They Have Stopped Singing This Song, Or Have They?

Heather Horn at The Atlantic:

On Tuesday, the results of the long, $300 million investigation into the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland were published. The inquiry, led by Lord Saville of Newdigate, found that thirteen demonstrators–and a fourteenth, who later died of wounds–were unlawfully killed by British paratroopers on January 30, 1972. In short, Saville found that the shootings were neither provoked by the marchers nor, as had previously been alleged, provoked by shootings from armed nationalists. Saville also discounts the theory that the attacks were “premeditated.”

William Underhill at Newsweek:

Today, there is hope—but only that—for closure at last. A 12-year official inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday released Tuesday yielded a 5,000-page report. The questions that fed the bitterness are finally answered. In particular, the allegation that the troops were responding to attacks by paramilitary gunmen from the republican IRA is formally rejected. Prime Minister David Cameron told the House of Commons the conclusions were “shocking” and that he was “deeply sorry.” The Army’s actions were “unjustified and unjustifiable.” Still, the report is hardly ideal.

If the deserved apology satisfies the victims, the report brings its own risks. When Tony Blair agreed to establish the inquiry back in 1998, it was intended as a gesture to keep suspicious republicans in the peace process that culminated in the Good Friday peace accord of that spring, ending 30 years of bloodshed. Today’s politicians may consider it one concession too many, threatening to aggravate the tensions that the commission sought to dispel. Few seriously fear a return to open strife, but a sour mood may hinder political progress. Already there are grumblings of discontent from hardline loyalists: Says Jim Allister, leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice: “Today’s jamboree over the … report throws into very sharp relief the unacceptable and perverse hierarchy of victims which the preferential treatment of Bloody Sunday has created.”

What’s beyond dispute is significance of Bloody Sunday: for the IRA, the Army’s brutality helped to sanction its own use of violence and to boost recruitment. There’s no doubt, too, that the perfunctory inquiry held in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday failed utterly to uncover the truth. Condemned as a whitewash at the time, it described the paratroopers’ actions as no more than “bordering on the reckless,” rather than the slaughter described by today’s report.

But the inquiry has also raised issues of its own that go beyond its $300 million bill or its unnecessary length. With almost 1,000 witnesses heard, this turned out to be the longest inquiry in British history. Is it safe, for example, to depend on witnesses’ recollections of events 38 years ago that might anyhow be colored by political attitudes?

Andrew Sullivan:

This panicked murder of unarmed civilians was the Brits’ Gaza moment (along with their Cheney moment in instigating the torture of terror suspects in prison). And this long-delayed report helps show how war crimes take time for democracies to process and take responsibility for. The entire history of the last forty years suggests something else as well: that Irish terrorism was not defeated by force of arms, or brutality, or collective punishment. It took negotiations with the worst parties, a stoic acceptance of some terrorist violence because the attempt to stamp it all out only made it worse, economic growth, and insistence on the most logical partition.

Harry Mount at Telegraph:

David Cameron was right to say the Bloody Sunday shootings were unjustified and unjustifiable. That doesn’t mean, though, that the Saville Inquiry, with its ludicrous cost and length, was either justified or justifiable. The same conclusion could have been reached after several months; and Tony Blair would, presumably, have been happy to give the same full apology as Cameron did today.

Prosecutions are a different matter. To establish the criminal intent of a serving soldier, firing under orders to fire, alongside colleagues doing the same, and all with the passage of 38 years, would be very tricky indeed.

Here’s hoping that the completeness of Cameron’s apology and the directness of Saville’s conclusions will remove any possibility of further violence. I have been a regular visitor to Ulster for more than 20 years, and the change in the place is extraordinary. I first went to Belfast as a 17-year-old, and remember bicycling up the Falls Road behind an Army armoured car with two soldiers in the back, fingers poised on the trigger. You wouldn’t see that nowadays – in fact, last time I was in Belfast, I went up the Falls Road again, and the Shankill Road, this time in a tourist bus, on a tour of republican and loyalist murals.

David Blackburn at The Spectator:

With the greatest respect to Lord Saville, who is a distinguished lawyer, this report cannot dispense justice. Establishing the facts is impossible 30 years after the tragedy, and the punishment can only be collective. Yet the political dictates of peace mean that the British army must be blackened. The soldiers who beat both sets of paramilitaries to the negotiating table will be branded as criminals.

Whatever their impulse, British officers took a disastrous decision to disobey orders and open fire. Thereafter, the IRA heightened its already intensive terrorism and recruitment. That the IRA deliberately provoked violence against a peace march for its own gain is as plausible as the insistence that the British opened fire first.

