Raid on Basra!A few weeks past saw the media publishing graphic pictures and real time accounts of our brave boys being fire bombed out of their tanks during an uprising by local Iraqi insurgence groups. Luckily the soldier photographed engulfed in flames jumping to safety suffered only minor burns and bruises. The press was quick to repeat the imagery of a burning soldier and the ‘out of control’ Iraqi mob, but almost as an afterthought reported the reasons why the situation got to where it was? A daring raid in Basra by two ‘alleged’ British SAS soldiers who were rumbled during their operation by local police. A firefight proceeded with Iraqi police being shot dead in the process! The two ‘unknown soldiers’ dressed in Arab garb were eventually overpowered by police. They were captured and detained in Basra Jail for the evening. Several hours’ later British tanks arrived and levelled the jail allowing the two soldiers to escape. Depending on whichever news site you read ‘between eight and sixty convicts’ also escaped that morning? Once the news got out British forces were met with hostile locals demanding both the soldiers to be re-detained and to stand trial. It was as ‘we’ are to understand it. ‘A secret mission’ by Special Forces to weed out the militant militia from the already saturated Iraqi police force’! However? Raghib al-Mudhafar a high Basra Judge together with the Iraqi police commander said in a press statement that the two soldiers detained were not British at all, and therefore would not come under the protective umbrella of British law. The two Iraqi officials said their detainees had a distinctive East Mediterranean appearance, more likely to be Israeli but not ‘European or English’ as stated by the ‘European & English’ press? The searched car revealed weaponry, explosives and two Canadian passports! This news byte was completely ignored by both the British & the American media news agencies? “Why!” Because if it was known that Israeli’s were involved as ‘agent provocateurs’ it would paint a completely different picture altogether. Most of the British public are already scratching their heads as to why these two were where they were in the first place. If the public had been given the rest of the jigsaw puzzle it would have undoubtedly tipped the balance of outing the real truth of the situation. Instead we were bombarded with the images of burning tanks like a loop tape mantra! Just when the embarrassing situation started to lose momentum, with ‘most’ people beginning to forget that the odd incident ever happened. The Americans start to get sloppy with their ‘Special Opps’ group with a copycat secret mission leading to a ‘copycat’ fuck up, ending in a copycat ‘use a whole platoon to get them out’. Again not a peep out of the ‘so called free press’! Not a single line written in any paper, magazine, bulletin, fag packet or napkin? Considering that the coalition forces have shot most of the ‘independent journalists working out of Iraq, it’s a miracle that any internal news not vetted by the military gets to print at all? The point drives home hard, that when we read ‘official’ accounts of sticky situations in south Basra, or anywhere in Iraq for that matter! We have to think about what they are not telling us also.
