The following is a guest post by our Ireland bureau chief Max McCauley a.k.a. MC Duh.

Is Karl Rove‘s mouth really a factory which produces misleading nonsense? Or should we really be looking at the misleading nonsense as a guide to further reading, on subjects we should actually know about? In his own super-fantastic devious way, is Rove really giving us clues as to what is really going on in the Bush Administration?

Rove made a comment the other day that the War on Terror, going forward, would be comparable to Great Britain’s eternal pain-in-the-ass: terrorists in Northern Ireland, and the way they make life annoying in the rest of the United Kingdom.

A ha! So what we’re really going after here are terrorists! Terrorists who sometimes might just be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and not actually terrorists. But at least dead! In 1992, a boy called Peter McBride was stopped and searched by two members of the British Army’s Scots Guard, Mark Wright and James Fisher. They didn’t find anything, and he was pretty scared. He turned and ran, and they shot him twice in the back and killed him. They were both put in prison to serve life sentences, and served a little over three years. They were released, rejoined their regiment and given promotions.

So, basically, the War on Terror will consist in part of rather unfortunate and depressing occurrences such as this, right? Well, if you were about to say no, then don’t worry because it will all be okay!

The Bush Administration has awarded a $293 million dollar contract to a British firm called Aegis Defense Services. The head of Aegis, Tim Spicer said in accepting the award, “I am pleased to confirm that we’ve been awarded a contract to assist the Project Management Office (PMO) in Iraq by the United States Department of Defense. The contract involves coordination of security support for reconstruction contractors and for the protection of PMO personnel.”

If you really want to fight terrorism in Iraq the way that the British Army has been doing so in Northern Ireland, then this is great news! Why? Because Spicer was the head of the Scots Guard when two soldiers under his watch shot Peter McBride in the back! And he was a main factor in their life sentences turning into three year sentences, and their being welcomed back into the Army even though Queen’s regulations dictate that they should have been dismissed after receiving custodial sentences from a civilian court.

Paul O’Connor, spokesman at the Pat Finucane Centre, based in Derry in Northern Ireland, issued a statement urging those concerned of the role of private security firms in human rights abuses in Iraq to raise concerns at this contract:

“Despite numerous court rulings that held that the soldiers under his command murdered an unarmed 18 year old boy and concocted lies to cover up their actions, Spicer has continued to claim that his soldiers should not have been prosecuted. By his own admission he wanted to send Guardsmen Wright and Fisher back on patrol immediately after the murder. ‘It’s the same principle as getting straight back on a horse when you have been thrown off,’ he wrote in his autobiography.”

If only Lyndie England were as lucky to have commanding officers as intent on eliminating terrorism!

A letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumbfeld written by Presidential Candidate John Kerry, and Senators Teddy Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd and Charles Schumer, questioning giving Tim Spicer $293 million plus to establish the largest private army in the world can be found here.

The war on terror is the answer to everything.