Posted by Jim on May 1, 2014
The arrest of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams for questioning about the murder in 1972 of Jean McConville is the latest example of the highly selective nature of the prosecution process in Northern Ireland.
It seems the only alleged crimes being heavily pursued are those on the nationalist side, with little or no attention to atrocities on the other side.
Thanks to the ill-conceived Boston College oral history project the spooks now have another ream of tapes full of allegations from long ago that cannot possibly be proven, mostly from people who are now dead.
Take a bow BC, Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre – you have done a wonderful job on behalf of British spookdom allowing them to whip up a whole new round of empty charges.
Meanwhile, nothing on the nationalist side. The Pat Finucane murder? No action.
The Loughinisland Massacre during the 1994 World Cup game between Ireland and Italy? No action.
The Dublin/Monaghan bombings of 1974 that left 33 dead? No handover of papers from the British government as promised. Oops.
The top human rights attorney was killed, as were six innocent men, including an 87-year-old watching a football match, as were 33 innocent civilians in Dublin and Monaghan yet there has been no resolution whatever.
Talk about one law for the Brits.
ESPN2 aired an excellent program on the Loughinisland case this week called “Ceasefire Massacre.”
The documentary showed that the killings reek of high level British security involvement. Even former UVF figure Billy Hutchinson conceded on the program there was something very fishy.
But good luck if you are seeking a follow-up. So many of the killings during the dirty war were carried out by gunmen acting on the orders of high level secret British forces who covered their tracks well.
I could go on, but it is clear there is really only one target and that is the senior figures in Sinn Fein like Adams, who present such a threat to the established order that they will do anything to bring them down.
The anti-Sinn Feiners are running very scared at the moment. Recent opinion polls in the Irish Republic show the Sinn Fein vote soaring in the upcoming European elections.
In the north, with an increasing nationalist population, there is a decent chance soon of a Sinn Fein led Northern government.
What if they also come to power in the south?
No wonder the spooks are out in full flight.
Adams has little to fear. The tragic circumstances of Jean McConville’s death are lost in the mist of time with witnesses long passed on.
Which is why this is such a cynical move at this time. There is zero chance of conviction but the real game is stopping Sinn Fein. They will stoop as low as they can in that regard.
Posted by Jim on
The killing of a widowed mother of 10 has been hanging over Gerry Adams for 40 years. His arrest is a calculated gamble to clear his name—and began with the Obama Justice Department.
It was, nearly everyone agrees, one of the most cold-blooded and pitiless killings in Northern Ireland’s 30-some years of bloodshed and conflict.
Now, 42 years later, it threatens to place Gerry Adams, the man most responsible for ending the IRA’s brutal violence, behind bars for murder and put the Obama Justice Department in the dock for endangering a prized monument to American diplomacy and peace-building.
On a cold December evening in 1972, 37-year-old Jean McConville, a recently widowed mother of 10 young children, was with her family in their cramped apartment in Divis Flats, a working-class housing project on the edge of Catholic West Belfast, when the door was forced open and a gang of masked young women burst in and dragged her away.
Her crying children were left to fend for themselves for weeks, begging and stealing food, until eventually the local social services were alerted to their plight and they were sent to foster homes. The children were never to be reunited again as a family.
Their mother’s fate was worse. The women who burst into her flat were from the female branch of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which had been fighting the British army and government for two years to reunite Ireland and achieve full independence from Britain. West Belfast, and the Divis Flats in particular, was one of the IRA’s toughest strongholds.
The IRA women had come for Jean McConville because they believed she had been acting as an informer, passing on low-grade intelligence to the local British army barracks about local members of the IRA. A small radio transmitter had been found in her apartment, and she had been arrested by the IRA and admitted her involvement.
But a local IRA commander had given her one last chance. Brendan Hughes, a veteran IRA activist, told this writer that he had given McConville “a yellow card,” a soccer term that means another offense would result in “a red card,” or an ejection. But in the IRA’s case, “a red card” always meant death.
