The Broken Elbow

In the light of the decision, announced today, by British prosecutors to charge two soldiers with the murder of Official IRA leader, Joe McCann, it is worth re-visiting a post myself and James Kinchin-White (then using the pseudonym ‘Bob Mitchell’) wrote for thebrokenelbow.com back in June 2014.

James had discovered in the Irish National archives a copy of a letter written by the then Irish ambassador to London, Donal O’Sullivan to the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Hugh McCann, describing a meeting he had a week or so after Joe McCann’s death with William Whitelaw, the new Northern Ireland Secretary.

In that letter O’Sullivan describes Whitelaw as expressing regret over the shooting of Joe McCann, saying he ‘should have been shot in the legs’, and that killing him had made him into a martyr.

The import of Whitelaw’s admission is that Joe McCann was unnecessarily killed, i.e. that he was murdered. Forty-four years later, someone has decided to do something about it.

You can read the full letter on this link: https://thebrokenelbow.com/2014/06/15/mr-whitelaw-regrets-joe-mccann-should-have-been-shot-in-the-legs-killing-him-created-a-martyr/

This, from today’s New York Times:

Congressman proposes national surveillance effort like New York’s.

Targeting Muslims?

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, after meeting with the president-elect in Trump Tower, proposed that Mr. Trump adopt a national counterterrorism strategy based on the surveillance efforts of Ray Kelly, the former New York police commissioner.

If it takes up the suggestion, the Trump administration will need some good lawyers.

The Kelly-era method of intelligence gathering was accused of targeting Muslims and has been the subject of years of litigation. A federal judge recently ruled that the New York Police Department had shown a “systemic inclination” to ignore rules protecting free speech and religion. Under Mr. Kelly, the city put its police intelligence division under the leadership of a retired C.I.A. officer and sought to build a domestic intelligence-gathering operation in that mold.

Among its contentious tactics, the department labeled mosques as potential terrorist organizations, allowing officers to tape entire sermons and collect information about anyone who attended prayer services. Plainclothes detectives hung out in restaurants and cafes in Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and keeping notes about how customers felt about drone strikes, foreign policy and politics.

“They were very effective for stopping terrorism, and they should be a model for the country,” Mr. King said.

He did not mention that an attempted car bombing in Times Square was thwarted only by a bad design, or that the most significant Al Qaeda plot against the city since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks slipped through the department’s net.

In that case, the department had no intelligence on Najibullah Zazi, a trained Qaeda operative living in Queens and visiting the very businesses and mosques that were under surveillance. He was identified by the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation before he could bomb the city’s subway system.

Teresa May snubbed at EU summit. Never mind, she’s got Boris to cheer her up…..

Whether the former British diplomat, Craig Murray is a fantasist or a truth-teller is a matter of debate, but given the US media’s determination to just ignore him, we may never never find out.

The fact that the media here won’t even test his credibility by talking to him but are content to accept, in some cases without question, and via anonymous and alleged intelligence sources, claims about Russian, and now even Putin’s, involvement in the theft of Democratic Party emails, is a depressing comment on the relationship between the Fourth Estate and the power structure in America.

To be sure Murray is a controversial figure in some circles, especially official government ones. Elsewhere he is regarded as something of a hero for speaking out publicly about British intelligence’s willingness to accept information acquired by torture from dubious, totalitarian regimes to justify war, such as Uzbekistan where he served as ambassador until his protests forced a confrontation with the Foreign Office which he lost.

Craig Murray

The British establishment scorned and shunned Murray for his allegations against the intelligence elite and the lesson has not been lost by the media on either side of the Atlantic. During our own Troubles in Ireland, we have had more than one whistle-blower discredited by government and then disowned by the media and the pattern is a familiar one.

One or two deserved the treatment, to be sure, and the fact that they were probably self-serving embroiderers of the truth or even fantasists was all to the good for officialdom. Their faults served to discredit the brand as it were and the media learned that to listen to such people risked being vilified in the same manner.

And so it is with Craig Murray. Praised at the time of his protests against the torture in Uzbekistan, where some victims were boiled in oil, he was then accused of all sorts of villainy by his bosses in the Foreign Office – from granting visas for sexual favours to drunkenness at work – but was eventually cleared.

