David Norris (Independent)

I distance myself from the remarks made by Senator Ryan and exonerate the Minister of State for any inappropriate attitude. I did not attack him personally but simply placed a factual legal matter on the record of the House. It would be easy for me to try to embarrass my colleagues on the Government benches but I will not do so. Instead, I salute them on their moral courage in saying what they said. I am proud of them and thank them from the bottom of my heart for the position they have taken. My colleague, Senator O'Toole, made the very good suggestion that this matter be taken back to their party for discussion — that is the democratic way to do it. I am not bothered about the vote. It is now perfectly clear that it is a farce because the House has spoken with a unified voice, which is terribly important.

I pay tribute to the decency of some of the American troops. It was as a result of their activities in searching for a missing teenage boy that the torture victims were found beaten and starved in an Iraqi Government bunker last week. We now know that 173 detainees were arbitrarily arrested and held without charge in the basement of the Interior Ministry building, after which they were held in an underground bunker. The sectarian nature of the detentions is clear from the fact that all the detainees were Sunni Muslims. Mr. Abdul-Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said in a statement, "According to our knowledge, regrettably all the detainees were Sunnis. In order to search for a terrorist, they used to detain hundreds of innocent people and torture them brutally."

Reports printed in reputable newspapers such as The Guardian include the information that, in addition to live persons, mutilated corpses — including some with electric drill holes in their heads — and torture instruments had also been found at the underground bunker. Another paper of record, The Observer, stated that its reporters had seen photographic evidence of post mortem and hospital examinations of alleged terror suspects from Baghdad and the Sunni triangle which demonstrates serious abuse of suspects, including burnings, strangulation, the breaking of limbs and, in one case, the apparent use of an electric drill to perform a knee capping. This is all part of a pattern.

One could take the case of an imam, Mr. Hassan an-Ni'ami, at a suburban mosque in Baghdad. He was arrested by paramilitary police commandos and taken for interrogation. His capture was reported on television as that of a senior terrorist commander, which was untrue. Twelve hours later, his body was in the city morgue. The Observer states:

What happened to him in his twenty four hours in captivity was written across his body in chapters of pain, recorded by the camera. There are police-issue handcuffs still attached to one wrist, from which he was hanged long enough to cause his hands and wrists to swell. There are burn marks on his chest as if someone had placed something very hot near his right nipple and moved it around.

A little lower are a series of horizon welts, wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that look like cigarette burns.

An arm appears to have been broken and one of the higher vertebrae pushed inwards. There is a cluster of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of his left knee. At some stage an-Ni'ami seems to have been efficiently knee capped. It was not done with a gun — the exit wounds are identical in size to the entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet. Instead it appears to have been done with something like a drill.

This kind of behaviour happened under the gaze and with the tacit complicity of elements within the coalition forces. One international official stated:

What is so worrying is that allegations concerning the use of drills and irons during torture just keep coming back. And we have seen precisely the same evidence of torture on bodies that have turned up after they have been arrested. There is a dirty counter-insurgency war, led on the anti-insurgency side by groups responsible to different leaders.

America is at last waking up to this horror. It is for this reason that Republican Senator John McCain made an amendment to a military spending Bill in the Senate in which he proposed prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by US personnel anywhere in the world. The amendment was passed — 90 voted in favour and nine against. It was then incorporated into the Senate Bill, which was eventually passed with some other modifications. However, the House of Representatives passed its own version of the Bill in the past week, without any of these provisions relating to the treatment of detainees. Vice-President Dick Cheney has recently spent a great deal of time lobbying Republicans to make an exemption from the McCain amendment for the CIA. On top of this, President Bush has come into the open, supported torture tactics and threatened to use his presidential veto to strike down any proposal that includes a blanket ban on mistreatment.

It is a matter of shame that the Irish Government, despite repeated questions from me, the Leader of this House, members of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and members of many parties in the Lower House, has made no qualification on the use of Shannon Airport for military traffic of all kinds. The Minister for Transport is responsible for civil aircraft while the Minister for Foreign Affairs is responsible for regulating the activities of foreign military aircraft. The carriage of weapons and munitions on civilian aircraft requires an exemption from the Minister for Transport. Up to and including 17 November 2005, a total of 1,287 exemptions had been granted by the Minister for Transport. Up to 31 October 2005, the number of US military troops passing through Shannon was 268,963. This makes us shamefully complicit in the waging of an illegal war.

