I see that the government of the Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly (do people really believe that that’s meant as a compliment?) is taking time off from screwing pensioners, school-children and the poor to protect torturers.

Shannon has been a staging-post for jets carrying kidnap victims to various locations for subjection to cruelty. The case of Binyam Mohammed makes the point.
CIA planes twice stopped over at Shannon en route to deliver Mr. Mohammed to torture centres in Morocco and Afghanistan. His lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, says his client has been beaten, starved, subjected to extreme sexual humiliation, had his genitals cut with a razor and still bears the vivid scars that prove it.
He was arrested by Pakistani police at Karachi airport in April 2002, handed over to the CIA and then consigned to the ghost prison system run by US and UK intelligence agents. He was eventually dumped at Guantanamo Bay.
Lawyers are convinced that three other men, and maybe many more, have been “rendered” through Shannon: Khaled al-Maqtari, Abu Omar and Khaled el-Masri.
Stafford-Smith has been trying to prise out information about flights which stopped in Shannon on July 22, 2002 and September 17, 2004, to substantiate Mr. Mohammed’s story of being ricocheted around the world from one secret jail-cell to another.
Stafford-Smith also wants the Brown Government to hand over documents which he believes would show the complicity of British security services in his client’s kidnap and torture. On October 2, he launched a case in the London High Court asking for an order compelling the government to produce the documents.
On October 21, a Pentagon spokesman announced it wouldn’t be proceeding with the charges against Mr. Mohammed, but refused to explain why. Lawyers and backbench MPs believe the motive was fear of what the documents might reveal.
The British and Irish Governments may have breathed a sigh of relief that they were off the hook. But they may have breathed too soon.
The case against Mr. Mohammed wasn’t dropped but “withdrawn without prejudice”. It can be re-entered later. So Stafford-Smith is pressing on with his court action. He also continues to press the Irish Government for the Shannon information. Amnesty International, the broad anti-war movement and a host of writers, artists, musicians etc. are backing his quest. But there’s been no response from Biffo.
The complicity of the Fianna Fail/Green/PD coalition in kidnap, torture and false imprisonment provides good reason for rushing into the streets and tearing the government down. But I suppose we have to allow the old folk first go.

Tale from Patrick Barr, ex-Daily Gleaner, Kingston, Jamaica: Canvasser calls to a door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Woman answers. Canvasser asks whom she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband. Husband is in another room watching the ball game. Canvasser hears him yell, “We’re voting for the nigger!”
Woman turns back to canvasser, says matter-of-factly: “We’re voting for the nigger.”
Barr says he “sees some hope there.” Maybe so. But asking her husband to tell her how she’s going to vote?

Speaking of Kingston, Nick Reynolds of the Kingston Trio died last month. Hardly any of Hot Press’ whipper-snapper readership will know much about him.
They were called the Kingston Trio because they’d formed in San Francisco as a calypso group. ‘The Man Who Never Returned’, was their second single – after the global smash, ‘Tom Dooley’ – released in 1959. It sold millions.
The song was a de-politicised version of the campaign anthem of Willie O’Brien, Communist-backed Progressive Party candidate for Boston mayor in 1949. It told of a strike-breaker on the underground who had passed a picket-line to go into work and never came back.
Many years later, as Specs, former merchant seaman and long-time member of the Communist Party, related to myself and Terry O’Neill in his bar, Specs, on Columbus Avenue in SF, just opposite City Lights, how he managed to convince the performing rights people he’d had a hand in the composition and was entitled to a cut of the royalties. Thereafter, his old age was greatly eased by regular royalties cheques, which helped keep the bar free of beer-company sponsorship and garish appeal to the class of customer who wouldn’t want a quiet read of Gerald Manley Hopkins or sophisticated rumination on the dialectical relationship between Marxism and the novels of Henry Miller.
I wonder did Nick Reynolds ever realise how much he’d contributed to the contentment of cultured drinkers such as Terry and myself on warm San Francisco nights.

Caught a lovely fund-raiser in the Nerve Centre for Limavady’s Furlo, whose equipment had been incinerated when their van was stolen by an ASU of Bogside brigands, hurled around the area and then torched.
Skruff, Junior Johnston and Dermot McBride, And So I Watch Your From Afar, Here Comes the Landed Gentry, Furlo (of course), Paul Casey and much, much more.
Sensation of the evening was Jetplane Landing’s Andrew Ferris fronting with Fighting With Wire, rocket-fuelling the audience to delirious heights. One of the year’s great musical moments, all the sweeter for arriving unannounced.
Four grand and belief in humanity raised.