Shannon WARport - Increase in US Military traffic through SNN

by PHuq Hedd Wed May 15, 2002 19:16

You're a great source of information on this. I'm surprised that your and ClareFM's reports aren't taken up by national media. (On second thoughts maybe I amn't!).

Your monitoring is very important, there's nothing like actual observations to be able to counter the bland lies from our elected leaders.

I'm writing to my leader, "Bertie", at the address that you give. The reason that I mention this is that I have heard that old-fashioned snail-mail letters are much more effective than email campaigns. The source for this information was Robert Fisk when he was on his recent speaking tour. Email is so easily automatically deleted with little or no effort on the part of the receiver. Letters, on the other hand actually require someone to physically tear them up and put them in the bin.

Thanks for doing a great job.

by Sean Lynn Wed May 15, 2002 23:35

Ireland is an integral part of the Western world, economically and culturally. This integration is proceeding now more rapidly. Because of this integration, the 9/11 attack in the U.S. was also an attack on Ireland. The day of mourning in Ireland was overwhelmingly supported by the people of Ireland. And rightly so, because those who died were just like me and you, ordinary people going about the working, everyday lives. Our freedoms have value and sometimes a price must be paid. This who committed this atrocity must be eliminated. What in the name of all thats good and decent is wrong with Ireland giving a small bit of support to the efforts of the U.S. to rid the world of this evil? Walk through the streets of Harlem, as I did recently, and see the stars and stripes proudly flying, because this attack has united all Americans as never before.
And the majority of the Irish people are with America in this struggle. So rant on, poor mis-guided fools. Your efforts will have no effect.

by john c. Fri May 17, 2002 11:37

hey tim,

great reporting there. i had no idea this
was still going on, and at such a scale.
living up in dublin i haven't seen anything
about this in the national or local media.

hope you can get some more national exposure.
keep it up.
john c.

by Tim Hourigan Fri May 17, 2002 13:48

Sean Lynn, were you watching the Late Late last September October when a bereaved family from Cork was in the audience?
They had lost two family members, including a young child.
They sympathised with all the bereaved and grieved for all the dead, and told Pat Kenny as well as the whole audience that while their hearts were broken with the loss of their sister and little girl, their hearts would break again if a US response were to kill more innocents abroad.

Unfortunately for these innocents, the media is manipulated to make sure that reports and (God forbid) pictures of civilian Afghan casualties do not appear on our screens so we can spare ourselves the reality that the US military response is just as wrong and evil as the twin towers.

Despite the fact that no Afghans were on the planes (they were Saudis) and that the Taliban offered to hand OBL over to a third country, Bush wanted to go for a viscious retaliation (a good 'strong' response from a 'strong' leader)
And so thousands of Afghans have been killed (that's not 'collateral damage' -it's murder) the vast majority of them have nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden - who is in remarkable health considering the tonnes of bombs dropping.
And the US is no safer for all the bombs and marines. People in the middle east see the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and I doubt it makes any of them like America more.

Ireland is my country as much as it is Bertie's.
I have as much right to the constitution as he does. He sure didn't shed any of his blood, sweat, or tears to defend it.
The people who wrote article 28 didn't do it as a whim. They knew the dangers of being pushed about by large military powers.
We may be small and our economy part of the west, but that doesn't mean we can cry for dead westerners and then turn a blind eye when the US air force uses our airports en route to Afghanistan to drop bombs from heights which ensure they don't have to see the faces of the people they are going to 'eliminate'.

Of course, you may be under the impression that "most people" agree with the US using our airports.

I've met a few people who agreed, (or rather didn't really object)
But when I tell them
- how many jets and troops are coming through,
- how many Afghan civilians have been killed
- how insecure Shannon is from terrorist attack

They generally change their minds.

Ask yourself, if Bertie's so sure he's doing the right thing, why don't most people know that Shannon is a buzzing airforce base (without the necessary security for military ops)
Why is RTE not reporting the Afghan casualties?
Why is their under-reporting of the anti-war demos?

by Joe - None Sat May 18, 2002 01:54 jdomhan at yahoo dot com

Tim,
Hi, its Joe again. If there has been as many Afghan civilians killed as you state, the American media, would surely be there. Whenever our military kills civilians, it is always there. Witness Operation Linebacker II, Panama, the civilians killed in an air riad on an Iraqi shelter (which doubled as a communications center). Also, I would like to know where you get your civilian casualty figures from?

