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Edited on Sat Nov-08-08 09:49 AM by Divernan
See this article for the background: www.counterpunch.org/boyer05232008.html From the H-Blocks to a Texas Jail
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan By SANDY BOYER and SHAUN HARKIN
TWENTY-SIX years ago, Pol Brennan was an Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, watching his friends die on hunger strike. Today, he is in solitary confinement in a Texas immigration holding center. His story reveals a great deal about the evolving Anglo-American attitude toward the IRA wrought by the Northern Ireland Peace Process. It is also where the war on "terrorism" meets the war on immigrants in the United States.
Pol Brennan was born in 1953 in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Belfast, Northern Ireland. While growing up, being detained and beaten by British soldiers or the pro-British police force was almost routine. By 1972, when he was 19, like many of his generation, he joined the IRA to end British rule in Northern Ireland. In 1976, Brennan was convicted of possessing explosives and immediately joined the blanket protest in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh prison. Here, IRA men refused to wear the prison uniform, demanding to be recognized, rightly, as political prisoners. They lived for years in cold prison cells, covered in nothing but a blanket.
Brennan shared a cell with Bobby Sands, the first man to die on the 1981 hunger strike for political status. As 10 men died, he lost several other friends. Along with British miners, Irish hunger strikers were on the vicious cutting edge of the Thatcher regime's attack on working people everywhere. In 1983, two years after the hunger strike ended, Brennan was one of 38 IRA prisoners who escaped from the H-Blocks. It was the largest prison break in British history from Her Majesty's Prison Maze, considered one of the most secure prisons in Europe.
Pol made his way to the Bay Area, where he met and married Joanna Volz, a U.S. citizen. They lived quietly until January 1993, when federal agents arrested Brennan on a British extradition warrant. He was forced to spend more than seven years fighting extradition, and was imprisoned for three of those years, half the time in a building with no windows. A campaign to block his extradition received wide support, with Noam Chomsky, Christy Moore and Alexander Cockburn among the many who spoke out on his behalf. The British government finally withdrew its extradition request in October 2000. By that time, Northern Ireland had changed dramatically. The IRA had ended its war. Sinn Fein, the main Republican political party, had agreed to govern Northern Ireland in coalition with Unionist political parties whose bottom line has always been preserving British rule in Ireland. In this new environment, Britain released IRA prisoners and withdrew its extradition requests.
(Much more in article)
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