McConville’s family and the vast coterie of supporters who champion her cause bristle at the accusation, pointing out that a mother of 10 would hardly have time to gather intelligence on the IRA. Instead they say she was killed for giving aid to a wounded British soldier and that local people disliked her because she had been a Protestant until marrying her Catholic husband, when she converted. An inquiry headed by the Police Ombudsman, a sort of referee figure, came down against the informer allegation.
Whatever the truth, the IRA claimed to have evidence that McConville had ignored the “yellow card” warning and had resumed her treacherous activities.
What happened next, according to Hughes, sealed her fate. In the fall of 1972, the IRA in Belfast was commanded by Gerry Adams, regarded inside the IRA as the brightest strategic mind in the organization. He was also, Hughes said, a man who was very media savvy.
If the British put Adams on trial, his hardline opponents’ accusations of naiveté or selling out will be justified and the peace process will be seriously undermined.
A meeting was held of the top IRA leaders in Belfast with only one item on the agenda: what to do with McConville. Those present agreed that the penalty for informing had to be death. The only point of dispute was what to do with her body. Normally the IRA advertised the execution of traitors; the dead bodies of informers would be left in the open, “thrown in the street,” as the phrase had it, as a warning to others tempted to go down the same road.
But admitting that the IRA had killed a widow and mother of 10 was a potential public relations disaster. The media would be appalled and the British delighted. Much better, some IRA leaders argued, to kill her and hide the body, bury it in a secret grave, South American-style, so no one would ever know what had really happened—except the IRA leaders themselves.
The decision came down to “disappear” McConville. Hughes, who also gave the same testimony to Boston College’s oral history archive, said Adams agreed with the order.
And so McConville, believing she was in the hands of a Catholic charity and safe from the IRA’s vengeance, was taken across the Irish border by members of a special IRA unit called “The Unknowns,” so called because the authorities were unaware of their existence.
The unit was, according to Hughes, answerable to Adams, the Belfast commander. And so, Hughes said, the order to disappear McConville came ultimately from Adams.
McConville was taken to Dundalk, a small town just across the Irish border, held for a few days and then taken to a lonely beach at Carlingford Lough, one of Ireland’s most picturesque spots. At the edge of an already excavated grave a single bullet was fired into the back of her head and she fell lifeless into the hole. There she lay until 2003, when a member of the public walking the beach noticed a bone sticking out of the sand.
One of “The Unknowns” who had ferried McConville to Dundalk was Dolours Price, a strikingly attractive member of a renowned Belfast IRA family. Price had joined the IRA in 1971, inspired by an aunt who had been blinded and who lost both hands in an accidental IRA explosion in 1938. Dolours Price would later gain infamy as the leader of a bombing team that devastated London in 1973.
Arrested and imprisoned, she then embarked on one of the lengthiest hunger strikes in British prison history, during which she was force-fed so often she developed life-threatening anorexia and nearly died. Released from jail, she left the IRA, married the movie star Stephen Rea, and had two sons, settling down in an affluent part of Dublin.
But she never lost her Irish Republican beliefs. When Adams concluded secret negotiations with the British, U.S., and Irish governments that resulted in an IRA ceasefire and the acceptance by the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, of the existence of Northern Ireland along with government posts for Adams’s colleagues, Price sensed betrayal.
She had ferried more than McConville to secret graves, and the burden of what she had done took its toll. Like Hughes, Price was interviewed for the Boston College archive, but she kept silent about McConville. When Hughes’s interviews were made public, however, she decided to break her silence and gave a number of newspaper interviews claiming that Adams had ordered McConville to be “disappeared.”
It is these two sets of interviews that form the core of the case against Gerry Adams, that the architect of the IRA’s peace strategy was an Irish Pinochet, responsible for the “disappearing” of innocent victims.
A British government effort to subpoena the interviews held in the Boston College archive has worsened Adams’s dilemma. The archive, begun in 2001, gave interviewees a promise that their memories would stay secret until they died, but a legal loophole created by an international treaty gave the British access to the trove. After nearly three years of legal battles, last fall several other interviews were handed over to the police in Northern Ireland. In March the police moved, arresting Ivor Bell, Adams’s closest confidant in 1972, in effect his No. 2, and charged him with aiding and abetting the McConville killing.
