Posted by Jim on May 2, 2014
Why Gerry Adams arrest is a farce and one-sided justice”. Read more: http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/Why-Gerry-Adams-arrest-is-a-complete-farce.html#ixzz30VZJQ6JP
While I totally agree with Mr. O’Dowd about the one-sided justice metered out by the British Government, I would like to comment on some of his statements in this article.
In your article you say:
[“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”.]
I would like to bring to your attention the following:
When Gerry McGeough, an Independent candidate running on an anti-PSNI/RUC platform in the 2007 elections in the north (the first republican arrested (post GFA) on 32 year old alleged troubles related offences dating back prior to the GFA) was arrested, you didn’t call it “selective prosecution”. Mr. McGeough was charged with membership in the IRA at the age of 18 and for allegedly wounding a UDR man Sammy Brush DUP. In fact, as the Chairwoman for the U.S. based Free Gerry McGeough Campaign, your paper refused to publish any letters submitted by me about his case. Your paper even demonized him because he spoke out against supporting the PSNI/RUC at the time Sinn Fein was calling for the nationalist community to support them. Gerry McGeough was one of the architects of the GFA and was on the Board of SF until he left them due to political and religious differences and you labeled him a “dissident” which you knew was far from the truth. His case was truly one of “selective prosecution”.
Ivor Bell, Adams 2nd in command back then, was arrested a few weeks ago on the same charges as Adams, but you didn’t condemn his arrest? Nor did you condemn the arrests of other republicans who have been arrested (post GFA) on decades old charges. This is the first time you are condemning “selective prosecution” since the GFA. Why? Because you practice the same double standards as the British Government. You and your paper are in bed with Sinn Fein and the Irish government, therefore you are biased in your reporting. You use your paper to try to demonize anyone who doesn’t agree with Sinn Fein. You use buzz words in your articles to try to “bully” and “criminalize” them into keeping silent and accepting the status quo or to alienate them.
[“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”.]
By trying to place the blame on the researchers of the Boston College tapes for the arrest of Adams, when clearly it was in
the hands of the British Government, even though they had passed the policing responsibilities on to Stormont (who could have stopped these subpoenas at any time before they got off the ground) you in essence are saying you don’t believe that there should ever be any research compiled regarding the troubles, or any revolutionary movement that has taken place around the world, for that matter, to eventually be used in an academic setting? Pointing the finger at McIntyre and Moloney also indicates that you don’t truly believe in freedom of speech, freedom of academic research, only selective academic research and selective freedom of speech like the kind your paper practices You write articles intended to bully and demonize those who you don’t agree with. If you were really being honest with your readers, you would place the blame for the subpoenas, (even being issued in the first place) where it really belongs; first at the feet of Stormont, the PSNI/RUC and finally the British and American government.
The time has come now, Mr. O’Dowd, to call for an end to ALL pursuit and prosecutions of republicans on prior GFA offences regardless of their political affiliations since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement!
Helen McClafferty
Posted by admin on May 1, 2014
The British Government never fully implemented the Weston Park Accord (paragraph 20) because they didn’t have to. They already knew they never had any intentions of ever prosecuting members of the security forces. On the other hand, they had every intention of arresting, incarcerating and interning republicans (post GFA) on alleged offences committed prior to the GFA and in some cases without charge or trial.
In not fully implementing the WPA, the Brits were able to selectively incarcerate any republicans who spoke out against them, the PSNI/RUC, the DUP, AND it also guaranteed SF that those who opposed them would be silenced (McGeough, for one, as he was the first republican arrested and given a 20 year sentence on 31 year old troubles related charges after the signing of the GFA) thus sending a clear message to others: “Step in line or else”.
Mary Lou McDonald, Gerry Kelly and others within SF are calling Mr. Adams arrest, around election time, “politically motivated”. Well, wasn’t that exactly what happened to Gerry McGeough? Only McGeough, an Independent candidate at the time, was arrested at the count center in Omagh and Sinn Fein never called McGeough’s arrest “politically motivated”.
According to media reports, the interviews recorded on tape of Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price cannot be used in court in the McConville case because they are both now deceased? In contrast, the judge in the McGeough trail allowed the taped testimony of deceased witnesses to the alleged shoot-out, between McGeough and Sammy (the “UDR/DUP”) Brush, to be used in court against Mr. McGeough. My, how things can change when you are considered politically correct in the eyes of the Brits.
