WAR, NATO and the LISBON Treaty

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report

Monday September 07, 2009 10:00

by Edward Horgan - PANA, IAWM, Shannonwatch

International Peace Conference at Shannon Airport

A very successful peace conference was held at Shannon airport on Sat 5 Sept 09 for the purpose of highlighting the interconnections between the establishment of a US forward airbase at Shannon airport, the militarisation of Europe, the abuse of Irish neutrality and the Lisbon Treaty. The attendance of over 80 was mainly for Dublin, so it was great to get such a dedicated group of peace activists to Shannon to show them very clearly to extent to which Irish neutrality has been abandoned at Shannon airport and the extent to which Ireland is complicit in the crimes against humanity being committed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

Speakers at International Peace Conference, including Patricia McKenna, Joe Higgins and Mary Lou McDonald

I encourage others who attended this conference to add their views to this posting, and I would ask the main speakers to include summaries of their speaches also.
As usual, the US military helped to emphasise the relevance of our conference by having a Hercules C130 cargo plane with long-range fuel tanks, which was most likely carrying munitions through Shannon. The troops going to Shannon normally travel on chartered OMNI Air planes, and true to form, there was also an OMNI Air planeload of Armed US troops at the airport and in the terminal building as their aircraft was being refuelled. Some of those attending the conference were harrassed by airport security as they tried to take photos of the warplanes.

Of special importance,. and a probable new development was the presence of Brittish RAF material in containers marked RAF Briese Norton, which is one of the main Brittish air bases in the UK supporting the war efforts in Afghanistan. This may be a serious new development, with our former colonial abusers now also abusing Irish neutrality. Photos of these RAF containers will follow.
The following is a summary of John Lannon's addres to the conference - John has done very important work in establishing the www.shannonwatch.org website, and helping to create the database of information on the US military use of Shannon airport and Irish airspace.
John Lannon:
"Welcome to US Military Base Shannon … many of you remember when this area was under the full control of the Irish state and when there was little by way of human rights abuse happening here.

But times have changed … “new realities” …but killing is still killing; human dignity is still human dignity. And the right to self determination should still exist.

We can speculate about what role Shannon is really playing in the so-called new realities. And about what deals have been done with the Americans. But this morning I’d prefer to deal in facts. And to get the day started, here are a few facts …

Facts:
 average of 20 landings per week by airline contracted to carry US troops to/from Iraq. Over 1,000 armed US soldiers sitting in the duty free lounges every week. One of the troop planes, operated by Omni Air International, currently at the airport.
 20, 30 … sometimes 40 USAF or navy planes per month. These include in-flight refueling aircraft, executive jets and transport jet aircraft such as Boeing 737’s. They also included Hercules C-130 military transport aircraft, typically used to deliver weapons and other equipment to areas of military operations. They are capable, for example, of transporting the robotic Predator drone aircraft used by the US Air Force to track and hit targets from the air in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One of these on the tarmac now – visible from the approach road to the airport.
 We’ve logged known and suspect rendition planes at the airport. N54PA, N379P, N71PG … have all become familiar to those of us monitoring the airport activity. Regular requests made over the years to inspect these. Requests ignored; no action taken except to arrest the ones asking for the inspections in some cases!
 Weekly flights by Murray Air (subsidiary of National Airlines) carrying cargo to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Flightaware.com (live flight tracking system) indicates that one of these flights MUA872 due to land around 11.15.
 Kalitta Air – an airline that was found to be covertly transporting laser-guided bunker busters through Prestwick a couple of years ago – uses Shannon regularly. One landed at the airport a few days before Christmas …
 There are 2 US officers of military rank stationed at the airport [either of them at the conference?]. See press release …
 The Irish army and Gardai provide security for many of the planes of the US military or their contractors.

I urge conference attendees to take some time to look around the airport, and to ask the authorities if they have any knowledge of the cargo/weapons on board the US military or military contracted planes currently at the airport.

Summary of Edward Horgan's address to conference:

Shannon Airport’s Role in War and Torture

We owe a great debt of gratitude to our foreign and national guests for their contributions to this conference, and of course to all of you for attending, and we hope actively participating in this conference. The very successful peace conference we held here last March dealt more comprehensively with the local issues, the primary emphasis in this conference will be on the larger picture, on the Lisbon Treaty and on Ireland’s role and integrity in international affairs.

Our Minister for Justice has introduced a number of '"important" new laws recent. The first one made Blasphemy a crime – why do we need such a stupid law at this time? The second one that became law earlier this week makes possession of a Samurai sword illegal. The sword I have here is not a Samurai sword but it’s the next best thing. It’s a World War 1 mk 3 Lee Enfield bayonet and it looks like it got quite a bit of use too. I could probably be arrested for having this in a public place. I have been arrested at Shannon airport on five occasions for a lot less.

However, the same Minister for Justice, Dermott Ahern sees nothing wrong with allowing up to 500 US troops to pass though this airport each day, each soldier carrying with him on the aircraft both a automatic rifle and a pistol and at least 2000 bullets. But these soldiers are not just in possession of these items as souvenirs. They fully intend to use these weapons to kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan – yet our Justice Minister sees nothing wrong with this. If that were not enough, we have plane-loads of military material passing through this airport each week, including most likely, very dangerous high-explosive munitions, some of which probably contain depleted uranium. We know that at lease one airline, Murray Air, stated publicly that it has been granted a licence to carry depleted uranium munitions through Shannon airport. According to our ministers, there’s nothing wrong with that. They claim that is does not interfere with “Ireland’s traditional policy of military neutrality”. – except of course that in Bosnia, Kosovo, Basra, Baghdad and Afghanistan, children are dying horrible deaths through cancers due to these same depleted uranium munitions having been used indiscriminately in their localities.

