Oh for fuck's sake. If you lived in a predominately Irish American community in this time in a major east coast city, you witnessed these morons. I had a go at you for saying I had personal involvement. Being present in your local pub when some idiot passes the hat hardly makes me Bernadette Devlin. Knowing that there are people in your neighborhood who are sympathetic doesn't give you personal involvement. If you encounter some RIRA asshole in the jakes there, does that make you involved? Get real.

Members of the IRA who were themselves cutting deals with prosecutors are liable to say anything. And the government still got shite for convictions. Again, the bar is very low for getting convictions on criminal conspiracy. The RICO act has been an extremely blunt tool and they use it.

The use of informants by the feds here - and state authorities - is highly suspect. There is nothing in the UK or Ireland like the sentencing or capital punishment laws or the types of prisons where one is held in perpetuity in solitary to threaten people with. If convicted, you can get sentenced to hundreds of years without parole here. People flip all the time based on that - even on the Mafia or IRA.

Maggie saying things like the US is soft on terrorism because some idiots like Peter King went drinking at Felons just is good politics. The Feds go for any conviction they can get. It's how careers are made.

They went hammer and tongs at the Mafia and the Irish Mob both. They went after terrorists here all through the 70's and 80's and got plenty of convictions. Because here is where the guns are. What they didn't get was a smoking gun with NORAID. They tried.

And for the Nth time. I don't have any sympathy for these people. The Provos, the IRA, NORAID or any of them. I am much more an MLK type guy. That doesn't mean that the US and British government wasn't full of shit when it came to going after any and every one they suspected of wrong doing. The same shit they do today with drones, surveillance and the like.