Roy Greenslade – Agent Of Influence – TPQ – Anthony McIntyre Explores a Strange Story

Anthony McIntyre offers a useful review of the Roy Greenslade story. At this stage I agree that the retired Professor is probably telling the truth, denying any role in an alleged IRA plot to kill the journalist Liam Clarke in 1988. We should all accept that denial unless any new facts are brought forward casting doubt on the former journalist’s statement.

I have previously written that I took solace from the fact that some British journalists were prepared to at least see things differently. When scribes were flocking to buy the deceptions of the British Army’s Lisburn Lie Machine there were others who did not join the queue to receive the daily dung diet. Greenslade went further than most: while managing news editor with the Sunday Times he wrote a column for An Phoblacht/Republican News under the pseudonym George King. It raises ethical questions but at the same time were he to have been out in the open he would instantly have rendered himself unemployable. If he wasn’t hiding behind his pseudonym to smear people but was instead using it as an enabler to convey accurately the situation as he read it for the benefit of public understanding, there is no reason that I can think of to be particularly perturbed.

For his delayed candour, Greenslade has faced a barrage of criticism: including the charge that he may have known in advance about an IRA plot to kill a journalist working for him, the late Liam Clarke.  These suspicions, while genuinely held, are speculative and Greenslade has denied any such thing.

Greenslade says “I categorically deny passing any information to the IRA at any time. I didn’t have any information to pass on. I was an intellectual supporter, not a practical one. I was not privy to any classified information. I was an office-bound executive with no contact personally or by phone with any person from the security services. So, it follows that I didn’t pass any such information to anyone.”

It is well within the bounds of probability that he is telling the truth.
— Read on www.thepensivequill.com/2021/03/agent-of-influence.html

As Anthony McIntyre says, Roy Greenslade’s timing is “strange” :

It has been a tough week for the British professor of journalism, Roy Greenslade, who for some reason decided to commit the literary equivalent of a soldier’s suicide. With what was considered rather strange timing, he popped his head outside the camouflage and into the crosshairs of the many snipers who at the time were not even scanning the terrain for a target, but who nevertheless pulled the trigger the minute he stepped into their sights. 

Mainstream media organs are concentrating on Greenslade’s newly-revealed (and concealed) long-term support, since 1972, for Sinn Féin and the IRA. They pay little or no attention to Greenslade’s active participation in a British Covert State frame-up of Arthur Scargill and the British National Union of Miners (NUM) in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Smearing opponents (anti-journalism) seems to be a continuous Greenslade practice. His 2014 attack on a rape victim, Máiria Cahill, is an ugly example. https://pressgazette.co.uk/roy-greenslade-ira-northern-ireland-coverage-scrutinised-rusbridger-speaks-out/. At that time Greenslade lectured and wrote on the subject of “ethics” in journalism – an example of brazen black humour, an anti-journalist passing judgement on journalists.

The method is embedded in the British Ruling Class armoury. It continues today, most prominently in the revolting “anti-semitism” campaign against former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Everybody active on the left should resist anti-journalism.

John Meehan March 8 2021