The Irish Government claims to respect international law – yet it is in daily breach of the Hague Convention on neutrality here at Shannon airport. The Irish Government not only allows US troops to transit through Shannon airport, it invited them to do so in late September 2001, and then gave them a blank cheque as to who and what they may bring through Shannon airport. So far we know that up to one and half million armed troops have passed through this airport since 2001 for the purpose of participating in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan that have cost the lives of over one million people. But that all right, according to our ministers - sure haven’t we secured promises in the long-term, maybe, that Ireland will get legally binding guarantees that the Lisbon Treaty will not affect “Ireland’s Traditional Policy of Military Neutrality”. Of course it won’t, since no such Irish neutrality, military or otherwise has existed since 20 march 2003. However, Our Government still fraudulently maintains that Ireland is a neutral state.

A recent report in the New York Times revealed that the Blackwater mercenary company is contracted to transport and assemble Predator type drone unmanned aircraft for the specific purpose of assassinating Taliban leaders – this of course is highly illegal under international law, and almost every other law. We are investigating whether any of these drones have been transported through Shannon airport, as reported in the Phoenix magazine last week. Some of these aircraft have been involved in the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan including weddings that have killed dozens of women and children. Of course in such incidents, all the men killed are listed as terrorists by the US military, and the civilians are just collateral damage.

In case you think that the Afghan War is some sort of peacekeeping operation, the latest reports from yesterday make it clear that this is a bloody war that will cause thousands of more deaths before the US and NATO will slowly re-learn the lessons of Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq and the Russians lessons of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Yesterday morning German NATO troops in northern Afghanistan, a force that includes 7 Irish soldiers, called in an air-strike, on two stolen fuel trucks from which local villagers were drawing fuel. The fuel trucks had been stolen or “liberated” from a NATO convoy, and were intended to fuel the war against the Taliban. Between the bombs and the burning fuel up to 90 people were killed and an unknown number seriously injured and burned. NATO claims that all the victims were terrorists. These German NATO troops did not pass through Shannon airport but it is most likely that more than half the foreign troops in Afghanistan have passed through Shannon.

I am one of a team here at Shannon airport that has been organising peace protests and carefully monitoring the military materials and armed soldiers that are passing through Shannon. I want to acknowledge the very important support that we have been receiving from steadfast peace activists from Galway, Cork and Dublin over the past two years especially. We have set up a website called Shannonwatch in which we publish the key aspects of the information we compile. Since July 2008 we have been monitoring aircraft movements in far greater detail, and we have created a database of this information. I started doing this work in 2001. You may ask, why am I and others still doing this almost 8 years later? While the issue of neutrality is important, it is the human rights aspect that keeps us going, and that will keep us going for many years to come. The most basis human right is the right to life, and this right has been removed from over one million people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, in wars that were waged mainly by the US, partly in revenge for 3,000 deaths on 9/11 and partly as wars of resources.

Even if these wars were stopped tomorrow, there is still an urgent need to achieve accountability for Irish complicity in these crimes against humanity. While a key aspect of what we are doing is inform the Irish people of what is going on at Shannon, this long-term issue of accountability is even more important. Many Irish people simply don’t want to know.

The Lisbon Treaty is very important to us here in Shannonwatch, because of the deliberate spider’s web of lies that are being told to the Irish people, to fool them into voting yes in this referendum. These lies include the assertion several time a day on RTE news bulletins that Ireland is still a neutral state, and that the Irish Government has received legally binding guarantees that the Lisbon Treaty will in no way effect the so-called “Ireland’s traditional policy of neutrality”. First, there are as yet no such legally binding guarantees, just a promise that at some time in the future, possibly at the next stage of EU expansion, that the heads of all the other 26 existing EU States will give such worthless guarantees. All it will take is just one EU leader to refuse to sign up to this agreement that his or her predecessor may have agreed to in the past.
The greatest lie of course, is implied in this waffle about legally binding guarantees, which implies that Irish neutrality does actually exist at the present time. You cannot legally guarantee something that does not exist, and one look across the car-park from this hotel will show you that Ireland abandoned its neutrality on 20 March 2003.

I want to emphasise also, that while we certainly want this Lisbon Treaty to be defeated next month, but, win, loose or draw, the Shannonwatch team will not only be continuing our activities, including monthly vigils, but we will be stepping up our activities. We owe at least this as an act of atonement to the victims of the wars that have been facilitated by Ireland at Shannon airport, but also as part of our effort to achieve some accountability from those of our politicians who have been and still are complicity in crimes against humanity.

Our Shannonwatch database contains what we have seen or recorded electronically, but we are aware that it is most likely that other military war materials and personnel are going through more subversively or more secretly. In many ways we are surprised at how much we have been able to find out. When all put together, it amounts to clear Irish Government active complicity in crimes against humanity, including torture.

Someone once asked the question, why did Kamikaze pilots wear helmets? They didn’t need them where they were going. The same can be said for the bogus legally binding guarantees that our Government claims to have received from the EU heads of states. These guarantees, even if they were real, cannot protect our non-existent “Ireland’s traditional policy of military neutrality”.