Britain Guilty of Internment Torture in Occupied Ireland Again

 

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2 days ago

Free Marian Price #freemarianprice #MarianPricehttp://irishblog-brianclarkenuj.blogspot.com/ — with (Add/edit faces)

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Retweet to Stop Torture of Marian + Feedback on the campaign below, would be appreciated ;

PUT HER IN TO GET HER OUT

New York attorney at law Martin Galvin with a letter that first featured in the Irish News on the 8th October 2012
  
  If Marian Price or a surrogate nominee were to stand on her behalf for the soon to be vacated Mid-Ulster seat, it would present Sinn Fein with opportunities that should not be hastily disregarded.

Again last Friday, Martin McGuinness told the IRISH NEWS that the British were under no illusions about Sinn Fein’s commitment to see Marian free. Yet Marian, like Martin Corey, remains in prison. Apparently Sinn Fein appeals against Internment by License, even those personally conveyed by Martin McGuinness, mean as little to Theresa Villiers as they did to Owen Paterson.

If Sinn Fein held real political sway with the British, and wants, indeed demands, an immediate halt to Internment by License, how can the British simply carry on regardless and ignore them?

The British obviously believe they have tethered Sinn Fein to posts in Stormont and on constabulary boards so tightly, that the party can no longer break ranks with the crown and walk out, even at the price of sitting still for Internment.

Unionists are so emboldened that Peter Robinson thinks himself worthy to lecture Republicans on the names we may or may not use   for the British ruled portion of Ireland, while Mike Nesbitt misinterprets the “sorry initiative” apologies for specific IRA operations as a sorry admission that the entire struggle was criminal and illegitimate.

Sinn Fein‘s own roots in using British elections to campaign for Republican prisoners, go back long before Bobby Sands MP, and the slogan “put him in to get him out” was used to fight for  the freedom of Republicans interned after the 1916 Rising.

Today the party seems reluctant to break ranks and challenge the British by a walk-out from Stormont or constabulary boards. Standing aside for a Republican prisoners’ representative in Mid-Ulster would provide a middle ground requiring no walk-out from any seats and merely substitute one abstentionist candidate for its own.

Backing this type of bold initiative and showing the political leadership necessary to “bring them home” and end Internment would show the British, Unionists, and all shades of Republicans that Sinn Fein will not sit still for Internment. It could mean freedom for Marian and Martin and for other Republicans who will be next on Britain’s list if we do not end Internment by License now! 

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On the same day the Parker report was published on 2 March 1972, the United Kingdom Prime Minister stated in Parliament, that its torture techniques in British Occupied Ireland would not be used ever again in future. The Prime Minister's statement, directives expressly prohibiting the use of the techniques, whether singly or in combination, were then issued to their forces by the Government.

At a hearing before British Courts on 8 February 1977, the British Attorney-General declared that the 'five techniques' would not in any circumstances be reintroduced either collectively or individually.

The Irish Government referred to the Commission of International Human Rights in Strasbourg, cases of persons submitted to the five techniques during interrogation, at the unidentified centre or centres between 11 and 17 August 1971.

In a recent article SPOOKY BIZARRE BRITISH SECRET EXPERIMENTS the details of the torture of Marian Price were covered, which clearly demonstrates the British have broken their promises and undertakings to the international community with regard to their torture. They have also re-introduced internment without trial in various disguise.

The Republic of Ireland v. The United Kingdom

Before the European Court of Human Rights

18 January 1978

The British Government introduced special powers of arrest and detention without trial, which were widely known as internment without trial.The Government of the Republic of Ireland brought an application before the Commission of International Human Rights in Strasbourg (ii) that various interrogation practices--in particular the so-called 'five techniques', which included wall- standing, hooding and deprivation of sleep and food--and other practices to which suspects were subjected amounted to torture and inhuman or degrading treatment contrary to Article 3...The Commission unanimously found that the five techniques did constitute a practice of torture and that other practices amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment;:

(i) Ill-treatment had to attain a minimum level of severity to fall within Article 3, the assessment of which was necessarily relative, depending on all the circumstances, including the duration of the treatment, its physical or mental effects and, sometimes, the sex, age or state of health of the victim.

(j) Although the 'five techniques'were never officially authorized in writing, they were taught orally at a training centre and accordingly there was a practice.

(k) Since the five techniques were applied in combination, with premeditation and for hours at a time, causing at least intense physical and mental suffering and acute psychiatric disturbances, they amounted to inhuman treatment.

(l) Since the five techniques were such as to arouse in the victims feelings of fear, anguish and inferiority capable of humiliating and debasing them and possibly breaking their physical or moral resistance, they were also degrading.

(m) The distinction between torture and inhuman or degrading treatment derived principally from a difference in the intensity of the suffering inflicted.

(n) The term 'torture' attached a special stigma to deliberate inhuman treatment causing very serious and cruel suffering.

(o) The five techniques did not occasion suffering sufficient in intensity and cruelty to constitute torture.

