There’s a bit of disappointment I think that there’s no support for the notion of a coverup or whitewash in the aftermath. To be honest though while that was obviously something people were hoping for, it’s not on the same level as the definitive statements on irrefutable innocence that the families were hoping for.
I’m really happy for the victims’ families and those who have campaigned for justice for so long. Also glad that the Widgery report has been shown to be a load of bollox. The likes of Jim Allister and Gregory Campbell truly are some of the biggest cunts in the world.
People asking Martin McGuinness if he was carrying a gun on Bloody Sunday.
FFS, he has already said he was in the IRA, and the day that the British Army has been proven to have murdered 13 innocent cvivilians and they quiz McGuinness about an alleged gun.
Miriam O’Callaghan even asked him if he felt sorry for thr soldiers as most of them were young, just like him on that day when he was carrying a gun.
She is undoubtedly hot but Christ she is rubbish at her job.
Why?
I’m still shocked at how the unionists responded. Surely they could look at the events of Bloody Sunday and say it was wrong. I was amazed at the stuff they came out with, still supporting the soldiers who shot unarmed civilians. The colonial mentality’s not going anywhere with that generation anyway.
Also great to see such a large crowd gather for such an emotive event and (as far as I’m aware) not a hint of trouble.
Given today’s rulings I would have thought they would stop seeking political capital from the shooting dead of unarmed civilians.
Miriam’s former husband is on Vinnie later to talk about the report.
Jim Allister:
My primary thoughts today are with the thousands of innocent victims of the IRA who have never had justice, nor benefitted from any inquiry into why their loved ones died.
Thus today’s jamboree over the Saville report throws into very sharp relief the unacceptable and perverse hierarchy of victims which the preferential treatment of ‘Bloody Sunday’ has created.
Jeffrey ‘porn movie’ Donaldson
The difficulty is that we have the truth on one side, but not the truth on the other.
We don’t know the truth about what Martin McGuinness and the IRA were doing on that day.
While we regret every death… we must not lose sight of the need for balance.
Cunts. Utter cunts.
The buzzwords earlier farmer were: regrettable mistake, young soldiers, inexperienced soldiers, guerilla warfare situation, confronting terrorists, the people shot weren’t ordinary marchers, and hierarchy of victims.
I agree. Cunts.
Robert Fisk: The innocent became the guilty, the guilty innocent
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
We knew the First Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. “Tough” was the word we reporters used if the soldiers were beating up rioters.
Brutal was the word we should have used. But sometime towards the end of 1971, I think we all realised that the Parachute Regiment was being prepared for some pretty nasty confrontations. They were the hard men, the reserve battalion at Palace Barracks, Holywood, a boring seaside town on the south side of Belfast Lough, a unit that spent most of its time waiting for trouble.
Shortly before Bloody Sunday, I’d seen them confronting a crowd of angry Protestants just off the Shankill Road. The “Prods” had blocked the street, set fire to some tyres; they were protesting at the lack of security. So the local British battalion in the Ardoyne called up the reserves and the first thing we saw was an Army “Pig” – a big armored vehicle with a wide-bodied snout over the engine – come roaring round the corner, knocking a youth clean off the road on to the pavement. It drove straight into the burning tyres and the paratroopers jumped out of the back with wooden cudgels and got to work on the street lads.
There were howls of rage and curses from the Brits and eventually the Prods cleared off and the soldiers of 1 Para stood in the street looking bored. Then a door opened and out came a man in his fifties. A Belfast Protestant, hair greying, he sort of hobbled on to the street as if he’d been hurt badly years ago and he walked right up to a group of Paras and plunged his hand into his pocket. He brought out an old Army red beret with a metal badge of parachute wings fixed to it and a tatty old regimental tie.
The soldiers watched him, bemused. Then he began to tear the beret to pieces, right there in front of the soldiers, and ripped up the tie. The man was shouting 'Bastards, bastards," over and over again at them and he dropped the ruined beret and tie at his feet and stomped on them. The soldiers laughed. And the man kept shouting “bastards” and he was crying and then he shouted at the soldiers: “I was at Arnhem.”
What had happened to the Parachute Regiment? A week before Bloody Sunday, John Hume, the MP for Foyle, encountered a far more disturbing demonstration of power by the same regiment. There was a nationalist demonstration on the beaches of north Derry and the Paras had turned up and beaten the demonstrators and a Para officer walked up to Hume and – in a very English public school accent – threatened him. “I realised something new was happening,” Hume was to tell me years later. “Some decision had been taken by the military. I was very worried about this. These were very hard men. There was no way of negotiating with them.”
Could we have guessed what this meant? Or the libels that British journalism was to commit against the dead of Bloody Sunday in the coming weeks? As usual – and for Derry, read Fallujah or Gaza or any Afghan village where civilians get in the way – the innocent became the guilty and the guilty became the innocent. “Bordering on the reckless” – Widgery’s whining description of the British Army rabble that fatally shot 14 Catholics in the Bogside – was the only real half-truth to emerge from his disgracefully short and lazy report.
