Posted by Jim on October 20, 2019
Deirdre Younge writing in Village
about the covert war waged by the British state in the North.
It was early November.1993. A senior RUC officer surveyed the docking area of a container ship in Teesport, Cleveland. ‘The Inowroclaw’ was sailing from Gdynia in Poland to Teesport and from there to its declared final destination of Belfast Port and into the hands of the UVF. It was jammed with armaments.
However, another RUC officer and a battalion of UK Customs officers would be waiting on Teesport docks to ‘intercept’ the shipment before it reached its declared destination
Recruited by M16 in the early 1970s, he had been in Teesport weeks in advance to ensure that nothing could go wrong. This time the weapons would not be distributed as had happen six years previously. If the arms were added to the UVF arsenal it would match anything imported from Libya by the IRA.
This is not the plot of a Northern Ireland ‘noir’ novel, but a ‘false flag’ operation at the tail end of the undercover war in Northern Ireland.
Continue reading in Village.
Posted by Jim on October 19, 2019
The GOP can either defend the United States or serve the damaged and defective man who is now its president.
James Fallows
National correspondent at The Atlantic
Leonhard Foeger / Reuters
There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president.
Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests—maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter.
Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.
Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both are possibly true, so that the main question is the proportions.
Whatever the balance of motivations, what mattered was that Trump’s answers during his joint press conference with the Russian president were indistinguishable from Putin’s, starting with the fundamental claim that Putin’s assurances about interference in U.S. democracy (“He was incredibly strong and confident in his denial”) deserved belief over those of his own Department of Justice (“I think the probe is a disaster for our country”).
I am old enough to remember Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon telling lies on TV, about Vietnam in both cases, and Watergate for Nixon. I remember the travails and deceptions of Bill Clinton, and of George W. Bush in the buildup to the disastrous Iraq War.
But never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another country over those of his own government and people.
Trump manifestly cannot help himself. This is who he is.
Those who could do something are the 51 Republican senators and 236 Republican representatives who have the power to hold hearings, issue subpoenas, pass resolutions of censure, guarantee the integrity of Robert Mueller’s investigation, condemn the past Russian election interference, shore up protections against the next assault, and in general defend their country rather than the damaged and defective man who is now its president.
For 18 months, members of this party have averted their eyes from Trump, rather than disturb the Trump elements among their constituency or disrupt the party’s agenda on tax cuts and the Supreme Court. They already bear responsibility for what Trump has done to his office.
But with every hour that elapses after this shocking performance in Helsinki without Republicans doing anything, the more deeply they are stained by this dark moment in American leadership.
Posted by Jim on
Carrie Twomey with a response to today’s ruling in the Bell case.
I am so sorry for everyone that has had to go through this for so many years. For the waste of time, resources, and money, chasing something that was always a sham and mockery of justice.
The Boston College archive was an oral history, with all that entails: memory, a rough draft, and opinion. Oral histories are a guidebook, sign-posts, maps to be used in excavating history. They are not confessions for use in prosecution, nor are they perfect or corroborated histories. They are not meant to be. They are one person’s recollections. They are meant to be challenged, and filled out. They turn history into people and their personalities, with all their flaws and imperfections. They are important and they have their value and place.
Their place however is not in a courtroom. Today’s ruling recognizes that. This is something we have said all along. The Boston College archive was worthless as evidence. It is a travesty of justice that it has taken as long as it has, and cost as much as it has, in terms of people’s lives, emotions, expectations, and in monetary terms, for the court to finally put an end to their pursuit. Farce does not begin to cover what this has been.
We are in the Supreme Court in London next week fighting the subpoena of Anthony’s materials, another sham case pursued in part I believe to create the pretext to arrest Anthony in order to put pressure on him to become a witness in the Bell case, something they were never going to achieve regardless.
The Bell case collapsed because the court ruled the tapes are inadmissible. It ruled that their inadmissibility goes beyond the narrow Trial of the Facts, and the PPS has declined to appeal the ruling.
