Margaret Thatcher's Government Murdered Human Rghts Lawyers British Occupied Ireland

The truth is Margaret Thatcher likely ordered the Pat Finucane murder -- British can never reveal the truth about the killing of civil rights lawyer


Geraldine Finucane, widow of murdered solicitor Pat Finucane

The latest British inquiry into the death of Pat Finucane is again leaving massive questions unanswered.

The Guardian newspaper editorial headline said it best; “Pat Finucane murder: collusion, contrition, but not the whole truth.”

My strong belief is that the whole truth is that Margaret Thatcher ordered the Pat Finucane murder on February 12, 1989.

That is the key reason that no British Prime Minister will ever allow a public inquiry into the killing of the Belfast civil rights lawyer gunned down in front of his wife and children at his home.

He was shot 14 times while his widow, Geraldine, who was injured, tried to save him.

His only offense was to defend suspected IRA men and women too well in their court hearings.

I am not at all surprised that David Cameron uttered words of regret and then refused a public inquiry after the Da Silva report was issued yesterday.

Geraldine Finucane, a woman of immense courage,called it for what it was.

“This report is a sham. This report is a whitewash. This report is a confidence trick dressed up as independent scrutiny and given invisible clothes of reliability. Most of all, most hurtful and insulting of all, this report is not the truth,” she told reporters afterwards.

Read more: Inquiry into death of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane shows ‘shocking levels of collusion’

She knows what the truth is. The order to kill her husband came all the way from the top and David Cameron or any other British Prime Minister can never allow that truth to be revealed.

He can’t admit the British kill civil rights lawyers, can he?

Patrick Finucane was bringing the case of the Gibraltar 3, three IRA members shot dead in cold blood in March 1988, to Europe, which was going to be a massive embarrassment for Thatcher, who very likely gave the order for them to be shot dead also.

That court later found the three had been shot unlawfully. They had their hands up in surrender when they were shot down.

Finucane was doomed by a top government official. A member of Thatcher’s government Douglas Hogg, a Home Office minister, stood up in the House of Commons three weeks before Finucane was murdered and stated that some lawyers in Northern Ireland were "unduly sympathetic" to Irish Republicans.

He was directly referring to Finucane and signaling the killers to go ahead.

The new inquiry shows that MI5 was perfectly aware of the Finucane murder plot as were the RUC Special branch.

The Stevens inquiry into the Finucane killings stated, “My Enquiry team also investigated an allegation that senior RUC officers briefed the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Rt Hon Douglas Hogg QC, MP, that ‘some solicitors were unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA.”

Mr Hogg repeated this view...and the Enquiry concludes that “the Minister was compromised.”

In this latest enquiry, Sir Desmond Da Silva wrote, "My review of the evidence relating to Patrick Finucane's case has left me in no doubt that agents of the State were involved in carrying out serious violations of human rights up to and including murder."

Those agents did not act alone, they did so on orders from on high -- all the way to 10 Downing Street.

Thatcher’s reaction to the finding that her minister was responsible for the death of a lawyer?

She promoted him to Minister for Agriculture, all the better to keep him quiet.

Hogg was not alone in fingering Finucane of course. It went much higher in the government, all the way  to the top.

It was a time when Thatcher apparently believed she could win the war if only those pesky lawyers would stop getting guilty terrorists off. She also faced massive embarrassment in Europe over the Gibraltar killings.

The killing was sanctioned and carried out by the British state. Of all the crimes committed in Northern Ireland, the Finucane murder is the one which successive British government, of whatever hue, have most resisted investigating.

Pat’s problem was that he was too good at his job of defending Irish men and women arrested for alleged crimes against the state.

He had to be got rid of. The leader of the gang that killed him was a British special branch agent named Tommy Lyttle. The man who confessed to being the Ulster Defense Association hit man was Ken Barrett, also a special branch agent.

The UDA man who supplied the gun was William Stobie, also a special branch agent. He was killed by the UDA, by a British agent  in 2001, when he threatened to tell the truth about what happened to Pat Finucane.

Hogg and Thatcher might as well have been in the room when the gun went off fourteen times - they were just as culpable. The naming was the equivalent of painting a target on Finucane’s back - everyone knew who Hogg meant.

The British government had made their preference known.

And all the whitewash in the world will never remove the truth about what happened to Pat Finucane


See more: Irish News, Margaret Thatcher, Pat Finucane, IRA. Irish history.

Proxy British Rendition Guilty of Torture European Court of Human Rights

The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) runs a global incarceration operation of suspected terrorists, known as “extraordinary rendition”, which from 2001 to 2005 captured an estimated 150 people and transported them around the world. A document which is a summary of 42 classified CIA documents given to the British in 2002 meant for "Eyes Only" in the intelligence community, but the program's roots can be clearly discovered in British internment practiced in British Occupied Ireland outlawed by the European Court of Human Rights to which the British promised cessation only to replacing it with rendition, often using the US to torture and intern in return for British training.

