The truth has a funny way of revealing itself

Mark Thompson

‘I want you to kill as many terrorists as you can’ – the words of Margaret Thatcher to British soldiers during a visit she made to South Armagh as told this week in a radio interview with Frank Mitchell on U105 by a former British soldier.

In RTE’s Collusion film (broadcast June 2015) UDR and UUP MP Ken Magennis said that during a visit to Tyrone in1988 Thatcher asked him personally for IRA names saying she ‘would take care of them’ – meaning have them killed. Magennis provided three names. Several weeks later over a dozen SAS, hiding with heavy machine guns, ambushed and assassinated three IRA Volunteers; brothers Gerard and Martin Harte and Brian Mullin.

A number of years back the late joint First Minister Martin McGuinness shared with me a conversation he and Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, had with Tony Blair concerning admissions about Thatcher sanctioning murder.

During his visit to Loughinisland in 2016, following findings of collusion in the UVF murders of six men on June 18th 1994 as they watched the Ireland vs. Italy World Cup game at O’Tooles Heights bar, Loughinisland, I asked Martin McGuinness to share that information with the families, which he did. Martin also went on record on this matter in an interview with the press that same evening.

The actions of Thatcher, and her government constitute criminality and war crimes.

In the De Silva Review into the murder of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane, details are disclosed that reveal how Thatcher ensured that an enabling ‘accountability gap’ existed in which collusion and murder would continue.

De Silva reveals that during a meeting (circa mid-1980’s) between senior RUC officers, ‘security’ personnel (MI5), and Thatcher a senior RUC officer (Raymond White, who went on to head RUC Special Branch) in response to Thatcher asking how she could help them more effectively tackle ‘terrorism’, asked for better guidelines concerning the use of agents and informers. Obviously the RUC were conscious that their agents were engaged in criminality and murder, and sensing their own (handlers & RUC hierarchy) vulnerability. Thatcher’s eventual response was to say that they should just carry on regardless without effective proper guidelines.

This ensured a continuing accountability gap in which a deliberately created grey area, an exculpatory mechanism for handlers, including seeking to put distance between Downing St and what was happening on the ground here in Ireland.

The absence of any rules – the void, the carry on regardless – is the actual policy of collusion in which no guidelines and no accountability facilitated the policy objective of collusion; i.e. the unrelenting sectarian campaign of the murder of hundreds of Catholics/nationalists and republicans. Not forgetting the hundreds injured.

The link below is of the Martin McGuinness interview concerning legacy, collusion, the Tory government of today also seeking to attack lawyers, NGO’s and families bereaved through collusion and who seek accountability, and the Tony Blair comments.

Ironically it also addresses the issue of the Tories and former British soldiers campaigning to avoid accountability concerning killings they carried out.

We thought it appropriate on the week these same British soldiers marched in London against the due process of law, truth, justice and of any form of accountability – as they seek to continue impunity – concerning the shooting dead of John Pat Cunningham.

The current focus on a “national security” veto is all about hiding the truth. It is all about this truth being officially denied. But as we see today, the truth has a funny way of revealing itself. The jigsaw of the truth of state murder and state collusion emerges in different ways despite the British state’s exhausting efforts to hide the truth of their role in our conflict.

The link below of the Martin McGuinness interview.