What this meant, was that the prisoner would be offered two choices, one that was terrifying or one comparatively more appealing (Melshen 15). During one visit to Northern Ireland, Bahraini officers were trained in “community intelligence” and “how to use dogs”.

Kitson’s Irish War lays bare the evidence they discounted: Kitson’s role in the events leading up to and surrounding that massacre; evidence from a deserter from 1 Para who joined the IRA; a deceitful MI5 agent; a courageous whistle blower whom the British state tried to discredit, and much more, all of which points to a motive for the attack on the Bogside. We still don’t know the truth of these cases, and Kitson denies any knowledge of the death of Patrick Heenan.

Meanwhile, the Saville Report (2010) into Bloody Sunday and the de Silva Report (2013) on collusion with loyalist paramilitaries led to two further ‘unconditional’ British apologies for the behaviour of its security forces in Northern Ireland. Kitson, in his blind pursuit of defending the crown’s interests, made no distinction between civilian and combatant as he honed his skills in applying torture, internment and death from Kenya, to Aden and then to Ireland,” Mr Doherty said. In Ireland during the War of Independence they had used paramilitary police units, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. Lady Kitson was appointed an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List of June 2015, for her work with the Army Families Federation. The military consequences of Kitson’s approach were that the Provisional IRA rapidly developed from a faction of a largely defunct IRA in early 1970 to a national liberation movement for many northern Catholics by spring 1972 (the deadliest year).

Tony Doherty, Chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust, said there will be no sadness at the passing of Frank Kitson in Derry. During specific periods that NI-CO staff were training guards in Jao prison, Ali reported being raped and tortured by his prison guards, as did dozens of fellow inmates. Heenan had initiated over the killing of her husband, arguing that this development was ‘as much of a threat to Britain’s fighting capacity as would be a failure to meet NATO budgetary targets, and it risks putting the special relationship under increasing strain … The extent to which those who served decades ago in Northern Ireland, including the highly distinguished soldier-scholar General Sir Frank Kitson, remain exposed to legal risk is striking and appalling. He was appointed to a regular commission as a lieutenant on 10 April 1948 (with seniority from 15 December 1947), [3] and promoted to captain on 15 December 1953. This was a war begun by the 1945 Labour government against the wartime Communist-led resistance, which had liberated the country from Japanese occupation.Such abuses were not merely low-level tactical excesses by undisciplined and racist troops but were institutional, systematic, and approved or covered up at the highest levels. In his obituary in The Times, which reported that he died on January 2, it read that "no general in recent times has provoked more intense and sustained controversy". In November 2013, a BBC ‘Panorama’ investigation into British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s revealed that members of a special covert operations unit known as the Military Reaction Force (MRF) admitted to the murder of suspects and unarmed Catholic civilians. Kitson’s counter-insurgency strategy heavily relied on the operation of internment centers or a similar concept, such as isolation.

He said he had no recollection of discussing the general situation in Northern Ireland with Major General Ford nor had he carried out specific training of troops. In 2015, Kitson was sued over the wrongful death of Eugene “Paddy” Heenan as a result of “negligence and misfeasance in public office” (“Ex-army”). In 1962, Kitson married Elizabeth Spencer, whose father, Colonel Charles Spencer, was Colonel of the 12th Royal Lancers. On 11 August 1971, two days after the introduction of internment without trial had seen Nationalist areas of Northern Ireland react with what was virtually insurrection, ten people were murdered by Paratroopers in Ballymurphy, West Belfast. million Kenyans were confined to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages, as documented by the historian Caroline Elkins in her Pulitzer-winning ‘ Britain’s Gulag’.

Shortly after this visit to Northern Ireland, Bahrain’s Ministry for the Interior managed to locate him. Like them, and following the experience of the Briggs Plan in Malaya in 1949 (when 600,000 Chinese rural ‘squatters’ were placed in concentration camps termed ‘new villages’), he concluded that population control was essentially about coercion and raising the costs for disloyalty, not winning by ideas: ‘conditions can be made reasonably uncomfortable for the population as a whole . Kitson and Wilford’s troops shot this woman in the head while she was helping one of the other Ballymurphy victims. A further brigade was usually attached as brigade reserve, but this could be employed elsewhere as required.