The Government offered "direct material assistance to the commission of war crimes" in Iraq by allowing almost 50,000 US troops to pass through Shannon Airport, the Irish anti-war movement has claimed.
It also claimed that the Government had "deliberately misled" the Dáil and the Irish people on the nature and scale of US military activity at Shannon and said that the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, should be summoned before a Dáil foreign affairs committee investigation.
The anti-war movement yesterday published a 12,000-word report on the Government's conduct during the war. "The Irish Republic, the US and the Iraq War: A Critical Appraisal" was written by Dr Kieran Allen, of UCD, and Dr Colin Coulter, of NUI Maynooth.
The movement's chairman, Mr Richard Boyd Barrett, said that Irish people were angered by the current situation in Iraq.
A demonstration is planned for 6 p.m. on Friday at the US Ambassador's residence in the Phoenix Park.
Dr Allen said that, unlike in Britain, there was an absence of serious political debate here about foreign policy on Iraq. Dr Coulter said that the Government's conduct during the war was not "sensible and principled", as it had claimed, but "shameful and shameless".
Yesterday's press conference was attended by Green Party TD Mr John Gormley and Socialist Party TD Mr Joe Higgins.
The anti-war movement compared the Irish media's "fairly patchy" coverage of the Government's war conduct with the British media's "dogged pursuit" of their government.
"There is a huge political scandal on our doorstep and the Government is getting a free run. I'd love to see a Jeremy Paxman-type interview with Bertie Ahern," said Dr Coulter.
The dossier states that 47,958 US troops passed through Shannon in the first four months of this year. Its transformation into a "US military installation" was "deeply offensive to the overwhelming majority of Irish people". Initially, the Government had said little about events at Shannon, hoping that the controversy would "blow over". But as pressure mounted it had resorted to "a series of evasions and half-truths" about whether the US planes were taking part in military operations and whether the troops passing through Shannon carried weapons.
The movement claimed that in speeches the Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs had repeated the accusations by Washington and London that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons had been found and these allegations had been shown to be "entirely groundless", it said. "The US and UK doctored information in order to persuade countries like our own to support the war. Yet Irish politicians have not even seen fit to ask Washington and London for as much as an explanation, let alone an apology."
The report also said that the Government's previously-expressed hopes on the upholding of Iraqi sovereignty and human rights after the war, and the UN's vital role in reshaping Iraq, had been dashed. The US was governing Iraq "in the manner of a colonial possession", yet Mr Ahern had yet to "raise his voice in dissent".