If Mr. Adams is cleared of any wrong doing in the McConville murder then so should Ivor Bell. In fact, Sinn Fein should take the lead on calling for an immediate end to the charges brought against Mr. Bell by the PSNI/RUC. If the tapes cannot be used in court, then how can the Diplock court justify continuing any prosecution against Mr. Bell without incriminating Mr. Adams, again?
When Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness insisted that the PSNI/RUC march in the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, after the parade committee rescinded their invite to them due to pressure from Irish-American activists, it was a slap in the face to the families of the innocent victims murdered by members of the security forces in collusion with loyalist death squads.
Instead of kissing the arse of the PSNI/RUC, British and Irish government, it would behoove Mr. Adams & Company to be calling for a complete HALT to the continuing pursuit of republicans on prior GFA offences by the PSNI/RUC. One would think that since Mr. Kelly and other members of SF sit on the NI policing board they would have some say in the matter? If the Brits are not holding members of their own security forces (war criminals) accountable for the murder of innocent civilians during the troubles, then why should republicans be held accountable any longer?
It should be realized that Sinn Fein is just as guilty as the Brits for allowing British injustice and double standards to continue to be used in northeast Ireland against republicans while known murderers within the PSNI/RUC, British Army, UDR and loyalists go unpunished. It wouldn’t hurt for the SDLP to step up to the plate on this issue as well.
McClafferty 32
Posted by admin on
The Pensive Quill
Thursday, May 01, 2014
Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams has been arrested in connection with the 1972 disappearance and death of Jean McConville. Despite much political handwringing about never returning to the dark days of the past, pre-peace accord toxicity continues to pollute the present and some, the PSNI among them, are intent on ensuring it remains that way.
Sinn Fein had hoped to play it cutely by having Mr Adams make himself available to meet the PSNI so that the unseemly spectacle of an arrest could be avoided which would surely project the image of the party president as an official suspect at the centre of a police investigation of an action widely regarded as a war crime. The party would have sought to spin the ‘meeting’ as their leader ‘putting manners’ on the police. Any chance of seizing that initiative was lost the minute Mr Adams presented himself at Antrim PSNI station where the PSNI duly placed him under arrest.
The party, stung by the turn of events, has taken to accusing the British police of interfering in the electoral process. Prior to his arrest Adams said he was suspicious of the timing in the midst of an election campaign. It was a line repeated by Gerry Kelly and Mary Lou McDonald last night following his detention and again this morning by Conor Murphy. McDonald in particular is in something of a bind as she had previously welcomed the arrest of Mr Adams’ fellow negotiator at 1972 truce talks in London between the IRA and the British government, Ivor Bell. Sinn Fein is also hoist on its own petard, having agreed to the process of evidence based prosecutions for past conflict activity, even going as far as to abandon a long standing republican demand for amnesty.
Given that the PSNI has since March been arresting others in connection with the McConville investigation, had it postponed the arrest of Gerry Adams until after the elections it could have been accused of political policing.
Yet the detention of Mr Adams is a political arrest for which the PSNI should be robustly rebuked. Its pursuit of the Sinn Fein president oozes political motivation through its pores although not for the reasons stressed by his party. One day before the arrest which was part of an ongoing British police inquiry into IRA activity, the British government slapped down, on the grounds of it contravening public interest, a demand for an inquiry into the 1971 British army massacre of civilians in Mr Adams’ then neighbourhood, West Belfast’s Ballymurphy.
This suggests that even if there is evidence of some sort against Mr Adams, it is not the existence of evidence per se that fuels the drive to prosecute. There is unlikely to be material evidence any more substantive than has previously been available. At the same time the PSNI and British government know the identity of every single member of the British security establishment who killed Irish civilians while on duty. They know the police, prison service and army torturers. They know the state personnel who colluded with loyalist deaths squads in killings such as that of the lawyer Pat Finucane. They are also in possession of the material evidence to prosecute many of these people. In the case of the Ballymurphy massacre they have had the evidence for 43 years and have shown not the slightest inclination to use it.
The family of Jean McConville have every right to know the story behind the abduction, death and disappearance of their mother. All victims of the North’s conflict have the same right to know what happened to their loved ones. The tragedy is that few will get it courtesy of the PSNI making this type of vengeful political arrest.
Posted by Jim on
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.