Thank you

Joe

by Tim Hourigan Wed May 22, 2002 18:07

And where are your media now when Iraqis are dying from US imposed sanctions? The media is allowed to view a few things, acknowledged as "infrequent accidents", to placate calls of media cover up. Vaughan Smith, (a former British soldier, turned freelance reporter) is on record at how much the military wanted to keep the media out of the realities of the 1991 Gulf War.
There is no Kate Aidie to give us the close up on this one. She got suspiciously canned after 9/11 and most of our english speaking news pictures from Afghanistan are from SKY and FOX. And let's not pretend they are not serving any agenda.

Like the initial figures of the Twin Towers Deaths, figures of Afghan civilian casualties have been revised downwards but they are still on the same scale as 9/11 - just more dispersed and without massive headlines.
================================================
WHAT THEY WON'T LET US SEE: THOUSANDS KILLED BY
U.S. BOMBERS

-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 20, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

WHAT THEY WON'T LET US SEE: THOUSANDS KILLED BY
U.S. BOMBERS

By Deirdre Griswold

The planned and deliberate brutality of the Pentagon war in
Afghanistan is a closely guarded secret.

People in the United States are being told practically
nothing about the war's effects on the Afghan people. What
images are we allowed to see on television? Explosions that
produce nothing but clouds of dust. Fuzzy objects in the
crosshairs of bombers that are always identified as
"military targets." Grateful refugees receiving generous
handouts from the West. And the smooth-talking boys of the
Pentagon who make it all sound like a heroic game that will
end when the "evil enemy" has been taken.

But the truth is there have been massive civilian
casualties.

The military no longer produce a "body count" at the end of
each day as they did during the Vietnam War. However, as of
Dec. 10, more than 3,500 civilians had died in the U.S.
bombing, according to Prof. Marc W. Herold of the University
of New Hampshire.

Herold has been keeping tabs on casualty reports since the
bombs began falling on Oct. 7. He has done a meticulous job
of tabulating, day by day and place by place, all the
reports of civilian casualties to be found in the world
press.

Herold released the results of his study on Dec. 10 in a
discussion with Amy Goodman, producer of Democracy Now! An
Excel spreadsheet containing the information can be found at
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/.

"I was concerned that there would be significant civilian
casualties caused by the bombing, and I was able to find
some mention of casualties in the foreign press but almost
nothing in the U.S. press," he said.

"These were poor people to begin with," he added. "And, on
top of that, they had absolutely nothing to do with the
events of September 11."

Herold lists the date, number of casualties, location, type
of weapon used and sources of information for each incident.
Here is one such listing for Oct. 11: "Two U.S. jets bombed
the mountain village of Karam, comprised of 60 mud houses,
during dinner and evening prayer time, killing 100-160
people. Sources: DAWN (English-language Pakistani daily
newspaper), the Guardian of London, the Independent,
International Herald Tribune, the Scotsman, the Observer and
the BBC News."

That was at the beginning of the bombing campaign, when the
Taliban were still believed to be strong. But what happened
after they began to flee south and eventually abandoned
Kabul?

BOMBING OF BIBI MAHRU

The bombing continued unabated. In an article entitled "U.S.
Planes Rain Death on the Innocent," Rory McCarthy wrote in
the Guardian of Dec. 1 that the village of Bibi Mahru near
Kabul had been hit several times by U.S. bombers, even
though they destroyed the only military target in the area,
a radar and anti-aircraft position on a hill above the town,
on the first night.

McCarthy saw the damage caused by bombs dropped 10 days
after the radar position had been destroyed. "The deep
craters and pieces of shrapnel indicate that America's
weapon of choice in Kabul was the Mark 82 500-lb. bomb,
which is designed to be guided to its target by the pilot, a
nearby observation plane or a spotter on the ground. But
there was nothing accurate about the 500-lb. bomb which fell
on Bibi Mahru. It killed Gul Ahmad, 40, a Hazara carpet
weaver, his second wife Sima, 35, their five daughters and
his son by his first wife. Two children living next door
were also killed. ... 'My husband was thinking before this
incident that the Americans would bring peace in our
country,' said Arafa, who lost eight members of her family.
'Now I am left with my five daughters and two sons and no
one to look after them.'"

McCarthy also visited a neighborhood in Kabul of workers'
apartment buildings built by the Soviet Union during the
period of the Afghan Revolution, which was overthrown in a
war financed by the U.S. CIA. On Nov. 12, wrote McCarthy,
the last day the Taliban spent in Kabul, "American planes
targeted a military garrison close to the densely populated
Soviet-built Microrayon housing district. Four 50-lb. bombs
hit the area. Only one hit the garrison.

"One landed at the corner of apartment block 33, where a
crowd of children were playing. Nazila, six, was crushed to
death by a concrete block. 'She couldn't run away in time,'
said her father, Abdul Basir. 'We believed because this was
a residential block they wouldn't hit it. We thought they
were hitting their targets accurately.' A second landed in
the road, a third landed on two houses, killing five people,
including a 15-year-old girl."