(p) With regard to the alleged ill-treatment accompanying the five techniques in the autumn of 1971, many of those held in custody were subjected to violence by the police, which, being repeated, occurring in the same place and taking similar forms, constituted a practice, which, since it led to intense suffering and sometimes substantial physical injury, amounted to inhuman treatment though not torture.

(q) The ill-treatment at the Ballykinler military camp was discreditable and reprehensible but was not degrading or otherwise contrary to Article 3 [181].


* * * * * * * * * * * *


The Parker report was published on 2 March 1972 and on the same day, the United Kingdom Prime Minister stated in Parliament that the techniques would not be used in future as an aid to interrogation. As foreshadowed in the Prime Minister's statement, directives expressly prohibiting the use of the techniques, whether singly or in combination, were then issued to the security forces by the Government.

At the hearing before the Court on 8 February 1977, the United Kingdom Attorney-General declared that the 'five techniques' would not in any circumstances be reintroduced as an aid to interrogation.

The Irish Government referred to the Commission eight cases of persons submitted to the five techniques during interrogation at the unidentified centre or centres between 11 and 17 August 1971.


JUDGMENT.

In their written and oral pleadings before the Court, the Irish Government allege breaches of Articles 1, 3, 5 (taken together with Article 15), 6 (taken together with Article 15) and 14 (taken together with Articles 5 and 6).

They also maintain--though they do not ask the Court to make a specific finding--that the British Government failed on several occasions in their duty to furnish the necessary facilities for the effective conduct of the investigation. The Commission does not go as far as that; however, at various places in its report, the Commission points out, in substance, that the respondent Government did not always afford it the assistance desirable. The Court regrets this attitude on the part of that Government; it must stress the fundamental importance of the principle, enshrined in Article 28 (a) in fine, that the Contracting States have a duty to co-operate with the Convention institutions.

 ON ARTICLE 3

 Article 3 provides that 'no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

A practice incompatible with the Convention consists of an accumulation of identical or analogous breaches which are sufficiently numerous and inter-connected to amount not merely to isolated incidents or exceptions but to a pattern or system; a practice does not of itself constitute a violation separate from such breaches.

It is inconceivable that the higher authorities of a State should be, or at least should be entitled to be, unaware of the existence of such a practice. Furthermore, under the Convention those authorities are strictly liable for the conduct of their subordinates; they are under a duty to impose their will on subordinates and cannot shelter behind their inability to ensure that it is respected.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Convention prohibits in absolute terms torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Unlike most of the substantive clauses of the Convention and of Protocols 1 and 4, Article 3 makes no provision for exceptions and, under Article 15 (2), there can be no derogation therefrom even in the event of a public emergency threatening the life of the nation.

 In the instant case, the only relevant concepts are 'torture' and ' inhuman or degrading treatment', to the exclusion of 'inhuman or degrading punishment'.

1. The unidentified interrogation centre or centres

(a) The 'five techniques'

 In the Commission's estimation, those facts constituted a practice not only of inhuman and degrading treatment but also of torture. The applicant Government ask for confirmation of this opinion which is not contested before the Court by the respondent Government.

 Although never authorized in writing in any official document, the five techniques were taught orally by the English Intelligence Centre to members of the RUC at a seminar held in April 1971. There was accordingly a practice.

The five techniques were applied in combination, with premeditation and for hours at a stretch; they caused, if not actual bodily injury, at least intense physical and mental suffering to the persons subjected thereto and also led to acute psychiatric disturbances during interrogation. They accordingly fell into the category of inhuman treatment within the meaning of Article 3. The techniques were also degrading since they were such as to arouse in their victims feelings of fear, anguish and inferiority capable of humiliating and debasing them and possibly breaking their physical or moral resistance.

On these two points, the Court is of the same view as the Commission.

The Court concludes that recourse to the five techniques amounted to a practice of inhuman and degrading treatment, which practice was in breach of Article 3.

Gobshite Gilmore

Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore said today, that parties of the centre left in Europe needed to prove that they had “credible answers” for the economic crisis.

Addressing a conference of European social democrat politicians on "Progressive Governance", the Leader of Labour in the right wing Coalition Government, said the European mood has shifted towards the centre left, “But we have to build now, on that success.”

Earlier on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU, he said it was a "great fillip" to Ireland's forthcoming presidency of the European Council next year, saying;



“I very warmly welcome the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union,” told reporters in Dublin shortly after the announcement this morning.

“The European Union has been the most successful peace process in our lifetime, and indeed in our living memory.," he said.

"When you think of the fact that Europe, in the first half of the 20th century, tore itself apart, slaughtered its young in two great wars and that the protagonists in those wars came together, worked to develop the EU. The wars of the 20th century that occurred in Europe would be unthinkable now.

“When you look as well at the role the European Union has played in reaching out to parts of the European continent, like the Balkans, where only 20 years ago we saw slaughter and genocide, now some of those countries are already members or about to be members of the European Union and others, there are enlargement negotiations going on with them.

