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While
Anthony McIntyre "love(s)
to whine" (letter)
about the outcome of a chance meeting on the street
with Sinn Fein's Tom Hartley, he has remained silent
on criticism in An Phoblacht of The Blanket's
promotion of misinformation.
Readers
can read what follows and make up their own minds.
'Stakeknife'
turns out to have blunt British blade
Media begins to ask: "Where's the beef?"
By
Adam O'Toole
The
naming of 'Stakeknife' exposed the way the media spreads
misinformation through un-attributed sources and becomes
a willing participant in the so-called 'dirty war'.
Journalists claiming to have anti-imperialist credentials
have used the 'Stakeknife' story to launch attacks
on Sinn Fein. For some, criticism of the Peace Process
and of Sinn Fein has become a funnel through which
British misiniformation is spread.
Peace
Process threat
The
British Establishment considers the Process to be
a threat to its rule in the North, not least because
it fragments and disorientates unionism. They have
sought to consolidate unionism since the Agreement
was signed by continuing the overt and covert campaign
against Sinn Fein. British strategy has sought to
re-incorporate the Dublin government into this strategy,
whose aim is to preserve the political integrity of
sectarian unionism and to marginalize Irish republicanism.
Elements
of the British establishment are attempting to re-engineer
the political isolation and demonisation that republicans
experienced prior to the Good Friday Agreement. The
Unionist paramilitaries have been used as part of
this strategy to put continuing violent pressure on
republican areas, with the hope of disrupting and
destroying the republican ceasefire.
MI5
speaks with forked tongue
However,
the plan to 'save Dave' has left Britain dangerously
exposed politically. It required the cancellation
of an election, a basic denial of the right to vote.
This action was accompanied by John Steven's report
on British collusion with unionist paramilitaries.
The revelation from Michael Stone that he was directed
to Milltown Cemetery in 1988 to kill mourners by the
RUC emerged the same day the 'Stakeknife' story appeared.
An
attempt at attention diversion was put in place by
the 'naming' of 'Stakeknife'. A large sucking sound
accompanied the story, which pulled in every gullible
journalist and media organisation.
The
purpose of the story is to demoralise northern nationalists
with the mistaken idea that they are not authors of
their own political destiny and to take the focus
off nationalist political anger.
Daily
Torygraph
Ed
Moloney wrote for the pro-unionist Daily Telegraph
on May 15th supporting the 'Stakeknife' revelations,
or 'Steak Knife' as he insists on calling it. Moloney
wrote an earlier Telegraph piece attempting
to partially discredit the BBC's Panorama, which exposed
the FRU/Nelson relationship with unionist paramilitaries.
Moloney deliberately undermined the expose. He wrote
that Nelson's task was to protect 'Stakeknife', while
the UDA organised the shooting of Pat Finnucane, Francisco
Notarintonio and other nationalist victims. That piece
deflected responsibility away from Britain's dirty
war. The Telegraph, as media representative
of the right wing of the British establishment, was
happy to print it.
Southern
anti-republican writers like Eoghan Harris, Fintan
O'Toole and Colm Tobin have promoted Moloney's recent
work, as has David Trimble's advisor (in the Telegraph),
Paul Bew and Daily Telegraph, former Ireland
correspondent, Toby Harnden. Moloney sees the Peace
Process as a British plot and promotes the conspiratorial
fantasy that Sinn Fein is controlled by highly placed
British spies. The anti-republican commentators named
above praise his delusional and patronising findings.
It is classic example of persistent misinformation.
Moloney
has an inflated sense of his own importance. He told
The Sunday Tribune after the publication of his book
on Gerry Adams, that "he would be exposing himself
and his family to "obvious dangers" if he
worked in the north again.... ". It is not that
I think the IRA would order action - they are not
that stupid - but that some 'Saturday night hero'
might try to impress his bosses by taking his own
action, " he said." (Irish News Sep
7 2002)
The
only people to attack and kill journalists have been
unionist paramilitaries under the control of British
intelligence. Moloney knows this. His comment was
both self-serving, ego-fuelled and a typically casual
smear.
Those
who ran with the 'revelation' and the blatant lies
and falsehoods that accompanied it continue to treat
this bag of smoke in a room full of mirrors as a fact.
Wild-eyed Irish journalists were seen on British television
demanding that the IRA conduct a prolonged investigation
and enquiry into a story that fell apart within days
of its appearance. Curiously, the clear evidence of
penetration of dissident republican organisations,
and the splits engendered, has not lead to similar
demands from these same 'anti-imperialist' media pundits.
