Brigadier Gordon Kerr

The officer who commanded the British military Force Research Unit* during the killing years in Ireland was Lt Colonel Gordon Kerr (now Brigadier Gordon Kerr) an Aberdeen man and former Gordon Highlander. As the British police homed in on his importance, he was sent to the other side of the world, to serve as the British military attaché in Beijing.

Brigadier Gordon Kerr is now in charge of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), to provide covert surveillance expertise for operations by the SAS and the Special Boat Service in Iraq and Afghanistan and other UK overseas interests.

*The Forces Research Unit is now known as the JCU (NI) Joint Collection Unit (Northern Ireland)

After the Iraq war ‘ended’ in May 2003 Kerr was sent to direct intelligence operations in Iraq. By May 2005 another of the British military intelligence units involved in the ‘dirty war’ in Northern Ireland – the 14th Intelligence Detachment – nicknamed the ‘14th’ or ‘the Det’- was renamed the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) responsible for ‘counter-terrorism’ operations in Iraq and the UK. Brigadier Gordon Kerr was appointed the head of the SRR. All retain immunity from prosecution – this time that held by all coalition troops in Iraq at the demand of the Bush administration as occupying power.

True to old form in Northern Ireland we now know that the SRR have already been involved in getting at least one more innocent person killed. On the day that the Brazilian Jean Charles De Menezes was killed by armed police in the London underground at least one member of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment was the man who wrongly identified him as possibly being one of the July the 7th bombers. The government and the Metropolitan Police have refused to answer questions about whether more than one member of the SRR was involved in the surveillance team following Menezes.

The Scotsman newspaper also reported that the two SAS men arrested by Iraqi police last August for allegedly driving around with automatic weapons and bomb making equipment were also under the command of the SRR – which would also put them under the command of Brigadier Gordon Kerr as head of that unit. Iraqi journalists hired by companies like CBS are frequently shot, jailed without charge and accused or ‘aiding insurgents by their actions’ or disappeared by US forces if they film the aftermath of terrorist bombings according to reports by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The advanced bombs or ‘improvised explosive devices’ (IEDs) being used against British forces in Iraq are also apparently a legacy of the FRU’s time in Northern Ireland. Using the logic that if they knew how the IRA made its bombs they could defuse them more easily the FRU was involved in using double agents to give the IRA the technology to make advanced bombs triggered by beams of light. The IRA used these against RUC police officers. It has been speculated that they then sold or shared the technology with the PLO and Hezbollah who traded it on to Iraqi insurgents – but how the technology was transferred to Iraq and by who remains uncertain.

Just as civil rights lawyers like Finucane and Rosemary Nelson were seen as ‘IRA’ by the FRU and the UDA terrorists who they handed death lists to in Northern Ireland so Iraqi academics who speak out against the occupation are routinely assassinated. There is no specific evidence that the Special Reconnaissance Regiment or the Joint research Group are involved in organising these assassinations but we do know that the tactic of collusion with terrorist death squad killings in Northern Ireland and there is no reason to think their tactics will have changed much given that many of their personnel – like Kerr – are unchanged.

There are death and torture squads linked to many different militias, to the coalition backed Iraqi government , and – according to Iraqi exile Sami Ramadani – to former Iraqi Prime Minister and ex-CIA funded terrorist Iyad Allawi.

US units are similarly involved in co-operating with extremely dubious groups in Iraq – including some of Saddam’s torturers in the new Pentagon funded secret police , the Iraqi police and the fanatical Shia ‘Wolf Brigade’. The ‘Wolf Brigade’ consider all Sunnis to be apostates rather than Muslims and have the same kind of relationship with US forces that paramilitaries like the Serbian extremists of Arkan’s Tigers had with the Yugoslav military in the Bosnian War – i.e. US forces can deny responsibility for killings and torture carried out by Iraqi government paramilitaries they trained.

All of this is a long way from a war ‘against terrorism’ or for ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’. You can’t teach human rights to torturers like the Mukhabarat, fanatics like the Wolf Brigade or old collaborators with terrorists like the SRR and JSG who were the FRU and ‘Det’ of the dirty war in Northern Ireland. To employ these people is to continue human rights abuses against guilty and innocent alike. Iraqis are not safer with them operating in Iraq with the immunity from prosecution held by all coalition forces there - and the killing of Jean Charles De Menezes showed that people in Britain aren’t safe from them either.

It’s time that people with a record of collaborating in terrorist murders were out of the military and in front of the courts so that we can eliminate the additional dangers of their ‘counter-terrorism’ operations and replace them with people who can be trusted.In Northern Ireland they were neither right nor effective – their collusion in UDA terrorist murders helped create a surge in recruitment and support for IRA terrorists in the 80s. The De Menezes case showed that they are just as much of a liability now.