“Indeed, the role that the EU has played in supporting peace processes and peace efforts in different parts of our continent, including the financial support that the EU has provided for the peace process in Ireland. I think it’s a great recognition of the peaceful role and the role in contributing to peace that the European Union has made.

“We so often think of the EU in economic terms and political terms. But it is a decision which causes us to stand back and look at the fact that the EU has made such a huge contribution to the maintenance of peace in Europe, to the promotion of peace on our continent and to supporting the efforts that are needed to bed down peace.”

Shity of London Villiers Villains Banksters Pirates War Criminals

By James Petras

October 11, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -  Whenever financial swindlers prosper at the expense of investors or a bank jiggers interest rates to bugger their competitors or tax evaders flee fiscal crises or rent gouging petrol monarchies recycle profits or oligarchs pillage economies and drive millions to drink, drugs and destitution they find a suitable secure sanctuary in London.

They are wooed and pursued by big British realtors eager to sell them multi-million dollar estates, trophy properties and landmark mansions. Pompous and pretentious British academics convince them to send their progeny to six digit private schools, promising them that when they graduate they will be speaking English through their nasal cavities, rolling their r’s and mastering the art of eloquent but vacuous elocution. British governments, Labor Liberal and Conservative, in the best and most hypocritical legal traditions, fashion the legal loopholes to attract the biggest and wealthiest parasites of the world.

Crime Wave Sweeps City of London

A veritable crime wave[1] has invaded the City of London, where millionaire investment bankers cook the books for billionaire clients and bilk the Treasury to pay their fines and flout the Law. Courses in business ethics are obligatory at Oxford and Cambridge since it has become standard operating procedure for mega-swindlers to plead guilty ,to pay a fine and avoid jail and to solemnly promise to never, ever, flout the law….. until the next mega-deal.

London has become the center of global financial capital by engaging in long term large scale active collaboration with multi-billion pound drug, arms, people smuggling and sex-slave cartels. The “Brits” specialize in laundering funds from the Mexican, Colombian, Peruvian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Nigerian narco-kings. Albanian white slavers have their ‘private bankers’ at prestigious City banks with a preference for graduates of the London School of Economics. Bi-lingual Greek kleptocrats, lifelong billion dollar tax evaders, fleeing from their pillaged homeland have their favorite real estate brokers, who never engage in any sort of naughty ‘due diligence’ which might uncover improper tax returns. The City Boys with verve and positive initiative, aided and abetted by the hyper-kinetic “Tony” Blair’s open door policy to swindlers and saints of all colors and creeds, welcomed each and every Russian gangster-oligarch-democrat, especially those who paid cash for multi-pound ‘Olde English’ landmark estates’.

The London Sanctuary for the world’s richest plunderers and parasites offers unprecedented services, especially protection from extradition and criminal prosecution at the site of their crimes. Impartial British legal and judicial officials are experts in citing constitutional precedents that, in strict regard for the established legal order, uphold the denial of extradition, denying the legal and justice systems of every pillaged country and the cries of justice of the impoverished Irish, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards.

Real and feigned indignation among the highly moralistic City Boys and cynical grins among the experienced senior partners, greet the unruly victims of their guest billionaires. The impoverished masses demand that the British creditor banks should collect their debt payments from the accounts of the swindlers who received the loans, passed their debt to the public treasury and recycled their ill-gotten gains into their British accounts.

When the Saville dressed, swashbuckling swindlers cross swords with their counterparts, as when the venerable and respectable, Barclays Bank fixed the Libor to profit on the interest rate differentials, at the expense of other banks, the bankers all agreed the solution was to pay a 290 million pound fine, admit the crime and try to save a system which should “only” bilk the public treasury, retail investors and ‘market takers’. Barclay’s “crime” was, of course, poisoning the trough from which their peers and partners prosper.

The Barclay Boys of both sexes, outraged by the indecent finger pointing by the other City Boys, raised an issue which nobody could deny: they were not alone. HSBC, Standard Charter, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds of London and many other bankers of equal or lesser assets across the Atlantic were engaged in similar unethical, (daresay criminal) or at least questionable undertakings. They also paid fines and were duly chastised. The older and more experienced senior officers of the City sent internal memos to their brash PR underlings to stop this unseemly washing of soiled silk shirts in public; mutual denunciations created the false image that there was a crime wave running through the suites of the City of London.

Unfortunately, the British legal system is not merely protective of overseas billionaire swindlers, it is also accommodative, supremely vindictive and bending over frontward when it comes to requests for extradition from its “Special Partner” in Washington. Let it be an Islamic religious figure or an Australian whistleblower (Assange) and, in due haste, with the extradition papers in hand, “the bobbies” are ready to break embassy doors to facilitate compliance.

