Posted by Jim on September 26, 2016
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Investigative journalist and author, Ian Cobain, has published a new
book examining Britain’s record of covert government actions and
cover-ups. Included in “The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the
Shaping of a Modern Nation” are accounts of Britain’s colonial wars in
the 1960s and ’70s, the rise of mass surveillance, and a chapter
dealing with Britain’s dirty war in Ireland. The following is an
excerpt.
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“On the evening of Monday 8 January 1990, a group of British detectives
decided that they had done enough for one day. It was getting late now,
and some of the officers had been working for thirteen hours on a
complex and politically fraught investigation that was being conducted
against a backdrop of escalating violence.
Northern Ireland’s savage little war had just entered its twenty-second
year. Eighty-nine people had died the previous year. One, Pat Finucane,
a lawyer, had been shot fourteen times after gunmen used sledgehammers
to smash down his front door while he was having Sunday dinner with his
wife and three children. Another was Loughlin Maginn, a father of four
who was shot dead at his home in a village south of Belfast. It was the
circumstances surrounding these murders, along with a string of others,
that the police team led by John Stevens were investigating. At just
past 9 p.m. they flicked off the lights of their incident room, locked
up, and left the building.
The facility from which they were working was no ordinary police
station. It was located beyond the chain-link fences, the razor wire and
the CCTV that protected a seventeen-acre complex that the Royal Ulster
Constabulary (RUC) operated on the outskirts of Carrickfergus, a coastal
town twelve miles north of Belfast. Known as Seapark, the complex was
home to forensic science laboratories, exhibit stores, a suite of
offices and no end of confidential archives. It was one of the most
secure policing facilities anywhere in the world.
Twenty minutes later, four members of Stevens’ team who had been
conducting inquiries elsewhere arrived back at the incident room,
intending to lock some paperwork away for the night.
First they smelt the smoke. Then they saw the flames. The entire
incident room was ablaze and they rushed to raise the alarm. Sarah
Bynum, one of the detective constables, later recalled: ‘There were a
number of fire alarm points in the building and I went to one and I
smashed it with the heel of my shoe and nothing happened. I ran down to
another one and smashed that and again nothing happened.’
A heat-sensitive intruder alarm had also failed. Bynum raced to the
guardhouse at the entrance to the complex, where an armed officer from
the RUC was on duty. ‘My first word to him was to call for the fire
brigade and he replied that the phones were down. I then told him to get
on his radio to call for help and his reaction was one of almost
disinterest, of: “Well what do you expect me to do about it?”‘ By the
time the fire was eventually extinguished, the team’s desktop computers
had melted into pools of metal and plastic; steel filing cabinets had
buckled, and the documents inside had incinerated.
Whoever started the fire clearly intended to destroy every scrap of
documentary evidence that the police team had gathered.
The immediate suspects were not members of one of Northern Ireland’s
paramilitary groups, however, but British soldiers. Stevens and his team
were convinced that the arsonists were from the Force Research Unit – a
shadowy British Army Intelligence Corps body known as ‘the FRU’ that
worked closely with MI5 and Special Branch, the intelligence wing of the
RUC. They also suspected that detectives from Special Branch had helped
the FRU to slip into the high-security complex and break into their
office.”
This of course was just one of many incidences throughout the Long War
when the documented records of the British authorities in the north-east
of Ireland, civil, military and paramilitary, were “accidentally” or
deliberately destroyed, or simply went missing. Invariably these losses
coincided with research being carried out by third parties from the
United Kingdom or in the wake of some notable atrocity.
Of further interest to Irish readers will be Cobain’s detailed
examination of the activities of Brian Nelson, the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
of UK terrorism in Ireland. The former British soldier from Belfast
began his murderous career by taking a blowtorch to a young, disabled
Irishman named Gerald Higgins, proceeding to torture him to near-death
in 1974 (he succumbed to his injuries several weeks later). At the time
Nelson was a member of the UDA-UFF, a militant pro-Britain or “loyalist”
faction, while also serving as an agent for the Royal Ulster
Constabulary (RUC), the UK’s regional paramilitary police force. In 1985
he was recruited by the British Army’s Intelligence Corps (IntCorps)
while temporarily living in Germany.
