George Dempsey, a former political officer at the American embassy, would have us believe that concerns about US planes using Shannon for "rendition" of prisoners are "bogus accusations out of an infantile leftist fantasyland," writes Breda O'Brien
Mr Dempsey declares "it does take the Irish to create a moral crisis out of a fantasy". It hardly seems likely Mr Dempsey is unaware that, far from being confined to Ireland or Europe, there is a major debate concerning rendition and torture going on in his own country.
Some of the most significant contributors to this debate, far from being inhabitants of an "infantile leftist fantasyland", are widely-read conservative commentators. True, they are not debating the stopover at Shannon. They are debating the nature of torture, and whether it is ever justified.
They are looking at whether exporting a prisoner to another country where there is a high likelihood that that prisoner will be subjected to torture, is any better than torturing the prisoner on US soil.
Mr Dempsey wishes us to take at face value Condoleezza Rice's statement that "the United States does not torture or condone torture. This legal prohibition applies to US personnel whether at home or abroad". However, what exactly does Condoleezza Rice mean by torture? More importantly, what does the US administration mean by it? In 2002, the current attorney general, Alberto R Gonzales, when he was White House counsel, chaired a review asked for by the CIA. The purpose of the review was to establish how much pain and suffering a US intelligence officer could inflict on a prisoner without breaking a 1994 law that forbids torture.
Gonzales apparently had no problem with the now infamous "waterboarding" technique, which involves placing a prisoner with his head lower than his feet.
Cellophane is wrapped over the face and water poured over it. Given that the head is lower than the lungs, it is difficult to aspirate enough water to actually drown, but the sensation is unbearably close to drowning, and most people crack within seconds. Gonzales solicited a memo giving the CIA the leeway they wished. Some commentators believe this memo was at least partly responsible for the atmosphere that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. However, it is probably truer to say that the fudging of the nature of torture existed long before this memo.
In an 18-page Atlantic Monthly article in 2003, Mark Bowden interviewed some practitioners of what he calls the "dark arts of interrogation". He came to the conclusion that there was a difference between what he termed torture and coercion or, in a deeply distasteful phrase, torture-lite. The distinction between torture and torture-lite is that, "while excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks, and do no lasting physical harm". However, coercion, or torture-lite, can include such things as keeping a prisoner naked in the cold, dousing with water, depriving him or her of sleep, and employing tactics to ensure maximum psychological disorientation.
At times, Mark Bowden demonstrates barely-concealed admiration for some of the practitioners of coercion, including one veteran Israeli interrogator.
Anti-torture campaigners were horrified by the tone of the piece, pointing out that "doing no lasting physical harm" did not take into account the kind of psychological harm caused by such tactics.
However, in the Bush administration, as evidenced by the CIA request for a legal review of how far it could go, there appears to have been a similar distinction between torture and coercion. Many now believe the invasion of Iraq was justified by faulty intelligence gleaned by methods euphemistically termed "extended interrogation techniques". If a distinction between torture and "extended interrogation techniques" exists, Condoleezza Rice's carefully-worded statement reads rather differently.
Her reassurances would also have had greater force had the Bush administration not been actively seeking until mere days ago the exemption of the CIA from John McCain's amendment to the Defence Appropriation Bill.
The US army field manual states explicitly that both physical and mental torture is forbidden and, furthermore, that information extracted by torture is inherently unreliable. McCain's amendment states that the army field manual should provide the uniform standard for the interrogation detainees, and that cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of persons in the detention of the US government should be forbidden.
In recent times, there have been many US voices calling for the curtailed use of torture, among them the conservative commentator, Charles Krauthammer. He believes that torture should be allowed in the so-called "ticking-bomb" scenario, where the potential loss of, say, a million lives is offset against torturing a terrorist who knows where the bomb is planted.
The second scenario is where there is a lesser threat. He says "interrogators should be constrained to use the least inhumane treatment necessary relative to the magnitude and imminence of the evil being prevented". Although this seems an extraordinary degree of latitude, he sets some rigid criteria. For example, no member of the armed forces should be allowed to torture. Apparently, torture is too morally contaminating for armed forces, but not for the CIA.
One of the most eloquent rebuttals of Krauthammer's proposal is by a friend, Andrew Sullivan. It is the cover story of this week's New Republic, hardly a bastion of "infantile lefties".
Mind you, Sullivan has a heterodox identity that would be virtually unimaginable in Ireland. To illustrate, he was described by one blogger as being a libertarian, Iraq war-supporting, gay Tory Catholic.
It is impossible to do justice in brief to Sullivan's argument, which is available free online at the New Republic, but perhaps this quote sums up the flavour of it. "The very concept of Western liberty sprung in part from an understanding that, if the state has the power to reach that deep into a person's soul and can do that much damage to a human being's person, then the state has extinguished all the oxygen necessary for freedom to survive."
Perhaps George Dempsey is too busy sighing over sad Irish fantasies to pay attention to the debate on torture taking place in the US. Perhaps he is also right that there are no prisoners being "rendered" through Shannon. However, his dismissive and patronising tone does little to increase confidence that this is in fact the case.
bobrien@irish-times.ie