[A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland & Wilson plot

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Sometimes I think it would be better if someone else other than Paul
Foot were covering this material, because Foot often allows his
pathological detestation of Harold Wilson to get in the way of the real
story here involving the concerted efforts of large sections of the UK
state to unseat someone elected according to the laws they are
supposedly sworn to uphold. Thankfully Robin Ramsay and a few others are
also on the case, and it should not be forgotten how much Foot himself
has done to ensure that the smear campaign against Colin Wallace failed.
One of the perpetrators of that campaign, "Professor" Paul Wilkinson of
St Andrews University, was being paraded on the BBC yesterday as its
terrorism expert. Wilkinson's attempt to put it about that Wallace had
tried to arrange the killing of a man in Northern Ireland so that
Wallace could continue to have an affair with his wife was scotched.

See http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2002w34/msg00071.htm


Private Eye

No. 1062, 6-19 September 2002

Footnotes:
Bloody Sunday: The Wallace Correction

An interesting witness at the Bloody Sunday inquiry in Derry will be
Colin Wallace, a former army information officer in Northern Ireland.

Mr Wallace is due to give evidence for two whole days on 19 and 20
September, largely because he played a crucial role in formulating and
presenting the army case at the Widgery tribunal in 1972, which
whitewashed the army role in the shooting dead of 13 demonstrators.

Mr Wallace may have much interesting information about the army's plans
and preparations for the whitewash. He may also be asked about his role
in forging a leaflet advertising a vigil to commemorate Bloody Sunday a
year after the event. The forgery was based on a real leaflet
advertising the vigil, in which the sponsors included well-known
radicals of the time such as Peter Hain.

The leaflet was skilfully doctored by Wallace's "black propaganda" team
at Lisburn; and the forgery was part of an intelligence operation called
Clockwork Orange, which started as an anti-terrorist campaign and
developed after the election of a minority Labour government in 1974
into a full-scale smear of Labour ministers.

In the summer of 1974, the forged Bloody Sunday leaflet was put in the
secret file that Colin Wallace would show visiting journalists. "If you
want to know the real truth about Labour ministers," he would say, "have
a look at these documents." Five Labour MPs' names were skilfully forged
into the list of sponsors of the Bloody Sunday vigil: Merlyn Rees, then
secretary of state for Northern Ireland; Stan Orme, his minister of
state; Tony Benn, secretary of state for industry; David Owen, health
minister; and Paul Rose, who was not in the government but had founded
the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster.

In the two days Mr Wallace gives evidence he may get an opportunity to
explain what on earth he was doing smearing his elected government on
behalf of the British army.

PS: Among the journalists who may take an interest in Wallace's evidence
to the Saville inquiry are David McKittrick of the Independent and John
Ware of the BBC. In a celebrated smear worthy of Clockwork Orange, both
journalists took up a whole page in the Independent in 1987 to denounce
Wallace as a poseur. One of their more illuminating lines of attack was
that Wallace's claim to have been associated with putting the army case
at the Widgery tribunal was "demonstrably false".