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An Open Letter to the Man Known as "Martin
Ingram"
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Mick Hall September 22 2004
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Dear
Martin
Myself
I welcomed it when you recently turned up on the
Danny Morrison discussion e-list, for without trying
to sound like a pompous middle class intellectual,
most people who post there try to reply to each
other in a civilised manner. You will not in the
main find the banter that on reading your posts
on the Republican Bulletin Board you clearly enjoy,
it probably takes you back to when you were a youngster
drinking pints of piss in the NAAFI whilst cracking
racist jokes and abusing some poor sap who could
not cut it.
Still I digress, as you once told me that was all
a long time ago and like many people, as they get
older, you no longer hold 'all' of the views you
did back then. If so it proves that if we wish to
we all can change our views and also hopefully our
behaviour and in the process develop as human beings.
For example, only recently I came across a young
man who had spent his teens in England as a street
thug in the National Front and his early twenties
as a full timer for the British National Party (both
British Nazi parties). He became sickened by their
crude, often violent racist politics and offered
to work undercover for the anti Fascist organisation
Searchlight. He did this dangerous work for a number
of years, the end result being that a number of
these nazi thugs went to jail for a considerable
period of time. As he had testified in the witness
box against them to ensure they were found guilty
he had to leave the UK for his own safety. Ten years
later he has returned and is now working with teachers,
probation officers, social workers, prison officers
in young offenders units, police and other professionals
who come into daily contact with youngsters who
have been infected by the likes of the BNP and UDA
with racist/fascist ideas, so that these professionals
can read the signs and hopefully turn these youngsters
away from becoming hard core scum who think it is
great to pour petrol through the letterbox of the
homes of asylum seekers in Belfast, London or Burnley.
To me this young man is a real hero, not only has
he turned his own life around and in the process
demonstrated to us all that there is a way back,
and that although normal decent people can do bad
things, they can redeem themselves and live worth
while and productive lives.
But, and sadly in life there always seems to be
a 'but,' I do have problems with your current political
position. I accept that by writing your book Stakeknife
(co-authored with Greg Harkin), plus some of the
articles you have written or co-authored, you have
contributed to the debate over British State Collusion
with paramilitary death squads in the north of Ireland,
and one can only welcome anything that will bring
to the light of day this murky and disgraceful period
of the governance of a part of the United Kingdom,
where, as far as the UK Government was concerned,
the rule of law did not apply to them or the agencies
they controlled.
However it seems to me to date you have refused
to recognise that you yourself played any discreditable
role in this whole disreputable business of State
Collusion with members of Paramilitary Organisations.
Indeed when I suggested, in a review of your book
Stakeknife, that today there is in all probability
someone from British Army Intel who looks and talks
much like you, offering the most base incentives
to some unfortunate Iraqi to sell his own people
out, you seemed to take real offence. The reason
for this I concluded is that you still believe that
during your service in the FRU you were on the side
of the angels.
On reading an article in the Belfast
Telegraph of the 20th Sept 04 in which their
columnist Malachi O'Doherty wrote, after
watching the recent BBC TV documentary on the Brighton
Bomb which was designed to kill the British Prime
Minister Thatcher, about how to him, leading Republicans
such as Gerry Adams, Dan Morrison and Pat Magee
displayed an inability to admit they were ever wrong,
because if they were to do so the burden of responsibility
for the deaths that followed their decisions would
be too great.
What
struck me about his article was that he could just
as well have been writing about you.
For surely you were responsible for the deaths of
people you had corrupted to betray their own and
worse, for without you, or someone very much like
you, would not the likes of Frank Hegarty, Tom Oliver,
Pat Finucane and Francisco Notorantonio with luck
have lived to an old age? You see, from where I
stand, if this whole wretched business of UK State
Collusion is not opened up to the international
light of day, then governments, being what they
are, will draw all the wrong conclusions from this
experience and will in the future, if they are not
already doing so in Iraq today, repeat it and inflict
again all the ghastliness that people experienced
in the north of Ireland onto more innocent people
elsewhere.
If the actions of people in the UK State's security
services, whether civilian or military and at whatever
level, are not made to abide by the law of the land
and are not exposed when they fail to do so, not
matter how long after they committed their criminal
offences, then the rule of law is worthless, to
be obeyed by only those with no power. Even worse,
we will be doomed to live in a country that continuously
goes through its very own groundhog day, on which
the State repeats the same atrocities against its
citizens and its enemies over and again.
For if those who have committed state collusion
in crimes in the north of Ireland are not brought
to book, I have no doubt that in my dotage of old
age, I will read newspaper articles and books about
how back when British troops occupied southern Iraq,
they worked in collusion with the likes of Abu musab
Al-Zarqawi, who like your own former organisation
the FRU's agent Freddie Scappaticci, has a penchant
for separating the brains from the bodies of terrified
helpless human beings. The only difference being
that your man did it by firing bullets into the
back of your victims heads and Al-Zarqawi prefers
to hack the poor helpless, trussed up victim's head
off with a butchers knife.
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All
censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging
current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress
is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and
executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently
the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.
- George Bernard Shaw
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