Returning to the Six Counties and the UDA-UFF, the Belfast man led a
reign of terror against the Irish nationalist community the likes of
which had not been seen since the late 1960s and early ’70s. Under the
direction of the counter-insurgency strategists of the RUC, IntCorps and
MI5, the Security Service in London, the agent transformed the
“loyalist” gangs into a body of organised death squads spreading murder
and mayhem across the north-east of the country. Answering to his
immediate superiors in the infamous Force Research Unit (FRU), one of
the many acronyms making up the British intelligence agencies, he became
the United Kingdom’s most effective weapon in its war with the
(Provisional) Irish Republican Army and the population supporting it.
“Soon he was appointed as the intelligence officer for the UDA in west
Belfast, playing a central role in selecting and locating targets for
assassination. Although he occasionally kept this information to
himself, Nelson would frequently pass details of these planned murders
to the FRU.
In June 1985, Nelson embarked upon the most extraordinary operation of
his undercover Army career. The UDA’s leadership asked him to help
arrange a deal with Armscor, apartheid South Africa’s arms corporation.
A unionist from Armagh who had emigrated to Durban and was working for
the company had been identified as a possible source of weaponry, and
Nelson was asked to meet this man. The FRU not only encouraged him to do
this, it paid for his airline tickets to South Africa and met his hotel
bills. One of Nelson’s FRU handlers, a man whom he knew as Ronnie, had
told him: ‘You’ve really hit the big time here Brian.’ While some have
claimed the FRU sponsored this arms-trafficking enterprise in order to
intercept the weapons and prevent them from falling into loyalist
paramilitaries’ hands, others suspect that the FRU, and some of their
political masters, were determined to help arm Ulster’s loyalists.
In Durban, Nelson examined a number of weapons, and was particularly
taken with an automatic shotgun called the Striker which ‘could be used
to devastating effect . . . in close-quarter combat’. Armscor made it
clear that it would accept a cash sale, but also wanted to know whether
the UDA could provide it with one of the latest generation of
ground-to-air missiles that were under development at Shorts, an
aircraft and armaments factory in east Belfast.
Armscor provided weapons to loyalist paramilitaries in a trafficking
operation that was financed by a #325,000 robbery from a bank in
Portadown, thirty miles south-west of Belfast. The corporation’s
European agent, an American called Douglas Bernhardt, had learned that a
large cache of arms held by a Lebanese militia in Beirut had come onto
the market. Bernhardt arranged for the arms to be loaded into a
container, which was shipped to Belfast via Liverpool, accompanied with
bills of lading and notes of origin that indicated it held ceramic floor
tiles.
The weapons arrived at Belfast docks in late December, and were smuggled
into the country undetected. Early the following month, at a farmhouse
in County Armagh, the arsenal was divided three ways between the UDA,
the UVF and a third loyalist paramilitary group, Ulster Resistance. The
UDA lost its entire portion within minutes: its share of about 100
weapons was loaded into two hire cars, which were stopped and seized at
a nearby police roadblock. Some of the UVF’s weapons were also recovered
over coming weeks, but most remained in the group’s hands, and
transformed the loyalists’ firepower over the years that followed. The
portion that went to Ulster Resistance was never captured, however. Nor
were these weapons decommissioned during the peace process: they remain
hidden today.
…the consequence was that loyalists’ access to high-calibre weapons –
and their ability to slaughter both republicans and uninvolved Catholics
– changed immediately. In the six years prior to the importation of the
South African weapons, from January 1982 to December 1987, loyalists
killed seventy-one people. In the seven years afterwards, from January
1988 to 1 September 1994, loyalists killed 229 people.”
The British state in the north of Ireland, civil and military, put guns
and explosives into the hands of British terrorists one with purpose and
one purpose only: to kill as many Irish men, women and children as
possible. That it did so in the forlorn hope of achieving some sort of
militarily victory over the Irish Republican Army is no excuse. As Niall
Stanage, an editor with the US politics’ site, The Hill, wrote way back
in 2002:
“The British state has been conspiring to murder its own citizens in
Northern Ireland.