Nonetheless the damage was done. The image of Craig Murray the corrupt, unreliable philanderer had been created and God help the ambitious reporter who sought him out. And so he was consigned to the fringes of the media, to places where only the Julian Assange’s of this world live, along with the occasional brave soul from The Guardian.

We shall see whether his latest claims receive anything more than derision, scorn and contempt from the mainstream media, but they should be tested. Below, courtesy of the Mail Online (ironically one of the best news sources around these days), here is Craig Murray’s latest contribution to the mystery of the Clinton hacking story.

(Interestingly Murray was denied entry to the US in early September this year but was then granted a visa in mid-September to attend a human rights conference. This would be around the same time as he now says that he met the whistle-blower in Washington who handed over a trove of Clinton emails. Just why was he initially refused entry?)

Enjoy:

WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Hillary Clinton emails – Daily Mail Online

A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by ‘disgusted’ whisteblowers – and not hacked by Russia.

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

Murray is a controversial figure who was removed from his post as a British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct. He was cleared of those but left the diplomatic service in acrimony.

His links to Wikileaks are well known and while his account is likely to be seen as both unprovable and possibly biased, it is also the first intervention by Wikileaks since reports surfaced last week that the CIA believed Russia hacked the Clinton emails to help hand the election to Donald Trump.

Murray’s claims about the origins of the Clinton campaign emails comes as U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly confident that Russian hackers infiltrated both the Democratic National Committee and the email account of top Clinton aide John Podesta.

In Podesta’s case, his account appeared to have been compromised through a basic ‘phishing’ scheme, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

U.S. intelligence officials have reportedly told members of Congress during classified briefings that they believe Russians passed the documents on to Wikileaks as part of an influence operation to swing the election in favor of Donald Trump.

But Murray insisted that the DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks did not come from the Russians, and were given to the whistleblowing group by Americans who had authorized access to the information.

‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ Murray said. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

He said the leakers were motivated by ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.’

Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

Murray claims he met with the person who passed the emails over in a Washington, D.C. part near American University.

His account cannot be independently verified but is in line with previous statements by Wikileaks – which was the organization that published the Podesta and DNC emails.

Wikileaks published the DNC messages in July and the Podesta messages in October. The messages revealed efforts by some DNC officials to undermine the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was running against Hillary Clinton.

Others revealed that Clinton aides were concerned about potential conflicts and mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation.

Murray declined to say where the sources worked and how they had access to the information, to shield their identities.

He suggested that Podesta’s emails might be ‘of legitimate interest to the security services’ in the U.S., due to his communications with Saudi Arabia lobbyists and foreign officials.

Murray said he was speaking out due to claims from intelligence officials that Wikileaks was given the documents by Russian hackers as part of an effort to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.

‘I don’t understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn’t true,’ he said. ‘Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.’

Murray was a vocal critic of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan while serving as ambassador between 2002 and 2004, a stance that pitted him against the UK Foreign Office.

He describes himself as a ‘close associate’ of Julian Assange and has spoken out in support of the Wikileaks founder who has faced rape allegations and is currently confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Assange has similarly disputed that charges that Wikileaks received the leaked emails from Russian sources.

‘The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,’ Assange told John Pilger during an interview in November.

‘Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.’

Murray suggested that John Podesta’s emails might be ‘of legitimate interest to the security services’ in the U.S., due to his communications with Saudi Arabia lobbyists and foreign officials

The Washington Post reported last Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies had ‘identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails.’

The paper said U.S. senators were presented with information tying Russia to the leaks during a recent briefing by intelligence officials.

‘It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,’ a senior U.S. official familiar with the briefing told the Post. ‘That’s the consensus view.’

The paper said U.S. senators were presented with information tying Russia to the leaks during a recent briefing by intelligence officials.

‘It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,’ a senior U.S. official familiar with the briefing told the Post. ‘That’s the consensus view.’

The Obama administration has been examining Russia’s potential role in trying to influence the presidential election. Officials said Russians hacked the Republican National Committee, but did not release that information in a deliberate effort to damage Clinton and protect Donald Trump.

