{"id":11235,"date":"2025-05-27T14:27:48","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T19:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=11235"},"modified":"2025-05-27T14:27:48","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T19:27:48","slug":"willfully-ignoring-crimes-against-humanity-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2025\/05\/27\/willfully-ignoring-crimes-against-humanity-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Willfully ignoring crimes against humanity again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nAs American planes are renditioning people to South Sudan via Ireland, Simon McGarr is reminded of the last time the country deliberately looked away from crimes against humanity<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\nWe have been here before, of course. Here’s the 2007 Irish Human Rights Commission’s report<\/a> on Ireland’s role in the George W Bush era of extraordinary renditions of individuals for the purposes of torture abroad. This was expanded upon by the Open Society’s Justice Initiative’s 2013 report “GLOBALIZING TORTURE: CIA SECRET DETENTION AND EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION<\/a>“, which determined that Ireland had “facilitated” the CIA rendition and torture project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the question of planes landing in Shannon and flying on to Israel has also triggered questions as to whether Ireland is being used as a refuelling stop in the delivery of arms to Israel’s government while it prosecutes its military action against the people of Gaza. <\/p>\n

The reason that these are still only questions- as yet unanswered- is that the government declines to have officials inspect the planes which land. Indeed, An Garda S\u00edochana seem as determined as they were in the Bush era<\/a> to place the level of evidence required to trigger an examination of what might be on one of these planes so high that it would be impossible for any member of the public to meet it. The view taken then was that police would only inspect US planes if a member of the public could already prove that there were prisoners (or arms shipments or even undeclared restricted items such as guns) on board.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nIt’s not surprising that the Irish government would rather look away than confront either the US or Israel. Better to tolerate this than to dire the wrath of either country, would be the thought. Few European governments would choose to do otherwise. How then, could you force them to do so anyway? As McGarr outlines, maybe you need to use VAT law:\n<\/p>\n

\nA few months ago Lelia Doolan<\/a> assessed the legal situation regarding the treatment of planes used by the US government stopping at Shannon.<\/p>\n

She wrote to the Attorney General to put him on notice that she had concerns that Ireland was not complying with its duties of systemic inspection of planes for cargo under EU VAT law.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nA clever tactic which might work but I’m doubtful it will. Perhaps the only way to stop these renditions is to do on a massive scale what people have done with success to prevent immigration arrests in the UK, by surrounding the arresting officers and physically keeping them from taking somebody away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As American planes are renditioning people to South Sudan via Ireland, Simon McGarr is reminded of the last time the country deliberately looked away from crimes against humanity: We have been here before, of course. Here’s the 2007 Irish Human Rights Commission’s report on Ireland’s role in the George W Bush era of extraordinary renditions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441,578,162,254],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-gulag","category-civil-liberties","category-us-foreign-policy","category-war-on-gaza"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11236,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11235\/revisions\/11236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}