NORTHERN IRELAND MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1972 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS, The subcommittee met at 9:35 a.m., in room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Benjamin S. Rosenthal (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Mr. ROSENTHAL. The subcommittee will be in order. The hearings which begin today represent a deep and continuing concern by the American people, and their Congress, for the tragic situation in Northern Ireland. By historic and cultural ties, and because many of our antecedents came from England and Ireland, this country sees itself as a close friend and a sympathetic witness to the terrible human, social, and political problems which engage both countries in Northern Ireland. The burden of finding solutions to these problems rests primarily on the countries involved. Yet no man of conscience can rest easy with that assertion and no country can subsist any longer behind the fiction that the nation-state system demands or even allows that injustices can continue simply because they occur wholly within national borders. WHY WE ARE INVOLVED For practical, as well as for moral reasons, we are all involved in the rights of other men. And when men begin to question the system of national authority protecting those rights, the legitimate interests of other nations are engaged as well. The only apology, therefore, of Americans viewing the tragedy in Northern Ireland is that they know not how to help. Our country, which still endures its own burden in a small country half the world away, cannot and should not maintain that questions of self-determination and peacekeeping in the world community must stop at the edge of the Atlantic. Vietnam is the world's concern; so is Ireland. Hopefully these hearings will point out some directions for the proper route to the goals of human freedom and justice. But if these hearings serve only to show our concern for these values and for the people in Ireland and England who must, in the first rank, pursue them, our work in the next 3 days is justified as a testament to the common interests of world and community peace which we all share. A VARIETY OF WITNESSES We will begin today with several Members of Congress, including two of our colleagues from the Senate. We will also hear from several organizations which represent a variety of political and religious viewpoints and from several individuals whose personal and direct experience in Ireland is relevant to the recent developments in Northern Ireland and to the resolutions which the subcommittee has before it. This afternoon we will hear from experts in the historical and legal aspects of Northern Ireland. Tomorrow the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, the Hon. Martin J. Hillenbrand, will speak for the Department of State. On both Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons we will also hear from visitors with various viewpoints from the Republic of Ireland, from Northern Ireland and from England. Our first witnesses today are our colleagues Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff. Let me say, gentlemen, on behalf of the whole subcommittee we are very pleased that you could join us this morning and are very anxious to hear your testimony. It is my understanding that Senator Kennedy will proceed initially. STATEMENT OF HON. EDWARD M. KENNEDY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS Senator KENNEDY. Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am honored to have the opportunity to appear before you and the other members of the subcommittee this morning as you begin these important hearings on the crisis in Northern Ireland. I would like to ask, Mr. Chairman, that my full statement be made a part of the record; I stand by all of it. Mr. ROSENTHAL. Without objection, so ordered. STATEMENT Mr. Chairman, I am honored to have the opportunity to appear before you and the other members of the Subcommittee this morning as you begin these important hearings on the crisis in Northern Ireland. The long and tragic Irish history is familiar to almost all Americans. For centuries, going back even beyond the settlement of the American colonies, Ireland has endured killing and violence, religious conflict and civil war. For hundreds of years, Ireland has seemed an incurable and interminable plague on Britain, destined to bring constant turmoil to unending generations of British and Irish people and their leaders. We know that our own century has seen its full share of the terrible death and destruction brought by Britain's inability to deal fairly and justly with the people of Ireland. Half a century ago, the world witnessed the traumatic upheaval and bloodshed that gave birth to the cruel experiment of partition. Now, a new chapter of violence and terror is being written in the history of Ireland, written on the front pages of every newspaper in the world, written in the blood of a new generation of Irish men and women and children. And once again, the people of Ireland are back at the forefront of history's greatest movement. They have joined the search in earnest for the only goal that really matters to people on earth, the search for which countless millions have died since history began, the search for human freedom and for liberty under God. SHOULD AMERICA BE SILENT? There are those who say that America should stand silent now in the face of the daily killing and brutality that is taking place in Northern Ireland, just as America stood silent over Bangladesh in the face of weeks and months of some of the worst cruelty and repression in the history of the world. I do not agree, and I do not think that most Americans agree. Our duty, our heritage, as citizens in a nation that has been the star of liberty in the world for two centuries, require us to speak out. Were I neither Catholic nor of Irish heritage, I would feel compelled to protest against the killing and violence in Northern Ireland, just as I have protested at other times in my years