“The tapes will become public with the end of this trial. Everyone who reads about them can form their own view, informed or otherwise, on the many issues they raise. But in the context of a criminal trial they are just not reliable or fairly obtained evidence.” – Judgement: Application to Exclude the Boston Tapes Evidence
We knew that from the first subpoena issued. Boston College had a duty to fight much harder against the subpoenas than what they did for precisely this reason: they were not evidence, they would never stand up in court, the pursuit of them was an abuse of process, and an egregious abuse of the US-UK MLAT. Shame on Boston College. Shame on them for not standing up for history. Shame on them for not protecting their researchers, their research, and, most importantly, their research participants. Shame on them.
A lot of things have been, are being, and will be said about Anthony and his involvement in the project. Some of which we would agree with, especially with the gift of hindsight! But I still passionately believe history belongs to people, and it is important it be told – especially in times and eras where it is contested, silenced, censored, and oppressed. The Belfast Project meets all those criteria. It is a history that the state wanted suppressed. State actors, supporters, and agents never wanted the histories contained in the Boston College archive told. We know this by the lengths they have gone to in destroying it. The histories in the archive are a means of unravelling the state’s carefully constructed façade.
Keep digging, keep pushing against the pricks, keep telling your truth.
Posted by Jim on
TO THE AMERICAN IRISH COMMUNITY AND THE IRISH DIASPORA WORLDWIDE
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Posted by Jim on October 18, 2019
| A draft agreement has been reached on Brexit between the European Union and the British government. However, following consultations with loyalist paramilitaries earlier this week, the DUP continue to reject the planned deal. The EU Commission said the agreement “fully protects the integrity of the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union, and avoids any regulatory and customs checks at the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland”. The Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said that the ‘backstop’, a previously agreed guarantee to prevent the remilitarisation of the border area, had been replaced. The new agreement provides a mechanism to empower the Stormont Assembly with the right to terminate arrangements for the Six Counties and allow for a hard border. However, he insisted overall the new deal “protects the all-island economy” and is “good for Ireland and Northern Ireland”. Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald described the deal as “complex and wide-ranging” and that all aspects needed to be considered “in their entirety”. However, the DUP quickly declared their opposition to the agreement, and on three separate issues — new customs arrangements for the north of Ireland, the likelihood of different rates of VAT (sales tax), and the plan for periodic ‘consent’ votes at the Stormont Assembly. Earlier this week, the DUP controversially consulted with loyalist death squads over its approach to the emerging deal. Arlene Foster and other senior party figures held talks with high-ranking figures from the UVF and UDA, including south Belfast’s Jackie McDonald. The meetings followed warnings of potential violence if loyalists feel the status of the Six Counties under British rule is being “diluted”. Sinn Féin MP Michelle Gildernew described reports of the meetings as astonishing and said the DUP was “living in a parallel universe”. Ms Gildernew said recent evidence directly linking the the DUP to the murderous paramilitary group Ulster Resistance made the meetings all the more concerning. “It is truly astonishing that the DUP are meeting with representatives of loyalist paramilitaries to discuss Brexit rather than listening to the majority who voted to reject Brexit, who want to protect the Good Friday Agreement and who are fearful of a crash-out Brexit,” she said. The British Parliament will vote this Saturday on whether it supports the deal, while the EU Commission President Jean Claude Juncker has recommended that all European partners support it. Arriving at the EU summit today, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said it was now down to the British parliament. “The House of Commons will meet on Saturday and the best thing we can do as Irish politicians is not intervene of interfere in UK politics,” he said. “It’s up to them to decide whether they want a deal, they rejected the last deal on three occasions.” When asked if the DUP could scupper the deal at Westminster, where the party’s ten MPs remain in a powerful position, Mr Varadkar said: “I don’t want to comment on a position taken by any political party, but this will go to House of Commons on Saturday and we have to give them time.” |