WHO'S YER DADDY, Harry ?

If you didn't know who they were, which of the two would you say was Harrys'daddy?..bearing in mind Diana was "messing' about with the Major around the time Harry was conceived. You wonder where Harrys' ginger hair came from !!

But then this is complicated and it may be that the milk man is Harry's grand father. I am not sure Lizzie will be happy to hear that.

Prince's Harry: A Gun-horny Adolescent 
By Joe Glenton

January 24, 2013 "The Independent" - - Winter has come and it seems that over the last few days leading figures in the War on Terror, unwilling to wait for Season Three of Game of Thrones to hit screens, have been re-watching past episodes to the point that it’s coloured their rhetoric.

Between Cameron’s assurances of a war against sundry evil-doers that will last ‘decades’ and French Defence Minister Le Driand’s frank (and frankly crackpot) calls for a ‘total reconquest’ of Mali, the only question is: how long until we replace drones with halberds?

Martial cant

The latest bit of martial cant has come from one dashing Captain Harry Wales; fighter, lover, occasional exhibitionist and warrior-prince of the House of Saxe-Gotha-Coburg. Having had his first tour of Afghanistan cut short, he has just finished his latest stint, where he has been fighting astride - or rather, in – Apache helicopters: the British Army’s multi-million pound engines of destruction.

The poor lad’s been having a hard time, even Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - a man whose admirable turn of phrase just can’t make up for his human rights records - called him a ‘shameless, drunken jackal’ recently. In all honesty, and I include a younger version of myself in this, that’s not a completely inaccurate description for young soldiers out on the town: hit the bars and clubs of Colchester on a Saturday night if you doubt me.

That said, we didn’t generally take our disco-dancing shoes on operational tour and Harry doesn’t kill Afghans while intoxicated as Hekmatyar suggested – on this evidence he does it while stone-cold sober. Apaches are too precious and expensive to be flown by drunkards, regardless of their pedigree. In fact, given that we aren’t doing at all well in Afghanistan, even with our potent technology, Apache may be even more of a burden on taxpayers then Harry himself. 

While a number of Household Cavalry veterans have informed me that young Mr Wales was okay ‘as officers go’, which is a pretty glowing assessment in soldier-speak, his latest public comments do make him sound for the all the world like a gun-horny adolescent playing a pricey version of Call of Duty.

Don’t get me wrong, squaddie culture and humour is close to the bone because the tasks soldiers are given are the grimmest imaginable and are often carried out, as in Afghanistan, without a mandate and with little public support. Brutal humour is often the only kind of armour a soldier can get hold of easily, I recall an expression brought back from Bosnia by older members of my own unit that seems to capture it: If you don’t laugh you’ll only cry.

Captain Wales does come across as fairly casual when he talks about taking lives to save lives, stopping people doing ‘bad stuff’ and ‘taking people out of the game’. In his defence though, and given his much publicised record as the royal social hand grenade, he may be politically naïve, or it could be that he’s a young man who’s been strapped into an attack helicopter for 20 weeks. One of the best arguments against war is the effects it has on the people fighting – though clearly Harry is, unlike many of the infantrymen he’s supporting, a soldier by way of choice not economics, I would not wish sleepless nights on anyone, even as a republican.

Just a job

This trivialisation of violence is not new thing; it is part of the process of dehumanisation which is central to modern warfare. It seems to have taken on new forms in the post 9/11 campaigns. During his short-lived first tour as a tactical air controller – calling in air strikes – Wales and his colleagues watched the bombs hit from their bunker on a live-feed monitor nicknamed ‘Kill TV’. This notion of a kind of professional distance from the killing you are involved in is also expressed in the US military term for an Afghan, Pakistani or whoever killed by a drone strike; a kill is referred to humorously – and officially - as a ‘bugsplat’ after a children’s computer game.

In all honesty, Harry’s comments are hardly revelatory and are tame compared to those I’ve heard from soldiers away from the media. To operate against and kill other humans, it helps to view this process as simply a job, however intellectually dishonest that is. Military training is sophisticated social engineering and wartime experience has the effect of ingraining a certain type of callousness. While war is a toxic institution, for some of those who conduct it, particularly privileged young princes who find themselves in the vanguard of US power, it can appear to be a latter-day boy’s own adventure.

The author refused to serve a second tour in Afghanistan on legal and moral grounds, later spending five months in military prison. His book, 'Soldier Box', is published by Verso in May.

Dolours Price Rests in Peace

Irish Republican News

" Veteran republican Dolours Price, sister of Irish political prisoner
 Marian Price, has died.

 Dolours remained a significant force in Irish republicanism until her
 untimely death in Dublin last night.