That is the only credible conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence
that has seeped slowly into the public domain over the past decade. It
now seems clear that members of the security forces, acting in cahoots
with loyalist paramilitaries, have facilitated sectarian and political
killings.
Nationalists in Northern Ireland are being told what they have always
known – that the police and army have been actively working against
them. From their perspective, the chief surprise is that a false image
of Northern Ireland’s political landscape – in which impartial security
forces have held the line against “mindless terrorists”, “gangsters” and
“psychopaths” – has endured for so long.”
Posted by Jim on
Families of victims of state killings have announced that they will be
suing the British government, DUP leader Arlene Foster and Sinn Fein’s
Martin McGuinness as the London and Belfast regimes again stonewalled
their demands for legacy inquests.
The move followed a walk out from a meeting on Monday with the new
British governor in Ireland, James Brokenshire, of the families of
eleven people killed in the 1971 Ballymurphy Massacre. Brokenshire
claimed the British government could not afford the costs of holding the
inquests.
About fifty inquests are pending but stalled. They relate to almost a
hundred deaths, some of them going back four decades.
The next day, they gathered with other families at Stormont to protest
against the failure of the British government to comply with its
international human rights obligations with respect to legacy inquests,
and hand-delivered notice of their legal challenge to the offices of new
British Secretary of State. Similar letters were also delivered to the
offices of Stormont’s First Minister Arlene Foster, Deputy First
Minister Martin McGuinness, and to the Six County Department of Justice.
“How many more secretaries of state do families have to meet before they
get justice for their loved ones?” the Ballymurphy Families group group
said in a statement following their dramatic walkout.
It was their first meeting since Brokenshire became the Secretary of
State and families were hopeful that he would advance their inquests.
They gave an emotional account of what happened to their loved ones in
August 1971 after which they asked him directly to intervene and provide
funding and resources to allow their inquests to resume.
However, Brokenshire, like his predecessors, simply referred the matter
back to the Stormont Executive, and denied the British government was
responsible. The families were so angered by his intransigence the
walked out, ending the meeting after 45 minutes.”
Speaking afterward, the group’s spokesman, John Teggart, whose father
was among ten people shot dead in August 1971, said that the families
were disgusted by the minister’s attitude.
“It was a terrible meeting,” he said. “James Brokenshire refused to
answer many of our questions and it was just going round and round in
circles.
“It was just the same old, same old. The families poured their hearts
out about what had happened to their late relatives and were basically
pleading for him to release the funding, but it was going nowhere.
“We explained that there is a wide range of families waiting for these
inquests and the inquests don’t need litigation. Lord Justice Weir said
in January our inquest is ready to and can be started within the year.
Mr Teggart pointed an accusing finger at the Democratic Unionist Party
as “representative from the other six parties were at meeting supporting
the families.” He said the DUP was blocking the funding from going
through the Executive.
Briege Voyle, whose mother was Joan Connolly was fatally shot four times
said: “What do we have to do for these people to see sense?
“We need this funding released right away. Campaigners Mary Murphy and
Joe Corr have died in the past few weeks. We need our inquests which
were granted in 2011 started now, not just for us, but for all the
ninety five families. James Brokenshire needs to make that decision
now.”
Earlier this month, the North’s most senior judge Sir Declan Morgan
called on political leaders to sort out the contentious funding issue
for legacy inquests.
His request for ten million pounds to fund a five-year programme that
would deal with controversial Troubles’ deaths was blocked by the DUP.
Outstanding inquests into more than 80 deaths that took place during the
30-year conflict have yet to be heard.
SDLP West Belfast MLA, Alex Attwood, said that the British government
seemed to be giving the the DUP a “veto” on a legacy issue.
“Victims and survivors, their grief and their needs, should not be
subject to a shallow veto,” he said. “If the DUP can veto funding for
inquests, they or others could try to do so again and attempt to veto
other proposals to achieve truth, justice and accountability. Where
would we be then? This cannot be allowed to happen.”
Sinn Fein’s legacy spokeswoman Jennifer McCann said the Ballymurphy
families had been “let down”.
“The British government has failed to uphold commitments made in the
Stormont House Agreement on how to deal with the legacy of the
conflict,” she said.
