In the US few people truly examine what the word freedom means anymore, and perhaps even fewer examine what democracy means, writes Colum McCann
A sense of terror can fall upon even the most anonymous corners.
It is six in the morning at Shannon airport: that moment before dawn when the darkness seems complete. The last of the stars appear like clawmarks on the sky. A few planes taxi on the runways. Inside, the duty-free lounge is filled with American soldiers returning from the war in Iraq. They should be happy. Unburdened. Relieved. They are on their way home. Their stint is done. They have survived.
One might expect them to be loud-mouthed and arrogant, to be bellying up to the bar and throwing dinars at the young Irish waitress. Or to be swaggering through the aisles of cheap liquor. Or to find them standing secretly at the perfume counter - after all, even war stories can be love stories.
But no. There are no swooning kisses, no guzzling of vodka in aisle four, no war tales, no histrionics.
Instead, the soldiers (and at least 900 a day pass through Shannon) have an air of disbelief, of longing, of melancholy. They sit and nurse their beers. They wander aimlessly through the aisles of merchandise, staring at Christmas cakes whose sell-by date has expired, the digital cameras, the rows of babies' clothes. Their conversation is hushed and polite. They seem stunned. It just may be that they are on strict orders from the US military to behave during what they euphemistically call a "re-fuelling stopover". Or it just may be that they are keeping quiet in order not to draw attention to the notion that, much to the outrage of the Irish people, they are shepherding prisoners to Guantanamo. Or it might be that, coming from a war, they have witnessed torture - not just the torture of others, but their own inner torture, too.
It shouldn't be a massive surprise that new photographs emerged recently, suggesting the widespread use of brutal interrogation methods in Iraq and Guantanamo. It's dirty, but it's no little secret. Everyone knows about it, right on up to the highest ranks. The irony is that few people on the US political landscape are talking about it. Torture, designed to make us talk, keeps the torturer silent.
In theory, democracy is the system most likely to examine itself. It is supposed, even designed, to embrace open thought, open language, open expression. It should, in its purest essence, be able to carry its own weight, and certainly the weight of its words. But the word torture conjures up so much in our minds - electrodes, hoods, metal tables, cattle prods, broom handles, lit cigarettes - that the horrors induced by its suggestion alone are enough to break us down. We end up telling lies, not only in the torture chamber, but about democracy itself.
Here's the situation, bare and simple: the country that claims to embrace the best of all humanity uses the worst of all human means to humiliate not only its enemies, but also itself.
Most ideas, even good ones, become lies when they are too tightly embraced. The United States (a country where I live, as a husband, as a father, a foreign-born patriot, an admirer, a protester) has become a place where language has been devalued by exaggeration. Few people truly examine what the word freedom means anymore, and perhaps even fewer examine what democracy means, though they'd be willing to fight for both.
It is not that they are stupid - in fact the infantilisation of the American people by both the European and US media is one of the most dangerous trends of recent times - it is more that the American people have been wilfully confused by the constant devaluation of language. One can hear the white noise in the White House, on the airwaves, in the corridors of power. "Freedom", "freedom", "freedom". "Democracy", "democracy", "democracy". They are incanted louder and louder and louder. "FREEDOM!" "DEMOCRACY!" Eventually the ears bleed.
You break the body, then you break the mind. As a metaphor this works for the political system, too. You attack the body politic, it is no longer able to recognise itself. The language of those who support the methods of torture - "but they did it to us; everyone knows it happens; they deserve it; they don't understand any other method; the end justifies the means" - is the stuff of playground chatter.
A democracy is examined first and foremost by what it does to its own people, and then by what it does to others. Torture is not just a bunch of photographs from Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, though they are horrifying enough to take the breath away - but torture is a mirror image, too. A country that uses such brutality (even when it's called coercion) is likely in the long term to suffer the guilt of the executioner. Even in a political bubble as distinctly unempathetic as George Bush's White House, there is surely a shiver of disgust under all those expensive white shirts.
Torture also shows a distinct lack of imagination. Bush, who has no imagination whatsoever, must be aware that the body-blows and cold-water treatments and broken broomsticks don't work. The US military would have caught Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi long ago if torture was in any way valuable. The fact of the matter is that if you beat someone long enough they will tell you anything you want to hear. You can almost hear the hollow echo coming from the cells of Guantanamo as the hunger strikers were being force-fed. "Freedom". "Democracy". "Freedom". "Democracy".
Ultimately, to use torture shows a lack of self-regard. To retreat to the lowest common denominator is to become the lowest common denominator. Torture eventually works against the torturer. And yet the blatant use of torture in a democratic system should not become an indictment of democracy itself. It is an indictment of those militaries (British and US and Iraqi and others) that are in the process of abusing the system.
We all know it is wrong. That's why we are sent reeling every time we see the photographs. It's why a cold bolt comes to the spine whenever we contemplate such horror. It's also among the reasons why those young soldiers going home through Shannon carry such sorrow with them.
Maybe they have seen torture first-hand. Maybe they have not. But in their own way they all carry the torture of having been in a war that does not make sense. That's one of the things that torture does - it sends us home despondent and broken and lost.
• Colum McCann is an Irish writer who lives in New York. His most recent novel was Dancer