General Sir Michael Rose at The Daily Mail:

But what I find perhaps most distasteful about this 12-year-long inquiry is that the role of British soldiers in Northern Ireland has been brushed aside for the sake of political expediency.

The truth is that peace was brought to the Province not by Prime Minister Blair, kowtowing to former terrorists such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

It came to Northern Ireland as a result of the courage of the British Army, the Ulster Defence Regiment, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the intelligence services.

By the time Blair offered this inquiry as a sop to Republicans, the IRA had already been militarily defeated by the very soldiers whose reputation he knew it would undermine.

The events of Bloody Sunday were terrifying, fast-moving and chaotic. But as I told the inquiry when called as a witness, there is one thing of which I am absolutely certain.

It was the IRA who started the firing with the Thompson machine gun  –  and, inflammatory though it may sound, I believe they started firing with the express intention of causing civilian deaths.

Laurence White at The Belfast Telegraph:

There is no point in saying that the IRA or the UDA or any other terrorist organisation killed far more people and that atrocities such as happened at Omagh, Dublin, Droppin’ Well, La Mon, Enniskillen etc etc were as bad or worse and why was there not an inquiry into them.

Firstly every right thinking person accepts that those atrocities were vile and that anyone involved in causing those outrages should be brought to justice and jailed for a very, very long time. There is no need for inquiries into those events because everyone accepts that terrorists engage in terrorism.

Failure to bring those involved in mass terrorist killings to justice is a failure of the investigating agencies such as the RUC or Gardai. It wasn’t that no-one wanted the perpetrators jailed, they just failed to get the evidence to do it.

Bloody Sunday was completely different. Those who opened fire were legitimately in possession of weapons. They also had to follow rules. They were helping to impose law and order. And they were subject to the law.

The Army know who fired the fatal shots. If people were killed unlawfully then those who committed the crime should be amenable to the law. It is not a terribly complex equation or great moral dilemma.

Chris Bertram:

I was thirteen at the time of Bloody Sunday, so I can remember it just about. It is hard to know what to think about today’s report. On the one hand, it is a kind of justice, however inadequate, for the relatives; on the other, it has taken nearly forty years. And the British government has spent £200 million to tell us what we all knew anyway: that British paratroopers murdered fourteen civilians in cold blood and that a subsequent “inquiry” (Widgery) was a whitewash. Still, it is one thing knowing the truth (as we already did) and it is another to have it publicly acknowledged. Will there be prosecutions? Doubtful.

It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp, I Mean, Former Princess

Heather Horn at The Atlantic with the round-up. Horn:

Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, apparently attempted to sell access to her former husband Prince Andrew, second son of Queen Elizabeth II. The attempt was caught on tape in a sting operation by British publication News of the World. Ferguson allegedly asked for a $40,000 up-front fee, followed by a $724,000 deposit into her bank account, according to Fox News. Unsurprisingly, the British public’s not too happy. The footage has even sparked some reaction in the U.S. There are a few willing to defend the scandal-prone duchess in the media, but the condemnations have generally been swift and fierce.

Joe Coscarelli at The Village Voice:

News of the World writes (caps theirs):

Unknown to the Prince, Fergie PROMISED to introduce us to him, CLAIMED he’d help fix lucrative deals and DEMANDED a cut of all profits.
…
Along the way she also INSISTED on one per cent commission on any deals we might strike due to her royal connections, and DEMANDED we wire the main £½million backhander into her private HSBC bank account.And though the world of princes and duchesses is a bit foreign to Americans, the implications are pretty clear. Imagine if Whitney Houston did this to Bobby Brown, but Bobby Brown’s mom was Nancy Reagan.

A comment on the News of the World site puts it like this: “Royals: lazy people, get a work!!!”

Joe Gandelman at Moderate Voice:

There are destroyed public images, and then there are destroyed public images — and now there is Great Britain’s Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson. Her name will now forever be associated with getting caught on tape in a tabloid sting operation where she was allegedly trying to sell access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew for $700,000, apparently seeking to make big bucks from her remaining links to Buckingham Palace, and putting some $40,000 into her bag before leaving the scene of her forever-destroyed reputation’s graphic demise. And apparently being tipsy when it all occurred.

