Ganley Spills the Beans

So, at this stage we've established a few things. The figures behind Libertas are extremely closely connected to the US military and Intelligence community; their arguments appear to be clearly disingenuous; the US military and intelligence community are indeed opposed to the treaty. The facts are, by themselves, strong circumstantial evidence in favour of the idea that Ganley and McEvaddy's connections to the US military provide the underlying motives for opposing Lisbon. But can we do any better? Can we turn up any positive evidence to support our tentative conclusion?

As it happens, we can.

The "positive evidence" (Ganley's spilt beans) decribed is actually still circumstantial and speculative, but worth considering.

Conclusion

This article has examined the reality behing the Libertas campaign, the connections of its two high-profile backers, the implausibility of its message, the peculiar nature of its campaign and some of the underlying strategic differences at play. The conclusion is that the evidence suggests that Libertas is most likely to serve primarily as a vehicle for advancing US strategic interests. However, it is important to remember that while this is the most likely and most plausible conclusion about the underlying forces at play, it is impossible to ever be certain about any individual's motivation. It is possible that both Ganley and McEvaddy are both entirely genuine in their stated reasons for opposing Lisbon - although that would mean that they are also seriously stupid and completely incapable of understanding many of the elementary facts about the treaty. There's also the possibility that some other underlying motive is at play, but the evidence seems to points towards the Pentagon.

All of the material in this article is in the public domain. Ironically, the source of some of the information contained herein is David Cochrane's politics.ie site where more speculative and less well substantiated versions of this argument have been published over the last few weeks: see here: http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?f=172&t=34169 (hat-tip to ibis) It is interesting that despite all of this material being in the public domain, it has been Internet posters who have raised it, while the media has essentially provided Libertas with mountains of coverage, without bothering to even check as to whether it's a real campaign at all. That's because the Irish media does little other than recycle press releases, and is utterly cowardly when dealing with stuff that might annoy powerful people.

Finally, for those who might suspect that this is a hatchet job aimed at discrediting the No Campaign. I am actually a No campaigner myself. See here: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/86857