Sunday World piece on Xmas day following up North Korean links to Ireland;
A piece I wrote for Sunday Mirror in October 2009 about North Korean links to Irish politicians. Reposted after the death of Kim.
FORMER Official IRA members have revealed the group’s links to Communist North Korea, where members received military training in the late 80s.
Official IRA volunteers have admitted making trips to the totalitarian regime during the same period that the Workers Party, their political wing, had seven elected TDs in the Dail, including current Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore and former leader Pat Rabbitte.
North Korean agents also supplied the group with a shipment of weapons, which are believed to still to be in the hands of people loyal to the organisation.
While the left was sleeping the EDL enter party politics
Imagine the streetfighting thugs of the EDL joined forces with an organised and well funded far right political party, a terrifying prospect isn’t it? It has already happened and everyone seemed to miss the whole thing.
Last Saturday EDL leaders met in the West Midlands where they agreed a tie-up between their group and the British Freedom Party, with the EDL serving as the street wing and BFP as the electoral front.
You might remember the BFP from the recent limp ‘expose’ of Nick Griffin on Panorama, it’s a group full of disgruntled ex-BNP members, led by former UKIP member who believes white English people are being ‘ethnically cleansed’.
The BFP recently announced former UKIP candidate Paul Weston as its chair, but if you look behind the scenes you’ll find people like the BNP’s former legal eagle Lee Barnes, BNP fundholder John Savage and their old Cornwall organiser Peter ‘rivers of blood’ Mullins.
Fool’s gold: How Stuart Hughes tricked the global press
This is the man who has tricked some of the biggest global news organisations into running fake stories about the world’s most expensive homes, yachts and cars.
Hundreds of stories about fantastic gold products manufactured by Stuart Hughes have appeared in respected publications over the last 4 years.
He has previously been praised for; selling a gold iPhone to Victoria Beckham, selling the world’s most expensive house ($12.2bn) and flogging a gold yacht that would have been too heavy to float.
This week his latest fantastic product, a £5million gold and ammolite iPad with dinosaur bones, has been covered by at least 77 newsrooms including; Sky News, Daily Mail, Discovery News, Gawker, Perez Hilton and MSN Money.
I can now reveal that the supposed international gold and diamond dealer Stuart Hughes is a father of two who lives alone in a modest apartment in Merseyside, Liverpool and regularly moans about the state of his finances.
Earlier this year I helped expose Johann Hari’s dishonest and lazy journalism techniques. I have since been contacted by a number of people who hold suspicions about certain journalists stealing work and cutting corners. One of these instances was so shocking I could not skip over it.
While the Irish Examiner’s Dr Steven King is not as widely known as Johann the extent of his plagiarism is mind boggling and his political background as former chief political advisor to Nobel Peace Laureate and First Minister of Northern Ireland David Trimble marks him out as someone who should have known better.
A colleague of King’s has confirmed the details posted to his online profile, he has worked as Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) negotiator on equality, human rights, security and cultural issues in the multi-party peace talks leading to the 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.
White Riot; a critical account of punk’s racial history
I interviewed the authors of a new book from Verso Press exploring the complex, contradictory ways in which punk has interacted with the politics of race. You can read it over here.
Brian Whelan interviews the authors of a new book from Verso Press exploring the complex, contradictory ways in which punk has interacted with the politics of race.
From its birth punk rock has been obsessed with identity, exploding into the mainstream in the late 70s with filth and fury proudly exclaiming ‘no future’, the movement has traveled across the globe surviving four decades and many premature pronouncements of its death.
A new book hopes to trace the history of punk rock’s racial identity, following the legacy punk has created from its origins in the white rebel music of the late ‘60s through to the thriving scenes today in Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico.
Nasa scientist refutes Hari’s prize-winning article, media awards drag their feet
As revelations emerged about legal threats received by the Orwell Prize from lawyers at the Independent last week I made an unpopular statement about how nobody would want to win the prize again.
How could anyone want to win this award when it allowed Johann Hari’s bad journalism to go unnoticed? Well, it could be worse, the Orwell Prize have spent weeks working to investigate and correct their error, leaving other media awards conspicuous by their silence.
Hari isn’t just a former winner of the Orwell Prize, he has received quite a few awards over the years and after taking a look through the list, it looks like he might even be able to hang on to some of them. Some, not all.