London: Pimping for Parasites:

The global economic crisis is a boon for London’s high end real estate corporations, as overseas millionaires and billionaires, tax evaders, political raiders of the public treasury, abandon pillaged economies and pour billions into mansions and penthouses. Super-rich rentier monarchists from the despotic Gulf States join Russian commodity speculators, and new rich Chinese sweatshop owners in bidding up London properties in prestigious postal codes in Belgravia (Ebury Street, Eton Place, and Eton Square) Knightbridge, Mayfair (Park Street). Corpulent Russian oligarchs and pious Saudi royalty loll in country estates in, Hertfordshire, Herefordshire and Cheshire overlooking their elegant English gardens and enjoy the purring and caresses of their very upscale British courtesans, in one or another of the two dozen bedrooms. The British government’s tolerance and open minded attitude to Russian and Albanian gangster oligarchs, whose bloody ascent to wealth can match any Sicilian godfathers, greases the wheels for the rise of what the Financial Times chooses to call, the real estate ‘industry’, bankrolled by the financial ‘community’ and aligned with the insurance ‘investors’.

The predators international, take their afternoon tea at 4 p.m., sherry at 6:30 p.m. They are entertained by the gossip of Her Majesty’s Court and the Queen’s Anniversary Celebration and indulge in the sporting life (soccer teams over polo horses). They cultivate a taste for culture. Accompanied by Oxbridge experts they shop for “collectibles” – paintings at Ordovas on Saville Row, Richard Nagy on Old Bond Street, Frank Auerbach at the Malborough, sculpture in Jean & Luc Baroni at St. James and jewelry shops for a Vacheron Constatin.

The Gulf oil oligarchs, who gouge exorbitant rents from energy poor African and Asian countries and Chinese and Indian billionaires who exploit hundreds of millions of Asian female factory workers and deny migrant workers residence, rest and health insurance, spent $9 billion pounds ($14.4 billion dollars) on central London houses in 2010-2011[2]. Between 2011 and mid-2012, 60 percent of the buyers in the prime central London market were foreign millionaires and billionaires[3].

The Cameron-Clegg regime demands sacrifice, austerity and belt tightening in Greece, condemning millions to destitution, suicide and desolation, even as it encourages the top 1% of Greek kleptocrats to “invest” and reside in central London’s exclusive neighborhoods. According to the IMF 56,000 Greek plutocrats are tax evaders[4]. According to a US study of their annual income, $28 billion Euros ($36 billion USD) is unreported[5]. Most of which is deposited in London banks or ‘invested’ in luxury property in Mayfair, Belgravia or thereabouts. If the illegal accounts were taxed or better still used to pay for the foreign debt, it would conform to Greek law, reduce the deficit and social cuts and perhaps revive the economy. But respecting Greek tax laws would mean fewer commissions for the real estate moguls at Savells, Marsh and Parsons, Knight Frank; less private accounts for HSBC and Barclay’s; less sales at the upscale art galleries; fewer patrons for the high end ‘escort’ agencies of both sexes.

Crime pays. FIRE[6] plays. Public hospitals close. Tuition rises. Private clinics and schools catering to the overseas oligarchs and their British partners flourish. Where’s “the crises”? Not to be found in central London, nor in the City; nor in the legal system; nor in the Special Forces. Bank swindlers flourish. Judicial litigation among oligarchs pays. Dirty mercenary wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere provide lucrative contracts for retired Colonel Blimps– in the best traditions of empire.

The crises? That’s for the other England outside of the City, with the wrong postal codes. Where workers crowd emergency rooms, where the poor await evictions in what were once council houses and where those who study and work can look forward to debt and dead end jobs.

God bless God damn London, the Parasites Paradise!

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked 

Ireland Nationalizing Banks or Gobshites Saving Banksters

 TheBigPictureRT

Ask any economist - and they will tell you that the housing crisis is still very real - and it's still one of the major headwinds for our economic recovery. Yet - in the last Presidential debate - there was virtually no attention paid to this crisis and the millions of Americans who are on the verge of losing their homes. Why is that? Well - it's because both candidates know that the one best solution to the mortgage crisis is to make the banksters take a hit. And - as anyone who's familiar with post-Citizens United politics knows - if you're in favor of a policy that's gonna hit Wall Street - and you want to be elected to political office - then you need to keep your mouth shut about it. And that's exactly what both men did.

But in Ireland - they're not afraid of the banksters. This year - the Irish government is expected to pass a law will force the banks to write down principal on their home loans, which will substantially lower monthly mortgage payments for struggling homeowners. Of all the nations hit by the global housing crisis - not a single one has taken bold steps to help homeowners at the expense of the banksters. But Ireland is trying to change that now. Here's what they're doing. They're changing their bankruptcy laws to make it easier for struggling homeowners to walk away from an underwater home mortgage. And when a homeowner declares bankruptcy this way, the bank gets nothing.

