The "intelligence services" (spying services ) of various countries are becoming more and more powerful.
That is not because they are well informed or clever. It is
because governments are using them more and more as a front to justify
what they are doing.
The Bush government shamelessly used intelligence services to
justify its war on Iraq. The London government did the same. The Dublin
government accepted intelligence assessments to justify handing over
Shannon in its own disgraceful act of war. The Bush government is now
using intelligence reports to target Iran. The Israeli government is
using intelligence services assessments to justify its planned attacks
on Syria.
Mr Ahern and Mr McDowell in Dublin are using the shield of
intelligence reports to justify accusing fellow Irish fellow citizens
of crime.
In none of these cases are the people who will suffer – and
whose sons and daughters may suffer too – being told either the worth
or the source of such intelligence reports. In some instances, as in
the case of Iraq, the reports were not only worthless but dishonest. So
lives are not only lost but thrown away, not through mistakes but
through carefully created plans worked out not in the field but in the
offices of the CIA and other intelligence services in London,
Washington, Dublin and wherever these murky operators lurk.
You may take it for granted that there is renewed activity now
by the CIA and other spying operators in the Vatican as they not only
watch but plan for the appointment of the next Pope. A thoroughly
disgusting rabble.
We can see the purpose behind their false reports. They could
not or, let's be open about it, perhaps they chose not to, prevent the
New York massacre. In Ireland they chose not to prevent killings which
they could have prevented. Either they knew what was going to happen
and let it happen, in which case they were accomplices, or they did not
know, in which case they were inefficient and worthless. But they
profess to know enough about Syria, Iran, Ireland and Cuba to justify
their governments making war in any of them.
Making war – and profits for their sponsors including the
arms manufacturers – is their purpose. Not the saving of lives (they
could but don't), not to prevent war, but the opposite.
Justifying war rather than the safety of the state is the
main purpose now of the spying services of London, Washington and
Dublin.
In Ireland the present campaign by secret services is to
undermine people's confidence in the republican leadership. Splitting
the opposition has always been a prime target. It was done in the
British miners' strike years ago and this is admitted now even by some
of the pillars of the British state, including the BBC. The agents
provocateurs, people paid by the government to get into citizens'
organisations and incite them to break laws, they were there just as
they were in Ireland and still are to this day.
Black propaganda is used mercilessly. Just as it was used
mercilessly about people in Kenya, or about Cardinal ó Fiaich in
Ireland, who was assailed by London propaganda as viciously as
Archbishop Makarios had been when the Cypriots were struggling for
their independence. No London administrator has ever apologised for the
abuse hurled at Tomas ó Fiaich and until this is done no Catholic
prelate should accept any courtesies from London – rights yes,
courtesies no. What they said about Tomás ó Fiaich and what they have
said about every leader in Ireland who ever dared oppose them was so
disgraceful that looking back on it one wonders how even a London
administration could think it would advance their policies in Ireland.
We are too proud a people for that to happen and they should
be told that in clear terms. Will the present London and Dublin
campaign to undermine people's confidence in the republican leadership
succeed? That depends not on Dublin and London, but on the people in
Ireland. And how can they accept as moral preachers these governments
which have waged war illegally and helped illegal wars for dollars?
Every single member of Dáil Éireann who refused to protest against this
is complicit in war and has lost the right to lecture others. And that
is quite apart from the knavery of which some members of political
parties in Dublin have been guilty – that knavery is only the bitter
icing on a sour political cake and is not the only corruption, or the
biggest.
Something which puzzles me greatly... Years ago the old
Republican Clubs – which fostered a lot of good people and good
thinking – became the Workers' Party and Democratic Left and eventually
part of the Irish Labour Party. I understood that a principle of the
old Clubs was that "We will use political means to advance our policies
but if we are refused the place in government we have won we reserve
the right to take up arms to defend it" or some such words. I
understand, too, that in all the transitions from Republican Clubs to
Irish Labour Party nobody was asked publicly to renounce that
principle.
And nobody seems to have done it publicly, or even formally (much
less with photos). Does that mean that step by step the Irish Labour
Party has inherited the principle that people may take up arms in
defence of their frustrated electoral mandate? Or can we expect that
Pat Rabitte will now formally demand that all the members of the Irish
Labour Party will renounce this principle at long last and be seen to
do so?
Maybe it is not necessary – many of us would settle for a
compromise; that is, let them keep whatever principles they have
inherited, but stop preaching the opposite at the rest of us.