In 2010 Press Gazette awarded Hari story of the year in the Environmental Press Awards for his work on Bangladesh. I contacted Dominic Ponsford, editor of PG, to ask if they had considered checking Hari’s work.
He explained; “When Press Gazette was sold by Wilmington in June 2009, they insisted on retaining the rights to all the awards which we used to run - including the Environmental Press Awards”
“On memory, Hari was awarded the prize for a piece which he wrote Bangladesh being at risk from flooding. And as far as I know, no questions have been raised over this piece so
“I don’t think stripping Hari of this award is an issue.”
The Bangladesh piece was sold on the back of a claim that the area would be buried under 25metres of water, a claim credited to Nasa scientist Jim Hanson - I spoke to Jim last week and he confirmed that he had not said that.
He explained to me; “The last time that Earth was 1-2C warmer than today, in the early Pliocene, sea level was about 25 meters higher than today. So that is where we are headed if we follow business-as-usual or even the European target.
“However, this could not happen this century. I have talked about “multi-meter” sea level rise this century, which means at least 2 meters. Indeed, if we were so foolish as to follow business-as-usual, I believe that 5 meter sea level rise is likely within ~ 1 century, i.e, it may occur before 2100.
“But the rate of sea level rise is a very difficult non-linear problem. It is more likely to be non-linear, better approximated as exponential than linear.”
Not dishonest journalism, perhaps, but certainly shoddy work and not award winning. Climate change is a serious issue, its important to get figures right. Dominic now says he will take a close look at the article.
“At present we have no plans to strip him of the prize. But I will now take a close look at the piece.”
Next stop the Comment Awards, where Hari has taken away both Cultural Commentator of the Year and Environmental Commentator of the year.
They say that they have “obviously talked about it and concluded that as his award was for comment rather than reporting or reportage then we would leave things as they were.”
I am not aware of which pieces he submitted and as such have no rebuttal. Although I hope his disputed version of events at the Copenhagen summit wasn’t involved.
Next up Amnesty International who awarded Hari Newspaper Journalist of the Year in 2007 and 2010.
Amnesty say “We are aware of the allegations being made about Johann Hari’s work and we are monitoring the situation closely.”
“The Independent is itself investigating some of these allegations and we will await the outcome of that in the first instance.”
I received no reply from the Marth Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, which Hari won in 2009. The award is for “factual journalism in English that exposes establishment propaganda.”. Funny then that one of the pieces Johann submitted was dubious “The dark side of Dubai”.
Andrew Gilligan received a reply from the Gellhorn Prize explaining they are waiting for the results of the Indy’s investigation. Why would they need to when the evidence is already there in black and white?
Telegraph:
A man interviewed by Johann Hari says the celebrated Left-wing writer “twisted,” “misquoted” and “misrepresented” his words in an article which won him a major journalism award.
Usman Raja, a counter-extremism expert for the Government’s “Prevent” initiative, was interviewed by Hari in 2009 for an article on those who have renounced extremism. He was described as a man who had “begged to become a suicide bomber” and quoted as calling himself a “papier-mâché Muslim.”
We still do not know whether the Indy will be publishing their findings or even sharing them with the people who, trusting the paper had checked the work, awarded Hari.
Given their aggressive attitude to the Orwell Prize it seems unlikely.
The EDL have been making a lot of noise over the last few days about how they aren’t violent like their Norwegian comrade. This video, showing horrific race attacks on the London Underground, was posted on Facebook profiles of EDL members on 21 June 2011. Manchester AFA speculate on the source here.
David Samuels’ serious factual errors about Sean Garland
In August of 2009 the Independent published an article entitled ‘Counterfeiting: Notes on a scandal’ by US ‘non-fiction writer’ David Samuels. The piece contains a number of serious factual errors that damage the reputation of a 77-year-old Irish man currently facing extradition to the US under disputed charges.
The article was published a long time ago, I am aware, but many journalists will no doubt be working from clippings when his court case resumes this Wednesday. Thanks to the Web any article with good SEO can linger for years spreading mistruths. All the worse when hosted on the website of a highly respected newspaper.
I wrote to the Indy outlining the errors last week. Why they won’t just take the piece down baffles me. I know they’re not keen on admitting when they’re in the wrong but perhaps they might if enough people ask nicely on Twitter.
