Ted Kennedy, Ed Horgan and our continued quest for peace, prosperity and progress.

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Friday August 28, 2009 16:31 by Fiachra Ó Luain

This Tuesday I rang Cape Cod Times journalist Karen Jefferies, who had done an article on my candidacy in the European elections with details regarding the investigations into the misapplication of 3000 of my first preference votes to Declan Ganley's quota. She told me that she had just returned from the Kennedy compound where Ted Kennedy looked to only have a couple of weeks left. It was with great sadness that I received the news the following day that indeed Ted Kennedy had passed away, so I decided to put together the details of my only dealings with the late Senator from Massachusetts.

When my uncle Mr. John Bangert, co-founder of ‘Cape Codders for Barack Obama’ told me that I could invite five people to travel with his group by train from Cape Cod to the inauguration in Washington D.C., Dr. Edward Horgan was my first choice.
Since October 2001 Ed Horgan has been one of the key organisers of the Irish opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like my father Joseph V. Bangert, who served as a U.S. Marine in Quang Tri at about the time of the My Lai massacre and the Tet Offensive, Ed Horgan is a former military officer who is repulsed by the abuse of military force.
In January 2002, when Ed brought me and others on a tour through Vukovar, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Mostar I began to understand how Ed Horgan’s heart works. For Ed, violence is our collective failure and every time he meets a rape victim or an amputee, Ed Horgan empathises with the victim as if he were their brother. In recent times Ed Horgan has been slandered for not only his opposition to the wars in the Middle East, his efforts to draw legal attention to the illegal transit of prisoners through Shannon Airport en route to Guantanamo Bay but also for his opposition to the thrice democratically rejected EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty. His opponents would have us believe that Ed Horgan and anyone opposed to the Lisbon Treaty is a ‘eurosceptic’, however I remember that January when Ed Horgan promoted the EU to the citizens of Sarajevo when paying for groceries with freshly minted Euro notes. He told us how he was convinced that stability could only return to the Balkans if all of the former Yugoslavia became part of the EU. However like many of us, Ed Horgan has a fundamental problem with the direction of the EU since the ratification of the Nice Treaty and the military proposals made in the Lisbon document that would further move the EU closer to the behaviour that the USA has recently come to realise is unsustainable, such as pre-emptive strikes and spying on its citizens.
It is Ed Horgan’s unshakeable integrity that has made him one my role models and why he was my first choice for the delegation I organised to attend the ceremony in Washington D.C. When Ed applied on-line for his visa waiver his application was refused. Following a contact with the U.S. embassy in Dublin it became obvious to us that Horgan, who is an EU and UN credentialed election monitor, had been put on the Bush State Department’s ‘No-Fly list’. Upon learning about his problems getting a visa waiver I asked my uncle to get in touch with Massachusetts Congressman William Delahunt, Senator John Kerry and indeed Senator Edward Kennedy, with whom Dr. Horgan had previously discussed the issues regarding Shannon Airport involvement in the War On Terror in the past. Dr. Horgan himself has a lot of contacts in Boston and Washington including a sister who is chaplain in a Boston hospital and a nephew who works for NASA and of course they also helped apply pressure on the embassy. Of course in Ireland he, like many of us who outlined the illegality of the Iraq war, has for a long time been cynically painted as somehow being “anti-American”, which is hardly surprising when we consider the standard of subservient swift-boat journalism we have come to expect from some elements in the media during Bush’s illegitimate presidency.
Dr. Ed Horgan is a huge supporter of Barack Obama and believes that through Obama’s tenure the USA may have once again found a way to move forward at such a crucial time in history. However for me it was more important to be present in Washington D.C. for the moment that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would finally relinquish power. Congressman Delahunt, Kerry and also Irish Minister for Environment and Local Government John Gormley all helped us get Ed Horgan into the USA for the Obama inauguration, however it was a phone call from Senator Ted Kennedy to the US embassy in Dublin that prompted the embassy to refer the issue to Condaleeza Rice’s State Department in the dying days of the Bush Administation. Ed Horgan soon took the train from Limerick to Dublin to collect his new ten year visa.
I flew to Boston with my other guests where we had meetings with Professor Noam Chomsky and the Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Later we travelled with ‘Cape Codders for Barack Obama’ with over a hundred people who ranged in age from 16- 71 and included former Black Panthers and staffers from the Kennedy Whitehouse, progressive American society was moving back to Washington after 40 years in the cold.
In Washington D.C.’s Union Station we met retired Commandant Dr. Ed Horgan who greeted us all wearing an Obama baseball hat and a smile. The following morning I redrafted an open letter from Dr. Horgan to President-elect to become an open letter to the President that urged Obama to make the appropriate moves to stop the military activity at our civilian airport in Shannon. My uncle informed me that we had been invited by Senator Ted Kennedy to watch the presidential inauguration from the comfort of the Committee room of the Senate Comittee on Foreign Relations. There Ed Horgan and a couple of others from my group joined in with the mainly black guests who sang “We shall overcome” and “God Bless America” as Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States of America.