Several congressional committees are also looking into the suspected Russian interference.

While there is a consensus on Capitol Hill that Russia hacked U.S. political groups and officials, some Republicans say it’s not clear whether the motive was to try to swing the election or just to collect intelligence.

‘Now whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that’s the subject of investigation,’ said Sen. John McCain on CBS Face the Nation. ‘But facts are stubborn things, they did hack into this campaign.’

President elect Donald Trump raised doubts about the reports and said this was an ‘excuse’ by Democrats to explain Clinton’s November loss.

‘It’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it,’ said Trump on Fox News Sunday.

Implicit in Vincent Browne’s defence of Gerry Adams‘ handling of the IRA killing of prison warder, Brian Stack published in The Irish Times today, is an assumption that Adams a) genuinely cares about victims and their families, and b) genuinely wishes to get to the bottom of the circumstances of their deaths.

He does this by comparing Adams’ dealings with victims’ relatives to a couple of official bodies, established during the peace process, which are statutorily obliged to be solicitous truth-seekers in these matters. One is the Commission to Locate Victims Remains (the Disappeared), the other is the so-called Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR).

But what can we learn about Gerry Adams’ actual behavior in such matters from past, similar incidents? The death of Patrick (Paddy Joe) Crawford in an IRA compound in Long Kesh in the summer of 1973, officially judged to have been a suicide but now widely believed to have been an IRA ‘execution’, is perhaps a useful place to start.

I wrote about the death of Paddy Joe Crawford in my book Voices From The Grave because in his interviews with Boston College, the late Brendan Hughes had claimed that Crawford had not committed suicide but had been hanged by fellow inmates on IRA orders from outside.

Hughes’ interviews were supplemented by further research carried out by Boston College researcher, Anthony McIntyre and the result provides a valuable insight into the way the SF leader sometimes deals with truth-seekers.

This is what I wrote, based on Brendan Hughes’ interviews:

Hughes’s belief was that the order to kill Crawford had come into the jail from Gerry Adams, who was still Belfast Commander at the time. Hughes was not present, he admitted, at the Brigade staff meeting that discussed Crawford’s fate and at the time of the hanging he believed that Ivor Bell had sent in the order. But when he discussed the matter with Bell some years later Bell told him that it was Adams who had issued the order, not him. Boston College’s researcher, Anthony McIntyre, interviewed former IRA internees held in Long Kesh at this time in an effort to confirm Hughes’s account and they corroborate his claim that Crawford was hanged. But they say that Adams’s role in the affair was to refer Crawford’s case to GHQ in Dublin which then ordered his death. If true this would mean that, ultimately, permission for the killing was probably given by the then Chief of Staff, Seamus Twomey, the most senior figure on GHQ.

Boston College researcher, Anthony McIntyre dug deeper into the circumstances of Crawford’s death and this is what I wrote in VFTG:

The former IRA members interviewed by McIntyre, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added disconcerting detail to the story. The hanging was accompanied by a macabre ceremonial: a black cloth was draped over the improvised steps from which young Crawford was pitched into eternity and his wrists were taped behind his back. Afterwards the cloth, a vital piece of evidence, was removed. They also say that he went meekly to his death. Paddy Joe Crawford was a strong young man and could have fought his executioners – and by so doing could have created enough forensic evidence to cast doubt on the suicide theory – but for reasons still unfathomable, he chose not to resist. Four men helped to hang Crawford. One of them was Harry Burns, known as ‘Big Harry’ to his friends, a prominent Belfast IRA man who was related by marriage to Gerry Adams. During the hanging a group of internees inadvertently burst into the hut and saw everything. Afterwards the word spread among other inmates. ‘Prisoners were simply told he had taken his own life. But people knew, although they did not talk,’ one of the sources told McIntyre.

Crawford’s death was officially judged to be suicide but the evidence that he had been murdered, and chosen so as to send a message to other IRA internees about the dangers of ‘informing’, kept piling up. And so did the suspicion that Crawford had been singled out for death because he was an orphan and there would be no-one to ask awkward questions afterwards.

