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Commentary: Patriot Games for Hypocrites

By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, April 20 (UPI) -- The furor over the revelations of the Stevens Report on alleged collusion between the British Army and paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland looks likely to strip away layers of hypocrisy from the British body politic. But only to replace them with a far worse and more dangerous hypocrisy.

Sir John Stevens, head of London's Metropolitan Police Commission, Thursday released a 20-page summary of an enormous, still-secret 3,000-page report concluding that British security forces in Northern Ireland in the elite, super-secret Force Reconnaissance Unit had colluded with Protestant loyalist paramilitary terrorists in killings.

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As could have been anticipated, Stevens' outspoken language both in his report and at the press conference releasing it in Belfast has created a firestorm of outrage and moral indignation in Britain. All but lost in the controversy has been any bleak but realistic assessment of the threats that terror organizations with a growing capability to deploy weapons of mass destruction now pose to open, democratic societies and what means may be necessary to contain and defeat them.

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Indeed, anyone who has covered such struggles, deemed "low intensity conflicts" or LICs by British Brig. Gen. Frank Kitson more than 30 years ago, knows all too well how aptly the security operations needed to defeat them fit 19th century German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck's description of the process of making both laws and sausages. The product in both cases was tasty and popular, Bismarck said, but for the piece of mind of the consumers, they should not know what went into making them in the first place.

The populations of open, tolerant democratic societies have every right and reason to demand that their governments and state security forces protect them from terrorist attacks on both the large and small scale. But the grim truth that all policemen and soldiers know is that it is impossible to do that by playing 100 percent fair according to Marquis of Queensberry rules.

As the London Daily Telegraph acknowledged in an editorial Friday on Stevens' revelations, "What went on in the nether world of spookery and paramilitarism was undoubtedly 'dirty.'" But it always is.

The democratically-elected governments of the Fourth and Fifth Republics in France waged war against the FLN or "National Liberation Front" revolutionary forces in Algeria in one of the largest, most bloodiest and most terrible of all 20th century colonial conflicts in the 1950s. The FLN terror apparatus in the city of Algiers was only broken by the widespread use of ferocious torture by the French security forces. New revelations and impassioned public debates over that dark chapter continue to reverberate in France to this day.

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Up to now, British media commentators and politicians in both the center and on the left, and even a few on the right and most British media pundits have adopted a smug, holier-than-thou attitude of superiority towards other democratic societies such as the United States, India, Turkey, France and Israel when they have been forced to condone ruthless retaliatory tactics or impose new restrictions on civil liberties to combat terrorist threats and insurrections.

A recurrent theme of such criticisms has long been that Britain's own stellar and virtually spotless record in Northern Ireland proved that all such excesses and murky relativistic suspensions of moral judgment could always be avoided, and the British example was proof of that.

Following the Stevens revelations, however, the obvious response to such sanctimonious declarations can always be, "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

But if old hypocrisy may be blown away by Stevens' report, it is very clear that new hypocrisy is already rushing in to take its place.

Describing the flood of moral outrage directed at the British security forces over the Stevens revelations, Sean O'Callaghan writing in the London Daily Telegraph Friday exclaimed, "I for one cannot help but feel angered at the sheer hypocrisy, the hand-wringing."

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"How clever to be so wise, so lofty" after the event, O'Callaghan continued, "when the great majority of the security forces carried out extraordinarily courageous work in the most dangerous of circumstances and, lest we forget, died in their hundreds to make these islands a safer and better place for all of us."

O'Callaghan, it should be noted, was writing from a very different perspective than the media pundits he decried, with considerably more practical experience of the real issues involved. He was a former senior officer in the IRA rising to be head of its Southern Command. Out of moral revulsion at what he and his comrades were doing, he became a top-level informer for the British security authorities and is credited with having saved hundreds of lives by foiling many terrorist operations during the years he led his own deadly double life.

Some of the most controversial revelations in the Stevens Report suggested that British double-agents within both the Protestant loyalist and Catholic nationalist paramilitary groups were directed to target relatively harmless or even innocent victims for assassination in order to preserve their own precarious positions and credibility within the groups. That way, they could continue to operate for years at a time and save a far greater number of lives.

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This kind of nightmarish, inverted moral calculus is unavoidable in the kind of grim, shadowy twilight intelligence operations such as O'Callaghan remembered and Stevens investigated. Yet such operations are today unfortunately more vital than ever. For we live in a world where fanatical terrorists with aims more genocidal and extreme towards all of decent human civilization than anything the IRA ever imagined have the credible possibility of gaining access to weapons of mass destruction to achieve their apocalyptic goals.

For more than a quarter of a century from the revelations of the Church Committee in the mid-1970s to the mega-terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that claimed 3,000 lives on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States was able to avoid most of these moral quandaries by depending upon primarily "Sigint," signals intelligence and other forms of "Elint," or electronic intelligence.

But the success of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization in carrying out the "9/11" atrocities served grim notice that Elint is no longer enough. In a world of such dangers, good "Humint," or "human intelligence" is a strategic necessity more crucial than nuclear weapons.

However, Humint requires recruiting and maintaining agents in the heart of small, secret, clandestine and utterly ruthless organizations -- and doing whatever is required to sustain their credibility. That automatically requires a return to the world of moral relativism and deals with the devil exposed by Sir John Stevens in his investigations. But in such a world, there is no credible alternative.

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