22 September 2005 Blog Home : September 2005 : Permalink
In public, for far too long, the British Government likes to operate a convenient political lie when dealing with the IRA’s leadership. The Prime Minister, and the hollow men he has in the past installed at Hillsborough Castle, talk of Sinn Fein and the IRA as if they are two distinct entities. But a lie repeated, even a thousand times, is still a lie.
The reality, according to Ireland’s Justice Minister, Michael McDowell, whose intelligence services run a network of informers within the IRA, is far simpler — Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are the IRA.
“The Provisional movement is dominated and has been dominated up till recently by one body and that is the Army Council of the IRA,” he says. “The IRA carried out those robberies, serious armed robberies, and had a separate fund-raising section. And the members of the Army Council must all have had knowledge of one kind or another of that campaign of robbery and violence and extortion which has kept the organisation going. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have been members of the Army Council throughout all of the relevant period we are talking about and it is inconceivable that as members of the Army Council they wouldn’t know the finances of their own organisation and what they are based on.”
In Basra, the Guardian reports:What was clear last night was that the trust between the British army and Iraqi police - whom the British helped to train - has largely broken down. Many of the 7,000 Iraqi police in Basra are now said to owe allegiance not to the state, but to the mosque. According to some estimates, at least half will take orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shia cleric.
Indeed, just as the IRA has tended to have a rather brutal approach to investigative journalists, so too do the Shia militia in Basra:Earlier this year, Steven Vincent, a journalist working for the New York Times, reported that British authorities were reluctant to interfere in the militias' growing influence on the police. Shortly after his report was published, Mr Vincent was abducted by militiamen and shot dead.
andAt around this time (Ed: last Monday), in the south-west of the city, a second New York Times journalist was being murdered. Fakher Haidar al-Tamimi, 38, who had also worked for the Guardian, had written an article for the Times in which he criticised the British authorities' laissez-faire attitude. According to neighbours, one of the vehicles driven by the men who abducted him from his home was a police car.
I hope the recent Basra events turn out to be a wake-up call for the British occupation, but going on the way that they have been treating the IRA in Belfast I'm not terribly optimistic.