The Pentagon keeps denying civilian casualties in its press
briefings. The corporate media here--the newspaper and
television bosses who control what gets aired--accept
whatever the military says. They kill any reports on
civilian casualties that come their way.

But reporters from other countries are sending back vivid
accounts of the death and destruction.

WHEN 'NOTHING HAPPENED' AT KAMA ADO

The most direct rebuttal to the Pentagon line came from
Richard Lloyd Parry, who went to the village of Kama Ado in
eastern Afghanistan near the mountainous Tora Bora area
shortly after U.S. B-52s bombed the area.

In a scathing, ironic piece in the Independent of London on
Dec. 4 called "A Village Is Destroyed and America Says
Nothing Happened," Parry described the devastation:

"[T]he village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist. Many of the
homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth. The
rest are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes."

Parry said that 115 villagers were killed in the bombing.
But "nothing happened."

"We know this," wrote Parry, "because the U.S. Department of
Defense told us so. That evening, a Pentagon spokesman,
questioned about reports of civilian casualties in eastern
Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the
U.S. is meticulous in selecting only military targets
associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network.
Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have wobbled
somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial
decisive statement: 'It just didn't happen.'"

Parry says that all along the road to Kama Ado he was
"confronted with the wreckage and innocent victims of high-
altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings." The only fear
he felt while visiting the village was on seeing U.S. planes
fly over. He was afraid that "nothing" might happen to him,
too.

Barry Stoller also wrote about Kama Ado. His account, "U.S.
Bombs Wipe Out Farming Village," appeared in a Dec. 3
Associated Press dispatch that was largely ignored by
newspapers here. "Children's shoes, bits of charred carpet
and cooking pots litter what is left of this hamlet, along
with dead cows and sheep," he wrote. "Here and there are
craters, some 20 feet wide. One holds the tail fin from a
Mk83 1,000-pound bomb. ...

"Witnesses and survivors say U.S. warplanes dropped more
than 25 bombs in four passes over the village on Saturday,"
Dec. 2.

By Dec. 10, the Independent, another London newspaper, wrote
that U.S. bombers were extending "their onslaught on the
mountains in Tora Bora, south-east of Jalalabad, where the
Saudi-born fugitive [Osama bin-Laden] may be making his last
stand. Witnesses said heavy bombing raids were being
launched every 30 minutes." This would make it the most
intensive bombing campaign yet and should boost Professor
Herold's casualty figures even further.

ACCIDENTAL OR DELIBERATE?

It is assumed in the press accounts that these attacks on
civilians are due to error. Of course, accidents do happen.
The pilots have even bombed a few U.S. Special Forces and
Northern Alliance troops. But the broad scope of civilian
casualties catalogued by Professor Herold speaks to
something other than just a few accidents.

"Officials say the Marines are trained to distinguish
'friend from foe' but Afghan truck and bus drivers complain
that their vehicles have been hit from the air on the road
from Herat to Kandahar and Kandahar to Kabul," said the Dec.
10 Independent article.

Villages, cars, apartment blocks, all hit and hit again.
Isn't it reasonable to assume that civilians are the
targets, and that the pilots know it? If so, it wouldn't be
the first time that U.S. pilots have been part of a
conspiracy to keep the public from knowing what was really
going on in a war.

When the U.S. started the secret bombing of Cambodia in
March 1969, phony flight plans were filed to conceal the
pilots' true destination. (See "Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon
and the Destruction of Cambodia," by William Shawcross,
Simon & Schuster, 1979.)

And, of course, there was the brutal bombing of civilians
just two years ago in Yugoslavia.

Everything about this war in Afghanistan reeks of Pentagon
disinformation and the conning of the public. Its very
premise is a lie.

Collapsing the government of Afghanistan, reducing its
cities and villages to rubble, and turning 7.5 million
people into freezing, starving refugees is not going to
protect people in the United States from terrorist acts.
That is absurd. It can only inflame the anger at U.S. world
domination that is already white-hot.

During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops began to realize that
those who cared the most about their welfare were the
demonstrators demanding that they be brought home. This
simple truth must be relearned. The anti-war movement is
determined to save both U.S. and Afghan lives.

It's the Pentagon, the Bush administration and the corporate
billionaires behind them who are risking U.S. civilians at
home and military personnel abroad in a "great game" to
control the riches of Central Asia.

