David McCloskey

The handlers know exactly what's going on.

I think here there's really three things that are happening.

The first one is that there are murders that are committed by agents of the state.

So there are cases here where one agent murders another agent, right?

And also rolled up into this are that agents do things that sort of go beyond or directly contradict the orders given to them by their handlers.

There's also the murder of alleged agents.

including some of the victims weren't agents at all, but there's nothing done to stop them.

And then there are cases where actually the violence, the murder could have been prevented.

So the British Army, the FRU, the Force Research Unit,

may have actually had forewarning.

They may have had intelligence that someone was going to be killed, but they didn't act on that to prevent the murder for fear of exposing Scappaticci, Stakenife, or another agent inside the IRA.

I was trying to think of what a direct comparison might be in the U.S.

today.

And the closest I could get would be if the FBI, most likely be the FBI, were running a source who's an American citizen, like a confidential informant, inside a drug cartel or inside an organized crime syndicate.

And as part of their job,

they had to commit violent crime against other American citizens.

And in this case, the direct parallel would be if the FBI

had forewarning of this in some cases where you have an American citizen who is going to kill other American citizens and the security service law enforcement actually knows in advance that this is going to happen and decides in some cases not to intervene because of the value that the source is providing or may provide in the future.

You could make the case that it kind of happened like in the Whitey Bulger case at the FBI where his handlers did know in some cases it seems that he was committing murder.

And allowed it to happen.