This is distressing.
Police in Northern Ireland arrested Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams Wednesday in connection with an infamous 42-year-old slaying, based on allegations contained in taped interviews recorded for a Boston College history project on the conflict in Northern Ireland.
A law enforcement official from Belfast said Adams was being questioned, but has not been charged, in the killing of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 who was abducted in west Belfast in 1972. The Irish Republican Army later took responsibility for killing McConville, whom they suspected of being an informant....
For BC’s Belfast Project, researchers Ed Moloney, a journalist, and Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA volunteer, recorded interviews with members of militia groups that clashed during the Irish Troubles, a conflict between those who would unite Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland and those who wanted it to remain within the United Kingdom.
I'm fairly confident, having kept up with this stuff, that Adams probably did order the McConville hit. But I'm also pretty sure that any prosecution will fail. I could be wrong.
But. This:
The greater issue for Moloney is that surrender of the oral history tapes will chill similar research in the future.
“The damage is done,” he said. “The whole process of conducting academic research in the United States of America on sensitive subjects with confidential sources has been dealt a death blow by the Obama Department of Justice.”
He later added: “It’s a disaster in Ireland, as well, because it means people are not now willing to sit down in front of a tape recorder and tell the truth about what happened.”
We could have known, now we wont.