Refuelling and rendition: Ireland's role in the war on terror

A report details the level of Ireland’s co-operation with the CIA’s programme of secret flights after 9/11

A report this week by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a human-rights advocacy group, details the co-operation that 54 states, including Ireland, afforded the US Central Intelligence Agency in its secret rendition of terror suspects. Among the European countries most implicated in the CIA’s counterterrorism network are Poland, Lithuania and Romania, which allowed the US intelligence service to run secret prisons, or “black sites”, in their territories.

The report, Globalising Torture, provides evidence that Italy, Sweden, Germany and Britain assisted in extrajudicial abductions, participated in follow-up interrogations, or both. Belgium, Spain, Germany, Finland, Denmark and Ireland permitted their airspace and airports to be used for flights associated with rendition flights. Of the pre-2004 EU states, only France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands refused to participate.

By knitting together official sources, court documents and testimony gathered by humans-rights organisations, the report provides the clearest picture yet of Ireland’s role in the so-called war on terror.

Ireland regularly allowed flights associated with the CIA’s rendition programme to stop and refuel at Shannon in the years immediately after the 9/11 attacks. In the largest list compiled to date, the report identifies 136 detainees who were held or transferred illegally by the CIA. It links the apprehension and transfer of three suspects to aircraft and flight schedules that included stopovers at Shannon between 2002 and 2004.

One of the principal sources of evidence against Ireland comes from documents disclosed in a case brought by rendition victims against Jeppesen Dataplan, a US company that provided flight-planning and logistical-support services for CIA flights.

Khaled al-Maqtari

The documents, along with evidence compiled by Amnesty International, indicate the aircraft in which Khaled al-Maqtari, a Yemeni national, was transferred from Baghdad to a black site in Afghanistan refuelled at Shannon airport the day before his transfer.

Al-Maqtari was transferred to Afghanistan on January 21st, 2004, in a Gulfstream V jet, one of the aircraft the CIA uses most frequently for rendition. The evidence indicates the same jet had left Shannon airport on January 20th en route to Baghdad, where it collected al-Maqtari.

Al-Maqtari had been arrested by US forces in Fallujah earlier that month before being transferred to Abu Ghraib prison as an unregistered “ghost detainee”. In April 2004, he was moved to another secret prison in an unidentified country.

The report said he was held there in “complete isolation” for 28 months before being sent to Yemen, where he was eventually released without charge or trial in May 2007.