The arrest reignited a firestorm of speculation and controversy over Adams’s role. If Bell had been involved as the police alleged, then what role did the No. 1 play? As the firestorm raged, Adams issued a challenge to the police: “If you want to question me about McConville, then here I am. I will be happy to answer your questions.”
On Wednesday, Adams surrendered himself to the police for interrogation in what is undoubtedly the biggest gamble in his political life.
The McConville allegations have been like a monkey on his back for the best part of a decade. His party, Sinn Fein—Irish for “We Ourselves”—is well placed to enter government in Dublin at the next election, but his opponents have a potent weapon to use against him: his alleged role in the disappearance of McConville. He badly needs to throw the monkey off his back, and that explains his extraordinary move in giving himself up to the police.
It is a calculated gamble. Two of those who claim he gave the order to kill McConville, Hughes and Price, are dead. (Hughes died in 2008, Price in January 2014.) And anyway, their evidence is hearsay and can’t be used to charge, much less convict, anyone.
So if Adams can hold out for the days of interrogation that lie ahead, there is a good chance he can come out of police custody, declare himself an innocent man who answered police questions truthfully, and finally throw the monkey off his back.
There is much more at stake than just Adams’s freedom and reputation, however. He was the principal architect of the IRA peace strategy; without him the IRA would never have been maneuvered out of violence. If the British put him on trial, his hardline opponents’ accusations of naiveté or selling out will be justified and the peace process will be seriously undermined.
In all of this, the role of the Obama Justice Department has escaped the scrutiny that it deserves. The road to Adams’s arrest began in May 2011, when the DoJ served subpoenas on Boston College on behalf of the British government without conducting due diligence.
In an affidavit to the Boston District Court justifying the subpoena seeking Price’s interview with the college, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz cited a Belfast Sunday newspaper report that claimed to have heard Price’s tape admitting her part in McConville’s death.
But Price never mentioned the McConville killing in her interview for the archive, and a moment’s reflection would have revealed as nonsensical the idea that a Belfast newspaper, the equivalent of a supermarket tabloid in the United States, would be allowed access to such a secret, well-protected archive held by one of the country’s most prestigious colleges. The police in Northern Ireland pulled the wool over Ortiz’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s eyes, and they did not even notice.
The peace process in Northern Ireland is a monument to American diplomacy. Without the efforts of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, it is doubtful whether a power-sharing government would be in Belfast or whether IRA guns would not only have been silenced but destroyed. The peace process is testimony to the fact that with enough effort, jaw-jaw can prevail over war-war.
Posted by Jim on
Mr Adams is being questioned in Antrim. (© Pacemaker)
It comes after deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness blamed the “dark side” of policing for the timing of his party leader’s arrest in the run-up of the European and local council elections.
Mr McGuinness said: “People who could be described as former republicans (are) targeting the Sinn Féin peace strategy and targeting the leader of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams.
“It has been disappointing to see the efforts of some of those people together in consort with the dark side within policing.”
But David Cameron said: “There has been absolutely no political interference in this issue.”
“We have an independent judicial system, both here in England and also we do have one in NI. We have independent policing authorities, independent prosecuting authorities. Those are vital parts of the free country and the free society we enjoy today.”
Gerry Adams is currently still in custody at Antrim PSNI Station where he is being held as part of the investigation into the 1972 abduction and murder of west Belfast mother Jean McConville.
Mr Adams presented himself voluntarily to the station on Wednesday night where he was then arrested and questioned under caution by detectives from the PSNI’s Serious Crime Branch.
UTV understands he is being questioned under the Terrorism Act 2000 and can be held for 48 hours before police need to apply to the courts for additional time to continue their interview.
Mr Adams has always denied having any part in the murder.
Martin McGuinness went on: “I view his arrest as a deliberate attempt to influence the outcome of the elections that are due to take place in three weeks’ time, north and south on this island.
“That raises very serious questions around why that is the case and what is the agenda.”
Meanwhile the DUP leader and First Minister Peter Robinson has come out in support of the PSNI in the actions they have taken in the McConville murder investigation.
He explained: “I would suggest it would be political policing if the PSNI had not questioned those that were deemed to have been involved in any way.
