Boston College urged to remain silent

Irish Times ^ | 5/14/2011 | GERRY MORIARTY

[bruinbirdman]

A WRITER and a former IRA prisoner have urged Boston College to resist attempts to force the college to disclose information provided to them by former republican and loyalist paramilitaries.

Boston College has been subpoenaed by the US attorney general’s office to release information that was provided in confidence to the college in an oral history project about the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The attorney general is acting at the behest of the authorities in the UK. PSNI detectives are hoping that this action will compel the college to release interviews provided by the late Brendan “the Dark” Hughes and Dolours Price, both of whom were former convicted senior IRA figures.

Detectives are seeking information that would relate to allegations and suggestions by Mr Hughes and Ms Price that Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams ran an IRA unit that was involved in several abductions and disappearances, including the disappearance of murder victim Jean McConville.

Mr Adams has repeatedly denied these allegations.

Author Ed Moloney used interviews Mr Hughes and the late David Ervine gave to the college as material for his recent book Voices From the Grave.

Former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre conducted the interview with Mr Hughes, a former senior IRA figure and estranged friend of Mr Adams.

Wilson McArthur, who is from a loyalist background, interviewed the former UVF prisoner and leader of the Progressive Unionist Party David Ervine. More than 50 other republican and loyalist paramilitaries have also given detailed interviews to Boston College, again based on the academic guarantee that details would not be disclosed until after their deaths.

Mr Moloney, who is now living in New York, deplored the attempt to compel the college to release details of the interviews. “I very much hope and expect that Boston College will resist this,” he said.

“It is very important that there is the freedom to write and chronicle history while it is still possible to do so, and to get accounts from people who were directly involved. This is vital,” he added.

“Part of the problem is that the conflict lasted so long. Unlike the Anglo-Irish War we can’t wait 20 years to interview people. If we don’t do this exercise now then we can forget it because a lot of the people will be dead,” said Mr Moloney.

“It is important to collect these valuable insights which help explain how and why the conflict happened, and to help prevent future conflicts.”

A spokesman for the college said: “Boston College is reviewing the subpoena from the US attorney’s office and is requesting additional information in light of the ramifications it poses regarding the safety of the interviewers and the impact on oral history projects as an academic enterprise.”

Researcher Anthony McIntyre, who had a number of disagreements with Mr Adams, said he suspected that the subpoena was motivated by a “British state agenda to embarrass Gerry Adams”.

“The college must resist this with all the force it can muster,” he added.

This move could have serious implications for similar history projects. “This is our worst-case scenario,” Mary Marshall Clark, the director of the oral history research office at Columbia University, New York told yesterday’s New York Times.

[bruinbirdman]

Toni Blair's Labour/socialist party is out after running UK into the ground.

Sinn Fein made considerable inroads in the Republic of Ireland's last election.

British conservatives are not happy with the results of the Clinton/Blair/Gerry Adams peace accord.

[Krankor]

If they’re trying to uncover the cowardly murder of a woman, then more power to them.

[Godwin1]

Terrorism as history. Adams is a terrorist, a senior member of the IRA “ARMY COUNCIL" implicated in the murders of scores of men and women. While he was on the Council, the IRA murdered 13 Irish Protestant civilians for the crime of attending a Memorial Service for WW2 and WW1 dead in Enniskillen, County FERMANAGH. This atrocity, which also maimed a dozen people, has never been properly investigated. In the USA, it is not even known. On the other hand, the Bloody Sunday shootings of 13 Catholic demonstrators, some of whom were armed and many of whom were violent, by the British Army has been investigated to death. And the incident is well known in America. A double standard.

[LTCJ]

Hear, hear!

[Tainan]

This is something that has long perplexed me. America has long been suckered into the quaint image of "The Ol Sod" presented by little old ladies collecting "for the widdas and orphans ye know" on street corners, subway stops and in "Irish bars" across the country.
Suckered in because this money went straight to terrorists for guns, semtex and hide-out money.
Funneled from the east coast and from the west coast this went on far too long. These are murdering terrorists who preyed upon the naivety, and stupidity, of Americans with hazy images of a place out of "The Quiet Man" and what they should have been thinking of was the aftermath of the bombing in Omagh.

[bruinbirdman]

yitbos

[porter_knorr]

I think what we were told on the coasts and implied in the media was “just like your country had to fight to get out from under the British, so do we.” it was all glorified, something like “it is a war” is what I heard many many times. You know what I believed changed people’s perspectives? Seeing 9/11 happen here.

Suddenly what was happening on another continent wasn’t really a war to be their own free country, it was in fact terrorism. I never put it together as terrorism, naively I suppose.

We can thank our media, and Bill Clinton too. They helped romanticize it -

My last name could not be any more Irish, when I moved to San Francisco for a couple of years (97ish) my dad said “you stay away from the Irish there, remember John Wayne’s Quiet Man was an American, not an Irishman. They are not what you think they are, and you stay out of their politics” What a wise dad I had.

[ReignOfError]

You know what I believed changed people’s perspectives? Seeing 9/11 happen here.

After stalling for a decade, the Provos decommissioned in 2005. A fair number of experts believe that a big part of that was their funding in NYC and Boston -- where two of the flights originated -- dried up.

[porter_knorr]

Very good point.

(I also wanted to add, it’s a lot easier to research now than in the 90’s. Dots are so much easier to connect.)

[bruinbirdman]

The Clintons and Obamas are revolutionaries. Mitchell did his job of uniting Hamas and PLO. Like he helped Clinton and Blair unite the IRA with UK Labor/Socialists. They support their revolutionary comrades.

Mubarak in Egypt was the heir of a military coup. Supposedly the mob that took over (and Mohammedan Brotherhood) are revolutionaries against the military dictatorship. They are supported by Hussein, Clinton, etc.

Same in Libya. The Gadfly took over in a coup. His detractors are rebels. They are supported.

The Iranian protestors are actually counter-revolutionaries and therefore not supported by Hussein, Clinton and their comrades.

Hamas and Syria are allies of the Iranian revolution, thus backed by the American communist comrades.

yitbos

[Alberta's Child]

If they’re trying to uncover the cowardly murder of a woman, then more power to them.

If the U.S. attorney's office handed me a subpoena for information allegedly relating to a murder case in Ireland or Great Britain, then I'd tell them to stick it up their @sses.

[Krankor]

If the U.S. attorney's office handed me a subpoena for information allegedly relating to a murder case in Ireland or Great Britain, then I'd tell them to stick it up their @sses.


So, if officials at Oxford University had known where bin-laden was hiding, you would have had no problem with them telling British prosecutors to stick it up their ass?

[Alberta's Child]

Absolutely -- and let the British prosecutors deal with them. If Osama bin Laden was hiding out in Great Britain and he was not wanted by the British government for any violations of British law, then I'm not sure what legal jurisdiction the U.S. would have outside of a formal extradition process. The U.S. government has no right to demand the cooperation of foreign citizens in a foreign country over a murder case (even a U.S. murder case) in Britain, and vice versa.

This is exactly why Osama bin Laden wasn't pursued by the U.S. Justice Department, was never served an arrest warrant, and was never subject to a criminal proceeding . . . and why the Obama/Holder plan to try the 9/11 masterminds held at Guantanamo Bay in a U.S. Federal court was abject idiocy.