The link has, ironically, Disappeared. Try here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/08/us-court-ira-secret-testimony?INTCMP=SRCH
The Guardian also had a column arguing that this will undermine the chances of a "truth and reconciliation" process in Northern Ireland, which really misses the point that a South Africa-style TRC _does have_ the legal power to promise immunity in exchange for testimony. It's not a private project, it has the force of law behind it.
Not that it's likely to happen, because too many of the players have nice political careers now, on both sides of the border, and standing up in front of Desmond Tutu (or whoever) and describing how you spent an entertaining six hours in 1978 with an electric drill, a soldering iron and the kidnapped brother of a policeman is probably not going to do much for your chances of re-election, even in South Armagh.
There is a recently law that allows for a researcher to obtain the right to keep the data confidential. I'm on a bus so I can't find details now.
5
There is a recently law that allows for a researcher to obtain the right to keep the data confidential. I'm on a bus so I can't find details now.
Is it for medical data?
That's the problem IMO - the person organizing the study doesn't have the power to make such a promise. It's not a legal confidentiality situation.
The person organizing the study can indeed make such a promise, and has an ethical obligation to keep it and go to jail, if necessary. Journalists, in fact, do go to jail every now and then under such circumstances.
8: but then again, the people participating in the study had an ethical obligation not to kidnap women and torture them to death before burying them in unmarked graves.
It is called a certificate of confidentiality. It doesn't have to be strictly medical data, but apparently it does have to connect to public health somehow. It's mostly for Big Grant things, but if it was interesting to NIH you could get it outside the usual channels.
Journalists go to jail rather than reveal their sources, but that is typically information that is only in their heads, right? If you are talking about hours and hours of tape, that's a large physical item you will have difficulty keeping from the police.
It still looks like the researchers made promises they couldn't possibly keep.
The SA TRC has always seemed a unique proposition to me, notwithstanding the regular calls for something similar w/r/t Election 2000/Iraq/Lehman Brothers/Countrywide/the Global Financial Crisis. For one thing, where are we going to find a figure of Mandela-level moral stature to embody the concept?
...where are we going to find a figure of Mandela-level moral stature
No need to keep dropping hints. I'll do it, but I want a good dental plan.
The person organizing the study can indeed make such a promise, and has an ethical obligation to keep it and go to jail, if necessary. Journalists, in fact, do go to jail every now and then under such circumstances.
I am willing to bet that they promised confidentiality without an internal gut-check about the extent to which they would fight for that confidentiality.
Morgan Freeman?
He's too close to the penguins, and they can't be trusted.
15: well, yeah, but internal gut-checks are painful and they'd probably have to fast the day before.
Semi on topic: digging through some teen-era papers of CA's recently, I came across a picture of Lord Mountbatten cut out from a magazine. Completely baffled as to why even nerdy young CA would have saved such a thing and looking to be a pill, I held it up and said, "Sorry we* blew up your dude!" CA looked annoyed and said, "Yeah, we'll, look who you could have blown up with him." Oops. Right next to Mountbatten was CA's great aunt (who was head of the Royal Women's Navy for a couple years in the 60s).
*A macabre family joke due to the fact that CA's mother holds me personally responsible for everything the IRA has ever done, despite the fact that I'm, you know, not really Irish and have never brought up the IRA to her.
He's too close to the penguins, and they can't be trusted.
Anyone who has seen the Madagascar movies knows that.
18: and, indeed, look who they did blow up with him: his fourteen-year-old grandson, the 83-year-old mother-in-law of his daughter, and a fifteen-year-old Irish kid who had come along on the boat to help out. Gerry Adams said he had it coming. Didn't mention whether he thought the teenagers had it coming as well, but the IRA has killed a lot of teenage kids over the years. It's crippled a lot more. Belfast is a European centre of excellence in reconstructive orthopaedic surgery.
8 is right, and the college should back the researcher. This is the time to exploit being a Jesuit institution and make the government forcibly remove a monk or two.
Really the recordings should be encrypted. Then the researcher really can just go to jail and keep them secret. (Obviously you'd need some other people to know the key, but which people know could be secret.)
Fun fact: one of the judges on the panel issuing the ruling is the brother of one of the US' most famous left wing political terrorists.
This looks like research malpractice. OTOH I doubt that as a realistic matter any IRA member who gave an interview did so in the serious belief that it could never be found by law enforcement.
