Yesterday the British government finally put to bed the most famous (a hit U2 song helps) tragedy of the Irish Troubles. The report was twelve years in the making, and it’s now been thirty-eight years since Bloody Sunday, but the government, faced with overwhelming evidence and insulated by the passage of time, fessed up and admitted that it had been wrong. BBC (naturally) has the details:
- No warning had been given to any civilians before the soldiers opened fire
- None of the soldiers fired in response to attacks by petrol bombers or stone throwers
- Some of those killed or injured were clearly fleeing or going to help those injured or dying
- None of the casualties was posing a threat or doing anything that would justify their shooting
- Many of the soldiers lied about their actions
- The events of Bloody Sunday were not premeditated
Also at that link you’ll find a four minute video of the remarkable speech given by recently elected – and Conservative – Prime Minister David Cameron. The Prime Minister, who was only five at the time, made no effort to soften the report, nor to mitigate or dispute its conclusions. He also uttered a line that some future American President may want to paraphrase: “You do not defend the British Army by defending the indefensible.”
We know a lot about the abusive excesses of the Bush and now Obama Administrations, whether it’s torture, warrantless wiretapping, war crimes of various stripes, summary executions, or the general undermining of the rule of law. And, given the nature of government scandals, it’s very likely those things are just a few pieces of the nasty whole, most of which remains hidden.
What is quite certain is that more and more evidence, and more and more specifics, of our government’s various terrorism justified wrongdoings will come to light. There are too many documents, too many e-mails, too many aggrieved parties. Just look at the Physicians for Human Rights report about doctors unethically assisting in waterboarding, it was pieced together from declassified and heavily redacted documents. No Bothans died to bring us that information, it was just a shitload of leg and legal work. More is sure to follow. Simply forgetting these things, as the Obama Administration is keen to do, is impossible.
Which brings us back to the British and this week’s long overdue mea culpa. Bloody Sunday did a lot to radicalize Catholic dissent and predated the worst years of the Troubles. It was bad for both sides and the resulting government cover up did nothing to further the cause or the government’s policies; it merely concealed the truth . . . for a while. There’s an obvious lesson to be learned there, but for our government to heed it, important people would need to be embarrassed and inconvenienced, and that is not the order of the day here in America. Too bad.
We’ve been violating our own laws in a futile chase of “security” since late 2001. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take thirty-eight years, until 2039, for us to get over ourselves and admit we did bad.
