Flying prisons in our corridor?

RECENT press pictures showed hooded and blindfolded Afghans strapped to the bare metal floor of an aircraft with legs chained and an elaborate network of straps preventing them from sliding.

They are prisoners (with no protection from either US law or the Geneva Convention) who are still being conveyed by the US military to the world’s most secretive and sinister internment camp at Guantanamo, Cuba.

Are these planes landing at Shannon for refuelling while carrying their indescribable cargo of human misery?

We beg, as a matter of urgency, for an all-party Dáil delegation to go to Shannon and investigate the situation forthwith. If there is any question of the airborne prison hulks touching down in Ireland, or overflying Irish territory, all US military flights here must be embargoed without negotiation.

We are constantly being reminded in the media of the Nazi concentration camps and how trains of captives were brought, without question, through German railway stations, and how afterwards people blandly said they “didn’t know.”

Today we have a chance to know: we have a democracy, we have democratic legislators who must face up to their responsibility to protect human rights.

Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden,

10, St Bridget’s Place Lower,

Galway