8 is right, and the college should back the researcher.
Really? If there would be any chilling effect on the practice of history here, it would only be to keep people from making promises they can't keep or aren't prepared to keep.
9: So it's okay to break your promises as long as they're to bad people? I didn't know ethics worked that way.
What other things is it okay to do as long as you're doing it to a bad person?
but then again, the people participating in the study had an ethical obligation not to kidnap women and torture them to death before burying them in unmarked graves.
Yup. I acknowledge that us procedural liberals have a tough time explaining things like our willingness to let obviously guilty people go free.
If you are talking about hours and hours of tape, that's a large physical item you will have difficulty keeping from the police.
In fact, TV stations and other journalists who use recording devices go to significant lengths to keep recordings away from police - sometimes even when recording public events, but especially when protecting sources.
heebie gets at the actual issue here:
I am willing to bet that they promised confidentiality without an internal gut-check about the extent to which they would fight for that confidentiality.
I mean, this ain't brain surgery. By making a promise, you incur an obligation. I'm guessing that the researcher would not have gotten much feedback had the promise been ""I'll honor your confidentiality unless the cops or courts ask me to do otherwise."
re: 21
Hence the RIPA (in the UK):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingdom
8 is right, and the college should back the researcher if and only if they knew about the promise in advance.
The IRB form has a box to check for "Your research plan is writing checks our legal department can't cash."
One story I saw on this said that the agreement was to protect confidentiality "to the extent permitted by law" so, there's that.
But of course BC shouldn't have to fight to the ends of the earth because some researcher acted incompetently, and of course the nature of what is being protected from disclosure should factor into the analysis.
So it's okay to break your promises as long as they're to bad people? I didn't know ethics worked that way.
What other things is it okay to do as long as you're doing it to a bad person?
Similar situation with a psychiatrist's ethical obligation of patient confidentiality; if the patient says that he's committed a crime, or even thinking of committing a crime, then not only does the psychiatrist not have to keep it confidential, she has a duty to report it to the authorities.
Given that there's no shield law for historians, the pro-secrecy argument is that the historian has an ethical duty to break the law in order to keep their word to an unrepentant murderer who would otherwise go to prison. This is a fairly far-out view of ethics; we're into the area of not lying to the Gestapo about where Anne Frank is, because lying is wrong.
I think Ajay's point, while reasonable in terms of the larger situation, is irrelevant to the researcher's obligations. I don't think anyone should shed a tear if the recordings are ultimately obtained and used by law enforcement. Still, I think the researcher made a commitment, and is therefore obligated to fight as hard as practical to keep that from happening, and if the college authorized him to make the promise, the college should be backing him. (As previously said in 8 and 21, among others.)
If the IRA folks disclosed planned crimes, it'd be okay to rat 'em out. Different situation.
30: Are psychiatrists obligated to report past crimes, rather than only planned future crimes? Lawyers aren't generally.
30: In the U.S., it isn't that broad. A psychiatrist certainly has no obligation to report all past crimes that a patient mentions in therapy. Certain types must be reported (e.g. child abuse), but not all.
33: I think they are, but I'm not an expert. Lawyers aren't because lawyer-client confidentiality is actually laid down by law. You have a legally enforced expectation of privacy with your lawyer. You don't with your priest or your psychiatrist or your GP. And codes of ethics for psychiatrists emphasise that you have to report that sort of thing.
I think the researcher made a commitment, and is therefore obligated to fight as hard as practical to keep that from happening
"as practical", though, meaning what? Now that this decision has been made, any further action would actually be breaking the law. If the researcher refuses to hand over the tapes, he's obstructing justice. If he wipes them, he's destroying evidence. How far is he obligated to go? If the police seize the tapes, is he obligated to burn down the police station in order to destroy them?
30. Why do you specify psychiatrist? Does this not apply to all medical practitioners?
At least at one time Catholic priests were obliged (by the church) to keep the secrets of the confessional, even if the person confessing has announced that they were planning to blow up the government. Antonia Fraser discusses this quite well in her book about the incident in which this probably occurred. I don't know what the church's position is these days.
36.1: Medical records are subject to subpoena for that kind of information, but I really don't think the psychiatrist would be in trouble for not reporting a past crime outside of certain specific classes that are required to be reported.
