To the editors:
Your riveting article (April 10) on the Winnetka “IRA” murders demonstrated the success of British disinformation about Northern Ireland. It is appalling that our FBI should be engaged in the harassment of U.S. citizens exercising their right to alleviate suffering and help end discrimination by our “most trusted ally.” It makes a mockery of the Bill of Rights.
Has the press been gullible or a willing tool in this type of abuse? The one occasion on which I met Jeanne Bishop was with a group meeting with a Tribune editor, prior to the tragedy, to demonstrate that its news coverage of Northern Ireland is not balanced. While much coverage is devoted to stories of IRA violence, there is little coverage of Unionist paramilitary groups, the policy and implementation of assassination of suspected republican sympathizers, the juryless trials, the tortured confessions, the intensified official policy of job discrimination against Catholics, etc. The Chicago Tribune, for years, has adamantly refused to publish the undisputed tabulation of “No. Ireland War Deaths: 1969-89,” presumably because it reveals that the main dispensers of death are British forces. The IRA is not the cause of the “troubles”; it is the inevitable reaction to tyranny.
Our electronic and print news media prate on about “the people’s right to know” every painful detail of the private lives of those already suffering tragedy. The Reader’s John Conroy, alone in Chicago, fulfilled the people’s right to know how government agents compound their suffering by pursuing an agenda foreign to our interests. Has the FBI become the Federal Bureau of Intimidation? Writer Conroy has provided a glimpse of the monster.
Anne McNally
W. Schiller