Perhaps. However, I think it is important to investigate the IRA thing because it may help the people in the USA who are not aware that the IRA is an illegal terrorist group realise exactly what it is, if these allegations are true of coarse.
To me it looks likely it is true, but of coarse it is not proven beyond doubt quite yet.
I do not know enough about USA govt links to Columbian terrorist groups to comment. But it’s certainly not an excuse the IRA should use when they’re trying to negociate a peace process in one country…
The IRA aren’t using it, though, I am. And what I’m trying to explain to you is that this is why a lot of people don’t particularly care whether they’re aiding FARC or not. The instability of Colombia is down to a lot of factors or which FARC are only one, and I and many others believe US policy in the region has far more responsibility for it than anything the IRA could do.
Well, I think that, whether the links to FARC exist or not, almost any American who’s heard of the IRA knows it’s a terrorist group. It’s not like the IRA is really secret about what they believe and what they do.
I thought the links between the US government and paramilitaries were common knowledge. Granted they are somewhat indirect, but very real. From Human Rights Watch:
The U.S. provides military assistance to the Colombian military. Some units of the Colombian miltary have collaborated with paramilitaries. Therefore, the U.S. has links to Colombian paramilitaries.
My bad, chula. I assumed “linked” meant actual support or contact. Just so you know, the AUC is anathema to the American government - it is much more intimately involved in the drug trade than even FARC.
No, I didn’t mean “actual support or contact” - though frankly it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that was going on as well. And I really shouldn’t have specified paramilitaries, as the actual Colombian military (to which the US’s links are quite clear) has often been bad enough. The full text of the HRW report chula refers to can be found here.
Essentially I was simply (if somewhat carelessly, sorry) trying to convey both that the US government’s hands are far from clean where the mess in Colombia is concerned, and that the US government may well have an agenda which makes its investigation into alleged IRA-FARC links rather suspect.
You guys can’t just redefine “link” to suit your argument. “Actual support or contact” is just one type of link. The US government gives large sums of money and weapons to the Colombian military with the full knowledge that some of it will be used to terrorize Colombian people. And I would say that training paramilitaries in terrorist techniques does constitute “actual contact.”