[caption id="attachment_67562" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="David Cameron"]
The recent United States announcement that Anwar al-Alwaki, a U.S. citizen, had been killed in a drone attack provides an interesting contrast to the subsequent announcement by British Prime Minister David Cameron that it will conduct a closed review of documents relating to the killing of one of her majesty's Subjects in Northern Ireland, lawyer Patrick Finucane.
Alwaki, a preacher of hatred, was alleged to have a role in various terrorist attacks in America and elsewhere. Finucane was too good at his job defending IRA suspects and was targeted by British security forces. His death, claimed by the Ulster Defense Association, has been admitted by Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Patterson to have been the result of police collusion. But still, the British government has fought an independent public inquiry into Finucane's killing.
The media have called for the Obama administration to explain the order to kill a U.S. citizen and it should do so. We must distinguish ourselves from the British government and the secret slaughter of its "subjects" in Northern Ireland. The U.S. has a constitution and a Bill of Rights. The British do not.
Our media is guaranteed a certain freedom but, as revealed in the News Corp scandal, the British media is often a tool of the government of the day.
A drone attack in Yemen, where Alwaki had fled, is clearly distinguishable from the barrage of bullets that took Patrick Finucane's life at home in front of his family.
Whether in domestic criminal matters, or in foreign policy, the United States' actions are subject to laws, accountability and transparency, even in the conduct of the war. It took 40 years for the British to stop lying about the Bloody Sunday killings but there has been no accounting for thirty years of lawlessness, police corruption, murder and false imprisonments in her majesty's name.
Now, American jurisprudence and Britain's role in the north of Ireland are to clash in a federal District Court in Boston. The British government has requested the U.S. Attorney General to retrieve documents and tapes retained in the Burns Library of Boston College and thought to contain information on a killing in 1973.
After decades of denying the Irish and U.S. governments information on the killings of Finucane, and also attorney Rosemary Nelson, or the role of the British army in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the Obama administration is summoned to aid yet another mischievous maneuver by England in Ireland.
The treaty terms used for this political fishing expedition by the Cameron government allow for the request to be denied if it is determined that Britain is not engaged in a bona fide criminal investigation.
Consider these conclusions of Jane Winter of British-Irish Rights Watch in March, 2010: "...Ballymurphy murders by the British Army of 11 Catholics and the loyalist killings of 15 Catholics in McGurk's bar, both in 1971, have yet to be properly investigated.."
Or this from the investigation of Professor Douglass Cassel of Notre Dame Law School in 2006: "..in 24 cases involving 74 murders evidence linked the RUC/PSNI [the police] and the UDR [the army] with loyalist paramilitaries ..and the investigation and ensuing prosecution of murdered Catholics were inadequate by ANY [emphasis added] standard."
Attorney General Holder should show the British our concern, not only for the continuing Finucane cover-up, but for an apparent priority of the Cameron government for a politically inspired subpoena, this when the full stories behind the murders of so many Catholics languish for want of full and proper investigation.
