Rendition Through Shannon Claim

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Irish Voice News

Rendition Through Shannon Claim

September 3, 2008

By Paddy Clancy

TAOISEACH (prime minister) Brian Cowen’s government has been asked for information relating to the use of Shannon Airport in the “extraordinary rendition” of a Guantanamo Bay detainee who could face the death penalty.

The request was sent last week by lawyers representing Binyam Mohamed, a U.K. resident arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and held since in Guantanamo Bay.

He has been charged there before the U.S. Military Commission with terrorist offenses which carry the death penalty.

The information from the Irish government has been sought under the Freedom of Information Act. An earlier request a month ago drew a reply from Cowen’s private secretary stating that the government was opposed to the “appalling practice of so-called extraordinary rendition” and that it had received categoric assurances that no rendition had taken place through Ireland.

Mohamed’s U.S.-trained lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who has a background in representing prisoners on Death Row and who works for human rights group Reprieve, said he was not arguing that any prisoners were rendered through Irish territory.

What he was claiming was that CIA aircraft and crew criminally implicated in transporting prisoners to torture stopped on Irish territory en route to and from their illegal missions.

He said, “Even if prisoners were not transported directly through Irish territory the movements and activities of these agents must be investigated, as should how Irish authorities came to be complicit in these activities.”

He is seeking information on two flights, already identified by the Council of Europe as having been involved in rendition, that stopped in Shannon. He maintained that one that passed through on July 22, 2002, had illegally rendered Mohamed to torture in Morocco.

A second flight that stopped in Shannon on September 17, 2004, was en route to deliver Mohammed from Rabat in Morocco to Kabul in Afghanistan.

Mohamed’s lawyers seek information on what happened to him between his arrest in Pakistan in April 2002 and his arrival in Guantanamo Bay in May 2004.

The High Court in London last week gave British Foreign Secretary David Miliband until Friday this week to agree to hand over information possessed by the U.K. government about the case.

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