Home > Ex-FBI boss blasts MI5’s Ulster record
A former director of the FBI has attacked MI5 for its "long and painful history" in Northern Ireland.
Louis Freeh told the Wall Street Journal that the spying agency’s operations in the province had been characterised by decades of "secrecy and non-transparency" and argued against a similar agency being established in the US.
This year MI5 - officially known as the Security Service and to be locally based in Holywood - will take over the lead role in intelligence gathering about national security from the PSNI, including international terrorist threats and terrorist activities within Northern Ireland.
This is the first time that Freeh has so openly criticised MI5, which worked closely with the FBI in operations against the IRA while Freeh was FBI director.
The FBI made the unusual step of releasing Freeh’s comments as a Press release on its website.
In an angrily-worded editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Freeh strongly rejected an argument by conservative federal circuit court judge Richard Posner that the US needs its own version of MI5 to fight terrorism.
Describing Judge Posner’s idea as "dangerous and dumb", Freeh accused him of having an overly romantic concept of MI5.
"Judge Posner’s citation to England’s MI5 is romantic enough but needs to be qualified by the long and painful history of its operations in Northern Ireland, which are still unfolding after decades of secrecy and non-transparency," he wrote.
Freeh warned that such an organisation could not be adequately trusted or monitored by the US public, and accused Judge Posner of offering a " long winded thesis" that could not work.
"I suppose that this secret-police agency would appear before Congress in closed sessions and operate with a black budget," Freeh wrote, adding that the American public would never tolerate a CIA-type police organisation operating against US citizens and non-citizens "who live and work under our flag".
He was responding to an editorial by Judge Posner, also in the Wall Street Journal, in which he said that Freeh had tried and failed to get the FBI to take terrorism seriously and that it was now time for a US version of MI5.
Freeh, who resigned in 2001 after nearly ten years as FBI director, has previously worked very closely with British spying agencies and police.
He ran into serious confrontation with President Bill Clinton because of his insistence in prosecuting US-based IRA members during sensitive moments in the Irish peace process.
Both President Clinton and a former Miami FBI chief have publicly acknowledged that Clinton and Freeh had shouting matches over Clinton’s opposition to prosecuting four Miami-based IRA gun-runners in the early 1990s.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/article2442155.ece
Judge Posner obviously watches too many James Bond movies. MI5, and the British Government, are lying sacks of shit that serve Her Imperial Majesty by using the same old divide and conquer routine that they have always done.
Maitreya
Forum posts
13 April 2007, 10:07
Shared Oppression and Struggle of the Irish Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere —by John Wight
(Taken from Ireland’s Own)
Irish Slaves in the New World
Throughout the seventeenth century, when slavery was still enshrined in English law, and when Ireland had been an English colony for nigh on 400 years, captured Irish rebels were sent to English slave colonies in the New World.Irish prisoners were sent to Amazonian settlements in 1612, and an English Proclamation of 1625 urged banishment overseas of dangerous rogues (Irish political prisoners).
By 1650, during the reign of Cromwell, which saw terrible atrocities committed against the Irish people, the number of Irish sent into slavery reached a climax, with estimates by historians at somewhere between 80,000 and 130,000 men, women and children. Many were sent to the Americas to work plantations in Virginia and New England. Most, however, were sent to the Caribbean islands, especially Barbados, where thousands perished in the tropical heat from hunger and disease.
The English were proud of this policy, as can be noted in state papers published in London in 1742: It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was thus relieved of a population which might trouble the planters. It was a benefit to the people removed, who might thus be made English and Christian, a great benefit to the West Indies sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and the women and Irish girls to solace them.
Any Irish caught trying to escape were either branded FT, for ’Fugitive Traitor’, on their forehead, whipped, and hung by their hands and set on fire. So that they might forget their religion, nationality and culture, most were given new names.
But Her Majesty’s government sure have succeeded in making the New World "English and Christian", haven’t they? "One nation under god". Yea right! Go on Republic of the United States. Do as Her Majesty tells you, like good little Christians.
Maitreya
13 April 2007, 10:30
We Only Want the Earth — by James Connolly
From Songs of Freedom, 1907
Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek
Our programme to retouch,
And will insist, whene’er they speak
That we demand too much.
’Tis passing strange, yet I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.
"Be moderate," the trimmers cry,
Who dread the tyrants’ thunder.
"You ask too much and people vie
From you aghast in wonder."
’Tis passing strange, for I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.
Our masters all a godly crew,
Whose hearts throb for the poor,
Their sympathies assure us, too,
If our demands were fewer.
Most generous souls!
But please observe,
What they enjoy from birth
Is all we ever had the nerve
To ask, that is, the earth.
The "labour fakir" full of guile,
Base doctrine ever preaches,
And whilst he bleeds the rank and file
Tame moderation teaches.
Yet, in despite, we’ll see the day
When, with sword in its girth,
Labour shall march in war array
To realise its own, the earth.
For labour long, with sighs and tears,
To its oppressors knelt.
But never yet, to aught save fears,
Did the heart of tyrant melt.
We need not kneel, our cause no dearth
Of loyal soldiers’ needs
And our victorious rallying cry
Shall be we want the earth!
Maitreya