Posted on 05/13/2011 11:05:47 PM PDT by 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 generals 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 cant wait 20 years to interview people. If we dont 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 attorneys 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 yesterdays New York Times.
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.
If they’re trying to uncover the cowardly murder of a woman, then more power to them.
Hear, hear!
yitbos
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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