Nichola Baxter, whose cousin Craig McCausland was killed by loyalist
paramilitaries in 2005, said the families were being denied closure.
“I come from a unionist background. We are waiting 11 years for an
inquest and therefore a death certificate, simple things that the law
says we are entitled to as families,” she said.
“There are answers we’re not getting and it’s the same for everybody
here, some people are waiting longer than 11 years and it’s an absolute
disgrace.”
Posted by Jim on September 8, 2016
CAPITOL HILL. Thursday, September 8, 2016
Recently released British/Northern Ireland Office (NIO) State Papers have caused considerable interest, and have given further insight into how the British Embassy spied on Irish-Americans.
The Papers were released the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), and cover the period 1980 to 1989. The Papers were released under the “30/20 rule”— the phased release of official documents that were previously secret for 30 years, but are to be released after 20 years.( Google PRONI CAIN for the released Papers).
As always, such released Papers are of intense interest to historians, the media and all those concerned about the history of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Not, of course, that the full truth is ever revealed by the British Government.
Fr. Sean Mc Manus—President of the Capitol Hill-based Irish National Caucus— whose life-long work always features in such Papers, said : “ This time the Papers are of particular interest for a two-fold reason : (1) they reveal how deeply worried the British Government was about our Mac Bride Principles campaign (which they accurately state is ‘ largely instigated by the Irish National Caucus’; and (2) the Papers reveal how the British Embassy penetrated and spied on Irish-American organizations.
Irish American Unity Conference
One of the released papers, titled “Irish American Unity Conference [IAUC],” consists of a report dated October 10, 1985, by the British Embassy to the Head of the Civil Service in Northern Ireland, Ken Bloomfield. (Yes, the same Mr. Bloomfield, whom another released State Paper exposed as outrageously stating that the Catholics in West Belfast are “ alienated from normal civilized behavior.”). The Paper gives a Report on the IAUC meeting in Philadelphia, August 23-25, 1985, and explains how one of the IAUC Members, Steve Ryan, monitoring the meeting was spying for the British Embassy. The Report lists a number of those present at the meeting, several members of Irish Northern Aid, and others, including Bob Linnon who would become the president of the IAUC(1987-1995), and a Ms. Patricia O’Hagan, Chairperson of the New York IAUC.
The Report exposes, “the IAUC’s … intense rivalry with Fr. Sean Mc Manus and the Irish National Caucus, ” and that “… the meeting revealed a deep hatred of Father Sean Mc Manus among the IAUC elite.” The Report states Ms, O’Hagan, “declared she ‘hated’ McManus.’
When asked to comment, Fr. Mc Manus said: “I have a life-long policy of not responding to personal attacks. But I have to make an exception in this case as it is not really a personal attack but one gloried in, and recorded by the British Embassy. It is sad and pathetic that at the height of the Mac Bride Principles campaign—which I initiated with Sean Mc Bride’s personal consent and which I launched on November 5, 1984— that the Brits could report that another Irish organization was spending its time in attacking me. How absurd and traitorous is that!
I Do Not Take It Personally
Fr. Mc Manus explained: “However, I do not take all that stuff personally. My “feelings” are not hurt because on the Irish issue I don’t do feelings. I do analysis and discernment: because of my life-long experience and background, I can figure out from whence come the constant, systematic attempts to sabotage my work. And it has ALWAYS come, one way or another, from the British Embassy, and, at least in the early years, from the Irish Embassy. Thus it has always been. For example, I follow a rule of thumb, which is also a good religious principle: if one never had a personal confrontation or had personally offended a person, then an attack from such a person can never be “personal.” Something else is always behind it. In all my 44 years in America, and in all my Irish activity, I’ve never had a personal fight or a nasty confrontation with any person on the Irish issue. And even though I have received hundreds of thousands of letters, phone-calls an emails, not one person has ever outlined to me what they disagreed with in my work. And that is because no genuine Irish person could reasonably oppose the main pillars of my life’s work on Irish justice. However, any time anyone contacted me to make individual suggestions as to how I could do my work better, I always listened with great respect and attention. And I will always be eternally grateful for the huge and splendid individual and collective support I’ve received over all these years.”