Knew a lawyer whose client showed him a briefcase full of weapons that he planned to bring to - and use at - his divorce settlement meeting with his wife and her lawyer. The lawyer called the cops on his client.
I asked the lawyer if there wasn't a professional obligation to maintain confidentiality. He was a nice guy, and didn't at all look at me as though I was an idiot, and patiently explained the appropriate limits of professional ethics.
37.1: yes it does; I specified them just because that's the sort of thing people are more likely to mention to psychiatrists rather than to, say, physiotherapists.
31. If the college authorised him to make that promise, then the college should take the fall, since they would have had a lawyer to hand who could have told them exactly what would happen. I find it hard to buy that, though. Easier to believe that the researcher got over excited and said things they couldn't deliver on without taking advice.
One story I saw on this said that the agreement was to protect confidentiality "to the extent permitted by law" so, there's that.
I only skimmed the opinion quickly, but it looks like the agreement between BC and the researchers included such a limitation; but the agreement between the researchers and the interviewees did not--it simply gave an unqualified veto over access to the material to the interviewees that expired upon their death.
Is there any sort of IRB-like approval that history projects and interviews have to go through?
I always confess my crimes to my allergist. He scares more easily that the GP or the psychiatrist.
44 because it seems like maybe no one higher up at the college (or any lawyers) knew about the confidentiality promise. And actually I'm not sure why they would, unless there's some sort of oversight board. But I don't think you need IRB approval for oral histories, do you?
Most commonly, as I understand it, the doctor to who people confess crimes is the Emergency Room surgeon who's patching them up after their felonious little plans went pear shaped.
if the patient says that he's committed a crime, or even thinking of committing a crime, then not only does the psychiatrist not have to keep it confidential, she has a duty to report it to the authorities.
I only had the "danger to self or others" law explained when I went in for some pre-divorce talks, nothing about "crimes" in general.
I miss my hat with the words: "Nobody talks; everybody walks."
Divorce lawyer friend was shot at near me a couple weeks ago.
46: Currently, you have to send even research that is exempt from IRB review to the IRB so that they can not-review it and tell you that it is exempt from IRB review. It's a much faster process than actual review. I have no idea what actually happens but it probably doesn't even get before the whole board.
Of course, back in 2001, things were different and less formal. At least, they were where I was.
I think the relevant category here isn't "keeping promises made to bad people" but "keeping stupid promises you shouldn't have made in the first place."
The latter gives you more room to maneuver. There is still some obligation to keep promises you shouldn't have made to begin with. (Think of all the times you've promised to do some work, and then when you actually look at the work, say "like fuck am I ever going to volunteer for this job again.) Still, when there is strong moral reason you shouldn't have made the promise, it is hardly binding.
46: it's not ironclad, but I would argue (and have argued) that any responsible historian conducting interviews should submit her research plan to the IRB. Nine times out of ten (in my experience), the IRB will issue a waiver and leave it at that.
"as practical", though, meaning what?
That's a hard question. I'd sort of think that the line would be resisting in ways that injure the researcher rather than other people -- yes, go to jail, no, don't burn down the police station. And I wouldn't really think too badly of the researcher for not going to jail, just that they'd made a promise and didn't keep it.
53: I'd think the irresponsible historians should submit plans also. They're much more likely to have a fundamentally unethical plan of the kind that the IRB is supposed to control.
I'd sort of think that the line would be resisting in ways that injure the researcher rather than other people -- yes, go to jail, no, don't burn down the police station.
But he'd have an ethical obligation to break in to the police station, crawl through the air ducts, bypass the trembler alarm, hack into the CCTV camera system, lower himself through a vent upside down to avoid the motion sensor on the floor, crack into the evidence storage locker, and remove the tape, as long as he didn't hurt anyone?
But it looks like regardless, the IRB probably did/would have waived review, so that no one actually looked at the confidentiality agreement form that the participants signed. Which said different things than what the college told the project it was supposed to say.
There ought to be some way to encrypt files such that the encryption key only becomes available upon verification of someones death.
57: Oral histories are generally exempt, but not when there is a substantial risk of harm to the participants. I've never tried that type of research, but I would expect that the IRA project, if proposed today, would result in a full IRB review.
I always confess my crimes to my allergist. He scares more easily that the GP or the psychiatrist.
Histamine's greatest monster?
re: 56
That's exactly the skill set taught in ninja-historian school!