“It strengthens the political process in Northern Ireland for people to know that no-one is above the law, everyone is equal under the law and everyone is equally subject to the law.
“I commend the police for the action they have taken. They must have known that by taking this step they would be criticised from some quarters but it is my duty as First Minister, as it is for others that have taken up ministerial office, to give their support to police and the rule of law.”
© UTV News
Posted by Jim on
Sinn Fein’s Six-County Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness has
said that the arrest of party leader Gerry Adams by the PSNI last night
was politically motivated.
Mr Adams spent last night at the PSNI’s main interrogation centre and
is continuing to be questioned there.
Mr Adams was first contacted by the PSNI on Tuesday and had volunteered
to help the investigation into the 1972 death of informer Jean
McConville, Sinn Fein said. He presented himself at 8pm last night and
within an hour the PSNI announced that a “65 year old man” had been
arrested in the case.
Reports have indicated he is being questioned under the Terrorism Act
2000 and can be held by the PSNI for 48 hours without recourse to the
course.
Unionists revelled in the development but demanded the Sinn Fein leader
face charged. Late last night, celebrating loyalists erected a large
British Union Jack outside the police base in Antrim town.
Mr McGuinness said Mr Adams was “the single most important person” in
the peace process.
“In that context I view his arrest as a deliberate attempt to influence
the outcome of the elections due to take place all over this island in
three weeks,” he said.
“That raises very serious questions about the agenda of those
responsible. There are people on the dark side of policing and this is
an attempt to flex their muscles.”
A recent poll showed Sinn Fein is on the brink of becoming the largest
party in both parts of Ireland in elections being held separately in
both jurisdictions later this month.
The Sinn Fein deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald blamed “old guard
elements” within the PSNI and unionism were working against the party.
She said it was wrong to suggest that Adams was a suspect in the
inquiry, saying that he had volunteered to travel north to help the
investigation.
Ms McDonald said there were people who viewed the growing strength of
Sinn Fein with “very considerable alarm” and that there are people “who
would wish to do things to stop that” ahead of the elections on May
23rd.
Asked if the arrest had damaged the PSNI’s credibility and the peace
process, she said that the PSNI have “questions to answer” but added
that the peace process is “fairly robust”.
The arrest of Mr Adams is being reported in the mainstream media in the
26 Counties as a major setback for the party’s chances of a historic
breakthrough in the local and European elections there.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny denied charges of political interference, saying
that parties in the 26 Counties had “absolutely no connection with this
at all”.
Posted by Jim on
Over three days in August 1971 eleven people were killed by British troops in the Ballymurphy area
By Niall McCracken
THE British Government has rejected calls for an independent probe into the deaths of 11 civilians shot by British troops in Ballymurphy in August 1971.
In a letter sent to the families who were bereaved in the west Belfast shootings, the Northern Ireland Secretary of State Theresa Villiers refused the calls on the grounds that it would not be in the public interest.
In a statement the Ballymurphy relatives, who had pressed for an investigation by an independent panel similar to that which examined the Hillsborough football tragedy, said they were devastated by the decision:
“We, the Ballymurphy families, are shocked and outraged at the British Government’s response, particularly in light of the support which has been rightly provided in the Hillsborough case which includes supporting the legal costs of inquests.
“We have led our campaign for truth and justice in a dignified but determined manner and deserve the opportunity to have the innocence of our loved ones proven.”
The families added: “Our legal representative, Padraig Ó Muirigh is considering a judicial review against the decision by the British Secretary of State to refuse the establishment of an Independent Panel.”
The relatives gathered together this morning to receive a letter confirming the decision. In the letter the Secretary of State said “the balance of public interest does not favour establishing an independent review”.
In a statement the Secretary of State added:“I would like to reiterate my deepest sympathy and condolences for the families who were bereaved in August 1971. I am aware that this decision is not the outcome the families had hoped for. Having met them – and other families affected by other incidents throughout the Troubles – I know that the passage of time does not ease the pain and hurt felt about the loss of loved ones.
“I am willing to meet with the Ballymurphy families and their representatives again, if they wish.”
