VICEROYAL VILLIERS CANNOT WASH HER HANDS OF KILLING IRISH PEACE PROCESS

'Martin Corey is being denied natural justice' – Sinn Féin meets British Secretary of State

»JOHN HEDGES

AN PHOBLACHT EDITOR

'Martin Corey’s imprisonment is unacceptable and an affront to his human rights and natural justice'

THE continued imprisonment of Martin Corey is an affront to his human rights and natural justice, Raymond McCartney MLA said on Thursday after Sinn Féin met with British Secretary of State Theresa Villiers concerning the Lurgan man’s continued imprisonment.

Matin Corey (pictured right) received a life sentence in December 1973, when he was 19 years old, for killing two members of the RUC in an IRA operation. He served 19 years and was released in June 1992.

In the early hours of 16 April 2010, 18 years after his release, he was rearrested and informed that the Secretary of State had revoked his licence because he was “a security risk”.

Last year, a Belfast judge ordered his release on unconditional bail because he was being held on the basis of secret evidence. But while he waiting to be bailed, the Secretary of State over-ruled the judge and ordered him to be arrested again.

Sinn Féin Assembly member Raymond McCartney said that British Secretary of State Theresa Villiers tried to wash her hands of the case and was “of no help whatsoever” in Thursday's meeting with her.

“Martin Corey is now in prison for three and a half years without having been charged, questioned or his legal representatives shown the alleged evidence that is against him.

“His latest parole hearing has been postponed yet again. Martin Corey has had no parole hearing since 2011. His continued imprisonment is unacceptable and an affront to his human rights and natural justice.

“Sinn Féin will be meeting with Justice Minister David Ford in the coming weeks to press him to bring this injustice to an end. The British Secretary of State was of no help whatsoever and attempted to wash her hands of the case.

“If there is evidence to show that Martin Corey is a risk to the public it should be put before him and his legal team so that it can be challenged. Natural justice is being denied to this man and it needs to end.”

THE KILLING OF FATBARSTURD AYMAN AL GILMORE

A few weeks ago Eamon Gilmore the Irish foreign Minister was campaigning around the world for an invasion of Syria like his mentor Tony Blair did with Iraq. How can this happen? This can be when you have the media, the Church, big business, the banks and many people in the community who are either pro-war, don't care, or suck-up everything these establishment groups and Labour fatbarsturds tell them. As long as the bourgeoisie feel comfortable, people in poor countries can starve, thousands of other people in other countries can be murdered in war, and the Western world can plunder the rest for geo-political advantage and resources.
Until we have co-ordinated action by the victims of these things and those who desperately want to help them - that will be the way it goes. 

Vive la Revolution.

The Party Game is Over. Stand and Fight

By John Pilger

"Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fall'n on you: Ye are many - they are few."

October 05, 2013 "Information Clearing House - These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" may seem unattainable. I don't think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spreadsheet.

Born of the "never again" spirit of 1945, social democracy has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1trn of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described "financiers" as the nation's "great example" and his personal "inspiration".

This is not to say parliamentary politics is meaningless. It has one meaning now: the replacement of democracy with a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born.

The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang built the foundation of the present "coalition". This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-shielded fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballintaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder.

Today, they are claiming 21st-century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a "deficit crisis". A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the Second World War, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the arts edifices of London's South Bank.

There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a "public spending review". The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that's beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a "shock doctrine" as applied to Pinochet's Chile and Yeltsin's Russia.

In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; and asylum-seekers can be "restrained" to death on commercial flights.

Athol Fugard is right. With Harold Pinter gone, no acclaimed writer or artist dare depart from their well-remunerated vanity. With so much in need of saying, they have nothing to say. Liberalism, the vainest ideology, has hauled up its ladder. The chief opportunist, Nick Clegg, gave no electoral hint of his odious faction's compliance with the dismantling of much of British postwar society. The theft of £83bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge up to £40bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who "cheat" the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule £0.5bn, and that £10.5bn in benefit payments was not claimed at all. Labour is his silent partner.

The propaganda arm in the press and broadcasting dutifully presents this as unfortunate but necessary. Mark how the firefighters' action is "covered". On Channel 4 News, following an item that portrayed modest, courageous people as basically reckless, Jon Snow demanded that the leaders of the London Fire Authority and the Fire Brigades Union go straight from the studio and "mediate" now, this minute. "I'll get the taxis!" he declared. Forget the thousands of jobs that are to be eliminated from the fire service and the public danger beyond Bonfire Night; knock their jolly heads together. "Good stuff!" said the presenter.

Ken Loach's 1983 documentary series Questions of Leadership opens with a sequence of earnest young trade unionists on platforms, exhorting the masses. They are then shown older, florid, self-satisfied and finally adorned in the ermine of the House of Lords. Once, at a Durham Miners' Gala, I asked Tony Woodley, now joint general secretary of Unite, "Isn't the problem the clockwork collaboration of the union leadership?" He almost agreed, implying that the rise of bloods like himself would change that. The British Airways cabin crew strike, over which Woodley presides, is said to have made gains. Has it? And why haven't the unions risen against totalitarian laws that place free trade unionism in a vice?

The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public's support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.

www.johnpilger.com