COLM O’GORMAN, executive director of Amnesty International in Ireland, has described as “barely credible” Green Party TD Ciarán Cuffe’s statement that he did not “believe” Shannon airport was being used by US flights involved in extraordinary rendition and that he was against extraordinary rendition.
The two were speaking in Dublin yesterday at the publication of a report by Amnesty International entitled Breaking the Chain: Ending Ireland's Role in Renditions.
The report calls on the Government to “admit that Shannon airport was used as a launching pad for rendition operations by the CIA and to act to ensure this can never happen again”.
Mr O’Gorman called for random Garda checks of private and CIA-owned aircraft using the airport. “Nobody can say with any level of certainty that flights are not involved in rendition.”
However Mr Cuffe said: “The Green Party would not be in Government if we believed extraordinary rendition was taking place on Irish soil . . . We have to establish whether members of the Irish gardaí can do random inspections of aircraft, and if they can’t, we should put legislation in place to ensure they can.”
Mr O’Gorman said after him: “It is not enough to say they have confidence in the assurances. It is not credible to say they are against rendition and to say Shannon is not being used and Ireland is not complicit. It is a basic hypocrisy to be condemning something and to then be a party to it.”
Asked to respond, Mr Cuffe repeated that he did not believe Shannon was being used for rendition, but added that he wanted to see “greater safeguards” that it would not be. “I want to see greater resources for the gardaí to investigate this area.”