A deeply worrying question arises regarding the Gulfstream V jet aircraft that has been permitted to continue using Shannon Airport's facilities. Other countries are not so pusillanimous and some ban the flights. Denmark denies access, and Austria had fighters intercept a suspect aircraft and escort it out of its airspace. Hungary searches the aircraft on the tarmac.

Some time ago in this House I was able to demonstrate, by an analysis of replies given in the Lower House, that American officials had lied to the Minister, leading him to misinform the House that these flights had ceased. The CIA had merely changed the registration number of the plane. This plane is known to have been involved in extraordinary rendition — it has done nothing else. Why should one believe it is taking tourists through Shannon Airport? By extraordinary rendition, I refer to the kidnapping and transfer of suspected persons to third countries for the purposes of torture. On 21 May 2005, the foreign service of The Washington Post stated:

Stockholm — the CIA Gulfstream V jet touched down at a small airport west of here just before 9 p.m. on a subfreezing night in December 2001 . . . Swedish officers watched as CIA operatives pulled out scissors and rapidly sliced off the prisoners clothes, including their underwear ... At 9.47 p.m., less than an hour after its arrival at Bromma Airport, the jet took off on a five-hour flight to Cairo, where the prisoners, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Zery, were handed over to Egyptian security officials.

The Taoiseach, in a reply to Deputy Michael D. Higgins last week, quoted an unsourced Human Rights Watch report, which is itself the subject of serious doubt, to suggest that it is unlikely that a major civilian airport would be used by the CIA for this traffic. However, the BBC radio programme "File on Four" broadcast a report from Stephen Grey which states:

This is Dulles Airport, Washington, within easy reach of both the Pentagon and the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Our flight logs showed that on almost every occasion when the Gulfstream jet leaves America, it passes through this airport.

The report further states that the Gulfstream jet also passes through Glasgow, Prestwick, Queen Ali International Airport in Amman, Jordan, and Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen. I am aware that citizens of this Republic have reported their suspicions and the detailed evidence from outside the State about the purposes to which this aircraft is put. The Garda has refused to take action and notification of these facts has been routinely ignored. As a result, I have written to Mr. Noel Conroy, the Garda Commissioner, as follows:

Dear Commissioner,

I am writing to you as a citizen and as an elected public representative to draw to your attention the fact that there is a clear prima facie case that a crime may have been committed by the landing of gulf stream jet, call sign N3 79P, at Shannon airport. I am also aware that a number of citizens have made complaints of a detailed nature to the police authorities in Limerick to no avail.

The aeroplane concerned has certainly been used by the American authorities for activities which are considered illegal under international law i.e. extraordinary rendition. You will be aware of the fact also that the Minister for Transport unintentionally misled the Dáil on the basis of misinformation supplied to the Government by unnamed American officials. You will be aware also that through the evidence of Harry Cohen MP the American authorities lied about the commission of parallel crimes by the employment of white phosphorus in Iraq a situation which led to Minister Adam Ingram MP misleading the House of Commons and having to admit this fact subsequently.

I have discussed this matter with members of the House of Commons at Westminster who are in possession of an opinion from international lawyers that the landing of such a plane if it is being used for such a purpose constitutes a crime under international law.

Ireland has already been reported because of this matter to United Nations Sub Committee for investigation. I am making this formal request that you fully investigate the matter and that this aeroplane is routinely subjected to garda investigation if and when it lands at Shannon airport. I should advise you that I will be making the contents of this message available to the international investigating authorities in the belief that further inaction by the garda authorities would be seriously regarded. I await a speedy reply.

Yours sincerely,

Senator David Norris

I encourage every Member of the House to write a similar letter to the Garda Commissioner. American public opinion is changing. No longer will people tolerate the bluster of Dick Cheney, who never served in Vietnam because he was able to pull strings and achieved no less than five draft deferments, infamously saying that he had "priorities in the sixties other than military service". He was content to send other people's children out to die. For a man such as that to accuse others——