One person did, however, ask questions, although it was many years later before he plucked up the courage to ask them. Gerry McCann was a fellow inmate at the orphanages at Nazareth Lodge in Belfast, and Kircubbin in Co Down and a friend of Crawford and had long wondered about his death.

Crawford was killed in June 1973 at a time when it was becoming clearer that the IRA’s Belfast Brigade had a serious informer problem. Not long after his death, Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes and other senior Belfast activists were arrested and interned.

Gerry McCann made contact with Gerry Adams and started to ask questions about Paddy Joe Crawford. This is what I wrote in VFTG about McCann’s experience with the SF leader:

In January 2008, Gerry McCann contacted Gerry Adams via the Sinn Fein website to ask for a meeting and, on 7 March, he and the Sinn Fein President got together at the party’s offices on the Falls Road to discuss Paddy Joe Crawford’s untimely death. While Adams’s role in ordering Crawford’s killing is open to question, there seems little doubt that the Belfast Brigade staff, of which Adams was the leading member, did play a central part in the events. But like Jean McConville’s family before him, Gerry McCann met a wall of denial from Gerry Adams. ‘The meeting was very cordial,’ recalled Gerry McCann. ‘I gave him a working document with questions. Was Paddy Joe an IRA Volunteer, which I knew he was, and Adams said he wasn’t. I didn’t believe he took his own life at the time and I still believe that he didn’t take his own life and I told Gerry that. His reply was that under no circumstances was he killed by his own people.’ Adams told McCann that he wasn’t in Long Kesh at that time and had no personal experience of the event but he would try to contact people who were and they might be able to tell him more.

The matter rested there but nothing happened for five months until McCann contacted Sinn Fein to ask when Adams would deliver on his promise. After that he got his second meeting, not with Gerry Adams but with Bobby Storey, who was a seventeen- year-old internee in Cage 6, next door to Paddy Joe Crawford’s cage in June 1973. Bobby Storey is, as Gerry McCann put it, ‘Gerry Adams’s right-hand man’, named in the House of Commons by the former Unionist MP David Burnside as the then Director of IRA Intelligence and the alleged moving force behind some of the IRA’s more spectacular operations in the last years of the peace process. Among the many tasks Storey has undertaken for the Sinn Fein leadership was handling the delicate issue of the disappeared, in particular the potentially explosive case of Jean McConville.

As Adams had done, Bobby Storey denied any IRA hand in Crawford’s death: ‘I asked him’, recalled McCann, ‘was Paddy Joe taken out by his own people and Bobby’s response was decisive and direct: “Under no circumstances could this tragedy be attached to the movement or any inmates.”’ Gerry Adams had told Gerry McCann that Paddy Joe Crawford wasn’t an IRA Volunteer but the Sinn Fein President’s right-hand man had a different answer: ‘Storey said he was,’ Gerry McCann recalled, ‘which raises the question why there were no Republican trappings at his funeral if he had committed suicide. It beggars belief.’

Quite a few followers of this blog cannot afford to buy The Irish Times, either in its hard copy or on the internet. They will therefore have missed this contribution to the ongoing Adams-Stack saga from Vincent Browne in today’s edition of the paper.

As ever, Vincent takes a stance contrary to the mainstream Irish media (always a sign of a good reporter in my view, since journalists who follow the pack invariably get the story wrong, and that applies in this country as well, e.g. WMD’s in Iraq) and makes some interesting points in the context of truth retrieval and the Troubles.

I would have added one other point myself: why is it that when some journalists probe into the darker corners of Gerry Adams’ past they are accused of trying to damage the peace process but when others do it, there’s no problem?

Anyway, enjoy:

The Irish Times
December 14, 2016 Wednesday

Adams is being hounded for providing a public service;
Breaking the confidentiality agreement over Stack meeting could make it harder for other relatives to gain information.

Vincent Browne

Austin Stack, whose father Brian was killed by the Provisional IRA in 1983, said last week he was “quite confident” he knew the identity of the “individual” to whom Gerry Adams introduced him three years ago and who had information about the murder. He said he had informed the Garda who this person was.