Using another article published in the Indy I’d like to show them how wrong Samuels has got this story. I won’t speculate on his motivations.
Samuels’ second par reads;
“Garland was a lifelong terrorist who had personally engaged in deadly attacks on British soldiers and police in Northern Ireland since the 1950s, and whose exploits were said to have inspired Tom Clancy’s novel Patriot Games (1). As the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) entered into fitful negotiations with Protestant groups in the 1990s, Garland served as chief of staff for “the Official IRA” or OIRA, which rejected the idea of a peace deal in favour of the continuation of bombings, bank robberies and other politically-motivated crimes (2).”
Pretty serious charges;
(1)The reference to ‘Patriot Games’ is a mistaken reference to the popular Irish rebel song ‘The Patriot Game’ by Dominic Behan. That David Samuel can’t tell the difference between a fictional spy tale about the CIA and this song shows a worrying lack of research.
(2)Here Samuels mistakes the Official IRA, who began their ceasefire in May 1972, for the Real IRA, a splinter from the Provisional IRA – themselves a splinter of the Official IRA in the 70’s. The OIRA are now a historic footnote, the RIRA continue an unpopular terror campaign.
The Indy was already aware of both of these facts surely, having published a lengthy piece on Sean Garland in December 2005 by David McKittrick, who gets it right;
In the 1950s he (Garland) joined the IRA, who then instructed him to infiltrate the British Army to procure arms. He carried out his mission successfully, the IRA seizing guns from an Army barracks with his inside help.
In his own words, he was “actively involved in organising and participating in a number of major operations from 1955-56”. The most famous of these was when he led an IRA squad that attacked a police station in County Fermanagh where two IRA militiamen, Sean South and Fergal O’Hanlon, were shot dead. A republican song acclaims, “Another martyr for old Ireland, Sean South from Garryowen”. Garland was seriously wounded in the incident. In the years that followed, he was imprisoned on various occasions in both parts of Ireland for IRA activities.
When the organisation split into traditional and Marxist factions in the late 1960s he opposed the “narrow nationalism” of the Provisionals, and pursued a left-wing political path as one of the leaders of what was known as the Official IRA. That faction announced a ceasefire in 1972, but for years remained intermittently involved in violence.
The OIRA did continue to be involved in violence, just not a sectarian war or national liberation struggle against the British state. I wrote in Sunday Mirror, 2009;
OFFICIAL IRA gunmen were given military training and arms by communist North Korea…The Official IRA, which was linked to the Workers Party, admitted making trips to the totalitarian regime during the 80s - at the same time the party had seven elected TDs, including current Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore and former leader Pat Rabbitte.
That would be the same Gilmore and Rabbitte who are now in power as part of a coalition government in Ireland. The former is Táiniste (deputy PM), the latter a minister.
Further on Samuels makes another serious error;
Garland was a self-proclaimed Marxist who dressed like a professor and served as head of a far-left faction called the Irish Workers Party that had never elected a single one of its members to any mainstream political body.
Contrast with McKittrick;
The Workers Party once held a number of seats in the Irish parliament, but its strength has been greatly reduced.
In fact, the Workers Party at their peak had seven members of parliament (TDs) in Ireland along with an MEP and dozens of councillors. Up north they held ten seats in the early 70’s and elected a number of councillors over the years. The party still has two elected councillors in the south.
Again, Samuels seems to be thinking of another group, most likely Republican Sinn Fein (political wing of the Continuity IRA) a group whose entire outlook opposes everything Garland argued for in the republican movement.
A decent history of the Workers Party was published in 2009, you can read my write up on it from my local newspaper days here.
Given his inability to get the basic Wikipedia facts right, allowing Samuels to go on to make claims like the following is editorial madness;
…needed foreign currency to fund an estimated $100 million a year in donations to Hezbollah and other terrorist organisations - who, as it happened, were being trained in bomb-making in Lebanon by Sean Garland.
Sean Garland’s campaign against extradition has the backing of politicians across the political spectrum both north and south of the border. I have no involvement. For more information on his extradion you can read this blog - http://seangarlandextradition.wordpress.com/
(Disclosure; in January 2010 I built a website, wrote copy and did some layout for the relaunch of Look Left magazine, funded by the Workers Party along with a million other publications I was writing for at the time.)
