Hi Tiberius and Gareth and all...
I did not find that there was an indiscriminant bombing campain, not to justify bombings of any sort. In point of fact, in historic retroview, the Rebublican movement did what England and NATO wanted them to do, carry on a war in responce to agression and human rights violations, in order that NATO forces could remain on the shore of a non-NATO nation until after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, which, oddly enough, the same year as that fall, secret negotiations for the end of that war begin, but to return to the origional point of the sentence, idescriminant is when a jet drops a bomb on a market place with multiple anti personel warheads, such as the fragment bomb droped in Bahgdad the other day. In point of fact, other than a very few glaring examples, the vast majority of the acts of war of the Provisional IRA where within the internationaly accepted articals of war, unlike the anti civilian actions of the British Army and the MI 6 directed Loyalist murder squads. If you don't accept my facts, being that until very recently your press was censored on these facts - and in fact BBC did a very good job recently of reporting on the fact that MI 6 DID in fact direct the loyalist hit squads and are responcible for programatic killings of civilians... the fact is that a non-biased history of this conflict can be found in court records in the US, where we had the advantage of being able (until the patriot act) to put our government and our alies governments on trial when the charge of terrorist was used in extradition hearings.
So, as I have said before on Mudcat, Joe Doherty was brought before an American federal court judge, Sprizzo, who at the first hearing said, "you mean I can't send this murdering son of a bitch back to Britain..." concluded the several months of hearings with this case presents the political exeption to extradition in its most perfect form." In order to reach that conclution, he and the judges who followed in the many appeals and who agreed with him, wieghed the contention of the British Government that the IRA was a terrorist orgainization, and found that they DID NOT target civilians as a targets in their struggle. On the other hand the SAS did.
Now, the out come of this trial, was the Att Gen Meese began the program which led eventualy to the Patriot Act. The executive branch of government wanted to remove from the courts the power to determine on the facts, whether an organization is or is not a terrorist group, so that people could be charged with giving material support to terrorism on the contention of a political branch of government, without being able to challenge the underlieing contentions of the executive branch. In this way, the lack of understanding of what was happening in Ireland, by the average people of the US and Britain, has led to a loss of very basic rights here.
This also answers the most recent post from Gareth. The fact that you believe you were invaded by Ireland not only flys in the face of the facts, but shows that you have as little personal understanding of what it was to live in Belfast in, say, the seventies, then most Americans did of what it was like to live in Viet Nam under the US invation or what it is to be an anti Sadamist in occupied Iraq today. Paul Wolfawitz was confronted by a student two days ago at a New School press conference, where in answer to the contention that your army and mine, is killing one thousand people a day, said it was an acceptable price to over throw Sadam. God help us.
All the best
Larry