified post-operation reports to cover up what they had done.

The revelations only emerged after a £10 million internal MoD investigation, Operation Northmoor, failed to discover evidence of SAS wrongdoing and was shut down.

Continue reading @ Declassified UK.

Veterans Minister Suspected S.A.S. Of War Crimes

Richard Norton Taylor - writing in Declassified UK. Recommended by Christy Walsh.

12-October-2023

An independent inquiry has heard shocking allegations of how SAS soldiers engaged in a “widespread and systematic pattern of unlawful extrajudicial killings” - which were known at the highest levels of the UK government, even in Downing St, but covered up for years.

The judge-led inquiry was forced on a reluctant Ministry of Defence (MoD) after allegations surfaced repeatedly in the media before families of Afghans killed by SAS troops, including the execution of Afghan males of “fighting age” between 2010 and 2013, took the claims to the high court.

The inquiry has heard devastating allegations, some of them privately backed at the time by serving SAS troops, that were persistently ignored. Commanders attempted to block investigations by the military police, according to detailed claims backed up by witnesses.

Computer records of SAS activities are reported to have been permanently and deliberately wiped before they could be shown to military investigators.

The inquiry is particularly significant with the combination of a catalogue of allegations backed up by detailed evidence shedding unprecedented light on the SAS, the least accountable of organs of the British state.

Continue reading @ Declassified UK.

Whitehall’s Cover-Up Of SAS Killings In Afghanistan

Phil Miller - writing in Declassified UK. Recommended by Christy Walsh.

6-December-2021

A veteran of colonial policing in India and Malaya advised Northern Irish officers how to tackle the IRA in the 1970s. The authorities refuse to release his report but one security insider is willing to talk about it.

A British court has ruled that a review of undercover policing compiled by MI5 at the height of the Troubles nearly 50 years ago will stay secret.

The verdict marks the end of a freedom of information battle between Northern Ireland’s police and Declassified UK.

It comes as a blow to legacy campaigners and bereaved families who hoped the report could shed light on alleged collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s (RUC) Special Branch and loyalist (pro-British) paramilitary gangs.

The dossier was drawn up by Jack Morton, a former MI5 director and colonial counter-insurgency veteran. He was called out of retirement by the head of MI5 who picked him for “special duties in Northern Ireland”.

Morton spent eight weeks in the summer of 1973 reviewing “the organisation, staffing and equipment” of RUC Special Branch in the fight against Irish republicans who wanted to end British rule over Northern Ireland.

Continue reading @ Declassified UK.

MI5 Report On Troubles To Stay Secret, Court Rules

Declassified UK @ UK defence secretary faces call to hand back his bravery award after it emerges terror suspects he captured were not prosecuted. Considered a worthwhile read by Christy Walsh. 


Phil Miller

An “IRA unit” supposedly caught red-handed by Britain’s defence secretary during his army career was not prosecuted, casting doubt over his dramatic account of the incident.

Ben Wallace served as a Scots Guards officer in Belfast in 1992 and told The Sun he was decorated for capturing an IRA gang that had planted a bomb.

Ahead of Remembrance Sunday in 2020, he briefed Britain’s biggest tabloid how his patrol found a sweet jar “filled up with Semtex plastic explosives and ball bearings, with wires coming out of it…primed and ready to kill.”

Five or six men suspected of handling the bomb were captured by the patrol in a pursuit “which involved jumping over fences and things like that”, Wallace claimed in the article.

In an earlier radio interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, he said: “We caught an IRA active service unit who was about to throw a rather large bomb at the patrol. And we didn’t just catch the person moving it, we caught the bomb makers – the whole shebang.”

Continue reading @ Declassified UK.

Exclusive ✑ ‘I.R.A. Bombers’ Captured By Ben Wallace Were Innocent

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