Bunch of Five

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It is a disgrace that this award still stands even after the innocence of the Ballymurphy dead has been clearly established. Bringing the Royal Family and the Honours System into disrepute, General Sir Frank Kitson (right), the man responsible for the Ballymurphy massacre and the vilification of its innocent murder victims. The point I am making is that Kitson and others could draw on all this, including having different laws on the shelf ready to be used. The psychology underlying the treatment prescribed by Ian Henderson for the recruits for the pseudo-gangs… was to trump the fear of betrayal by an even more powerful fear of instant death by hanging.

Alistair McNutt, a former police officer in Hong Kong under British rule, was a colonel in the interior ministry until 2002.

Accordingly, when Petraeus in 2006 was planning the US military ‘surge’ in Iraq to crush a mounting Sunni insurgency there, he visited Kitson for guidance and advice. The MRF not only murdered suspects and unarmed Catholic civilians but also colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in a campaign of sectarian murder of innocent Catholics. In the context of The Troubles, this can clearly be seen through the use of the “five techniques” and the threat of legal punishment for being associated with the IRA, both of which Keefe discusses. This assumption has been replicated in the ‘Petraeus doctrine’ with disastrous outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan. General Sir Michael Jackson, who was an adjutant in 1 Para in the early 1970s, described Kitson as an ‘incisive thinker and military theorist’, and claimed that ‘he was the sun around which the planets revolved .

General Kitson was also at the centre of controversy following the McGurk's Bar atrocity in December 1971, which killed 15 Catholics. Sent Kitson’s ‘Private Army’ – Support Company of 1 Para - to Derry where they perpetrated the Bloody Sunday massacre. This included internment centers and the employment of the “counter-gang,” or informants inside the opposition group, to both gather “critical intelligence” as well as, “effectively confuse, divide and undermine the authentic organizations,” the IRA in the case of Northern Ireland (“Inside: Spies”).

The then Tory government grasped matters were spiralling out of control and pulled back from Kitson’s methods, which were seen to act as a recruitment officer for the IRA. On New Year’s Day 1955, Frank Kitson was awarded the British Military Cross “in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Kenya”.

The eldest son of a rear-admiral, he attended one of England’s leading public schools, Stowe, in the mid-1940s, and was head boy of his house.During Britain’s brutal war in Malaysia – waged in part so that Clement Attlee’s government could continue to plunder the country’s rubber, despite a famine, to fund Britain’s post-war reconstruction – half a million Malaysians were forced into concentration camps through a process known as ‘villagisation’. Kitson was one of those who organised ‘counter-gangs,’ including captured Mau Mau who had been ‘turned. The commander of land forces in 1971–2, Major-General Robert Ford, was a veteran of Palestine and Aden, and Kitson’s predecessor as commander in the Belfast Area, Major-General Farrar-Hockley, was a veteran of Palestine, Cyprus, Aden, and of covert operations in Indonesia.