He went on in an RTÉ Prime Time interview to say he expected Adams would be “man enough” to go to the Garda station in Dundalk and tell gardaí the same information, that is who this “individual” was.

Stack acknowledged in that interview that he entered into a confidentiality agreement with Adams.

It is Adams’s refusal to give gardaí information that, according to Stack, they already know that has become the subject of the latest episode of fake indignation in the media. Even if gardaí did not know already who this “individual” was, the indignation would still be fake for there is clearly a public interest in information communicated in such circumstances remaining confidential.

There is now an acceptance by the courts that some circumstances justify confidentiality that even the courts themselves will not intrude upon, even though there is no legislative basis for this. For instance, courts will not require Catholic priests to disclose what was communicated to them in a confessional setting or require lawyers to disclose what was said to them by their clients.

This is done in acknowledgment that there is a public interest in usually protecting such confidences, for were such confidences to be breached – except in extraordinary circumstances – then the public welfare could be compromised.

This acknowledgment of a public interest in protecting confidences is contained in two pieces of legislation or proposed legislation agreed by the Irish and British governments and by the parties in Northern Ireland.

Worst atrocities

One of these pieces of legislation relates to a commission established by the governments to inquire into the location of the remains of the “Disappeared”, the Criminal Justice (Location of Victims’ Remains) Act 1999.

This commission has assisted in the location of many of the bodies of the “Disappeared” including that of Jean McConville, the victim of one of the worst atrocities carried out by the IRA. Section 6 of that Act states that “information provided to the commission in relation to the process [of locating the remains of the ‘Disappeared’] shall not be disclosed to any person except for the purpose of facilitating the location of the remains”.

The Stormont House Agreement negotiated two years ago with the involvement of Charlie Flanagan, Theresa Villiers, David Cameron and Enda Kenny, and published on December 23rd, 2014, provided for an independent commission on information retrieval (ICIR) “to seek and privately receive information about the [Troubles-related] deaths of their next of kin”. It states: “The ICIR will not disclose the identities of people who provide information.”

Precisely similar considerations apply in the case of Adams, the “individual” and the Stack family, although of course, as yet, there is no legislative basis for this as there is not in the cases of priests, lawyers, doctors, journalists and others.

Adams was asked by the Stack family to assist in obtaining information on whether their father was murdered by the IRA and the circumstances in which this occurred. He agreed to assist, provided the confidentiality of the process and what was communicated was respected.

The Stack family agreed to this, as they have acknowledged. This resulted in the Stack family being given some information related to their father’s murder and they expressed gratitude for the assistance Adams provided.

Adams was providing a public service by his assistance, a service he may have provided previously and may do again, unless the recent contrived furore deters others from taking part in a process that may turn out not to be confidential at all.

Inadvertently, the Stack family have done damage to that process now, which could lead to other families being denied similar information about the murder of their loved ones, because of their breach of confidentiality and the controversy surrounding this.

But were Adams also to breach confidentiality, then other families could forget it. They would get no such assistance. The absurdity of this is all the greater, since, according to Stack he has already informed gardaí who this “individual” is.

Opportunistic gain

There is a virulent cynical opportunism surrounding all this. First by Independent News & Media and then by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, cynical by their indifference to the damage to the process that could help other families, all for opportunistic gain. In the case of Independent News & Media this gain is through hoped-for sales and the strutting rights of journalists who think they are doing some public service and in the case of political parties through some electoral advantage.

The most significant political/societal achievement on the island of Ireland since 1922 was the peace agreement of 1998 and its subsequent embellishments.

More than anybody else Adams was crucial to those agreements; they simply would not have happened when they did were it not because of him.

Yes, as the leading figure in the IRA from 1978 onwards, he had a part in serial gruesome atrocities. These probably would have happened had he not been there. But the peace – however imperfect and however compromised in the years immediately following 1998 – we now enjoy would not have happened in 1998 were it not for him. Others had important roles, but none as crucial.

Of course, Adams brings with him much of the chilling residue of the conflict. However, there is now little recognition of the achievement of peace for which he was the principal architect and when he attempts further public service for which he could not possibly expect any political or personal gain because of the confidentiality he wanted to surround all this, he is vilified.