A sobering tale of state-sponsored terrorism

There's nothing more dangerous than a state that believes its ends somehow justify its means

Sir John Stevens certainly knows how to pack a great deal into 20 pages. His slender interim report, published yesterday, into the murder in 1989 of Pat Finucane, the Belfast lawyer who represented leading republicans, was expected by some to be a "whitewash". I sincerely hope that it isn't, because the depravity, evil and corruption outlined yesterday by Sir John is already unbearably shocking, chilling and vile.

In an odd way, though, this confirmation of the cruel, inhuman corruption of some of those forces ranged against the republican-sympathising community during the Troubles is timely. Many people now feel what they believe to be righteous frustration at the stalemate in the peace process, which is generally and simplistically characterised as being caused by the IRA's reluctance to decommission.

So it is sobering to look at this emerging story of something uncomfortably close to British state-sponsored terrorism, and see confirmation that some of the most awful allegations made against Ulster and Britain by the republicans had very much more than a slender basis in truth. What deep wells of justified bitterness, resentment and distrust have been overcome on the republican side in order to bring the process this far. Nowadays, we have become fond of declaring that the Northern Ireland peace process is an object lesson in how to engage with terrorism. Maybe, latterly, it became so. But it is also a miracle and a gift, given all that went before. That we are now so smug about the process suggests that we have already begun to take peace for granted.

Sir John's report should put an end to that. Peter Cory, a retired Canadian judge, will decide whether there is to be a public inquiry into this lot. What's to decide? While we are not privy to the mounds of information that have been put before him, there was enough in Sir John's report to suggest that anything less than a full tribunal would be quite unacceptable. It is not his place to comment, but I'd be extremely surprised if Sir John does not privately hold that view himself.

Sir John, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, described his document as "robust". In it he said, more or less, that the police and the Army had colluded with Protestant paramilitaries in murdering innocent people, when instead they could have saved them; that they had then spent years covering up this evidence in the most blatant and anarchic of ways, and that the malign influence of these elements in the forces, namely the Royal Ulster Constabulary's Special Branch and the Army's Force Research Unit, had reached as far as the House of Commons.

Nor did Sir John in any way suggest that the implications of these allegations and others – for each of which he stressed he had evidence and documentation – related only to the past. Instead he hinted that the system under which these unspeakable criminal abuses had flourished had not yet changed, and that until change had been affected, Britain's democratic accountability was undermined and that the country's ability to wage any sort of "war on terrorism" would remain tainted.

In his efforts to emphasise just how shocking he and his staff had found the evidence they uncovered, he spoke of how six of his inquiry team had found themselves unable to continue with policing, how several had believed themselves to be suffering from heart trouble, only to find that their painful symptoms were of stress, and that the skin of others had erupted into boils as they assembled their information.

Sir John also was at pains to explain why his inquiry – as yet incomplete – was taking so long. It was, he said, because the lack of co-operation from the forces involved meant that his team had been obliged to build their own intelligence from scratch – amounting to 9,256 statements, 1,000,000 pages of documentation, and 16,194 exhibits. All this is unlikely ever to result in the prosecution of any of the killers of Mr Finucane, who was murdered in front of his wife and children, even though their names have been known for years. Of the four most deeply implicated in the killing itself, three – William Stobie, Tommy Lyttle and Brian Nelson, are dead. The fourth lives in Britain, his identity protected. All were RUC special branch agents.

Sir John claimed to share the "frustration" the Finucane family felt about the failure to bring the killers to justice. He also stressed that the Commons statement by a junior minister, Douglas Hogg, that suggested in a veiled reference to Mr Finucane that some lawyers had links to the IRA, had no basis at all in fact. If he does share their frustration, he must see that the claims of Mr Finucane's widow, Geraldine, that some of those responsible for covert operations at the time of her husband's death have since been promoted, and even honoured by the Queen, must be fully and publicly investigated.

All of this matters for its own sake, and for the sake of the continued progress of the peace process. Sir John talks of "mistakes" and how they must be learned from. But these illegal and immoral operations were not "mistakes". They were crimes of the most cowardly and damaging kind. The damage that betrayals like these cause is to the fabric of civil society itself. Nothing but total rejection of such crimes is a defence against their ability to wreak havoc and distrust.

Now, as the West is being asked by its various governments to surrender its civil liberties as part of the war against terrorism, it is timely to remind those who believe this to be a small price to pay, that the price is not always small. When the state itself cannot be trusted to uphold civil liberties, then the population cannot afford to surrender a single one of them.

Sir John was at pains to stress the horror of the killing of Brian Lambert, a 19-year-old student doing work experience on a building site, who had no connection with any terrorist organisation, but who was shot in the head in error. His innocent death indeed was appalling, as was the innocent death of Mr Finucane, whose great crime, it seems to me, was to uphold the rights of people his pursuers knew they were violating grossly. But the deaths we have not learned the details of yet, rumoured to run into treble figures, of people involved in paramilitary organisations, are just as unforgivable.

It is important to remember that even the "guilty" have rights which must be upheld, not simply because the innocent might be mistaken for them, but because those charged with upholding the principles and policies of a democratic state cannot be allowed make their own interpretation of how those principles should be served. Those who detest the proliferation of "rights" fail to understand that it is their own cavalier contempt for the rights of humanity that necessitates their tedious, minute, legal definition.

There is nothing more dangerous than a state that believes it can make its own rules, because its ends somehow justify its means. Mr Finucane's family have called on Tony Blair himself to order a public inquiry into the "widespread evidence of collusion" that Sir John has begun to uncover. If he does not, them the electorate can draw only one conclusion – that Mr Blair cares no more for British law than he does for international law. Before he calls for truth and reconciliation in Iraq, Mr Blair should call for truth and reconciliation much closer to home.

d.orr@independent.co.uk