Sinn Fein Accused (of hypocrisy) over Bush Visit

[Khephra]

Sinn Fein was accused of hypocrisy today over its opposition to this weekend’s visit by US President George Bush to the Irish Republic.

As Irish police and Army chiefs prepared for the biggest security operation in the history of the country, Ulster Unionist Assembly member Esmond Birnie said Sinn Fein’s opposition to the visit was rooted in anti-Americanism and was deeply hypocritical given the regular trips of Gerry Adams and his colleagues to the White House.

snip............


“Gerry Adams and his colleagues also seem quite happy to visit the US and the White House. So why can’t they let Bush visit Ireland?

“The Irish republican-Marxist terrorist leopard has great difficulties in changing its spots and at heart it is deeply anti-American.”

more..................

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3104516

[Pachamama]

1. Yeah, why should a former terrorist group oppose a group of terrorists?

:kick:

They are not deeply anti-american...they are just what the world is deeply anti-bush....

[Pale_Rider]

2. Aye ...

Irish recognize two things ... their deep blood-ties with America, American tourists and their recognition of American corporations that provide jobs. During the 9-11 when hundreds of flights between Ireland and the States were suspended, hundreds of Irish families opened up their homes around Dublin, Shannon and Cork for stranded Americans.

However ... love of the British is definitely another matter.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

3. I don't think Provisional Sinn Féin/IRA are particularly anti-American

Although they don't need as much money to operate on since they are not actively engaged in their former activities. I think they're able to get away with some opposition to the US, as they are no longer reliant on funds from the minority of gullible Irish-Americans.

However, I do agree that they have become very Marxist in recent years. It is quite interesting, that Sinn Féin made the jump from being quite populistic and nationalistic (famously they once espoused deporting all protestants from Ulster) to a quiet Marxist philosophy.

I think the Ulster Unionists should give up the grudge with Sinn Féin. Yes, they did kill 1800 people over 30 years, but everyone swallowed their pride for peace and stability. The Ulster Unionists should pay more attention to the Loyalists terror gangs who are stirring things up the most, even more so than Irish Republican splinter groups like the Continuity IRA and RIRA.

[seemslikeadream]

4. Now I wonder where they got all those guns

from. Bush learns from the best. Arm both sides and let them kill each other off.

[Bridget Burke]

8. I was unable to find any anti-American statements from Sinn Fein..

There are numerous, specific complaints about US policy in Iraq, but none against the American people.

Of course, some of the Sinn Fein statements do refer to their own experience with prisoner abuse--so I can see why the Unionists would complain. But they just love to complain, anyway.....

[stickdog]

5. Sorry, but this sounds like Ulster bluster to me. (nt)

[veggiemama]

6. Gerry Adams: "I have been in torture photos, too"

If Gerry Adams doesn't have the right to complain about how the Chimp's misadministration has behaved internationally, then who does?

<snip>

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.

For example, the interrogation techniques which were used following the internment swoops in the north of Ireland in 1971 were taught to the RUC by British military officers. Someone authorised this. The first internment swoops, "Operation Demetrius", saw hundreds of people systematically beaten and forced to run the gauntlet of war dogs, batons and boots.

Some were stripped naked and had black hessian bags placed over their heads. These bags kept out all light and extended down over the head to the shoulders. As the men stood spread-eagled against the wall, their legs were kicked out from under them. They were beaten with batons and fists on the testicles and kidneys and kicked between the legs. Radiators and electric fires were placed under them as they were stretched over benches. Arms were twisted, fingers were twisted, ribs were pummelled, objects were shoved up the anus, they were burned with matches and treated to games of Russian roulette. Some of them were taken up in helicopters and flung out, thinking that they were high in the sky when they were only five or six feet off the ground. All the time they were hooded, handcuffed and subjected to a high-pitched unrelenting noise.

This was later described as extra-sensory deprivation. It went on for days. During this process some of them were photographed in the nude.

And although these cases ended up in Europe, and the British government paid thousands in compensation, it didn't stop the torture and ill-treatment of detainees. It just made the British government and its military and intelligence agencies more careful about how they carried it out and ensured that they changed the laws to protect the torturers and make it very difficult to expose the guilty.

I have been arrested a few times and interrogated on each occasion by a mixture of RUC or British army personnel. The first time was in Palace Barracks in 1972. I was placed in a cubicle in a barracks-style wooden hut and made to face a wall of boards with holes in it, which had the effect of inducing images, shapes and shadows. There were other detainees in the rest of the cubicles. Though I didn't see them I could hear the screaming and shouting. I presumed they got the same treatment as me, punches to the back of the head, ears, small of the back, between the legs. From this room, over a period of days, I was taken back and forth to interrogation rooms.

On these journeys my captors went to very elaborate lengths to make sure that I saw nobody and that no one saw me. I was literally bounced off walls and into doorways. Once I was told I had to be fingerprinted, and when my hands were forcibly outstretched over a table, a screaming, shouting and apparently deranged man in a blood-stained apron came at me armed with a hatchet.

Another time my captors tried to administer what they called a truth drug.

Once a berserk man came into the room yelling and shouting. He pulled a gun and made as if he was trying to shoot at me while others restrained him.

In between these episodes I was put up against a wall, spread-eagled and beaten soundly around the kidneys and up between the legs, on my back and on the backs of my legs. The beating was systematic and quite clinical. There was no anger in it.

<<

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1231978,00.html

[Maeve]

7. Good op-ed article from Sunday on Ireland and the US

Gerry Adams is more in touch with the rest of Ireland and the feelings of its people than that writer is...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/opinion/23OFAO.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fContributors

There is another twist: we Irish, in our quarrel with Britain, have relied on American power, and that implicates us in how that power is exercised. The images from the Abu Ghraib prison were especially shocking here. We took the British Army to the European Court of Human Rights for using techniques of interrogation in Northern Ireland much less extreme than were used in Abu Ghraib — and, for all we know, in Guantánamo Bay, in Afghanistan and elsewhere in Iraq. The British techniques were ruled inhuman and degrading.

And Iraq is only the most lurid in a sequence of isolationist initiatives — the abrupt rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, the imposition of protective tariffs, the hostility to any international court of justice, and above all, the disrespect this administration has shown to the United Nations. Not that anyone has unqualified respect for the United Nations. But small nations, in particular, have to rely on international bodies, and the United Nations for all its flaws is the international body we've got. We take it seriously and we strongly support it. Irish troops are serving with United Nations missions in places that could do with the money and attention Iraq is getting, like Liberia, Kosovo, Lebanon, Congo and the Western Sahara.

The hardheaded proconsuls in Washington know that we, though by no means the victims we once were — we've a stunningly successful economy — do not matter in terms of realpolitik. Ireland's population is a little less than that of Atlanta. But the attitudinal change I see here is part of global politics all the same. Americans who work or play outside their own country will have felt already, I'm sure, that the Bush presidency has changed how the world looks at America. For them — for ordinary Americans — the reception they get abroad at this time of profound difficulty should be warmer than ever.

But for the present administration — and a 1,000-strong entourage will be accompanying President Bush on his visit — my welcome flag is furled. It was such fun and such an honor, the first four times a president came here. But in the bitter words of a poet: "Never bright, confident morning again."

Nuala O'Faolain, a former columnist for The Irish Times