Imagine that you have some evidence that your spouse has been unfaithful. You ignore this evidence for a long time, even though you know that lots of your friends are talking about it, writes Fintan O'Toole.
The chorus of murmuring gets so loud that you finally have to ask the question. But you don't want to hear any bad news. It would only upset you. You want to be reassured, to be told that all the rumours are false. So this is what you say:
"Darling, I love you madly. Our life together is wonderful. If I thought that you were cheating on me, I would be very sad and I might have to reconsider our relationship. So I'm going to ask you a very painful question, but I want you to know in advance that any answer you give me, I will accept completely and implicitly."
You expect your darling to get the hint, and to tell you what you want to hear. After all, if your spouse is already living a lie, one more little fib won't hurt. And you can tell those so-called friends that you asked the question and were given categorical assurances.
This is what happened between Dermot and Condi last week. Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern asked US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice whether the CIA had used Shannon airport for "extraordinary rendition" flights in which suspects are taken to countries where they can be tortured. If the answer was "yes", a long love affair might hit a rocky patch. The US government would have lied to the Irish government on a number of previous occasions, and Irish ministers would have become party to international crimes.
Happily, however, Dermot had made it abundantly clear in advance that he would be more than happy to take "no" for an answer. Whatever Condi said, Dermot would believe without further question. As he has told the Dáil every time this issue has been raised: "The Government will continue to follow the long-standing practice whereby details supplied to the Department of Foreign Affairs in this area by the US authorities are accepted in good faith as being accurate."
Such blind faith is, in this cynical era, deeply touching. The Bush administration may have lied when it announced that Saddam Hussein "has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons". And when it announced that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases". And when it claimed to have "found a biological laboratory in Iraq". And when it denied using white phosphorus as a combat weapon. But Dermot Ahern is a trusting fellow (after all, he accepted all those assurances that Ray Burke was not corrupt) and he still cannot bring himself to believe in the possibility that anything the US administration says might be treated with a degree of scepticism.
The Government knows very well what its obligations are under international law. Those obligations are not passive and they do not exist only where there is absolute proof. Dermot Ahern himself put it with admirable clarity when he told that Dáil last month: "The European Court of Human Rights has held that Article 3 [ of the European Convention on Human Rights] imposes a positive obligation on states to prevent torture. A state is obliged under the convention to take measures when it knows that there are substantial grounds for believing that a person faces a real risk of being subjected to torture."
Nobody looking objectively at the known facts could conclude that there are not substantial grounds for believing that Shannon is being used by CIA flights in a way that contributes to some people facing a real risk of torture.
A Boeing 737 aircraft, with the call sign N4476S, which has been spotted at Shannon, is known to have been used in the abduction of a German citizen from Macedonia. The man, Khaled el-Masri, was taken to Afghanistan where he was beaten during interrogation. After nearly five months, he was released, and the US subsequently admitted that his was a case of mistaken identity. A Gulfstream Five jet with the call sign N379P, which has been used in numerous so-called "extraordinary renditions", landed at Shannon airport on 13 occasions between 2000 and 2004. On one of those occasions, January 18th, 2003, the flight is known to have picked up suspect Abu Omar in Italy and taken him on to Egypt where, he claims, he was tortured.
We do not know whether these flights actually contained prisoners when they stopped at Shannon. But there is no doubt whatsoever that they used the airport as part of missions where prisoners were transported. Minister for Transport Martin Cullen told the Dáil in October 2004 that the flight that picked up Abu Omar made "a technical stop" at Shannon. Even if it is true that no prisoners being taken to be tortured have actually passed through Shannon, it is completely clear that the airport has facilitated those crimes.
The smallest obligation that lies on the State is to search these flights when they land here. But then we might discover something we don't want to know.