They are old now, those soldiers, the same age in 1972 as those they killed in Derry. I was on The Times – the glorious, pre-Murdoch Times – and I was not in Derry on the day. But for years I went there as I go back, still, to the scene of Middle East massacres. In 1997, home from Beirut, I was again prowling around Derry. Was anything left? In the wall of a ground-floor apartment in Glenfada Flats, I found two bullet holes from Bloody Sunday, two gashes in the cheap stucco and cement to remind the Catholics of the Bogside of the power of a self-loading rifle.
“There’s another hole round the corner in Chamberlain Street,” a young man told me. “Would you like to see it?” Cruelly, I told him I’d seen enough bullet holes in the Middle East and the Balkans these past 22 years. “But do people know about Bloody Sunday in Beirut?” the man asked. No, I said. Not a soul there knew – or cared – what happened here. So all the man said was: “Jesus Christ!” It is a name much invoked on the Derry memorials.
The most dramatic of these is a simple granite cross erected to the memory of the 14 “murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday 30 January 1972”. Beside it, back in 1979, someone had scribbled a note: “All we need is the truth to help heal the wounds.”
Did we get it yesterday? Was it enough? Certainly it is more than the Palestinians will ever get for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre. Or the people of Qana who were demanding an inquiry in 1996 after Israeli shells slaughtered 101 civilians sheltering in the UN compound. The UN’s official report into the massacre implied that it was deliberate.
Lord Widgery was not so brave. Of 500 eyewitness testimonies given to him, he bothered to read only 15. Was he merely idle? Or was he a weak, morally enfeebled man, more fearful of condemning his country’s armed forces than he was of concealing the truth?
Or did we British journalists have something to answer for in our slavish adherence to the notion of the British Army’s integrity? I don’t think we cared about the Irish – either the Catholic or the Protestant variety. I don’t think we cared about Ireland. I don’t think the British Army cared. At last, I suppose, the Saville report has answered that scribbled note I found outside the Glenfada flats 13 years ago.
But at least the people of Derry care about others who have died unjustly. In 2003, as the Americans occupied Iraq, American paratroopers opened fire on a crowd of protesting Iraqis in the city of Fallujah. They killed 14, claiming they were shot at. Subsequent inquiries suggested this was a lie. A few days later, in Baghdad, I took a call from an old friend in Derry. He wanted to lead a delegation of Bloody Sunday relatives to Fallujah, he said, to show their sorrow for the dead Iraqis. I don’t think the Americans cared about the Iraqis. But the Irish of Bloody Sunday cared.
What paper does this guy write for?
Fisk? He writes for the Independent in England.
Its a very apologetic article, in fairness there has been a number of them today.
Fisk wouldn’t be that type of writer, in that he a fiercer critic of British foreign policy than almost anyone else you can think of. And he always has been. He’s been based in Beirut for nearly thirty years but he was in Northern Ireland before that.
Some of the music made during the troubles would be enough to turn a man unionist
You don’t understand the depth of bad feeling in the North so. Its still very very deep. Trouble hasn’t gone away, despite the perception of the opposite. I would say its like a dormant volcano waiting to explode. Recession should help it along.
Not so much the army but the British justice system. Was there really a need to execute American citizen William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) for treason? He was only a British citizen because he lied to the passport office. A truly needless and vindictive act.
:mad:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/94345
How My Dad Was Murdered By The British State
Internment - indefinite imprisonment without trial - was reintroduced into the North of Ireland on August 9 1971 at 4am. Three hundred and forty people were dragged out of their houses across the Greater Ballymurphy area of west Belfast, many of whom would not be released for years.
Hundreds of homes were wrecked in the process and the entire community was effectively terrorised by the British army.
Later that day, as the full horror of what had just taken place began to sink in, loyalists from the neighbouring Springmartin estate began to form into a crowd to taunt their nationalist neighbours across the road in Springfield Park, shouting slogans such as “Where’s your daddy?”
John Teggart, the son of Belfast local Danny Teggart, picks up the story. “The crowd in Springmartin, as the night went on, grew to maybe 400. They had been stoning the houses that back onto Springfield Park and a lot of anxiety was building up,” he explains.
"At the top end, most of the houses were getting wrecked and stoned, so people had moved out down to the lower end of the park. A man named Bobby Clarke suggested moving out of the area altogether and started to evacuate the youngest first. He went out on his own across the field with an 18-month-old baby and brought her over to Moyard Park. As he was returning a soldier from the Parachute Regiment shot him in the back.
"Friar Hugh Mullen then phoned the army and told them there was a wounded man on the field and asked their soldiers to stop shooting. He then left the house and, waving a white cloth, went out onto the field to issue the last rites to Bobby. Bobby said he wasn’t dying, so Friar Mullen went back towards his house to phone the ambulance, still waving the white cloth. That was when he was shot.
