Secret Deals and Treaties? The scale and significance of US military use of Shannon airport has taken on a new dimension with the revelations that Shannon has become part of the illegal movement and torture of prisoners, and the airport's increasing level of use by US military and civil leaders. This begs the question, has the Irish Government done a secret deal with the United States, granting US citizens immunity from arrest and procecution under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court?

I am making these allegations in all seriousness and with genuine concern. I have no intention of wasting police time. I am making serious allegations about serious and worrying crimes. I state and I believe that serious crimes have occurred and are ongoing at the present time. I believe these crimes to include:

*Aiding and abetting TORTURE and unlawful detention (a crime against humanity) by means of facilitating unlawful landing at Shannon airport of an aircraft known to be used in the transport of people taken without charge or trial to a place of torture and unlawful detention for an indefinite period of time.

These words were found in the complaint that four members of MAMA lodged with the Gardai on 2nd October 2004. Over the next two months, regular planespotter and indy reporter Tim Hourigan communicated with the Gardai - the details are within.

In other Shannon news, Dick Cheney graced the airport with a visit and attempts were made to muddy the trail with Jets, Jet Companies and Handling companies changing names and owners.

Are you aware that all compound feeds commonly fed to farm animals contain GM maize and other GM meal? Given the state of information and discussion in this country on GMOs, many a farmer won't know this. But worse: it is virtually impossible for conventional farmers, especially small farmers, to get GM free compound feeds from their local suppliers. We are pretty sure that the presence of GMOs in animal feedstuffs is well known to the Department of Agriculture and other officials, but did they properly inform small farmers and consumers? Farmers and consumers: please check the small print on feed bags and food labels.

• We (Cavan Leitrim Environmental Awareness Network) urgently call on all farmers to demand GM free feeds.
  
• We urgently call on consumers to demand GM free meat, eggs and milk.
  
• We urgently call on the government to take action that GM free feeds are available and GM feeds banned.
  
• We urgently request that labelling of GM meat, milk and eggs i.e. from animals fed on GM feeds be labelled as such.
  
• We urgently call on the government to keep Ireland GM free. This is the only way to avoid any more problems for farmers and consumers.
  
• We urgently call on the government, the EU, and on our Irish representatives there, to work towards a GM free European Union, whilst noting that all the directives, regulations and labelling within the EU make no sense, if the countries of origin of imports cannot guarantee that their products are GM free.

Related Links:
Will Bertie give us a GMO time bomb for Christmas? A GM-Free Network press release.
Round up of UK Anti-GM protests via Indymedia UK.
Save Our Seeds.

Musa Gulusen is a well known face to anyone who shops regularly on Royal Avenue in Belfast. He has been a stallholder there for seven years. Originally from Turkey, Musa settled here 12 years ago and has a family here. Last Saturday there was a PSNI operation against unlicensed stallholders in Belfast City centre. Musa says that during this operation he was severely assaulted and racially abused by the PSNI officers taking part in the operation.

Musa says “a police officer grabbed me by the throat and he shoved me up against a wall. I was protesting and asking him why are you holding me. I was trying to tell him that I had made my application for a license to Belfast City Council. I told him the name of the person in the Council who is dealing with it. He wasn’t listening. He hit me in the face with the back part of his hand.

Then other officers came over. They forced me to the ground. They grabbed my arms up behind my back. I was yelling and yelling how sore my arm was but they were not listening. They kept pulling and my arm was in real pain. There was blood on the ground. They then half dragged me across the ground to the Land Rover and put me inside. In the Land Rover the policeman who had hit me in the face asked me my name. I said that I was in pain that I would not tell him my name as he had hit me. Other police got into the Land Rover. One of them appeared to be senior – like an inspector. He looked me straight in the face and said “Hey Kebab Boy”. All the other police in the Land Rover started laughing really hard. They just kept laughing. There were four of them. I was thinking I am 36 years old. I have lived here for twelve years, I have a British passport and they see me as if I was an animal. It was the same as if he had said to me “Hey Monkey Boy”.

After simmering along on Indymedia for a number of weeks, a dispute over the actions of legendary guerrilla commander Tom Barry and the IRA in Cork during the 1919-22 period boiled over into print in The Village, the BBC, The Irish Examiner and The Sunday Times. The controversy relates to research by historians, Meda Ryan and Brian Murphy, criticising claims first put forward by former Queens history lecturer, now Memorial University Newfoundland academic, Peter Hart.

The dispute centres mainly on two areas:

1. Peter Hart’s attempt to overturn the long held and widely accepted view that British Auxiliaries fired on and killed three IRA soldiers after the Auxiliaries had called a surrender during the Kilmichael ambush in November 1920.

2. Peter Hart’s suggestion that the post-Truce killing of Protestant males in the area surrounding Dunmanway in April 1922 was part of a sectarian war being pursued by republican forces. Point 1 is related as it formed Hart’s launching pad into his thesis that the Anglo-Irish war was in reality a squalid battle for ethnic supremacy, and that the two states in Ireland are an expression of a mutually exclusive ethnic sectarianism (except that Hart is accused of under-reporting unionist sectarianism and British responsibility for using sectarianism as a method of government in Ireland).

In other words it is suggested that Hart sees Irish politics in the context of balkanisation, rather than in the context of colonialism and imperialism.

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This Friday sees the premiere in Dublin of Six Films About Social Centres – a series of short documentaries about autonomous social centres from Belfast to Barcelona. Ideally, this screening should take place in an autonomous social centre, but Dublin has none. (A parish hall is being borrowed for the evening).

So, in a year or two will someone be able to come to Dublin and make a documentary about an autonomous social centre here? Or will fundraiser gigs, political meetings and workshops always have to take place in Teachers Clubs or the upstairs rooms of pubs? Will Food Not Bombs always be at the mercy of the weather? Will there be somewhere indoors to go after street parties?

The Indymedia centre that operated for a couple of weeks around Mayday this year gave many people a glimpse of the great use to which a disused building can be put. It reminded just how badly Dublin lacks an autonomous space.

The Six Films made by Direct Action Against Apathy, a Belfast-based collective will be screened at 8pm on Friday at the St Nicholas of Myra Parish Hall (Carman's Hall, a street running between Francis St and Thomas St Map), followed by a brief discussion, music, a raffle and a photo exhibition about social centres.

Directactionagainstapathy...numerous reports and photos of spaces.
Giros/Warzone Collective Belfast
The Story of Disco Disco.
One of numerous stories about the Magpie Squat.