Ms. Patricia O’Hagan
Fr. Mc Manus continued: “Regarding Ms. O’Hagan: I had never heard of her and I’ve no idea who she is. Therefore, I know her attack was not personal. She was — willingly or unknowingly —used by one of the aforementioned Embassies. It also must not be forgotten that Denis Donaldson, a British Agent was later in the late 90’s placed in charge of the Irish Northern Aid Office in New York City. So for a crucial period, a British Agent was telling members of Irish Northern Aid and other Irish organizations what to believe and what to do. In fairness, it could be said Michael Flannery was probably too old to be held responsible, but the younger New York City Irish Northern Aid leaders and spoke persons, and those in charge of the Irish People newspaper, must surely accept some responsibility and blame. I know if I had placed a British Agent in charge of the office of the Irish National Caucus, I would never hear the end of it, nor should I.”
Fr. Mc Manus concluded: “However, in all of this pathetic stuff, the central issue is: By what right and under what law is the British Embassy — or, indeed, the Irish Embassy— entitled to spy on Americans who are exercising their Constitutional rights? What has the State Department to say about this? What if the Soviet/Russian or China embassies were spying and recruiting spies in the United States, would the State Department be silent?”
Posted by Jim on
New York Mayor enrages Irish over St. Patrick’s Day parade violence claim
J’Ouvert takes place in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, throughout the night before the West Indian Day Parade, held every Labor Day.
“I’m outraged… this is a libel against the Irish community in this town,” lawyer Brian O’Dwyer, Chairman of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center, said.
“There were some hooligans we took care of, but there was never year-after-year of people being killed, shot and stabbed,” O’Dwyer added.
The mayor also compared the festival’s violence to the Puerto Rican Day parade, angering the city’s Puerto Rican community.
“This is disrespectful — this is shameful for him to say that. The Puerto Rican Day Parade has never got a death, killing, bloodshed,” State Senator Ruben Diaz said.
De Blasio claimed that “For decades, permits were given to the Puerto Rican Parade, to the
St. Patrick’s Day Parade… there was violence and people bluntly expected it.”
Even his own Police Chief Bill Bratton disagreed with his boss, saying St.Patrick’s and other parades dealt only with “quality of life issues.”
“J’Ouvert is singular in the significant violence associated with it,”Bratton said.
That is true and de Blasio knows it. I don’t know what weed de Blasio was smoking.
Someone forget to tell him that the last shooting or serious violence connected to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade was an IRA hit in 1923 on the informer “Cruxy”O’Connor by Pa Murray of the Cork IRA after “Cruxy” was identified and followed at the parade.
Since then there have been issues with the parade, God knows, but never gun violence. The worst was beer showers and boos for Mayor David Dinkins when he marched with a gay group in 1991.
Why does de Blasio choose to lump in the Irish parade with the murderous events at the J’Ouvert carnival, where two people were shot dead, one a young girl who objected to being fondled by a pervert?
Gangs use J’Ouvert as a time to settle scores, marring the celebration. As in other years, deadly violence broke out.
At 3:45 am on Monday, at Flatbush Avenue and Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights, Tyreke Borel, 17, was shot in the chest. He later died at Kings County Hospital, sources said.
At 4:15 a.m., Tiarah Poyau, 22, was fatally shot in the eye at Washington Avenue and Empire Boulevard, police said.
Poyau’s LinkedIn page showed that she was an international tax intern at PricewaterhouseCoopers and an aspiring accountant. She listed St. John’s University as her undergraduate and graduate school.
These are terrible tragedies and the clear and obvious thing to do is cancel J’Ouvert until the community and police can get their act together. Two deaths in a year when the police presence was higher than ever before is more than enough to warrant this. No one attending is safe, as these two killings make clear.
Instead, de Blasio announces the parade can go on. “I think it was very clear yesterday that we were not including the option of ending something which has gone on for decades and decades,” de Blasio said at a news conference with police officials. “We have to find out a way to make it safer.”
De Blasio’s PC mentality blazer is getting worse the longer he is in office, and he now cannot distinguish fact from political correctness.
