Dear Robert:
Good luck back at the grind of the work day, and best hopes of justice, and as Bill Kunstler said, in the earlier quote an appeal when it happens! An excellent point about official secrecy, and in fact much of what passes for far flung conspiracy is just the knee jerk reaction to secrecy among governments today. The judge is Sprizzo, rather that Rizzo, and offered me one of the greatest comments I ever recieved off the record in a court room I approached the bench to tell him that a fiddler I played with, was his roomate in law school. He replied, Oh yes, Jim. A wonderful musician, but much to intelligent to practice law!
The paranoia of Americans with guns is becoming indemic. On behalf of many Americans who shrink into the shadows in pubs and restraunts in Europe when fellow contry folk enter, and who always takes the advice of an old anarchist friend when in an American security que, take your time and be obstructionist, let me appologise. 99 per cent of US military and police training is the development of hightened paranoia, which is why we have over a million Americans in prison at present.
I ran across an interesting quote from Father Des Wilson, of Ballymurphy about a conversation he had with a British Army officer which he offered when giving a summery of the outcome of the 1981 hunger strike.
I... remember a conversation I had with a very high ranking British Army officer in the the days when people still thought it was a good idea to argue with them.
I said, "You will never help to solve a problem if you do not speak the truth about it. You tell the people that the people who have taken up arms here, the IRA, the UDA, the UVF and others, are nothing but thugs and gangsters. But you know as well as I do that among the military groups there are men and women who are sensitive and highly intelligent political thinkers and strategists. You tell the public lies."
He replied, "but we know this is so."
"Then why do you tell the public that they are only thugs?"
"We do not tell the public that; the government does. We know differently," was his response.
When reading this quote from Father Des, I remembered a morning early in the cease fire when a spokes person was sitting rather uncomfortably in the green room at WBAI in New York. I was there to speak about the rights of Gypsies, and noticed that no one quite knew what to do about him. I thought that he looked very uncomfortable and that he had reacted to the same political assassinations and staged incidents by British Intelligence that Republicans had. I poured two cups of tea and sat down next to him, commenting how we had arrange a cold wet day, to make him feel at home. In only a few words someone whose political acts and beliefs were an anathema to me was an acquaintance rather than an enemy. We had a lot to talk about that we did not agree in any way with, but in the right environment peace is easily done. Part of the equation is to remove the instigation of governments who divide people for geo-political political gain.
All the best
Larry