Usually an implied term of contracts forgives the obligation if it would require breaking the law. I don't see why that wouldn't apply here -- the researcher should do everything within the law to protect the confidentiality of the material, but shouldn't act in criminal contempt or criminally destroy evidence. If the researcher falsely represented that he had the ability to keep the materials confidential, the remedy might be a fraud suit.
That's exactly the skill set taught in ninja-historian school!
"We only have twelve hours to safeguard the university's code of research ethics! Quick, to the faculty ekranoplan!"
63 is boring and sensible and convincing. I was hoping that there was going to be some sort of intellectual property argument here. (The alliance everyone has been dreading: the IRA and the RIAA.)
re: 64
Unfortunately the Emeritus Professor wrecked the ekranoplan on a misguided jaunt to Atlantis.
63: Huh. A promise of confidentiality seems like exactly the sort of area where you'd expect an implied term like that not to apply. It's perfectly standard to expect a journalist to go to jail to protect a source -- while there are some press shield laws, they're not everywhere and they're pretty new. Mostly, my reaction is figuring that I'd expect a reporter to go to jail rather than reveal information on straightforward non-political criminals, so I don't see why I'd expect less from a historian.
||I'm going to be in London this week. I'm arriving Wed. morning (Aug 11) and leaving the following Monday morning. Anyone around? Yes, rather short notice.>|
re: 68
Gah. I'm in Edinburgh for work from Wednesday until Monday.
Maybe some others are around? Alex? Ginger Y? tierce?
66. Never mind. According to Wikipedia the Russians are going to resume production of Lun class ekranoplans this year, so we can replace it. That's much more exciting than boring old ethical codes.
Can I be slightly annoyed here.
1. It wasn't like only one side of the this conflict was torturing people and murdering civilians, and yet the hammer on decades old crimes is only coming down on one of the two sides. Does anyone think if a SAS member admitted similar facts (murdered a IRA informant on orders) he would be looking at any legal trouble at all? I think that this is important, but I'll admit, I'm not sure why I have that reaction.
2. I think duty to report laws are generally speaking bad ideas, and in the case of suicidal thoughts REALLY bad ideas.
Does anyone think if a SAS member admitted similar facts (murdered a IRA informant on orders) he would be looking at any legal trouble at all?
Yes I do, as a matter of fact. They're not meant to discuss these things.
72. I'm not looking for examples of point missing.
re: 68
July, you mean? I'm away this Wed to Monday. I'll be here in August.
I'd like to come out strongly in favor of the duty to report law concerning specific threats to others.
Yes, July. I'm in London from July 11-16, and I could meet any time from the 11th in the evening until the 15th in the afternoon.
I think that in the UK health records are not as protected as they are in the US. In the US psychotherapy notes are even more protected than others with the exception of the harm to self or others which came after the Tarasoff case, I believe.
There was a GP named Crippin who used to have a blog. He always urged his patients whose problems were mostly issues of stress management to talk to him rather than a consultant because it could affect their eligibility for life insurance and was reportable.
the hammer on decades old crimes is only coming down on one of the two sides. Does anyone think if a SAS member admitted similar facts (murdered a IRA informant on orders) he would be looking at any legal trouble at all?
Given that the PSNI has just started a murder enquiry into Bloody Sunday 1972, I'm going to go with a big "yes" and a side helping of "you don't actually know what you're talking about here".
re: 71
Actually, that's not entirely fair. The protestant paramilitaries haven't entirely gotten off the hook, and there's been (some) ongoing press attention and inquiry [e.g. Saville, etc] into: government collusion in crimes by serving soldiers; protestant paramilitaries acting on information or direction provided by agents of the state (e.g. the Finucaine murder); and actions by IRA informants working for the British (e.g. 'Stakeknife', the Force Research Unit, etc).
Is the government interested in explicitly admitting the really dirty stuff they did? No. But it's not as if no-one knows they did it, and any hypothetical Truth and Reconciliation commission would have to take it into account.
On preview part-pwned by ajay.
76 was me. Stupid Mac can't remember my info
77. It's reportable in the sense that if you apply for life insurance you're obliged to declare pre-existing conditions which will affect the actuarial decision on your application. Is that not the case everywhere?
It's a somewhat technical distinction, but the reporters who have been fined or served brief jail sentences are usually held in civil, not criminal, contempt (there may be a counterexample but I'm not thinking of it right now). I can't think of a journalist carrying the source-protection idea sonar that they would commit an affirmative crime, such as the destruction of evidence for these tapes.