There’s a huge difference between ensuring people are not publicly drunk (the main issue with the St. Patrick’s Day parade) and shooting dead two unarmed citizens, as happened in Brooklyn.
De Blasio implies an equivalence that is plain nutty but this mayor is well known for having strange demons to exercise.
He refused to appoint an Irish community liaison, has rarely ever attended an Irish event other than keeping the community waiting until the last moment to announce an Irish community breakfast on St.Patrick’s Day, and arrives incredibly late at St.Patrick’s services.
Saying the St. Patrick’s Day parade has been violent is nonsense.
Indeed, there is marvelous security provided for marchers and the public by the hundreds of volunteers who staff the parade and the police who provide security.
This mayor has shown his tin ear and total contempt for the Irish once again.
Posted by Jim on September 7, 2016
Brian Feeney. Belfast Telegraph. Wednesday, September 7, 2016
Let’s be clear at the outset. Máirtín Ó Muilleoir is quite right to raise the question of EU funds for Peace IV and INTERREG which have produced £1.5 billion and £820 million respectively since the ceasefires in 1994.
Another £500 million are due from these funds in the next four years. Ó Muilleoir’s question is whether the UK Treasury will guarantee that money. So far they have said they will underwrite only any plans signed off before November even if the UK gets out of the EU before the money is paid over.
That kind of money is vitally important for the north because of the jobs it supplies particularly in impoverished districts and also to people affected by the Troubles across the north. It’s pretty obvious as Ó Muilleoir says that if the money is not forthcoming hundreds of jobs will go. Now equally it’s a lot easier to sign off on schemes already planned than to anticipate schemes which might come on stream in the next four years so he’s doing his job to try to nail down the Treasury to meet the British share of money the EU has promised.
You have to wonder why Arlene Foster felt it necessary to step into this area. Her intervention contributed nothing except to get herself on TV. She said she was ‘disappointed’ and that Ó Muilleoir was ‘causing alarm among the business community’. Let’s leave aside the fact that as a successful businessman in his own right the finance minister has a lot more hands-on experience in business than Arlene.
Is this the same Arlene Foster who signed a joint letter with Martin McGuinness on August 10 standing her Leave campaign on its head by registering concern about the north’s access to EU funds and agricultural support? She also signed up to pointing out that the ‘north is uniquely vulnerable to the loss of EU funding’ and ‘recognised the possibility that it cannot be guaranteed that outcomes that suit our common interests are ultimately deliverable’. Hmm.
So it’s OK for Arlene to say it but not Ó Muilleoir? Accused of doing a U-turn by implicitly admitting that advocating Leave vote was a major miscalculation – which it was – she subsequently said a letter from the Treasury in August provided ‘clarity’ in relation to EU funding. It didn’t. It provided what concerns Ó Muilleoir, namely a guarantee that anything sent in before November is OK. After that who knows? Not Arlene. Foster’s sniping raises again a wider matter. She seems to have no concept of sharing power. She seems to regard herself as prime minister able to control other ministers. In reality, by interfering and sniping she diminishes the office of first minister. Engaging in inter-party political banter demonstrates she can’t see the wood for the trees and shows she hasn’t yet learnt the difference between being first minster and an MLA.
If every statement by a Sinn Féin minister or a UUP MLA that annoys her leads her to yield to the irresistible urge to tweet a reply or issue a press statement then she shows no sense of priority let alone gravitas. All her utterances assume equal importance (or unimportance) so no-one can distinguish between what she thinks important enough for the first minister to comment on and what is another cheap trivial shot.
In the end her inability to button her lip reinforces what a report last week for the Centre for Democracy and Peace Building found, that is the executive is so divided with fundamentally different views about how to respond to Brexit that it will be extremely difficult to agree a position. The fact that Foster and Ó Muilleoir met the secretary of state for Brexit separately last week proves that.
Nonetheless we come back to the fundamental point which is that Arlene Foster got it wrong, the voters in the north rejected her case and she’s still in denial. It’s Ó Muilleoir who’s accurately expressing the concerns of the majority in the north. Perhaps that’s why Foster was so piqued by the positive reception his remarks received.
It seems her signing up to her U-turn letter on August 10 was an aberration.