Lethal Allies

#Panorama to show absence of very good tools to critique the state

John Ó Néill on November 21, 2013, 4:55 pm | Readers 99

Tonight’s BBC Panorama programme will detail allegations about the operation of the Military Reaction Force, or MRF, and how it killed unarmed civilians as part of its work up until 1973. The programme has identified ten unarmed civilians it believes were shot by MRF members operating undercover. It also will include a claim that a Ministry of Defence review concluded that the MRF had “no provision for detailed command and control”. As with so much reportage about ‘the past’, they aren’t particularly new …

#Lethal Allies: this is not collusion.

John Ó Néill on November 1, 2013, 4:18 pm | Readers 1183

This is much worse. The publication of Ann Cadwalladers Lethal Allies last month by Mercier Press was always going to have a relatively predictable reception. In many ways, nationalists and republicans have largely accepted that there was participation by members of the security forces in providing intelligence, weapons and targeting information to loyalist/unionist paramilitary groups from the late-1960s onwards. In some cases, it was even clear that either officially or unofficially, security force members and agents being run by the security services directly …