Afterwards we thanked one of Senator Kennedy’s staff members who was kind enough to invite Dr. Horgan and myself to go to Kennedy’s office in the Russell Building in the next hour where the Senator would possibly have an audience with us if he felt up to it. We made our way there directly. While we waited for word from the Kennedy staff we stood on the balcony of colonnades that looks out on the courtyard between the Capitol Building and the Supreme Court of Justice. Somebody had a scarf that read “The World is Watching” that I asked if I could borrow and I held it up over my head as a Reuters photographers snapped us from the street below. (To my amazement we appeared in the Financial Times slideshow of the event the next day between shots of the Obamas, the Bushs and the Cheneys.)
Then came the moment when the former President Bush was escorted to his helicopter by President Obama. Memories of everything that had happened under Bush flashed through my mind; from the voting irregularities in Florida to September 11th and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act, the torture flights and detention centres, the ham-fisted response to Hurricane Katrina and the recent annihilation of the Gaza Strip, we realised that the nightmare was finally over. As Bush walked down the back steps of the Capitol Building, directly opposite the Supreme Court of Justice I chanted the only phrase that came to mind; “Habeas Corpus! Habeas Corpus!” in the hope that one day Bush and Cheney may be legally judged for their actions. Most people present on the balcony were climbing over each other to get a chance to see the Obama’s enter their Cadillac limousine nicknamed “The Beast”. For me though Obama had only begun to become important and what was more significant was that Bush had just left office. I watched as Bush’s helicopter blades began gyrating, how they ascended vertically before flying out over Capitol Hill and down the Mall to become but a speck in the sky.
BBC Radio Foyle phoned me and I described to them the atmosphere, after my phone call I turned around and CBS were interviewing Senator Chris Dodd right behind me who was describing how Senator Kennedy had collapsed at the luncheon. This was then confirmed to Ed Horgan and myself by a member of Kennedy’s told us that the Senator was delighted that we could have made it to the inauguration and hoped that we might have the chance to organise another meeting in the future. After delivering copies of Horgan’s doctoral thesis entitled “U.N. Beyond Reform?” to the offices of Senators Kerry and Clinton we rejoined our friends from Cape Cod on the Mall.
The next day Ed and I returned to the Russell Building with some presents for the Senator. We brought a copy of Massachusetts Veteran For Peace Pat Scanlon’s CD ‘Songs for Peace’ and I unbuttoned a Black Shamrock from my lapel before handing them over to the office staff who assured us that they would deliver them to the Senator along with our best wishes for his recovery, they in turn gave us some black and white photographs of Kennedy.
That day I joined my uncle for a meal with Rosemarie O’Neill whose father had taken JFK’s junior senate seat and later became Speaker of the House during the Reagan years. Over food Ms. O’Neill told me that she disagreed with Ed Horgan’s opinion on the military use of Shannon Airport. She told me that it was her opinion that seeing as the United States had helped the Irish after the famine that we in turn ought to help the United States pursues its interests by allowing the troops use Shannon. I told her that I felt that the militarisation of Shannon Airport worked contrary to the logic and spirit of the Peace process that herself and Ted Kennedy had been so involved with. She then told me that she had recently been to give a talk in Magee College in Derry and I was glad to inform her that Magee was only down the Northland Road from my own secondary school that I attended in Derry until 1998.
I remember when Ted Kennedy came to visit Derry in the same year when I completed my GCSEs. The spirit of those times will live on with all of us who saw sectarian tension dissolve in a palpable way over a very few years. What I believe Ed Horgan and Ted Kennedy understood together was that the Peace process was not just an exerted effort confined to one geographical region but that it embodied the universal ideals of equality that have been an inspiration from the time of the United Irishmen to the inauguration of President Barack Obama. For me it is a metaphysical meithal when we work together help solve problems of conflict. When Ted Kennedy along with many others worked hard to guarantee peace in our island they inspired a whole new generation who would live and breathe the notion that no man or woman is better or worse than you and that although we may disagree with a contrary opinion, we must never deny or dismiss that opinion. In short, you help my peace process, and I’ll help yours brother.
Perhaps it is because my own family worked hard to help end the Vietnam War and that my own father’s opinions have always been respected since he was Director of the Agent Orange Program of the Massachusetts Veterans’ Services, that I never once considered that being critical of US foreign policy under Bush was being cheeky or ‘anti-American’. It was the obvious stance whether we are rich or poor, whether we have American investments in Ireland or not. I always felt that keeping our mouths shut on the issue of extraordinary rendition was cowardice rather than loyalty. I still believe that the unprecedented international example of the Irish peace process is being jeopardised by the continued military use of our civilian airport and I will never change in that opinion. People like Ted Kennedy realise that any denial of such opinion is a denial of fraternity itself and he will be sorely missed by many of us who continue to gather regularly in small groups at Shannon Airport until peaceful prosperity becomes the definition of Ireland’s economy.

Photos: Reuters photo including Ed Horgan and myself on the Russell Senate Building Balcony during inauguration and Edward Horgan and myself at the Inaugural podium (More photos also available)

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