- END -

(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
[email protected]. For subscription info send message to:
[email protected]. Web: http://www.workers.org)

by Joe Sat May 25, 2002 04:02 jdomhan at yahoo dot com

Hello Tim.
In several postings, I have argued that it is the fault of the Taliban abd Al Qaeda terrorist for the civilian casualties in Afghanistan-I still stand by this. Any casualties as a result of our bombing are unintentional, despite what you say. However, the Al Qaeda terrorists DELIBERATELY targeted the World Trade Center knowing that innocent civilians would be killed. In addition to the WTC and the Pentagon, I am sure other facilities were targeted. Fortunately, the courageous passengers were able to overtake the terrorists on one hijacked airliner. Remember, what happened on September 11th was well planned. US soldiers in Afghanistan are facing a tenacious foe who should not be underestimated.
As for Professor Herold, he has relied on such sources as the Afghan Islamic Press Agency, the al Jazeeera news network, and newspapers in Pakistan. In late 1966, early 1967, New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury accused the US of deliberately targetting civlian areas. It was later revealed that Mr Salisbury was using North Vietnameses sources. Nevertheless, let us assume that his figure of 3500 civilians is correct. If the US really wanted to wantonly kill civilians, as you consistently suggest, then I would think there would much more than 3500, out of 7.5 million. On the first night, the US could have sent over 100 bombers and attack aircraft and simply lay complete waste to Afghanistan. But we don't-because it would serve no real purpose. If the Al Qaeda were really concerned about civilian casualties, then they would have thought about this before launching the September 11th attack.
I would also like to point out that according to Yugoslav authorities, between 400 and 600 civilians were killed. Again, truly unfortunate, but this hardly in indication of "brutal" bombing. It should not be forgotten that the Yugoslavs were not exactly kind and gentle, for they have set up concentration camps. The only reason why the US got involved was because the European nations did not have the courage to do what was necessary.
As far as the demonstators and the antiwar movement are concerned-are these the same people who were waving Viet Cong/North Vietnamese flags and spitting on returning Vietnam veterans?. Is this the same antiwar movement who, in the personage of Jane Fonda saiid our POWs were being well treated, when in fact they were not?. The anti-war movement did not care about American lives then, and still does not. People in the antiwar movement did not say a word when Al Qaeda terrorist executed Neal Roberts. If they are that concerned about American lives, they would support heavy bombings against terrorist. Actually, it was heavy B-52 bombing in December 1972 that created an environment for peace negotiations that ended US involvement. The antiwar movement vehemently opposed this bombing.
I have met many people who served in Vietnam, and despite how they have been portrayed by the antiwar movement, they are some of the greatest people I have ever met.
Tim, if you are sincerely concerned about Afghan civilians, I have a suggestion. Start a collection of humanitarian aid for them, such as food, clothing, etc. Then bring it to Shannon Airport. Any of the US military transports can carry these materials to the Afghans. These military transports are already doing this for the Afghans. No other nation is doing this. Thanks for Ireland's generous use of Shannon Airport, humanitarian aid to the Afghan people is possible. Ireland's The Prime Minister should be praised for this.

Joe

by xx Wed Jul 17, 2002 23:31

joe, why don't you try to reading what
afghan women have to say?

does it make sense to help people without
seeing how they want to be helped?

by mr jinks Wed Aug 21, 2002 03:27

in all fairness.... to all the nerds and planes spotters getting their binocs, anoraks and note books in a twist..... get a life will ye. There is more to living then sitting up all night in shannon airport to 'spot' planes, be they US military or whatever. My advice would be get a real hobby(and possibly a job) and stop trying to put needless fear into people( who probably dont give a tupenny f**k anyway.

by James McKenna Sat Aug 24, 2002 10:02 jimmymac61 at hotmial dot com West Cork 02835152

Well done TIM, keep it up.

Joe, what did they put in your food?

Take that hatred and narrowminded pride someplace else....buddy!

by Mike - The Human Race Wed Aug 10, 2005 04:38

Aircraft Spotters do not normaly sit at the airport all night, please do not these people with spotters.
Where were Hussains weapons of mass destruction ? I think I know. They were released into villages in Iraq....released as a lethal gas that killed "on mass, hundreds of innocent Iraqi people". Gas is a weapon of mass destruction. War was declared on christianity and freedom, this declaration came in the shape of a London bus, tube trains and three aircraft that hit buildings in the USA on 911. I have a question for the peace activists..what were the registrations on the sides of those aircraft on 911. An aircraft spotter can tell you, your not interested are you in those numbers ,but bye God your interested in U.S.Military or charter ones. Do us all a favour.."Peace - Off"

by Dissident Wed Aug 10, 2005 15:36

"War was declared on christianity and freedom"
which? The two are not the same, and frequently (some would say permanently) they are at odds with each other.