Guardian of Law And Order

It's now open season on Lord Hutton, who failed to tell the 'left' what it wanted to hear. But the Guardian gets lower than the gutter in choosing a writer to take a shot at him. More the depth of a shallow grave.

In 1990 an IRA volunteer and suspected informer called Sandy Lynch was rescued by police while undergoing interrogation by IRA internal security (aka the 'nutting squad') in a house in Lenadoon, West Belfast. According to his court testimony, Fred Scappatici told him he'd better talk, or he'd 'be able to talk to me the way he wanted, hung upside down in a cattle shed. He said it didn't matter about me screaming because no-one would be able to hear'. He was resigning himself to a slow and terrible death when police burst in and arrested everyone in the house.

Among those present and arrested was Danny Morrison (known within the IRA as the 'Lord Chief Justice' for his power of life and death over informers), Sinn Fein's publicity director.

The man the Guardian thinks suitable to judge issues of the 'contradictions, the lies and the evasiveness' of government evidence.

The Guardian has inadvertantly raised one point in Hutton's favour. Morrison may just possibly be biased against Hutton, who sentenced him to eight years in jail for conspiracy to murder, IRA membership and kidnapping. My respect for Lord Hutton has doubled. Pity the sentence didn't.

(Info from Toby Harnden's Bandit Country, about the IRA in South Armagh)