007
school of politics
Undaunted
by setbacks in the 'outing' of 'Stakeknife', proponents
of the 007 school of politics have started to claim
that we should examine the whole box of cutlery. The
anti-republican journalist Jim Cusack in the Sunday
Independent tried to salvage the story. The IRA's
GHQ was "riddled with informers", he said
in a futile attempt to derive more column inches from
this securocrat fantasy.
Securocrat
and media circles are more than happy to promote the
'Stakeknife' theory. It has the potential to send
republicans into a frenzy of self-recrimination and
fruitless speculation about spectres and phantoms
- if republicans were foolish enough to fall for it.
Martin
McGuinness ate my hamster
Anther
curious example of persistent misinformation is from
this website. The website hosts mutually self reinforcing
praise from Bew and Harnden for the Steakeknife' theory,
reprinted from the Daily Telegraph - not usually
thought of as a source of pro-Irish nationalist, never
mind republican, information.
An
uncritical response to British propaganda has developed
alongside a relationship with Liam Clarke (Ireland
Editor of The Sunday Times) and his partner
Kathryn Johnston. Clarke openly claims to write for
a paper with "a robust anti-nationalist line".
He regularly contributes un-checkable 'security' sourced
stories, in which facts' are not facts at all, just
guesswork. Clarke 'revealed' the existence of "Stakeknife"
four years ago in The Sunday Times.
A
recent interview on this site with Clarke and Johnston,
after their arrest by the PSNI team investigating
the publication of the McGuinness-Mowlam tapes, turned
into a diatribe against Martin McGuinness.
The
website's friendly association with Clarke & Johnston
began with the publication of a positive review of
Clarke and Johnston's 'biography' of Martin McGuinness.
The book claimed that Martin McGuinness started the
Bloody Sunday massacre. The review was written by
a member of RSF and said that McGuinness was a "censor"
for advising people not to talk to Clarke and Johnston.
It's
the PSNI and British Army, stupid!
The
interview tries to shift responsibility for the PSNI's
treatment of the intrepid pair on to Martin McGuinness.
This is the way Clarke-Johnston wrote about Bloody
Sunday. The Irish Democrat noted that, "smears.
are delivered without fanfare [and] arrive in the
company of known facts". This latest smear is
published without critical comment. Perhaps, to borrow
a phrase from the piece, this is an example of how
"chummy" relations have become.
It
should be obvious, but Sinn Fein is not responsible
for treatment meted out by the PSNI and the British
state, or, for that matter, for what happened on Bloody
Sunday. The Brits are to blame.
Provos,
Paras - spot the difference
It
remains for us to speculate about the upcoming participation
by Clarke and Johnston in the Saville Tribunal, announced
by Johnston on a TV programme. In it Johnston tried
to rehabilitate the Widgery Tribunal and consistently
attacked the IRA, whose guns were silent during the
march.
Clarke
and Johnston plan to contradict the evidence of Derry
people and will support the British view that 'the
Provos' were partly to blame for Bloody Sunday - if
it were not so serious this 'evidence' should turn
out to be a real laugh (and a half). It has to be
asked if the participants in this website are going
to continue to collude in a gross historical fabrication.
The
attempt to deflect British responsibility for Bloody
Sunday on to the IRA is part of Britain's dirty war.
The attempt to conceal, or to deflect attention away
from, collusion with unionist paramilitaries is also
part of that war. Unfortunately, there are some who
claim to know better who have been deflected into
the political cul-de-sac of an endless spy hunt.
Where's
the beef?
Two
questions can be asked. Why did British sources release
the 'name' of 'Stakeknife' and then do nothing to
protect their 'superspy' - did they want a dead body
on republican hands? Second, why do so-called purer-than-the-driven-snow
dissident 'republicans' promote pro-British propaganda
and propagandists? Those who are blind to the relevance
of the first question are incapable of self-reflection
in relation to the second.
British
spies and informers are a fact of British rule in
Ireland. So too is misinformation and the tactic of
divide and rule. The British still carry out both
an open and a clandestine struggle against the advance
of Sinn Fein. Open in the demand for sanctions and
the denial of the right to vote. Clandestine in the
direction of unionist paramilitaries, attacks on nationalist
areas and the continuation of the dirty war and the
media war.
This
is not the action of people who think their opponent
has sold out. You don't fight a dirty war against
an enemy that has given up. The securocrats will not
succeed. Exposure of their activities will enable
more people to open their eyes to the nature of British
rule in Ireland.
Commentators
like Liam Clarke and Ed Moloney are so fixated on
tripping up their biographical subjects, Adams and
McGuinness, that they are increasingly blind to political
reality. Luckily most of the rest of us can read between
the lines.
Liam
Clarke and Kathryn Johnston reply, see Wishful
Thinking and Shades
of 1984
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