The US government has threatened the British government that the US-British intelligence relationship could be damaged if this material were released.  The dimensions of this program for the most part are still classified but revelations regarding torture, includes documentation of the fact the CIA conducted "continuous sleep deprivation" under threats of harm, rendition, or being "disappeared," were declared by a British court as being "at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. "Eyes Only" in the intelligence community, but the program's roots can be clearly discovered in  Rendered persons are reported to have undergone torture by the receiving countries. This occurs with the cooperation and training of the United Kingdom who trained the CIA with its colonial experience with internment torture worldwide. Britain still practices internment without trial and deprivation torture in British Occupied Ireland.

European Court of Human Rights Finds CIA Guilty of Torture

America must now apologise to the German citizen, a victim of mistaken identity who was kidnapped and beaten by the CIA

By Amrit Singh

December 13, 2012 "The Guardian" --  The much-maligned European court of human rights has this week shown itself at its very best: standing up for the rights of an individual who has been denied justice for almost nine years since he was abducted, secretly detained, and tortured under the CIA's rendition program.

Khaled El-Masri, a German national, was seized by Macedonian security officers on 31 December 2003, at a border crossing, because he had been mistaken for an al-Qaida suspect. He was held incommunicado and abused in Macedonian custody for 23 days, after which he was handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven to Skopje airport, where he was handed over to the CIA and severely beaten.

The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled, and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository – in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock" – as Macedonian officials stood by. The CIA drugged him and flew him to Kabul to be locked up in a secret prison known as the "Salt Pit", where he was slammed into walls, kicked, beaten, and subjected to other forms of abuse. Held at the Salt Pit for four months, el-Masri was never charged, brought before a judge, or given access to his family or German government representatives.

The CIA ultimately realised that it had mistaken el-Masri for an al-Qaida suspect with a similar name. But it held on to him for weeks after that. It was not until 24 May 2004, that he was flown, blindfolded, earmuffed, and chained to his seat, to Albania, where he was dumped on the side of the road without explanation.

In December 2005, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a press conference – while then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stood by her side – that the United States had admitted it had made a mistake. But the US government still refused to acknowledge its shameful conduct in el-Masri's case and waged a successful campaign to prevent other governments from disclosing the truth.

El-Masri's subsequent search for justice has repeatedly been thwarted. The United States succeeded in getting el-Masri's US lawsuit dismissed on "state secrets" grounds without even responding to his allegations; in 2007, the US supreme court declined to review that dismissal. The Macedonian government resorted to bald-faced lies, claiming that it played no role in his detention or abuse, despite overwhelming evidence confirming his account. The German government refused to disclose what it knew about el-Masri's case, and apparently caved to US pressure not to seek extradition of CIA officials involved in el-Masri's rendition.

Today, the European court of human rights delivered a measure of justice to el-Masri. It vindicated his account of his ill-treatment, and unanimously found that Macedonia had violated his rights under the European Convention, including by transferring him to US custody in the face of a risk of ill-treatment, and facilitating and failing to prevent his being subjected to CIA "capture shock" at Skopje airport.

This is the first court to comprehensively and specifically find that the CIA's rendition techniques amounted to torture. The decision stands in sharp contrast to the abject failure of US courts to deliver justice to victims of US torture and rendition.

Both the United States and Macedonia must now issue el-Masri a full-scale public apology and appropriate compensation. Macedonia should also commit to an internationalized investigation capable of holding its officials accountable. There are plenty of examples of such inquiries into national issues that are too politically charged to handle unaided: Northern Ireland's 1997 Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) included members from Canada, the United States, and Finland.

But Europe's work is not over yet. Macedonia was not the only European country complicit in CIA renditions. A 2006 inquiry by Swiss Senator Dick Marty implicated 14 European governments – including the United Kingdom – in the CIA's "spider's web" of rendition operations. But with the exception of Italy, whose highest court recently upheld the convictions of US and Italian officials for involvement in rendition, neither the UK nor other complicit countries – including Lithuania, Romania, and Poland, which hosted secret CIA prisons – have conducted effective investigations capable of holding officials accountable for their participation in rendition.

The human rights principles at stake extend to the use of the death penalty. European governments are prohibited from transferring criminal suspects to the United States if they risk execution; yet Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national, was secretly flown to Guantánamo Bay after being held in secret CIA prisons in Romania and Poland. He now faces a possible death sentence after a trial by military commission that does not meet international standards.

The European court's decision in the el-Masri case is a clarion call for accountability for the flagrantly illegal CIA rendition program.

The time has come for European governments to stand up to the United States and break the conspiracy of silence, regardless of the diplomatic consequences. As former Human Rights Commissioner for the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammerberg, rightly said on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the 11 September attacks:

"The purported cost to transatlantic relations of pursuing such accountability cannot be compared to the damage inflicted on our European system of human rights protection by allowing ourselves to be kept in the dark.