In any event, reporters who go to jail to protect their sources in jurisdictions without shield laws are basically engaging in civil disobedience in the service of a vision of the role of the press and confidential sources for reporting. I don't think the issue there is well framed as one of keeping a promise. Civil disobedience is fine, but a call to civil disobedience requires thinking about the values at stake and the point of the disobedience.
Here, I don't see resisting disclosure as protecting either an important principle (researchers should just accurately state how confidential they can keep oral histories) nor do I see it as worth resisting in these particular circumstances (ie, to take a pure hypothetical, civil disobedience might have been justified to protect, say, ANC members from prosecution by the apartheid South African government, but I don't have those kinds of concerns for IRA terrorists).
Psychiatrists/therapists don't have to report past crimes, but any notes they have are subject to subpeona and they should tell their patients that when they initially discuss confidentiality. At least, that is the law in Wisconsin.
71.2 duty to report laws are ... in the case of suicidal thoughts REALLY bad ideas.
Agreed. But some shrinks are more relaxed than others. I visited one recently (but I've known him for a while) to see about this prolonged grief reaction and after we talked for a bit he said "At some point you'll fall seriously ill and when it all gets to be too much you will kill yourself. You know that's true and I know that too. Meanwhile, let's see what we can figure out for the time between now and then." I do appreciate his zero tolerance for bullshit approach.
I'm away this Wed to Monday.
It would be a better excuse if you were away to wed this Monday.
Here, I don't see resisting disclosure as protecting either an important principle (researchers should just accurately state how confidential they can keep oral histories)
But that's the exact principle I'm defending here.
You can say that research into past criminal acts ought not be done as oral history, I suppose, but if you're going to do such research, you're going to have to offer confidentiality. And if you offer confidentiality, you ought to mean it.
There ought to be some way to encrypt files such that the encryption key only becomes available upon verification of someones death.
Public key encryption, but adjust the key size depending on how long you want it to stay secret. Of course, you might be off by orders of magnitude, depending on technological and algorithmic advances.
Divorce lawyer friend was shot at near me a couple weeks ago.
Yikes!
ekranoplan
I should keep a list of things that I would never have heard of without Unfogged.
Mostly, my reaction is figuring that I'd expect a reporter to go to jail rather than reveal information on straightforward non-political criminals, so I don't see why I'd expect less from a historian.
This is arguably less an ethical issue (in practice - did Judy Miller strike you as especially ethical?) than a pragmatic one. Journalists who burn their sources soon won't have any sources.
||
I'm taken with the learned judge in the UK version of the Apple/Samsung spat, who has handed down an opinion finding for Samsung on the grounds that Galaxies don't imitate iPads because "They are not as cool."
|>
did Judy Miller strike you as especially ethical
Judy Miller was pragmatic in just the sense that you describe - she refused to report anything that a valued source would not want reported. So she had lots of sources. But she wasn't ethical.
68: I'm sorry -- still not well enough to travel into London for anything except a family funeral ... no no, sweet of you to offer to arrange one, but you don't need to go to all that trouble.
82: I think that it might have been the fmconsultation alone. He took down his blog, so I can't find it. I just remember thinking that it seemed really different.
I don't have super-strong feelings on whether a law protecting the confidentiality from disclosure in a criminal investigation of oral history research like this would be appropriate, along the lines of something like what the NIH does (and which I hadn't known about before, thanks Moby).* Certainly there is oral history that gets done right now without such protection, so such protection isn't *necessary* for oral history. I don't think that there's a civil disobedience principle worth fighting for that would require the researcher to commit a crime in these circumstances.
*I don't think the case for journalistic shield laws is overwhelming, and the protection for pure historians should arguably be less -- a journalist is, at least often, providing information about an ongoing event in real time that can be stopped, where the historian is just compiling information about the past. But as I say I don't have a very strong view.
92: Reminiscent of the Duke sucks ruling.
Unfortunately the Emeritus Professor wrecked the ekranoplan on a misguided jaunt to Atlantis.
I do hope that you've read the Atomic Robo comics which were recommend at CT a while back. It took me a while to warm up to the art style but, having done so, I highly recommend them.
