Hi guys, this is not really the time to make one paragraph comments on very complex issues. To what degree the war in Ireland was one of the many cold war games, where Thatcher and Regan and Andropov and Charley Haughie and Jack Lynch played their power games with our lives and people did things in responce, not fully aware of the part they were being led into in the power games of the powerful, well, it is such a big story and such a big question that I,for one, can't begin to address the issue here. Many of you know that I worked hard to make sure Joe Doherty was not extradicted from New York to England.
I am not at all questioning my role in preserving his, and hence our civil rights. Joe went on to get his university degree in jail, and now works with troubled teens in Belfast, where loyalists tried to kill him last month - some sease fire.
But the truth is - and the point is, here in downtown New York, the difference between insainty and insuerction is clear. It is also clear that if the US responds with terror, as Britain did with the killing of Carol Ann Kelly and so many other children and other civilians, then, we can expect this to be the begining and not the end of the troubles here. I hope and pray that the US will respond with reason. I for one, thinking of what the loss of my wife's law office ( she is a solo practicioner whose office, we assume is badly damaged at least ) will cost us, with our 15,000 debt we have already. Old firms are now gone, all the members killed, 20,000 is the projected loss of life here. Well, we surviving lawyers should move to sue any country which harbours the bombers, when they are identified. Let us demand the complete settlement of the punitive losses American jurries usualy give, for every person, every tourest, every one who lost anything. So, how would it get paid? Well, Say it is benlaudin. If Afganistan is harbouring him, or if it is Irac, any airplane of theirs that lands anywhere in the world is seazed and sold any ship is seazed and sold, any asset of thier nation sold, until the debt is paid. Or, until there is a garentee of an end to facilitating terror. Now, to touch on England and Ireland. England sought to use the courts in this country to make the claim that their war was against terror, and no courts here bought it in light of the evidence. No court could see this in any light other than that. Also, America cannnot only see the responce as getting the other side to give, we have to stop creating missery overseas. We need to stop playing the kind of games we and Britain played in Ireland which resulted in such missery, in fact, it was not American support for the IRA which kept that war going but American NATO power games.
Well, this went on longer than I expected it should, Look, in one sentence... Pray for peace, and work for justice.
Larry, here in Downtown Manhattan.