Grim's Hall

Bad News from Ulster:

This is the biggest story out of Northern Ireland in several years. Scotland Yard has disclosed that British security forces aided Protestant hit squads in Northern Ireland. The Washington Post has the story as well.

The credible suspicion of this sort of thing fueled a lot of US donations to the IRA during the pre-9/11 days. I was myself pro-IRA in my misspent youth, just exactly because I believed--truthfully, as it turns out--that the British government was involved with murder raids on Northern Ireland Catholics. It's really only been 9/11 that brought many of us Americans to take a second look at the IRA, and realize what a band of thugs it is. But if part of it was that we didn't understand what terrorism really was, there was also the fact that the British were behaving brutally.

It's important to realize that MI5 isn't the whole of the British government, though. In the days after 9/11 we often read in the UK newspapers that we Americans needed a domestic security service like MI5. No, we don't, thank you kindly. This is the kind of thing such groups do.