"A young man named Frank Quinn then ran onto the field to help and met a barrage of bullets. He did a heroic act helping his neighbours and he was shot in the back of the head.
"At the same time as this was going on, my daddy and several other people were down the road near the army barracks.
"All of a sudden the paratroopers came out of the main gates of the barracks and started firing at anybody, anybody at all. A young man called Noel Philips was wounded, fell and screamed out. A woman named Mrs Connolly went to help but when she got to him she was shot in the face. The whole left-hand side of her face was taken off with the force of the bullet.
"My daddy was wounded in the leg initially according to eyewitness accounts. He was then shot 14 times whilst he lay out in the open, from a distance of less than 50 yards. They also shot an 11-year-old boy in the groin.
"The soldiers then came out of the barracks in a Saracen (armoured truck) and two soldiers got out, one with an SLR, one with a handgun. The one with the handgun walked up to Noel Philips, who was lying on the field wounded, and executed him with a bullet behind each ear.
"I can say these things with confidence because we have seen the autopsy and there was a 9mm bullet in him from a Browning pistol. This is from experts. And our eyewitness accounts back this up.
"Then there was Joan Connolly. One of the soldiers went round the side of the house and claimed later that he found a woman who was obviously dead. It was later found out that she hadn’t been shot once, but four times - in the belly, in the shoulder and the thigh, as well as in the face.
"The other soldier grabbed a man called Gerald Russell from where he was injured behind a pillar and just started shooting him at point-blank range with the rifle. He was shot four times.
Then they started piling the bodies into the Saracen, both dead and wounded.
"Joseph Murphy, who had been shot in the leg, was taken in and repeatedly beaten. He died a week later. Because the injuries he received during the beating were so bad, he couldn’t be operated on. He died from gangrene.
"The whole of his body was completely black from where he was bruised and he told his wife on his death bed that they shot rubber bullets into his wound as well.
"Davy Callaghan, an ex-navy man, was also taken out of the Saracen. There was a gauntlet of paratroopers waiting for him. He was taken out and held on the ground whilst they took it in turns to kick him severely between his legs. He ended up in hospital with a cage round his lower body.
"Gerald Russell was taken into a room, where he was beaten repeatedly and hit with rifle butts. They actually put the rifle muzzle into one of his wounds and picked him up with it. They then jumped off the bed repeatedly onto him. This was a man wounded four times. He said while he was there, there was a naked man, thrown onto the floor beside him. He says this man was obviously dead or dying. We believe it was Danny Teggart, my daddy. He said what they did to him, bouncing off the beds, they did to my daddy as well. The dead and the wounded were both beaten.
“Six people in the space of around half an hour or an hour were murdered by the paratroopers.”
In the two days that followed, another five were killed or were later to die from their wounds - four after being shot and one from a massive heart attack after being subjected to a mock execution.
None of the deaths was ever properly investigated. Military police interviewed their colleagues in the days that followed and those statements were taken at face value by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Those killed were all said to be gunmen.
“From their interviews there are total discrepancies,” says Teggart. “They said that Mrs Connolly” - a 45-year-old mother of eight - “was a superwoman, that after dropping her gun she jumped over their heads with a submachine gun and starting firing again. They said she used at least two firearms to shoot them.”
In a pattern starting to become depressingly familiar, those reports were then reported as fact in the media. Nor has the official story of events been changed to this day. "The only way it’s going to change is through the likes of what we’re doing with the campaign.
“Our goal is an independent international investigation, independent of the state. The evidence is there that this was murder, this was a war crime. There were 14 people killed less than six months later in Bloody Sunday by the same soldiers, the same regiment - 1 Para. If Ballymurphy had been dealt with, Bloody Sunday could never have happened.”
The campaign has made progress in recent months and now has the full support of both nationalist parties as well as the foreign minister of the Dail. They are also due to meet the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland next month. But perhaps most importantly, the campaign has received important new evidence from the Catholic church.
“They came up with some archives that hadn’t been seen before - including a report and witness statements,” says Teggart. “One of those reports says that you could indict the paratroopers in Springmartin for shooting dead Frank Quinn.”
The Saville inquiry has also boosted the families’ confidence and actually recommended that the Ballymurphy killings be investigated.
"You have to remember that Bloody Sunday wasn’t an isolated incident. They had already killed 11 people in Ballymurphy before going on to kill 14 in Derry. They then went on to kill five people - three teenagers, the father of the boy shot in the field the previous year and another Catholic priest. This was in May, less than a year later, in the same area just yards from where John McKerr was murdered near the church.
“You would think that every murder should be investigated. But if your loved ones are murdered by the state it’s an uphill struggle. You have to almost prove what happened before you even get any investigation, and that’s the struggle we’re involved in at the moment.”
Join the Ballymurphy families’ campaign for justice at www.ballymurphymassacre.com