Are we now party to kidnap?

On the night of December 18th, 2001, a small private Gulfstream 5 jet landed at Bromma airport near the Swedish capital Stockholm, carrying a number of men in plain clothes with their faces hooded.

They went to a private room where they were joined shortly afterwards by Swedish police officers and two prisoners, who were bound hand and foot. The prisoners were both Egyptian men in their 30s who had entered Sweden as asylum-seekers. Their clothes were cut off with scissors and suppositories containing an unknown drug were inserted into their bodies. Their hands and feet were chained to a harness, and they were carried on to the Gulfstream jet. On the plane, both men were blindfolded and hooded. The jet took off and the men were taken to Egypt.

This was one small incident in the so-called War on Terror. American intelligence agencies believed that the two men, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, were connected to Islamist terrorism. These suspicions, in the prevailing climate after the September 11th atrocities in the US, were used to justify flagrant breaches of international law.

Agiza and Zery were effectively kidnapped. Their abduction was part of a widespread, if undeclared, American policy of seizing suspected terrorists and taking them to friendly countries where they could be tortured. Back in Egypt, the two men were, according to their families, subjected to torture by electric shocks. Agiza, who had past ties to the senior al-Qaeda figure Ayman al-Zawahiri, was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in jail after a dubious legal process. Zery, however, was eventually released because even the most extreme methods failed to produce any evidence against him.

The appalling abuses of human rights in this case are by no means unique, but they should be of particular concern to Irish people because there is disturbing evidence of complicity in them by our Government. From Seymour Hersh's new book Chain of Command, from an investigative documentary broadcast last May by the Swedish TV programme Kalla Fakta and from the logs of planes using Shannon Airport compiled by anti-war protesters, a fuzzy but sickening picture begins to emerge.

Hersh reveals that, sometime in late 2001, President Bush signed a top-secret order authorising the US Defence Department to set up a clandestine team of special forces operatives who would evade diplomatic niceties and international law and kidnap or, if necessary assassinate, so-called "high-value" targets. Secret interrogation centres would be set up in allied countries where torture and ill-treatment, unconstrained by legal limitations or public disclosure, could be employed. The programme was concealed as an "unacknowledged" special-access programme (SAP), whose operational details were known only to a few in the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House.

The unmarked Gulfstream jet, registered as N379P, which took the two Egyptians from Sweden, has also been used in other similar incidents. It is owned by an unlisted American company. When the Kalla Fakta TV programme contacted this company, posing as potential customers interested in hiring the jet, its reporter Fredrik Laurin (whose help I would like to acknowledge) was told: "We only lease through the US government - we are on a long-term lease with them."

N379P's pattern of landings show it moving back and forth between the US and a variety of destinations including Egypt, Pakistan, Kuwait and Guantanamo Bay. Both Hersh and Laurin believe that there is overwhelming evidence that the plane is a tool of the SAP operation.

N379P was spotted at Shannon Airport long before its role in the abduction of Agiza and Zery became a matter of international controversy. In the period for which protesters have a fairly detailed log of planes landing and taking off, January 2003, it certainly features on the list. Given that the plane seems to have been used exclusively for covert operations by a secret US squad established explicitly to evade both international law and democratic scrutiny within the US, the presence of the plane at Shannon raises two possibilities.

One is that the Irish authorities were not informed that Shannon was being used to facilitate what Hersh calls the US "entering the business of 'disappearing' people". The other is that the Government was told, or, what amounts to the same thing, that it thought there might be something funny going on and decided not to ask questions. Either possibility raises the most basic questions. If the Government was not told, then its trust has been abused by a friendly state in the most egregious way. If it knew, or even suspected, what was going on, then it has colluded in serious crimes under national and international law.

It is now more obvious than ever that the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster and that the so-called War on Terror, with its systematic subversion of human rights, is, at best, counter-productive. Last year, over 125,000 US troops passed through Shannon. The longer we allow ourselves to be part of this unholy mess, the deeper we will be sucked into the moral swamp.