To the people who say the troubles was not a war

You can stamp your feet and grit your teeth and choke back the tears of rage until the cows come home. And when the fury and frustration subsides all you have is you opinion.

Can you prove that Adams was an IRA man? No...neither can I. Anymore than I can prove that Maggie Thatcher, John Major, Ian Paisley or Patrick Mayhew were members of the SAS or Parachute Regiment or LVF.

It doesn't depend on anything. If you are in a car with a drug dealer does that mean you are in the trade? You may not like it but that's the LAW.

Is the Queen Of England a terrorist because Bashar Al-Assad spent 2 nights in Buckingham Palace as her guest?

Grow up and come back with a better argument.

"Tell me this , how come Adams has never taken any substantive legal action against any agency or individuals who say he was in the IRA."

Why exactly should he?

Would it make you happier if Adams said "Yes, I will admit that I was a RA man just as long as you people pay me a trillion quid for banging me up, in violation of International law, torturing me and shooting not only me be my family members" ?

You ought to think before you open your mouth. So I'll give you a second chance. Are you stating that killing civilians is "terrorism" ?

Do you write the "laws" of war?.

During the Falklands War (and it's amazing that we are calling that little skirmish a "war" yet centuries of oppression and resistance in Ireland is deemed a problem) ...the Prime Minister of the UK insisted that a retreating battleship be attacked and sunk and all on board perish. So the Belgrano was limping back to Argentina and British subs sank it anyway in a decision of ultimate cruelty and murder.

You see, when the Brits or the Americans kill at will to make a point there's always a justification.

Are you familiar with the concept "interment without trial" in violation of not only the Fourth Geneva Convention, International Law but also the Magna Carta?

In case you didn't know a "concentration camp" is by it's very definition, to CONCENTRATE those in one area and under their wing.

What would you call Diplock Courts. They are no different to drum-head courts martial or kangaroo courts.

In the 1970s, 1000s were rounded up and thrown into camps. No charge, no trial, just put into a camp. Now You will probably say "well it wasn't as bad as Dachau or Treblinka"

That's a concentration camp. The fact that they were all gassed to death doesn't make it NOT a concentration camp.

Auschwitz was a DEATH/EXTERMINATION camp.

As was Belsen, Buchenwald, Sobibor, Chelmno, Sachsenhausen.

These were DEATH camps.

Lengries and Torgau were concentration camps. You just got sent there, no questions asked.

Easy target? That doesn't really pass muster, no, yes? An easy target could be anyone. Why was this man shot dead?

My granny was born in 1908 and was walking to school with others in I suppose, 1916/17/18 in Burnfort, just outside Mallow.. She told me when I was a teenager that they had a lovely time on the way to school except when they heard a British army truck. and then ran into the briars in fear until it passed. No stories of walking to school barefoot in the snow...just being afraid of British soldiers.

You can flap all you want about books, and codes and statutes.

You opened your mouth and called the IRA a terrorist mob because they did something that you and YOUR mob have being doing for generations.

Is the cognitive dissonance kicking in yet? How many of your "brothers in arms" were banged up for hurting innocent people? Grainer? Lyndie England? that's about the hard and fast of it Dragging people around a dungeon on a leash, having dogs bite them, punching their teeth in as they are wearing menstrual sodden women's underwear on their faces. ... and taking selfies?

And who gets punished? Not the sadistic bastards who do this but the ones who report it.

If you think that the IRA are scum because they plant a bomb in a pub and call to give a warning, yet you and your crew just napalm a village or obliterate a wedding party and later say you "took out" a "high ranking ISIS or Al-Queda" leader, ought you not hold youself to a higher standard?

You swore an oath to the US Constitution (as if that means anything to anyone). The second you took part in a war of aggression and occupation you betrayed that oath.

Listen, if you get your kicks being a violent man then fine. Don't bluff us out that you are doing the right thing and you are all legal and righteous. You'll never stand trial, Manic, but under the definition of the Geneva Conventions, you are a war criminal.

Would an off duty Gestapo agent or Gendarme collaborator in France in the 1940's be a legitimate target of the French Resistance? Or a French judge who hands down brutal sentences to Algerians rioting against occupation? You can't have it both ways. I'm pretty certain some sage will chime in with that threadbare cliche "whataboutery".

People don't like to admit it because it's uncomfortable but occupying armies for all their pieties about fighting the good fight and "helping" the people they are brutalising do commit atrocities. They do target civilians. They do engage in collective punishment and they most certainly conduct false flag operations to further their agenda. You might be a bit too squeamish to contemplate such disturbing and unsavoury possibilities, but that's your problem.

"We do? I must have missed that paragraph in the manual. Except the IO manual, of course, where absolutely the civilian population is deliberately targeted, but that's perfectly lawful."

Don't give me this UCMJ nonsense. What do you call Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What, the bombs slipped out of the payload door by accident. Something like 4000 US POW's were also incinerated as they were in a prison on the outskirts of Hiroshima. The US knew the location but bombed anyway. What about the carpet bombing of Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia. You then get these "rules of engagement" that are oh so secretive. A Humvee in Iraq comes under fire and the top-gunner is ordered to just shoot everything that moves. He lays down a withering 360 degree field of 50 calibre gunfire slaying everything in that radius. After a bomb killed a load of Marines in Lebanon in 1983, that old asshole Ronnie Reagan had a US Navy warship lie off the coast and just pound the sh!t out of Beirut and other civilian centres. The firebombing of Dresden. The massacre of a retreating army and civilians from Kuwait in 1991. There's nothing made-up here. Don't take my word for it. Maybe read some books by intelligent men like Smedley Butler, Stan Goff, Howard Zinn, etc and a dose of reality might kick in.

Why am I "losing" if I reference Nazi history? I thought I was referencing French History. This whole Godwin's Law thing is a construct for people such as yourself to shut down a discussion. A kind of get-out clause. Tell me, were French collaborators in the 1940's legitimate targets of the French Resistance? If you can't answer that question it's because you don't want to. Because it will expose your double-standards and hypocrisy. Tell me this (and I'm confident the cognitive dissonance will kick in fast and furious), if Afghan Pashtun fighters targeted and killed civilians under Soviet rule as opposed to British or American rule would you see them all as the same terrorists?

You don't even have to answer that. I know that deep down you'll have less intolerance for "terrorist" action against Russians than against the US/UK. You'll give the Brits a free pass for their crimes and atrocities but you will froth at the mouth over the Chinese in Tienanmen Square and Hong Kong. You'll rage against the Chinese treatment of Tibetans or Uighurs or Turkish treatment of Armenians and Kurds, but you won't say a damn thing about what the Belgians did to the Congolese, The Portuguese to the Angolans, The Spanish to the Morrocans and most of South and Central America, the Dutch did to the Indonesians. You'll be conspicuously silent about Arial Sharon overseeing the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp massacres. Thousands were butchered. Yey you will scream to the rafters about IRA civilians deaths and on top of that you will try to say that I am "losing" because I brought up resistance to German occupation.