• When Irish politicians start telling the public the truth about the nature of the money loaned to them by banks, that it is money that simply didn't exist before the loan agreement was signed, that it was "created" by the bank using the borrower's signature as collateral. That the borrower isn't equally entitled to create money out of nothing to pay it back. When they do this, I'll believe they are not afraid of or in the pockets of the banksters.

  sullivan912 32 minutes ago
• This is bullshit. Ireland's bankruptcy laws are currently amongst the most punitive. Debts stay with you for the remainder of your life. Your ability to obtain credit is permanently reduced. In contrast, the laws in the United Kingdom limit the effect of a bankruptcy on an individual's life to seven years. Ireland making the bankruptcy laws a little more lenient doesn't equate with them being unafraid of the banksters.

  sullivan912 35 minutes ago
• This has been flagged as spam show

  DystopianEmpire01 in reply to IntolerantAntiTheist (Show the comment) 4 hours ago in playlist Uploaded videos

  Every time I see roofers, I see maybe one white guy(the guy in charge). You know they love that illegal cheep labor. Someone is making lots of money.Trust me, white or not, roofing don't pay worth a shit, it's backbraeaking work especially in summer heat. You have to be desperate to do it for a living.
• DystopianEmpire01 in reply to heyNebraska (Show the comment) 4 hours ago in playlistUploaded videos
• heyNebraska in reply to cshargeit (Show the comment) 5 hours ago
• In Ireland, the government is afraid of the banksrers, but more afraid of the people

  frepi 9 hours ago
• Comment removed

  Author withheld
• Ireland bought a share in the banks a large share, its now selling them off to the ESM all while the Government has told the banks to increase the mortgage interest rates so the banks can get back to profit.

  Barry O Brien 

• Nationalization Gets a New, Serious Look

  
  

  
  

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  By DAVID E. SANGER

  
  

  Published: January 25, 2009

  
  

  
  
  

  WASHINGTON — Only five days into the Obama presidency, members of the new administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are already dancing around one of the most politically delicate questions about the financial bailout: Is the president prepared to nationalize a huge swath of the nation’s banking system?

  Enlarge This Image

  
  

  Mark Wilson/Getty Images

  Speaker Nancy Pelosi has alluded to internal debate over whether large banks should be nationalized, while aides to President Obama have avoided the word and are looking into alternatives.

  
  
  

  Privately, most members of the Obama economic team concede that the rapid deterioration of the country’s biggest banks, notably Bank of America and Citigroup, is bound to require far larger investments of taxpayer money, atop the more than $300 billion of taxpayer money already poured into those two financial institutions and hundreds of others.

  But if hundreds of billions of dollars of new investment is needed to shore up those banks, and perhaps their competitors, what do taxpayers get in return? And how do the risks escalate as government’s role expands from a few bailouts to control over a vast portion of the financial sector of the world’s largest economy?

  The Obama administration is making only glancing references to those questions. In an interview Sunday on “This Week” on ABC, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, alluded to internal debate when she was asked whether nationalization, or partial nationalization, of the largest banks was a good idea.

  “Well, whatever you want to call it,” said Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California. “If we are strengthening them, then the American people should get some of the upside of that strengthening. Some people call that nationalization.

  “I’m not talking about total ownership,” she quickly cautioned — stopping herself by posing a question: “Would we have ever thought we would see the day when we’d be using that terminology? ‘Nationalization of the banks?’ ”

  So far, President Obama’s top aides have steered clear of the word entirely, and they are still actively discussing other alternatives, including creating a “bad bank” that would nationalize the worst nonperforming loans by taking them off the hands of financial institutions without actually taking ownership of the banks. Others talk of de facto nationalization, in which the government owns a sizeable chunk of the banks but not a majority, with all that connotes.

  That has already happened; taxpayers are now the biggest shareholders in Bank of America, with about 6 percent of the stock, and in Citigroup, with 7.8 percent. But the government’s influence is far larger than those numbers suggest, because it has guaranteed to absorb the losses of some of the two banks’ most toxic assets, a figure that could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

  Many believe this form of hybrid ownership — part government, part private, with the responsibilities of ownership unclear — will not prove workable.

  “The case for full nationalization is far stronger now than it was a few months ago,” said Adam S. Posen, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “If you don’t own the majority, you don’t get to fire the management, to wipe out the shareholders, to declare that you are just going to take the losses and start over. It’s the mistake the Japanese made in the ’90s.”

  “I would guess that sometime in the next few weeks, President Obama and Tim Geithner,” he said, referring to the nominee for Treasury secretary, “will have to come out and say, ‘It’s much worse than we thought,’ and just bite the bullet.”

  So far the Obama administration has signaled that it is trying to avoid that day, and members of its economic team — among them Mr. Geithner and the president’s top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers — made the case during the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s that governments make lousy bank managers.

  Indeed, the risks of nationalization they warned about then apply equally to the United States now. The first is that nationalization can prove contagious. If the Obama administration took over Bank of America and Citigroup, two of the largest banks in the United States, private investors could decide to flee from the likes of JPMorgan Chase andWells Fargo, or other major banks, fearing they could be next.

  Moreover, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they are acutely aware that if the government is perceived as running the banks, the administration would come under enormous political pressure to halt foreclosures or lend money to ailing projects in cities or states with powerful constituencies, which could imperil the effort to steer the banks away from the cliff.

  “The nightmare scenarios are endless,” one of the administration’s senior officials said.

