Madam, - In the world we live in, there is no hiding-place from a global terror network, now and into the foreseeable future. "So if in this hideous world, 'rendition' occurs through Shannon, what of it?" So argues Kevin Myers in his Irishman's Diary of December 22nd.
This is the conclusion of his well-argued article about the clear struggle between the forces of evil and of right, as he sees the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He is sceptical about allegations that captive suspects are subjected to "torture". In any case, conventional interrogation techniques are often ineffective. Mr Myers makes clear that he does not mean we should abandon common human decencies, but merely recognise that they cannot always prevail.
So what's wrong with "rendition"? When we provide a moral alibi for torture as part of interrogation, we cross a moral sound-barrier. When we choose wicked means such as torture to achieve morally worthy goals, we are most likely to lose our own humanity. We become depraved and demented in our hatreds, rather like the enemy we thought to overcome.
History abounds in conflicts in which one or both parties justified the infliction of lethal violence on the enemy. At all times, violence has its good reasons. In the past, popes and other morally serious people allowed the torture of heretics, albeit as a necessary evil. Heretics were seen as the embodiment of evil, threatening civil and religious order. There is a point here about the limitations of all human articulations of the forces of evil and of right.
Now there is a near-general consensus that it is always wrong to use the body of another human being as a means to an end, as in torture or terrorist violence, no matter how necessary this action appears to be. There is a sacredness about the human person which means that he or she has a right not to be tortured or subjected to cruel and degrading treatment.
This remains true even if the person is believed to be part of a terrorist network.
There is a deadly reciprocity in the use of violent force. If we allow for the possibility of torture in interrogation, to save ourselves from deadly enemies, we are quickly assimilated into a spiral of "necessary" violence. We soon find ourselves in a different moral universe. The great Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz observed sharply in his book on war: "We therefore repeat our proposition, that war is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds; as one side dictates the law to the other, there arises a sort of reciprocal action, which logically must lead to an extreme" (emphasis mine).
The terrorists who murder innocent victims on video-tape are perhaps dictating the law to us. If we in Europe and the US respond in accordance with the laws of this dynamic then, as Clausewitz said, we are led to an extreme - most probably, a world determined by reciprocal menaces. Having made a Faustian pact, we will not succeed in sustaining humane values and communities in the present global war of values.
There are some things which human beings must never do, for the sake of survival or to win the current war of right against evil. - Yours, etc,
BREIFNE WALKER, Whitehall Road, Dublin 12.