Murderers, torturers and liars to vet Bloody
Sunday report

By Eamonn McCann

The British Government wants MI5 and the
Ministry of Defence to have a chance to examine the Bloody Sunday report and
suggest deletions before the families of the victims are allowed to set eyes on
it.

 Northern Secretary Shaun Woodward claims
that, as “publisher”, he has to make sure the report doesn’t breach national
security or put lives at risk - and that MI5 and MoD officials are the only
people capable of doing this. 

The real reason is so his agents can
prepare to spin the findings in a way which won’t be open to the families.

More than 30 years on, still no level
playing field.

 The MoD was the employer of the
paratroopers on Bloody Sunday. MI5 lied in the run-up to the massacre, hyping
up beyond all reason the dangers the paratroopers would face in the Bogside..

 More recent events show MI5 as totally
untrustworthy when it comes to “national security”.

 In the appeal court in London earlier this
month, Lord Neuberger attacked MI5 for conniving in the torture of former
Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed and lying about it afterwards. He suggested
that Foreign Secretary David Miliband had been hoodwinked by MI5 into issuing
three Public Interest Immunity Certificates falsely claiming that documents
relating to the case should be withheld because national security was at stake.

Neuberger suggested that the real reason
was that the documents supported Mr. Mohamed’s claim that MI5 officers had
flown to Pakistan where he was being held by the CIA to put questions to him,
even though they knew that he had been tortured by the Americans to try to
force him to give information - information which, it turned out, he didn’t
have. 

In other words, MI5 has just been found by
a British court to have connived at the torture of an innocent man and then
suborned a Government Minister to issue three separate fraudulent documents to
thwart the efforts of the courts to get to the bottom of what had happened.

Now Woodward wants MI5 given privileged access
to a report on a massacre which they themselves had a hand in!

It is in the interests of every section of
the working class that the uniformed representatives of the State who massacred
unarmed citizens be held to account. Socialists in the North will be supporting
the Bloody Sunday families as they embark on the last obstacle-strewn stretch
of long their journey towards the truth.