  
  

  The argument in favor of nationalization, even a brief nationalization of a few months or years, is straightforward: It might be the only way to pull America’s largest financial institutions out of the downward spiral that makes it enormously difficult to raise the capital they need to keep operating.

  Right now, many banks are reluctant to write off their bad debts, and absorb huge losses, unless they can first raise enough capital to cushion the blow. But they cannot attract that capital without first purging their balance sheets of the toxic assets. Japan’s experience proved the dangers of that downward swirl; the economy stagnated, new lending ground to a halt and the country’s diplomatic clout shrank with its balance sheets.

  
  

  Nationalization could pull the banks out of that dive, at least temporarily, as the government injected capital, hired new managers and ordered a restart to lending. But some Republicans who bit their tongues when President George W. Bush ordered huge interventions in the market would charge that Mr. Obama was steering America toward socialism.

  Nationalization, said Charles Geisst, a financial historian atManhattan College “is just not a term in the American vocabulary.”

  “We think of it,” he continued, “as something foreigners do to us, not something we do.”

  It is also something foreigners do to themselves: the British have recently taken a majority stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland.

  Some of Mr. Obama’s advisers have asked who the government would get to run the banks. Many of the most experienced executives are tainted by the decisions they made during the age of excess. And how would the government attract the best talent if it demanded that they take minimal pay — a political reality in the current environment?

  Another option is for the government to buy the banks’ most toxic assets either through a giant fund, or, more likely, a federally supported bad bank designed to buy up troubled investments. But in that case, taxpayers might well be the losers: They would have all of the banks’ worst assets and none of their performing loans. And unless a deal is worked out to take a larger share of the banks whose bad loans are shuffled off to the government, the taxpayers would not have the chance to benefit by selling the shares back to private investors.

  Moreover, cleaning up the banks’ bad assets, without extracting a heavy price for the bank managers, shareholders and their lenders, is exactly what Mr. Summers and Mr. Geithner warned against during the Asian financial crisis.

  “We told the Asians that they had to be willing to let banks and companies fail,” said Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management and a top official in the Clinton administration. “We warned that there was great moral hazard if governments just bailed them out.”

  “And now,” he said, “we are doing the polar opposite of our advice.”

  
  
  

  
  

  
  

LIB LAB

TEMPER-MENTAL MISSELAYNEOUS

UNA MULLALLY

FOR DECADES, much of the emphasis on the Irish language in the arts has been about preservation. But things are changing. The Irish language in contemporary arts is spreading beyond Gaeltacht areas and reaching new collaborators and a new generation.

This rather accidental movement might also in time call for new structures and organisations, but for now, the fragmented innovations seem to indicate that something more whole is happening.

Imram, the Irish-Language Literature Festival takes place from October 11th to the 20th, and offers a dynamic programme. There are familiar names participating: Louis de Paor, Dairena Ní Chinnéide, Micheál Ó Conghaile. And there are familiar names discussed: Pádraic Ó Conaire and Seán Ó Ríordáin among them. But there is a current of energy flowing through the festival that those used to the traditional narratives of the Irish language in the arts might be surprised by.

There is an indoor and outdoor multimedia installation by Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin; a dance piece called Ré written by Daithí Ó Muirí and choreographed by Fearghus Ó Conchúir; contemporary prose from Éilís Ní Anluain; the Mouth On Fire theatre company reading Beckett’s poetry in Irish; The Cohen Project sees poets Liam Ó Muirthile and Gabriel Rosenstock translate some of Leonard Cohen’s work into Irish, with Liam Ó Maonlaí, David Blake, Hilary Bow and the Brad Pitt Light Orchestra providing the music.

“I’m a great believer in pushing the boundaries of language, it has to reach out beyond the island,” Ó Muirthile says. “There are obviously problems, technical questions, issues of readership and literacy and these are huge issues, but when you’re engaged in a piece of work, you have to set those aside. The advantage of taking a model like Cohen is when you’re writing in Irish or any minority language, you’re constantly translating into that language. You’re going through a constant process of translation of all sorts.”

Ó Muirthile also has high praise for his collaborator. “Gabriel Rosenstock has been the great innovator in Irish in that he’s been searching for models outside the language for many years. And Gabriel is the great inspiration model for all of us.”

Next week, a two-day symposium is being held in Dublin aiming to “explore, challenge and provoke notions of contemporary arts practice in Irish.” The symposium, titled Fás agus Forbairt’ (Grow and Develop) is hoping to bring together contemporary artists who are currently working in Irish and artists who may speak Irish but whose work is in English.

“The intention is that three organisations who have an active interest in programming contemporary work in the Irish language come together to provide support to artists who are already working in the Irish language, and to artists who may not be, but who might speak Irish,” says Róise Goan, the director of the Dublin Fringe Festival. Cian O’Brien, artistic director of Project Arts Centre, and Niamh Ní Chonchubhair, the programme manager at Axis: Ballymun, have joined Goan in organising the conference. “We’re hoping to connect all those artists, hopefully provide inspiration and then pilot a commissioning scheme that promotes collaboration in making contemporary Irish arts.”

