US government ‘trying to hide serious crimes’

Jim Cosgrove’s excellent letter “US security machine runs rampant” (Aug 12), hits the propaganda nail on the head.

Such propaganda is often designed as a smokescreen to hide serious crimes and wrongdoing by states. The letter appropriately lists some of these: “Guantanamo ethics prevail. Meanwhile, the drones stay in flight, rendition remains extraordinary, while dictators and despots are strategically useful betimes.”

Irish people should be aware that successive Irish governments, and by

default the Irish people, are complicit in these violations of international laws by allowing the US military and CIA rendition flights to refuel at Shannon airport. But these are not just technical legal violations by the US and Irish governments.

Part of the most recent propaganda effort to justify US violations of civil liberties and privacy invasion included a series of drone strikes in Yemen that killed over a dozen people, who were then posthumously declared to be terrorists, all this being done without trial or judicial process.

In Egypt the US is using its influence with the Egyptian military to replace the democratically elected government, ‘inconveniently’ dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, by a military dictatorship

almost identical to the one recently ousted by the people of Egypt.

US military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, in the interests of maintaining US global power, have all proved

disastrous for the peoples of these countries, who either have been, or are about to be, abandoned to situations of civil wars, corruption and warlord rule.

Lest we forget, over two million people have died in these unjustified wars.

Edward Horgan

Newtown

Castletroy

Limerick