 Following the introduction of internment in 1971, when hundreds of
 nationalists were arrested and imprisoned without trial, she approached
 Sean MacStiofain, one of the founders of the Provisional IRA and said
 she wanted to be a "fighting soldier".  She campaigned to join the IRA,
 not part of Cumann na mBan, the women's wing of the republican movement.
 An IRA Army Council was convened and Price was sworn into the
 organisation, followed by her sister.  Both played a significant role in
 the IRA's armed struggle.

 In 1973, she and her sister were sentenced to life imprisonment in
 England, and immediately embarked on a 200-day hunger strike seeking
 their repatriation to a prison in Ireland.

 During the hunger strike, which was called off in 1974, the sisters were
 force fed.

 Following her release on compassionate grounds in 1980, Dolours returned
 to Dublin and she married Belfast actor Stephen Rea in the early 1980s.
 The couple, who divorced in 2000, have two sons.

 Her sister Marian Price was interned in 2011 by an order of the then
 British Direct Ruler Owen Paterson.  Marian continues to suffer serious
 ill health as a result of her hunger strike and remains the subject of a
 worldwide campaign for her release.

 Their brutal treatment in English prisons continued to affect both
 sisters' mental health, and Dolours has received treatment for post
 traumatic stress disorder.

 In recent years, she was highly critical of the Sinn Fein leadership of
 Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and of the peace process.  She has
 made a number of statements denouncing Mr Adams for allegedly denying
 his IRA past, and her involvement in a historical archive project for
 Boston College became the subject of a PSNI subpoena and multiple legal
 actions.

 It is understood she died peacefully at her home last night in Malahide,
 County Dublin.  Ar dheis De go raibh a hanam."

Dolours Price has been found dead at her home in Dublin.

The 62-year-old mother-of-two was found at her home in Malahide last night, sources said.

Her death is not being treated as suspicious. A postmortem is due to take place on her body at the Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown later today.

Ms Price and her 58-year-old sister Marian, who has been politcally interned in British Occupied Ireland since 2011 were on hunger strike for over 200 days,being force-fed by the British for 167 of them

In an interview with Suzanne Breen, they  described being force-fed:

Four male prison officers tie you into the chair so tightly with sheets you can't struggle. You clench your teeth to try to keep your mouth closed but they push a metal spring device around your jaw to prise it open. They force a wooden clamp with a hole in the middle into your mouth. Then, they insert a big rubber tube down that. They hold your head back. You can't move. They throw whatever they like into the food mixer – orange juice, soup, or cartons of cream if they want to beef up the calories. They take jugs of this gruel from the food mixer and pour it into a funnel attached to the tube. The force-feeding takes 15 minutes but it feels like forever. You're in control of nothing. You're terrified the food will go down the wrong way and you won't be able to let them know because you can't speak or move. You're frightened you'll choke to death.

Dolours Price and her sister, Marian Price, were the children of Albert Price, a prominent Irish Republican and former IRA member, from Belfast.

In 1980 Dolours and Marian Price received the Royal Prerogative of Mercy and was freed on humanitarian grounds afterwards her health became permanently damaged as a result of being force fed by the British.

In February 2010, it was reported by The Irish News that Dolours Price had offered help to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains in locating graves of three men, Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, who were allegedly killed by the IRA and whose bodies have not been found.

Oral historians at Boston College interviewed both Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes between 2001 and 2006. The two former IRA members spoke on condition that the tapes not be released in their lifetimes. In May, 2011, the Police Service of Northern Ireland subpoenaed the material, possibly as part of an investigation into the disappearance of a number of people in Northern Ireland during the 1970s.

 In June 2011, the college filed a motion to quash the subpoena. A spokesman for the college stated that "our position is that the premature release of the tapes could threaten the safety of the participants, the enterprise of oral history, and the ongoing peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland." 

In July 2011, U.S. federal prosecutors asked a judge to require the college to release the tapes in order to comply with treaty obligations with the United Kingdom. On July 6, 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed with the government's position that the subpoena should not be quashed.On October 17, 2012, the United States Supreme Court temporarily blocked Boston College from turning over the interview tapes.The matter caused considerable duress to both Dolours and Marion.

 
Time Magazine Article:

The World: Ulster's Price Sisters: Breaking the Long Fast

Monday, June 17, 1974

• 
  
  Each day passes and we fade a little more. But no matter how the body may fade, our determination never will. We have geared ourselves for this and there is no other answer.

Dolours Price, May 27 letter to her mother

Sometimes we can achieve more by death than we could ever hope to living. We 've dedicated our lives to a cause and it's supremely more important than any one individual's life.

Marion Price, May 27 letter to her mother

Fate and politics have a way sometimes of cheating would-be martyrs. Belfast's Price sisters—Dolours,... Rest of the story censored

If anyone can resurrect this article please 

forward or publish.

On Thursday 24 January 2013 it is reported that "Dolours Price has been found dead at her home in north Dublin. The Garda Síochána are investigating the circumstances surrounding the sudden death of the former Irish republican icon in her apartment in Malahide, although she had been in general ill health