The organisers are hoping to award three commissions, which will then go on to showcase works in progress in March 2013 during Seachtain na Gaeilge. “Hopefully, if the projects are going somewhere interesting, they will present that work in the Fringe next year,” Goan says. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s an experiment, but we feel it’s a worthwhile experiment. I think a lot of the problems come from the fact that in terms of mainstreaming Irish language arts, things need to be tried and tested.”

Ray Yeates, then the director at Axis in Ballymun and now Dublin City Council’s arts officer, blasted the sean nós form open in 2009 with Hip-Nós, performances of hip-hop, sean nós and spoken word in Axis that went on to Vicar Street.

“You have great people like Róise Goan, and Ray Yeates and Willie [White, director of the Dublin Theatre Festival] – they’re the next movement,” says Maggie Breathnach, the producer of TG4’s flagship arts programme Imeall, who spends most of her time running around the country surveying the frontlines of contemporary Irish arts.

“Arts is niche, Gaeilge is niche, and ultimately, you need to put bums on seats. They’re doing it slowly, but it’s happening. You see in schools now, it’s a string to your bow to have Irish in a way it didn’t used to be. It’s not necessarily that you’re going to automatically see an Irish play if you speak Irish, or go to a launch of an Irish book, but there is work in Irish, there is funding there, and people are taking the opportunities. But ultimately, the bigger stage is perceived to be the English language.”

Breathnach believes changing the perception of the Irish language in a contemporary arts setting should start at an early age. “In education, maybe it should start to be the case that kids are also educated in the language in an arts context and would then be interested in going to an Irish play. And you go to a play because of the quality of the play not the language. Look at Tromluí Phinocchio.”

Tomluí Phinocchio or Pinocchio – A Nightmare is a production by Moonfish Theatre that was lauded at this year’s Absolut Fringe and also showed at the Galway Theatre Festival. “Those girls are brilliant,” Breathnach says. “There’s really good stuff happening, but sometimes people think either they won’t go to something because ‘it’s an Irish show’, or if they are going, it’s ‘ar son na cúise’ [for the cause], so we need to show that there is a pincer movement that catches both the Irish language and quality.”

In music, the Kilas and the Ó Maonlaís were flying the flag for Irish-inflected contemporary music from the 1990s on, and that’s still the case. The annual Seachtain na Gaeilge Ceol compilation CDs feature contemporary Irish artists singing Irish-language versions of their songs. While the overall result might be nice, there’s a sense of tokenism about it, even if, on occasion, these songs are occasionally brought to a live setting.

But things are changing. Temper-Mental MissElayneous, an upcoming Dublin rapper, has a tendency to drop Irish rhymes into her raps accompanied by bodhrán instead of beats, namely with her track Cailín Rua. And Daithí, a Clare fiddle player who has managed to successfully fuse traditional strains with contemporary electronic music, recently sampled the singer Mary O’Hara in one of his tracks, a trick last pulled by Massachusetts band Passion Pit in their break-out single Sleepyhead.

From the Puball Gaeilge tent at Electric Picnic to Manchán Mangan’s theatre work, there is an edge to the Irish language in a contemporary artistic context, and that edge is growing as those in charge of funding continue to quietly seek out more non-traditional targets. But a new generation of artists also need to take the leap. Perhaps next week’s Fás agus Forbairt symposium will put a real structure around such tentative, yet quickening steps.

Che Guevara of Galway Ireland International

This is What Imperialism Does to Men

"In our condition as colonial slaves, we could not observe: that “Western Civilization” disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals. That is the only name that can be applied to those who have gone to fulfill such “humanitarian” tasks in the Congo. A carnivorous animal that feeds on unarmed peoples. That is what imperialism does to men. That is what distinguishes the imperial “white man.”

By Ernesto Che Guevara

Che Guevara : The Legacy Endures

The 45th anniversary of the death Ernesto Che Guevara

By Syed Badrul Ahsan

October 09, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - Ernesto Che Guevara was murdered in the Bolivian village of La Higuera on October 9, 1967. Caught a day earlier by Bolivian soldiers in the jungles near the village, 13 days into the siege he and his fellow guerrillas had been pushed into, Che was bound hand and foot and made to lie down on the floor of a classroom in a school. Near him lay the bodies of two of his murdered comrades. Tired and worn out and obviously in a state of humiliation, Che was subjected to systematic questioning by Bolivian officers as well as Felix Rodriguez, an agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. His self-esteem intact, the man who had with Fidel Castro caused the revolution in Cuba on New Year's Day in 1959 would not give anything away, save only to murmur, sadly, that he had failed.

The CIA agent Rodriguez, for all his antipathy to Che, seemed to empathise with him in his moment of defeat. At one point, he took Che outside and put his arms around the bedraggled guerrilla as a photographer recorded the scene on his camera. It was to be the last image of Che Guevara alive. Soon afterward, a ruffian named Teran, instructed to shoot Che below the face, fired at his leg. Che bit his wrist in order not to scream out in pain. Teran fired again and again. The last bullet, the ninth, hit Che in the throat. The blood filled his lungs. He was dead.

