sound familiar?

June 5, 2004 9:32 AM

I have been in torture photos, too.Gerry Adams speaks out. "News of the ill-treatment of prisoners in Iraq created no great surprise in republican Ireland. We have seen and heard it all before. Some of us have even survived that type of treatment. Suggestions that the brutality in Iraq was meted out by a few miscreants aren't even seriously entertained here. We have seen and heard all that before as well. But our experience is that, while individuals may bring a particular impact to their work, they do so within interrogative practices authorised by their superiors."
posted by sunexplodes (9 comments total)

Adams really is an odious, festering little turd isn’t he?

Despite having taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights and won resoundingly he can’t resist an opportunity to crow. No excuses for excesses of the British army in Northern Ireland in the 1970s but the former military commander of the IRA has some charges to answer to as well.

While the Army has been held accountable – despite inexcusable foot dragging over the Saville Inquiry – the boyos from Bogside aren’t held to the same standard for the kneecappings, punishment beatings and heroin trafficking that constitutes business as usual for the relatively recently impoverished IRA.

Holding whole communities in thrall at the barrel of an Armalite is hardly the work of a statesman and no one should confuse Adams with one despite his having had the shit kicked out of him. That he’s wronged doesn’t necessarily make him right.

The Adams gets the message that the Republic of Ireland doesn’t want Northern Ireland back the better. Shame because there’s no excuse for Britain’s continuing occupation and it’s an economic millstone round the UK’s neck.
posted by dmt at 9:58 AM on June 5, 2004

But our experience is that, while individuals may bring a particular impact to their work,

Yeah, I'm sure Gerry knows a lot about that.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 10:08 AM on June 5, 2004

Not as much as Martin McGuiness, surely.
posted by yerfatma at 1:39 PM on June 5, 2004

To the victor, the spoils

he considers himself to have lost? funny, sinn fein seem to be on the up and up.
posted by knapah at 2:20 PM on June 5, 2004

Adams really is an odious, festering little turd isn’t he?

Um, no.

While the Army has been held accountable

I don't think that has happened, frankly, apart from a few public wrist-slappings. Why don't you ask Kelly McBride, for example. Indeed, the entire point of Adams' - entirely valid - article is that they haven't.

That he’s wronged doesn’t necessarily make him right.

Fair point, but that doesn't validate the other stuff you've written.
posted by ascullion at 2:25 PM on June 5, 2004

The constant bleating of the shinners these days about evil warmongers and protecting Ireland's beloved "neutrality" must be one of the sickest ironies on the go at the mo.
And Gerry, you're a northerner! Stay off the election posters down here!
posted by Celery at 2:42 PM on June 5, 2004

All we seven lay in the house, and had shot and powder, being resolved to die in that place before we should yield or be taken.
posted by seanyboy at 2:30 AM on June 6, 2004

Um, no.

Well I won't hesitate to contradict you; he and McGuiness both indisputably are.

As the one time military commander of the IRA he is personally responsible for scores of murders, not a few of British soldiers but many more meted out to those of his own community who dared to oppose the cycle of violence that the IRA continues to perpetrate.

A wrist slapping? Yeah right. And I suppose that the Saville Inquiry is a farce too? I’m not trying to defend the indefensible: there were wrongs done by both sides in Ulster but to suggest that the IRA is somehow held to account and that the British Army hasn’t been is naive, ill-informed and offensive.

Peter McBride’s death was a sad and disgraceful tale and the treatment of the Wright and Fisher could have been more sensitively handled. Would that it had never happened; but then again I feel that way about those slaughtered by the IRA in its homicidal campaign.
posted by dmt at 1:46 PM on June 6, 2004

"But our experience is that, while individuals may bring a particular impact to their work, they do so within interrogative practices authorised by their superiors."

His point is valid. I don't see that attacks on Adams are at all relevent to the real subject of this post.
posted by Shane at 6:32 AM on June 7, 2004