In recent years the families have been campaigning for an inquiry similar to the model used to examine the Hillsborough football disaster of 1989 which would review all documents relating to the deaths of their loved ones.
In a previous interview as part of The Legacy series professor Phil Scraton, a key architect of the Hillsborough Model, said he believed it could be used to examine controversial killings from the Troubles.
An independent panel was appointed to look at the 96 deaths which occurred as a result of a stadium crush during the 1989 FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield.
In contrast, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry cost £191 million and following the publication of Lord Saville’s report the Prime Minister, David Cameron, publicly stated that there would be no more “open-ended and costly inquiries”.
But the panel model is seen as faster and more cost effective than other public inquiries and, after it was successfully used in the Hillsborough tragedy, the Ballymurphy families campaigned for a similar panel to be funded by the British and Irish governments.
Earlier this year the Irish Government backed the families’ campaign and in March the Taoiseach Enda Kenny raised the issue with Prime Minister Mr Cameron during a meeting at Downing Street.
However the Secretary of State’s letter marks the British Government’s first public confirmation that it would not help fund the panel.
“NOT IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST”
John Teggart describes eye witness accounts of how his father was shot in Ballymurphy in August 1971 /
Over three days in August 1971 eleven people were killed by British troops in the Ballymurphy and Springhill area in West Belfast. Ten of the victims were shot dead, while another was wounded and died of a heart attack.
Eleven families lost loved ones and a total of 57 children were bereaved.
Mother of eight Joan Connolly was among the civilians shot dead by the Parachute Regiment. Eyewitness accounts compiled by the families detail how she was shot in the face when attempting to aid an already injured man.
Further accounts detail how local parish priest, Father Hugh Mullan, approached an injured man waving a white baby grow and was fatally shot in the back when returning to safety.
The events unfolded hours after the government introduced a policy of internment – the controversial detention of paramilitary suspects without charge or trial.
At the time army officials claimed troops opened fire in response to shots from republican paramilitaries – though this was rejected by the bereaved.
Families of the victims say the case raises serious questions over the human rights record of the army in Northern Ireland.
Graphic accounts of the events in Ballymurphy have been recorded . Speaking to The Detail before the Secretary of State’s decision was announced, John Teggart recalled how his father was killed.
“One of the eyewitness accounts, that saw my father get shot, said his body bounced with every bullet,” he said.
“That’s 14 bullets passing through his body from a distance of 50 yards across the road.
“I was 11 years of age at the time and we have been campaigning ever since.”
A number of investigations into the event have proved unsatisfactory for the bereaved families and they have taken their campaign for an independent investigation to Europe.
Legal representatives of the Ballymurphy families have openly questioned the fitness of the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), after the UK’s top policing watchdog, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, found it had serious shortcomings. It said the way the HETreviews deaths caused by soldiers was not sufficiently independent.
The shootings in Ballymurphy took place six months before Bloody Sunday in Derry where thirteen people were shot dead when British paratroopers opened fire on crowds at a civil rights demonstration.
In November 2011 the Ballymurphy families welcomed the Attorney General’s decision to re-open inquests into the deaths but raised concerns about the limitations of an inquest to investigate “the context, circumstances and aftermath”.
In June 2012, the former Northern Ireland secretary of State, Owen Paterson, turned down the campaigners’ request for a full public inquiry inquiry saying it was “not in the public interest”.
Today Ms Villiers repeated this position and said she did not believe a Hillsborough-style review would “provide answers which are not already in the public domain or covered by existing legal processes”.
In recent years families have been lobbying both the British and Irish governments for the appointment of an independent panel to instead examine all documents relating to the deaths of their loved ones.
Its focus would include the investigation of the role of the British Government, British Army, criminal justice agencies such as the RUC, the Coroner’s Office and the significance of the media.
In a previous article as part of The Legacy series, The Detail interviewed Queen’s University professor Phil Scraton who was a prominent member of the panel tasked with looking at the circumstances and aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster.
Professor Scraton believes killings from the Troubles could be investigated using the same model of inquiry and he is one of the proposed members of the seven member Ballymurphy panel put forward by campaigners. Other proposed members include civil rights lawyer Gareth Pierce and former police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan as chair.