in the Senate against the killing and violence in other parts of the world, in areas like Vietnam, Biafra, the Middle East, and Bangladesh. The rising concern in Congress and the nation today over the violence in Ulster is a bright new chapter in the long and distinguished record of America's concern for human rights and equal justice in Ireland. Two hundred years ago, the Irish played a major role in securing the independence of the American colonies, a role acknowledged often by George Washington and our other great early patriots. And so, it was natural, during the following century, that the Irish struggle for their own self-government attracted wide sympathy and support in the new American nation. Throughout our history, and especially in periods of intensifying violence in Ireland, resolutions have been introduced in both Houses of Congress supporting the cause of Irish freedom. The platforms of both the Democratic and Republican parties in 1888 gave strong encouragement to the historic Home Rule campaign for Ireland led by Gladstone and Parnell at the time. Later, in the violence surrounding the Easter Rebellion in 1916 and the subsequent guerrilla war, Congress led the way in urging Woodrow Wilson to use the good offices of the United States to ease the crisis. Responding to the view of Congress and an American public outraged by the violence and brutality of that day, President Wilson took frequent and substantial steps to urge the Government of Britain to end the violence and achieve a peaceful settlement. EARLIER AMERICAN CONCERN Perhaps the high water mark of American concern in the Twenties was the formation of the prestigious Committee of One Hundred Fifty on Conditions in Ireland, a private group of distinguished Americans established by the New York Nation to investigate the situation in Ireland at the height of the violence fifty years ago. From its members, the Committee elected a smaller Commission to conduct a public inquiry, led by Jane Addams, the famous sociologist of Hull House in Chicago, Senator George Norris of Nebraska, and Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts, a man whose Senate seat I hold today. The Commission held 14 days of public hearings in Washington in the winter of 1920-21. It heard 41 witnesses, almost half of whom had come from Ireland to tell first hand about the violence and repression. The hearings and the Commission's subsequent report had enormous impact in mobilizing American public opinion. The vivid descriptions of cruelty and violence brought home to people throughout the country the awful horror of events in Ireland, and were an important influence leading toward the subsequent settlement of the conflict. As the Manchester Guardian commented in England at the time: "One can only read the report with a kind of helpless rage. A few leaders in Britain have landed us in the dock, without a defense, before the conscience of mankind." And so, these committee hearings today follow in a long line of important precedents demonstrating the concern of Congress and the nation for the cause of Irish freedom. The United States has a role to play, and I commend the members of this Subcommittee for acting now to bring the situation in Northern Ireland to the attention of the American people. In light of these important precedents, it is fair to ask, why is the Administration still so silent over Ulster? Why does it abdicate its responsibility to let the official voice of America speak out to end the killing? A few weeks ago, in the controversy over Britain's base on Malta, America was not so silent. We did not hesitate to intervene. The Administration was quick to prod the British then, when a few square miles of an obsolete island base of no military significance were at stake. Why is it so slow to act on Ulster now, where basic human rights and the lives of innocent people are in the balance? A RATIONALE FOR ACTION Indeed, if one is needed, the Administration could easily find a military rationale for action on the Ulster issue. We have a Naval Communications Station in Northern Ireland today that employs 300 U.S. Navy personnel and 150 Ulster citizens. It is located on the outskirts of Londonderry, near the Bogside, so that the potential for its disruption by the violence is all too clear. In addition, the 14,000 British troops now tied down in Ulster could be of obvious value in our effort to reduce American troops in NATO through replacement by European forces. Moreover, as Dr. Patrick Hillery succinctly put it on his recent visit to Washington, there could be no more gross intervention in the affairs of Ireland than the presence of British troops in Ulster. And, as we know, Britain has never been reticent to intervene on American issues. Indeed, the United States today would be partitioned into separate nations, North and South, if Britain had had her way in our Civil War a century ago. NOT SOLELY AN INTERNAL MATTER More important on the issue of intervention, Ulster cannot fairly be called the internal affair of Britain. Not a day goes by without new evidence of the deep involvement of the Republic of Ireland in the crisis-a separate and independent nation whose affairs and future are intimately bound up with the solution of the Ulster issue. We sent the aircraft carrier Enterprise to the Indian Ocean last December, and we intervened in other ways to try to tilt the balance between Indian and Pakistan, two nations with whom we have had long and friendly ties. But by some cruel irony today, we are unwilling even to make our good offices available to mediate a crisis over Ulster that involves two of our closest friends, Britain and Ireland. In sum, America can play a useful and entirely proper role on Ulster, if only we have leaders with the compassion to act and the wisdom to see the way. There is ample precedent in history, law and logic for us to make our good offices available, and I hope that we shall be equal to the task. That is why I welcome these hearings today. It is long past time for the Congress of