Wednesday 16 June 2010

WIDGERY

For a few years at the end of his career, John Widgery QC, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, refused to absent himself from the bench, even though he was barking, falling asleep, talking to himself, was, in fact, suffering from dementia. He wouldn't be told, Judge knows best.

Lord Chief Justice Whitewash, QC, PC

Keynote examples of his judgements were his rejection of the first appeal by the so-called Birmingham Six  - who eventually served sixteen years in prison, although innocent - and his preparation of the Widgery Tribunal Report into the events of Bloody Sunday, in Londonderry, on which the Saville Inquiry, also, has just reported, overturning his conclusions.

The dogs in the street, the pigs in the pen, knew, in the early seventies, that the Parachute Regiment had all but run amok in Londonderry but in appointing Widgery to chair the inquiry, the UK government achieved the false exoneration  it sought, even though international bodies, such as the United Nations, derided both that report and the widespread use of torture by security forces in  Belfast's Castlereagh Road police station. Widgery's disgraceful kow-towing to the Military/Security establishment was perhaps the most significant event in the entire Troubles, enraging decent public opinion in the Province and internationally and validating, for some, enough, the increasingly violent, quid-pro-quo strategy of Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Marty Kneecaps, transforming what had been, before Bloody Sunday,  a perfectly legitimate, if unruly civil rights movement, into a dreadful thirty-years war, billions of pounds, oceans of blood, rivers of tears. Widgery's report, a cynical whitewash, would reverberate for decades, long after his rotten, learned self was roasting in Hell.

A more just approach by this horrible bastard,  to either the Birmingham Six Appeal or to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry would have had huge ramifications for the culture of bent coppers and rogue trigger-happy soldiers.  Despite the state brutality they suffered and despite the rigged evidence no-one has ever been punished  for the crimes against the Birmingham Six, eminent jurists - aren't they all? - maintain smugly, to this day, that they must be guilty of something,  a bit guilty; Paddies, Republicans, nuff said. And those same lawless voices mutter today that those killed in Londonderry nearly forty years ago had it coming, teenagers, demonstrating on the streets and everything.

Should soldier F be charged? Well, why not? There is no statute of limitations here, he shot and killed  four people.  And doesn't Old Bill almost jump for joy  out of his lambskin apron when DNA research cracks any other sort of cold case? Doesn't matter that Marty Kneecaps killed, bombed, maimed, tortured and burned hundreds, thousands, maybe;  the elected government of the United Kingdom decided that he was beyond prosecution, immune,  so great was his contribution to the Peace Proh-cess.  Maybe Soldier F should be indemnified similarly and we be left with a justice system as flexible, elastic as need be.  Law enforcement, the cops and soldiers, well, if they murder someone, that's ok. 

But maybe if soldier F had been tried way back, in the day, that poor Iraqi hotel worker wouldn't have been battered to death by a platoon of the Queen's Own Nancyboys.


Mr Mousa before and after his encounter with British troops.

And maybe, if an honest judge had bent his mind to the turkeyshoot in Londonderry, we may have avoided all that shit - Birmingham, Warrington, Canary Wharf, Hyde Park, Eniskillen, Warrenpoint, Brighton and  so on and so on, down all the days.

The worst thing about Widgery, though, is not Bloody Sunday, it is the Hutton Report, its inevitable, logical successor.

First thing, kill all the lawyers.

7 comments:

PT Barnum said...

The bill for the Saville inquiry: £190,000,000

Lawyers' fees as part of that bill: £100,000,000

Mission accomplished, I'd say. They managed to string it out for twelve years before stating the bleedin' obvious (those dead bodies? Guilty of Being Irish While Walking). There's chutzpah for you.

mongoose said...

You could not make it up, Mr PTB. 12 fucking years. I knew what the truth was, we all did, thirty-eight bloody years ago. And I was twelve years old. How difficult can it be? Number of soldiers dead and wounded? Nil and nil. Oh. Number of civilians dead and wounded? Fourteen dead and a dozen or more wounded. Fuck me! How many?

