An opinion piece first published in the Irish Daily Mail on Jan 20th 2010

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On the 22^nd of July 2002 a Gulfstream jet, registration number N379P, landed at Shannon Airport. It was owned by Premier Executive Transport Service, a front company operated by the CIA. Its crew overnighted in Shannon and flew out to Washington the next day, no doubt well rested.

This was not a normal stop over, like hundreds that take place every day at Shannon, this was a getaway.

A few months before this a young man called Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan at Karachi Airport. He was handed over to US custody and the CIA sent this jet to pick him up. It flew him to Morocco, where he was held in a secret detention centre for 18 months and brutally tortured, before flying home through Shannon.

“I tried to put on a brave face,” he said later. “But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they’d electrocute me. Maybe castrate me. They took a razor to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. Then they cut my left chest.

“One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming.”

Eventually Binyam would end up in Guantánamo. Last February he was released after a total of nearly nine years in detention. He was never convicted of any crime.

‘Extraordinary rendition’ is one of those phrases like collateral damage that tries to hide what it is by sounding like something official, something legitimate but it is not.

It actually means CIA agents kidnap people in one country, sometimes using others to do their dirty work, and then secretly smuggle them to another country where they are generally held in secret. Once there they are interrogated, often tortured, either on the direct instructions or with the active participation of members of British and American intelligence.

While Guantánamo and renditions are the responsibility of the US, other countries made it possible. They allowed people to be transferred through their airports, took part in illegal detentions and kidnapping or, as in Ireland’s case, they allowed their territory to be used as a staging area for rendition operations.

The Irish Government says that no prisoners have ever been transported through Irish airspace. It knows this because President Bush says so. As our then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, put it in 2006, “I looked at the great President Bush and said to him, I wanted to be sure, to be sure, and he assured me”.

I doubt many were as convinced. The British Government was given the same assurances Bertie was. They were told prisoners were not being transferred through their territory. However in 2008 the US Government admitted that planes carrying prisoners had landed at a British air base on at least two occasions.

The simple fact is this. We don’t know whether the CIA has transported boys and men through Shannon Airport to be imprisoned and tortured elsewhere. Neither does the Irish Government. No one knows because suspected rendition flights are not searched by the Gardaí. Planes known to be involved in kidnapping boys and men have routinely used our airspace and airports but we are told that checks are not necessary. Imagine if planes known to be involved in drug smuggling were passing through Shannon and the Gardaí didn’t inspect them?

What we do know, and what we can say for certain, is that Shannon Airport was used as a launching pad for four rendition operations involving the kidnappings of at least four people, Abu Omar, Khaled al Maqtari, Khaled el Masri and Binyam Mohamed. We have the dates and the flight logs to prove it.

Yet the Irish Government has consistently refused to address the issue and seems uninterested in whether CIA agents were breaking the law while flying through Shannon Airport.

For some people, this is all in the past, the legacy of the Bush administration and its so-called ‘war on terror’. There is a widespread belief that President Obama ended the practice of renditions but this is not the case.

One year ago President Obama signed an order to close Guantánamo Bay and to end the CIA’s programme of long-term secret detention. But he did not end extraordinary rendition.

So is Ireland still being used as a stop over for the CIA? We don’t know. But we do know that suspect planes are still using Shannon.

Only last month human rights activists monitoring planes landing at Shannon announced they have identified five planes that were previously involved in renditions operations using Shannon since March of last year, some of them on multiple occasions.

The UN Human Rights Committee, the Irish Human Rights Commission and the Council of Europe have all called on the Irish Government to inspect suspect flights using Shannon Airport.

In November 2008 the Government responded to growing public pressure by setting up a Cabinet committee to review the law and ensure Gardaí had the power to board and search suspected rendition flights.

Green Party TD Ciarán Cuffe said at the time that, “This marks a sea change in the way the Irish Government intends to approach the issue. It is a signal that this Government is taking human rights seriously”.

Over a year later there is still no sign of this review and the committee has only met twice. It is essential that the Government puts in place a procedure for inspecting flights through Irish airports. It is simply not good enough to rely on a foreign government to tell us what’s happening in our airports.

This week marks eight years since Guantánamo was opened. It must be closed and the remaining 200 or so prisoners released or given a fair trial. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. At least three dozen people believed to have been held in secret US detention centres are still missing. Neither their friends, nor their families know, where they are or what has happened to them.

The US has admitted that it has detained boys as young as thirteen in Guantánamo. Fathers and sons, bothers and loved ones, kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured with no access to their families, and denied a fair trial.

Another 500 prisoners remain in limbo at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is appealing against the decision of a US judge to allow these men to challenge their ongoing detention.

No one has been brought to justice for acts of torture or enforced disappearances – both crimes under international law – committed by CIA agents.

Amnesty International Ireland has always been clear. Diplomatic assurances from President Bush were not good enough. They would not be good enough from President Obama. The responsibility to ensure Ireland is not used for illegal acts rests entirely with our Government.

We need to see the promised review of legislation governing searches of suspected rendition flights. The Taoiseach must announce when it will take place, ensure it is comprehensive, commit to making the findings public and to changing the law if necessary.

It is time to ensure we are never again accessories to kidnapping, imprisonment and torture.

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