the United States to go on record again, to take our stand on Ulster, to lend our voice to the effort to rally the conscience of the world to the cause of peace and liberty. And so I hope that this committee will consider the proposals before it fully, and report a measure that can bring a new call for reason and compassion on the Irish issue, and thereby move us farther along the road to peace. The measure that I favor is Senate Resolution 180, which I cosponsored with Senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut in the Senate last October, and which Congressman Hugh Carey of New York introduced on the same day in the House. Briefly, our Resolution contains a number of principal provisions that I believe deserve immediate implementation. AN END TO INTERNMENT First, there must be an end to the cruel and repressive policy of internment. More than six months have passed since internment was adopted, and the soaring daily toll of bloodshed, bullets, and bombing in Ulster is a continuing awful reminder of how wrong that policy was at its inception, how wrong it is today, and how wrong it would be to allow it to continue. The daily headlines tell us what Britain has done to Ulster, but we are only just beginning to realize what Ulster has done to Britain. It is fair to say, I think, that the launching of internment has brought British justice to her knees. Only last Wednesday, we witnessed that sordid spectacle of the British Parliament in London, sitting in the darkest hours of the night, steamrollered into rushing midnight legislation into law to reverse a decision by the High Court of Northern Ireland earlier that day, holding that British troops in Ulster had exceeded their authority under the constitution in carrying out their arrest, internment, and other orders. Day after day, week after week, month after month, the nation that gave Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus and Due Process to the world imprisons hundreds of innocent citizens of Northern Ireland, without warrant, charge or trial, often on evidence of the rankest hearsay and deception, on grounds so spurious, D so obsolete, and so discriminatory against the religious minority that they would be laughable, if the results were not so calamitous for the peace and people of Northern Ireland. DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL The notion of detention without trial is an abomination to democratic nations throughout the world, and it ought to be anathema to the British Government. Of all the great traditions of American liberty, we are proudest, perhaps, of the tradition of Anglo-Saxon law and justice, handed down to us from the pillars of British jurisprudence. And yet, by an historic irony, a far less drastic policy of preventive detention in the United States was instituted in the District of Columbia in recent years, but only after months of bitter debate in Congress, and then only with safeguards to prevent the worst abuses. By contrast, Britain's far more outrageous internment policy in Ulster was launched in the dead of night last August, without advance debate in Parliament, a quid pro quo, they say, for Brian Faulkner's agreement to ban the Orange marches. The decision was made without any notice at all, except the knock on the door in the dead of night in hundreds of Ulster homes, with the victims chosen as though by some cruel and irrational lottery and hauled away to places of detention that bore the hallmarks of concentration camps. The Protestants in Northern Ireland are fond of saying that Belfast is as British as Birmingham or Bristol, but does anyone doubt that if they tried to launch internment in Britain today, the Government itself would fall? And then, compounding the crime of internment, we saw the early reports of how the prisoners were treated in the camps. We read the reports of torture in the camps with horror, as they described the efforts of British intelligence to learn the secrets of the IRA by methods no civilized people can countenance. THE COMPTON REPORT On the heels of the first reports of torture we heard the outraged British denials. But many of the worst fears were confirmed in all but name by the report of the Compton Inquiry. Yes, said the Compton report, the prisoners were deprived of food and sleep. Yes, said the Report, the prisoners were spread-eagled against a wall for up to 48 hours at a time. Yes, the prisoners were shrouded in heavy black hoods, to induce a sense of desperate isolation. Yes, they were forced to suffer through the intense loud hissing noise of machines designed to surpass human endurance. Again and again, the Compton Report found the immoral and inhuman facts of torture. Yet, it whitewashed their meaning by Alice-in-Wonderland logic, by obscure and hypocritical phrases that denied brutality and spoke only of "ill treatment" and "deep interrogation," and by rhetoric that sought to justify obviously barbarous means by resort to a higher end. Over forty years ago, the distinguished American jurist, Louis Brandeis, dealt with the heart of the Compton argument in these words: "Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means-to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal— would bring terrible retribution." A generation later, in one of the great passages of British law, Lord Atkin stated the relevant principle clearly in his famous opinion in Liversidge v. Anderson, in words directly applicable to the logic of the Compton Report and its attempt to blur the difference between torture and "ill treatment": "I know of only one authority," said Lord Atkin, "which might justify the suggested method of construction: 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be masterthat's all.'" No nation that calls itself a democracy can justify a policy of internment for its citizens. And so the first step I urge Britain to take at once on Ulster is to end the police state policy of internment, and thereby bring back to Ulster the evenhanded justice for which Britain has always been renowned. |