44, 46, 57: IRBs are an institution by institution set up in the US. Rather than passing laws governing research, the federal government has waived the big hammer of loss of all sources of federal funding for serious institutional violations, so each college or university with its shit together has put in place a review process that they think will keep them covered/fits with evolving academic standards. Back around 2002 when the big freakout came down, some historians were exempt from IRB review and some were subject to essentially the same kind of review that a study taking blood samples from children would face.
These days most HSRIRBs, including Boston College's, have a category for "oral history" in their methods section and such projects go through expedited review if they don't trigger any red flags. Discussion of criminal activity, however, is a great freaking red flag and you can bet that whatever the reserch set up was gone over in some detail by the college. In my experience that should have included sample consent forms and substantially changing the nature of a consent form, say, by removing qualifiers on the assurance of confidentiality, would have required a separate submission for approval to amend the the existing protocol. So, my take is that these historians were sloppy; given the stakes involved for their informants, whatever you think of them, unethically so.
I always thought that the confidentiality agreements in this kind of situation just meant "we'll definitely keep things confidential from anyone who doesn't show up with a valid subpoena, and if someone shows up with a subpoena, we'll do what we can to fight it, but we can't make guarantees." But I guess that might not be explicitly stated.
30: Who is supposed to be Anne Frank in this case?
To LB's point, this a question of how one understands professional obligations. Journalists go to jail, because they believe they have a responsibility to protect the confidentiality of their sources, but the state/law disagrees. There is no consensus among historians about what obligations we have to protect informants. I mean, we all agree that we have one, of some kind, but there's no consensus on what that entails or how much we need to put ourselves personally at risk to fulfill it. This is a difficult case for making good sense of that, because it was essentially a provisional commitment to non-disclosure on the institution's part, and an unqualifed one on behalf of the institution by the researchers, and, moreover, the informants aren't anonymous apparently, just not released until after their deaths. So it's hard to see what actionable (sorry) obligations anyone has to protect information. The researchers aren't in possession of the data and can't hide or destroy it and the institution always said that it would turn the material over if compelled to. Any future such research is probably doomed unless its carried out by journalists or private individuals who keep quiet about the whole thing until everyone's burried, but that's probably better than creating institutional repositories of identifiable criminal acts.*
A much more difficult situation, in terms of profession ethics, is one where an assurance of annoymity has been made and proceedures to enforce that (destroying notes, using annonymized codes to identify informants, etc) followed, but where the individual researcher is compelled to testify about individual subjects. There, I would say, there is something much more like the obligation of reporters and news agencies at play.
* There are, of course, any number of situations where you'd want to protect individuals from prosecution by corrupt states, including violence carried out in the course of a freedom struggle, but inevitably that's a political decision about which struggles are legitimate and an ethical question of what's legitmate violence and what's a war crime.
Would make for a cool headline if there were 401,000 interviews (though people unfamiliar with USA investment tax law would not appreciate it).
I always thought that the confidentiality agreements in this kind of situation just meant "we'll definitely keep things confidential from anyone who doesn't show up with a valid subpoena, and if someone shows up with a subpoena, we'll do what we can to fight it, but we can't make guarantees."
This.
And I would further assume (though perhaps wrongly?) that the interviewees thought the same thing about the confidentiality agreement into which they had entered. They must have known the 'guarantee' was not iron-clad, surely? I mean, they must have known, and yet they granted the interviews nevertheless. I think people just like to talk.
I have encountered professors who though that the Milgram 'torture' experiments were unethical because
by lying to the participants, the experimenters corrupted the subject pool.
Interpretations of those experiments run from 'proves you cannot trust psychologists' to 'proves you should
trust experts in change -- when experts tell you something is all right, it probably is, even if it does not
seem so'. (In fact, it is worth noting that in this case the experimenter was indeed correct: it was all right
to continue giving the 'shocks' ).
71
History is written by the winners.
Except for Von Wafer, of course.
History is written by the winners.
Yes, and two wrongs don't make a right; and if you can't say anything nice about a person, please don't say anything at all.
Today's episode in meaningless, content-free platitudes (masquerading as deep wisdom, or perhaps as hard-boiled, hard-nosed cynicism-as-pragmatism) brought to you courtesy of your mother Mr. James B. Shearer.
Prosecutions were brought against British soldiers for murder of members of the IRA during the Troubles. I mean, I have no huge regard for British justice in Northern Ireland, but there was an effort to try and pretend to be keeping to the rule of law, and there still is.