February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Speaking to the Irish Echo at last weekend’s Pat Finucane conference in Trinity College Dublin, Cullen said the president had the moral authority to make the British face up to the legacy of what many see as its “dirty war” in Northern Ireland.
“President Obama has the inclination to take moral stands and to use moral persuasion to return a friend to the right path. And I think he will, in due course, do that (with Britain),” said Cullen.
But the general – who was invited to the White House with other retired generals on the second day of the Obama presidency to witness the signing of the executive orders closing Guantanamo and banning torture of prisoners – said the British remained in denial about their role in the murder of Pat Finucane.
“When we look at the Pat Finucane case, we are looking essentially at state-sponsored terrorism,” he said.
“The British need to close this case by dealing with it directly and honestly. This is a cancer within the British legal system, and until they excise that cancer by exposing it to the surgeon’s knife, and extracting it from the body politic of English law, they can never look the rest of the world in the face and talk about the rule of law, and what others should do.”
Meanwhile, speaking at the weekend at a ceremony in honor of Sinn F