What followed once Che was killed remains a story that was to turn into a modern legend, almost of an epic sort. His body, with its eyes open (giving onlookers the eerie feeling that Che was alive) was placed on display for the public. Once the display was done, it was washed by a nurse who was later to tell people she felt she was giving Jesus Christ his last rites. There were reports that some of those present at that final ritual of a bath surreptitiously clipped off bits of Che's hair to keep them as mementoes.

The Bolivian government, then led by the military ruler Rene Barrientos, was inclined to decapitate the dead Che and keep the head as a sign of its triumph in tracking down the individual its functionaries considered the most dangerous man in the world. The thought was as macabre as it was sinister and was quickly discarded. What followed was something simpler, though no less revolting. Che's hands were sawn off and were later sent to Havana, to convince the Cuban authorities that their hero had indeed died in the jungles of Bolivia. It was a somber Castro who informed his people of the tragic end of the man who, having left his native Argentina, had identified with the Cuban revolution and then set out to revolutionise the world.

The end of Che Guevara was in several ways the culmination of an era of idealism for people across vast tracts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Che believed, and millions believed with him, that socialism offered a way out of the woods for the world's underprivileged and disenfranchised. He inhabited an era where feudalism in Latin America and pseudo-capitalism in parts of Africa and Asia threatened to undermine not only tradition but also the future of those who peopled these regions. Cuba, Che had convinced himself, could be a powerful symbol of revolution, of the socialism that could act as a catalyst for change. Steeped in the social circumstances of the region, the man trained to be a doctor went on long rides through the hamlets and villages of Argentina, in the process discovering anew the tough, hardened faces of deprivation. Poverty was a hallmark of life in South America. In his final moments, when a Bolivian army officer asked him why he had come to Bolivia with his revolution, Che answered, "I am a Cuban, an Argentine, a Peruvian, a Bolivian, a Chilean, an Ecuadorian."

Those final words defined him. In a career that would not rest on laurels, Che would reach out to every segment of society that suffered at the hands of exploitative forces. He was in the Congo when he thought men like Laurent Kabila needed to offer a clear vision about emancipation to a nation wracked by conflict since the murder of the patriot Patrice Lumumba in 1961. It was Che's belief, like that of any other Marxist, that revolution was not to be confined to geography but had to move beyond and across frontiers if it was to be purposeful. Revolution is an inclusive affair. Socialism is always about internationalism and because it is, Che persuaded himself into thinking that he could be among those who needed to play a leading role in spreading the socialistic message across the globe.

There was restlessness in Che, even at a time when it was widely believed the triumph of Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas in Havana in 1959 would have the Argentine sit back and formulate the policies that constituted governance. Che served as a minister in Castro's government and in that capacity he went out into the wider world informing global leaders of what it meant to be a Cuban revolutionary and what it would mean once the Cuban revolution was replicated around the world. Che was eminently equipped to carry out this responsibility. He was, besides being a guerrilla, a doctor and an intellectual. There was no ambiguity in him about the modalities in which revolution was to be brought to the dirt poor homes of the world's poor. He exchanged ideas with Mao Zedong on the nature of revolution; he was at home with Ahmed Ben Bella in a free Algeria; and he marvelled at the way Gamal Abdel Nasser went about constructing the edifice of Arab nationalism in Egypt. At the United Nations in 1964, he was clear in his conviction that the world, including its capitalist regions, needed to be enlightened on the utilitarian aspects of socialism. His words were a robust defence of the beauty inherent in leftwing thinking. He minced no words in his excoriation of imperialism.

And then Ernesto Che Guevara went out into the night. Divesting himself of all the perks and perquisites of power, he went into disguise as a middle-aged western businessman before walking away into what he believed would soon become a wider, more substantive world of equality, of truly Marxist dimensions.

And then he died. He was only 39. In that brief span of a fullness of life, Che Guevara reflected on the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca and John Keats. In the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and Franz Kafka and Albert Camus he sought the meaning of existence. He was, as Jean-Paul Sartre was to say of him, 'the most complete human being of our time'.

Ernesto Che Guevara's remains were located, along with those of his comrades, 30 years after his assassination in a secluded spot near an airstrip in Vallegrande. In a world that had changed, if ever so slightly, for the better, they were dispatched to Havana. On October 17, 1997, they were buried in Santa Clara with full military honours.

(Ernesto Che Guevara -- statesman and revolutionary -- was born on May 14, 1928 and killed on October 9, 1967).

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.

See also - This is What Imperialism Does to Men - Video and transcript - December 11, 1964, 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. - "In our condition as colonial slaves, we could not observe: that “Western Civilization” disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals. That is the only name that can be applied to those who have gone to fulfill such “humanitarian” tasks in the Congo. A carnivorous animal that feeds on unarmed peoples. That is what imperialism does to men. That is what distinguishes the imperial “white man.”

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