But this is old and sad, a straightening of the tablecloth for the vicar's tea, now that most of them, the officers anyway, are dead. The real injustice happened, started, decades ago as the Black and Tans thundered about the place slaughtering folk at will. Paddies, eh? Foul, bewhiskered bunch of Guinness-niggers.

The moral of this story, the moral of this song, is that the government can kill you if it wants. Ask David Kelly. Ask Saddam, the bastard. Ask Menendez. "Looked like a sand wog to me, M'lud." "But why did you shoot him eight times, Officer?" "Ran out of ammo, M'lud."

But the most horrible, just the most soul-eating, savage, cold-hearted cant-ridden cunt is Hutton. That they think they can wheel out some old boy, that he can put his specs on the end of his nose and read a lot of shite from some report he has made up, and that we will believe it. If you all recall, even Campbell was unhinged by the free ride they got. "Fuck me, scot free? Not a word at all of wonder or worry? Fuck me! Doubles all round, what?" Yes, hang Hutton first.

PT Barnum said...

Was there ever a time, Mr Mongoose, when we expected An Inquiry to reveal the truth? But, as you imply, for An Inquiry to reveal none of the truth whatever is quite remarkable.

British troops, certainly by the back end of the 70s (when I knew serving soldiers who had done several 'tours' - such a strange word - of Northern Ireland/the North of Ireland, had been inculcated with similar beliefs to Israeli conscripts now: Irish republicans/Gazans = subhuman murderous scum. Living and breathing that ethos, of kill before you're killed, of exterminating vermin, one might wonder why such events were not more common. But then, where the army failed, the judiciary would step in.

mongoose said...

Widgery and Hutton are indeed cheeks of the same backside, Mr PTB, in their cynical myopia. Though be in no doubt that the paras came under fire that day. Was it before or after they opened up? I know not, and now we never will. It is now in the interests of everyone that an official line in the sand be drawn. Folklore of Brit savagery for my lot; the Boys on the inside pissing out for Our Brave Leaders.

It was probably a very meagre few shots that spooked one of the Tommies - possibly even one of their own shooting elsewhere - but a more certain guarantee of mayhem I cannot imagine. Give the sound of gunfire to a zipped-tight bunch of teen-aged paratroops in the middle of a near riot, and folk are going to get killed. And that does not begin to take account of the attitudes you mention. Put an army into the field and these things are going to happen. Peterloo, Mi Lai, Derry, and now cowboys in choppers raining death from afar. It is happening now, today, somewhere.

As ever, the massacre itself is almost more excusable than the cover-up and lying. It is insulting that they no longer even need us to believe them. The denial, the lie, is enough.

call me ishmael said...

But what a grand opportunity for CallHimDave to speak Statesman and Peacekeeper, especially when we know that if the gabshite had been in office at the time he would have spoken that strange blend of Thatcher-Pinochet which so became that Time Of The Mad Dogs - aka Sortin' Aht The Country.

jgm2 said...

Dead right about the Hutton report Mr Ishmael. Fucking judges always bleating on about the 'independence' of the judiciary and then when the opportunity to prove that sentiment is worth the self-serving, port-scented breath it was uttered on they roll clean over.

Sad though that chap going bonkers in Cumbria is we must take some solace from the fact that he shot a solicitor as well as himself.

As you get older you begin to see the truth in the older generations distrust of politicians, journalists and lawyers. There are times when I have flirted with the idea that such cynicism is a lazy characterisation but time just reinforces what, well, time has always reinforced.

Pure scum. Cunts all.

It simply is not possible to be too cynical about such scum.

call me ishmael said...

Hutton was especially bad, mr jgm2, even for an Ulsterman. I was briefly at the same school but in a lower year as His Grace, the shafted Lord Trimble; decades on I still flinch at the memory of Young Orangemen, their bullyboy fathers, the pool of hypocrisy and brutal self-interest in which they swam; Hutton was an outstanding example of that crew, a pox on him.