Adding to the humiliation: she says herself in the video that the Prince himself is squeaky clean, suggesting more than ever that she viewed her association with Buckingham Palace as a kind of fallback lifetime lottery — except in this discreet lottery no one except her and the clients to whom she was peddling Buckingham Palace access knew she was about to win big. Now, as this story rapidly exploded in England and throughout the world via TV, print and the Internet, she has issued a statement saying she is “devastated” and “regretful” by the video.

Christina Odone at The Telegraph:

It makes me sad. The Duchess, I know, was always over the top, a loud lively lass with a twinkle in her eye and an appalling taste in everything from men to clothes. But she was, undoubtedly, fun. She brought Diana down to earth, clowning about for the paparazzi at Klosters. She giggled at Buckingham Palace and showed too much leg at Clarendon House. Around her, Andrew beamed, Charles looked priggish, and the Queen looked like she was, for once, having a good time.

And when she fell, she fell so spectacularly, you kind of warmed to her. She was caught sucking a man’s toes. They were not Prince Andrew’s, and all hell broke loose. Fergie was banished from Royal circles, and even though she and her ex-husband stayed in touch, she was a pariah. This allowed her to date a long list of increasingly unappetising (but always wealthy) characters, which of course kept the tabloids buzzing around “the Duchess”.  Her exploits grew more and more like a hysterical hen party that never led to marriage. Or, in her, case re-marriage.

But nothing could keep her down. She made good money as an ambassadress for Weight Watchers, she wrote a children’s book, and she took America by storm, gracing every TV sofa from Oprah’s to Jay Leno, and every party from Manhattan to Miami.

On this side of the Atlantic, they were less welcoming: they bitched about her going out on the town with her teenage daughters, and about her making a documentary about common people. Still, everyone had to admit, this Duchess bounced back. She seemed to have regained Prince Andrew’s love, and even the hard-hearted had to smile at the sight of the two ex-spouses chortling together over their daughters.

Fergie, it seemed, was flawed, but human, and you couldn’t help wish her well. But now, the cat has used up all her lives. The accusation of selling access to her (unwitting and innocent) ex is ugly, greedy stuff, which won’t play well at the Palace, or in ordinary homes. Sarah Ferguson, the jolly Royal, is no more. The desperate Duchess has taken her place, and she’s not a pretty sight.

Harry Mount at The Telegraph:

Looking at the video of the newspaper sting that got her, it’s like looking at a museum piece, or a very clever installation by an artist – “The 1980s Sloane,” you might call it. Everything’s still in place, as if we are still in Sloane Square in c.1982 – the lunchtime bottle of wine (a £95 bottle of burgundy), the fags (Marlboro Lights, I do hope, though it’s hard to tell from the video), the swearing like a trooper. Even her food at Mosimann’s in Belgravia (a stone’s throw from Sloane Square) is pretty 80s – the pea soup (£12.50) followed by the lamb and vegetables (£30).

And, of course, the traditional Sloane stupidity has survived intact. Surely, every celeb in the land should now be familiar with the operational tactics of Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World’s resident fake sheikh and chief investigations editor.

I once interviewed her for the Telegraph in New York, where she was launching her own eponymous sandwich – the Duchess of York (grilled chicken breast on rye, lettuce, tomato, melted cheese and a horseradish-flavoured light mayo), manufactured by a company called French’s, who were paying her to promote the mayo.

I must say that Fergie was tremendously friendly – “Oh, call me Sarah” – and good jolly Sloane company. “That’s humungous,”  she said – excellent Sloane word – as she was handed a two-inch thick Duchess of York to sample. She was also very unguarded – a quality that’s a great relief to a reporter in search of good quotes, but a disaster for a member of the Royal Family, particularly when combined with hunger for cash.

James Whitaker at The Guardian:

The woman is skint. And, like any desperate person, she will do almost anything to get her hands on some cash. Fergie has made it abundantly clear that if this means “using” Andrew she will not think twice.

It isn’t attractive – it’s not so different from selling your mother. But the question has to be asked: how has the Queen allowed the situation to deteriorate to this level? The duchess was always a loose cannon and needed looking after.

The amount of money apparently granted to Fergie on her divorce was abysmal; £15,000 a year is hardly a fortune for any divorcee with children to bring up. But when those children are granddaughters of the sovereign, such a piffling amount is asking for trouble. And now the Windsors have got it.

Fergie, by fair means or foul, needs money. She’s beyond caring what the royal family think of her. In the case of Prince Philip she’s always known. Years ago the duke described her as “having no point”. Her relationship with the Queen is more civilised: there will always be contact.

UPDATE: Rebecca Dana at The Daily Beast