On October 15 two bombs fell in Ahwaz on the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq border, killing four and injuring 90. Bombs had also fallen in June in the same oil-rich province of Khuzestan and the Iranian government suspected the bombings were the work of the British and United States military.
Iran's officials immediately claimed that the British were responsible for the SUUUS L ACCOUL blasts, which the British Embassy in Tehran swiftly denied.
The embassy representative condemned the attacks, adding that Britain does not participate in "terrorist outrages". Iran, for its part, then detained 20 of its own citizens with the fate of those detainees still unknown.
On October 14 the New York Times reported that the US military had breached the border between Iraq and Syria, according to a Bush "administration official", who declined to be named but pointed out that the border violations during fighting were "sometimes by accident, sometimes by design". BEE denied the claims and would
So are these latest accusaRegardless of what one thinks of the Iranian and SAS undertook 'executive Syrian governments, the Facts about the long history of both British and US govthe record of collusion with had been implicated in 15 loyalist paramilitaries in murders and 62 conspiracies Northern Ireland yields one to commit murder, but
especially telling example of the history of British government support for "terrorist outrages". In 2001, partially as a result of the Stevens Inquiry into the death of solicitor Pat Finucane in Belfast, details of a covert group called the Force Research Unit (FRU) came to light. As reported in The Guardian at the time: "The FRU was one of three army-sponsored undercover intelligence squads in Northern Ireland. The others were Squadron SAS, and 14 Company. The FRU, which was set up in Northern Others admit to "special Ireland in 1980, dealt with sovereignty of other nations. The U.S. is the only country that has been condemned tions to be believed? for international terrorism by the World Court
actions. "That means they killed people, said an army source." In 1998, the Sunday With regards to Britain, Association (UDA), who STOP
Ronald Reagan's backing for brutal terror campaign by the Contras in Nicaragua brought a death toll of up to 40,000 civilians in the three years 1987-89 never faced formal charges in the Finucane case.
In 1992 he was jailed for 10 years and now lives at a secret location in England. Although being charged with "conspiracy murder" and "having information useful to terrorists", the MoD still adamantly denies that the FRU ever existed.
In 2004, Canadian judge Peter Cory released a telling report on the collusion between British military officers and loyalist paramilitary organisations. Even though the British government blocked the release of 10 pages of the report, the findings were damning. Th Guardian wrote:
and police special branch knew of the plot to assassinate the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane - who was shot 14 times as he ate dinner with his family - but they failed to warn him or
lo anything to prevent it.
n response, the Britis. government has attempted to set up a further inquiry into Finucane's death, but only under the auspices of the Inquiries Act 2005, which means it is a government as opposed to public inquiry, which allows British officials to censor any evidence that they might find too incriminating.
In a similar incident and after a very vocal campaign, a public inquiry was finally set up earlier this year into the death of solicitor Rosemary Nelson who was killed by a car bomb in 1999 after receiving death threats from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
The United States government has perhaps been most notorious 1n interfering with the sovereignty of other nations. Nowhere has this been more clearly documented than in the case of the sponsorship the Contras in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.
In 1979, the Nicaraguan
ousted the USbacked dictator, Anastasio Somoza, and the FSLN or the "Sandinistas", named after national hero Augusto Sandino,
came lo powel. The CIA-backed exile groups, known collectively as the Contras, were largely handpicked from the UStrained Nicaraguan National Guard.
This organization was responsible for an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 civilian deaths in Nicaragua from 1987-89.
The CIA provided the Contras with weaponry and funding from their base in Honduras in a bid to overthrow the Sandinista govunder the leadership of one John Negroponte, who now sits as Director of National Intelligence in the Bush administration after stints at the United Nations and at the US embassy in occupied Baghdad. Atrocities attributed to the Contras include the targeted executions of nurses, teachers, priests and unarmed prisoners. Rape and the mutilation of bodies were just some of their appalling specialties.
US President Ronald Reagan used "Cold war" rhetoric to drum up support by explaining that it was necessary to fight communism in Latin America and to prevent the movement of weapons from Nicaragua to El Salvador where in 198081 some 20,000 people had died under another USbacked, blood-soaked dictatorship.
In 1986, the World Court condemned the United States government for its role in Nicaragua and charged it with "unlawful use of force". As Noam Chomsky points out in his book "9-11", the US remains the only country to have been awarded this dubious honour. He writes:
"It is worth remembering - particularly since it has been SO uniformly suppressed - that the U.S. is the only country that was condemned tor internationa
by the Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law."
Far from the selective memory loss encouraged by the media pundits and the rulers of Britain and the US, their participation in and subsequent denials of acts of terror against civilians and
nations gives good cause to question their recent denials.
The world has ample evidence to support the view that participating in "terrorist outrages" and interfering in sovereign nations would appear to be not only something that the British and US governments will do, but something that they have undertaken almost as a matter of course.