David Norris (Independent)

I also welcome the Minister of State to the House and I welcome the tone of his speech. It is significantly different from some of the earlier speeches delivered on this subject in this House. I also welcome very much the balanced speech of Senator Mooney, particularly his condemnation of the use of cluster bombs. He is right. That was condemned by the most senior humanitarian official as an international war crime, which is what it is, and those responsible should be brought to justice. I say that as somebody who has traditionally supported Israel. I love that country and I love its people, whom I know well.

I want to make a specific and urgent request to the Minister. I am proud to say that my former partner, Ezra Yitzhak, is an Israeli born native Jewish citizen of Israel who, like many in Israel, is a man of conscience and who opposes the criminal activities of his government. He is involved particularly in the building of clinics providing sheltered housing to the indigenous inhabitants, the native people, of the villages in south Hebron, particularly a village called Al Toani. They have been building facilities for health, sewerage and so on. It has been announced in Al Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, that the Israeli Government has been under pressure from the international community to demolish some of the illegal settlements. It now proposes to do that. The Israeli military is moving to do that as we speak but for political reasons, in order to counter criticism, the Israeli Government is cynically preparing to instruct the military to demolish clinics and houses in Al Toani. Those communities are under the most severe threat. I ask the Minister to contact Jerusalem through the Israeli ambassador and urgently request that any such action be halted and indicate to them that any such action, which is clearly illegal, will be registered and remembered, and those responsible held to account.

I am glad the question of cluster bombs was mentioned. That was an outrage. The whole adventure in Lebanon was a disastrous mistake. I could not understand how the Israelis could allow themselves to be lured in, and the pretext was nonsensical. Did the kidnapping of two soldiers require the massive invasion, the colossal destruction and the huge loss of life? That from the people who use targeted assassination.

Let us hear it for the very considerable number of Palestinian parliamentary representatives who were kidnapped. They were not arrested or detained. They were illegally kidnapped. I regularly attend the interparliamentary union and have been very lucky to be selected many times. The treatment of parliamentarians, their human rights and their immunity from this sort of action is one of the standard items on the order paper of the IPU yet there was scarcely a peep about it. I was glad the Minister of State mentioned it in his contribution.

Senator Mooney mentioned the cluster bombs. There have been many other events that were clear and gross violations of human rights. I would like the Minister of State and his advisers to ponder this question because I have raised it in the past 18 months to two years in the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, that is, the matter of the external association agreement between Israel and the European Union. There are human rights protocols attached to that which are supposed to be triggered by violations of human rights. Will the Minister of State explain the reason they have not been triggered? Has Ireland played a role in raising that issue in the forum of the European Union? We must be honest. It does a disservice to human rights to attach those kind of provisions to a treaty and then ignore them and treat them with contempt. Those matters should be examined. The situation in the Middle East is not confined to Israel and Lebanon, although that is one of the most urgent cases. The situation in Iraq is very dangerous and is getting worse, as we predicted before the invasion began. This prediction came not only from the Opposition. Senators Ó Murchú, Minihan, Mooney and Dardis stated the same thing. Coalition forces are now getting ready to withdraw and beat a retreat from Iraq. The invasion was not programmed; it was brutal, ham-fisted and blunt.

The withdrawal must be correctly carried out in a regular way. Otherwise, the catastrophe will be even worse. The head of the British army, James Baker and others are choreographing the withdrawal. The old saying in America used to be: "If you break it, you take it." The Americans are now blaming the Iraqis for the mess. Let nobody forget that they created it. It is reported that levels of torture in Iraq are now worse than under Saddam Hussein. Sunni and Shia groups have confirmed this. How can we be proud of that record and what will we do about it?

Regarding the ludicrous trial of Saddam Hussein, I opposed Saddam Hussein while Ireland sold beef to him for his army so I hold no brief for him. I had a row about human rights in Baghdad. His trial is a farce. Defence lawyers cannot be protected and every so often another is assassinated. The trial is grossly prejudiced and could not continue in a European country because the Iraqi Government has already found him guilty in press statements and has decided what to do with him, namely, kill him. A judge at the trial has been removed because he was believed to be favourable to the defendant. That will make a martyr of Saddam Hussein and this is nothing other than a botched trial.

What is the point of the war on terror? I commend to the Minister and his observers an interesting article in The Irish Times by David Keen, of whom I had not heard until today. The headline states "Winning 'war on terror' may be irrelevant" and the article confirms some of my nastiest suspicions. It confirms the accuracy of the prophecy made by President Eisenhower in 1957-58 when he stated that the greatest threat to America was not communism but the takeover of the apparatus of government by the military-industrial complex. That is what has happened in America under President Bush.

The operations of the American Government often seem to be counter-productive. The stated foreign policy aims of the US are being contradicted by results. We all think President Bush is stupid but he cannot be that stupid. What is behind this policy is very sinister.

The article reads, "tactics which actively promote the strength of the enemy have been widely adopted; they have also been maintained even when it has become clear that, from a military point of view, they are counter-productive". The reason suggested is a political one. As Hannah Arendt confirmed in her analysis of attitudes in Germany after the First World War, it is very politically effective to have a vague, diffuse enemy that one can blame for everything. It is also usefully economically. The article states:

One key aim has been to make money. US interest in Afghanistan has been inseparable from the oil and gas fields of the Caspian, just as US interest in Iraq has been linked to the oil.

Beyond this, there is the vast US military-industrial infrastructure which burgeoned during the Cold War. In this "war", too, the (Soviet) enemy was not engaged directly: that would obviously have been suicidal; instead, the casualties were mostly exported to civilians and soldiers in Third World countries hosting proxy wars and to those Americans (often poor, often black) recruited into the proxy war in Vietnam.

This is what is happening in Iraq.

The Minister of State must tell us the truth about Shannon Airport. A number of Senators have consistently raised this matter. It is unacceptable for the Government to answer questions that have not been asked and to respond to statements that have not been made. I never stated I knew that people were brought through Shannon Airport in shackles, although it is possible. What is incontrovertible is that some kidnapping expeditions, whose ultimate product was to yield innocent people to torture in some of the most barbarous regimes in the Middle East, were assisted by refuelling in Shannon Airport. Under international law we are complicit. That was the finding of the Marty report and the Secretary General of the Council of the European Union confirmed it and stated that it was a liability.

I knew that the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Dermot Ahern, would state that he knew nothing about it. I arranged to have the correspondence I sent to the Department of Foreign Affairs and the debates in this House forwarded. I hope this material was used and that the Government was embarrassed. It has every reason to be so embarrassed.