Feargal Quinn (Independent)

We had an interesting debate on Iraq last November. I am on the board of an organisation in the US and when there in December, I found myself talking to a number of Americans about events in Iraq. I was surprised that they did not seem to understand that the steps they were taking were working against their long-term interests.

I admire Senator Mooney for what he said today and we are both friends of the US. When I spoke last November, I spoke as a friend of the US, even though I was very critical. In January, I circulated that speech to Americans and many of them came back to me to talk about it. They were surprised at the strength of feeling I had expressed. However, I found that many of them were supportive of what I would regard as torture. That surprised me because my memory was that they would not have done so before. One of them sent me an article to which I will refer.

What happened last Sunday at Shannon Airport has shaken me, because until then I believed the Americans. I believed what they said, although some other Members of this House did not. I was surprised by what was discovered last Sunday. I am shaken by that. If a person lets me down by misleading me once, I will give him or her a second chance but if that person misleads me a second time, he or she loses my trust. The Americans are in danger of losing our trust because they seem to have misled us about what was happening with those aeroplanes that were passing through Shannon Airport in recent times.

I was surprised by the lack of understanding among Americans that they have no chance of winning this war on terror by using the same tactics as those used by the terrorists. Their only way of winning it is to change the hearts and the minds of those terrorists, but instead they seem not only to be losing out on the fight to change the hearts and minds of those terrorists but to be creating many more who have become associated with the aims and objectives of those terrorists.

When I circulated a copy of what I had said on that occasion, I was surprised by those who came back to defend the areas of torture. One of the comments made was as follows:

It didn't take long for interrogators in the war on terror to realise that their part was not going according to script. Pentagon doctrine, honed over decades of Cold War planning, held that 95% of prisoners would break upon straightforward questioning. Interrogators in Afghanistan, and later in Cuba and Iraq, found just the opposite . . .

In particular, torturous interrogation methods, developed at Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan in illegal disregard of Geneva protections, migrated ... [later to Iraq] and were manifest in the abuse photos [that we saw].

It appears that this was binned on with the approval of very high ranking Americans. Chris Mackey a co-author of the book "The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda" wrote a gripping account of the interrogation methods used in Iraq. I will refer to one of two of them, one in particular caught my imagination. It states:

Battlefield commanders in Afghanistan and intelligence officials in Washington kept pressing for information ... The frustrated interrogators constantly discussed how to get it. The best hope, they agreed, was to re-create the "shock of capture" — that vulnerable mental state when a prisoner is most frightened, most uncertain, and most likely to respond to questioning. [However, it was not working for them.]

The question was: Was such treatment consistent with the Geneva Conventions?

President Bush had declared in February 2002 that al-Qaeda members fell wholly outside the conventions and that Taliban prisoners would not receive prisoner-of-war status — without which they, too, would not be covered by the Geneva rules. [I had not been aware of that.]

What emerged [from this] was a hybrid and fluid set of detention practices. As interrogators tried to overcome the prisoners' resistance, their reference point remained Geneva and other humanitarian treaties. But the interrogators pushed into the outer limits of what they thought the law allowed, undoubtedly recognising that the prisoners in their control violated everything the pacts stood for.

This is what frightens me. It seems the American are now defending the steps they took. They say the terrorists do not stick to the rules, therefore, why should they do so. They treat the soldiers who fight them on a battlefield differently because they could receive the same treatment from the soldiers, but they say the terrorists act differently and, therefore, they do not have to adhere to the Geneva Conventions.

The reason I have gone to some pains to outline this is that I believed the Americans were not involved in torture other than those who had stretched the limit beyond what they should have done. When we heard the outcry against the Abu Ghraib prisoners and we saw those photographs, we said that was not acceptable, and we thought it was not acceptable to the Americans. However, now it seems that is not correct.

I am not sure that the proposal in the motion to establish a select committee to investigate this matter is the correct way to address it, and I would like to hear the Minister of State's view on this. I notice that the Government has not tabled an amendment to the motion and, therefore, I assume it is likely to accept Senator Norris's proposal to establish a select committee.

Perhaps there is another way to deal with this matter, but it seems the Americans abused the reception opportunities we allowed at Shannon Airport. There was no doubt as to whose side we were on when the war commenced in Iraq. I was opposed to that war, but on the day it started there was no question as to whether we were on the side of Saddam Hussein or on the side of those who had gone into Iraq. We had hoped the fighting would be over as quickly as possible, but that did not happen and it appears highly unlikely it will happen. However, we must now help the Americans who invaded Iraq to get out by way of some mechanism. The manner in which we can do that is by urging them to change the hearts and minds of the terrorists and of those who support them and not to begin acting like terrorists.

A step taken which ignores the Geneva Convention is unacceptable. It is unacceptable if Shannon Airport has been used in some form or other in that respect. To take up Senator Dooley's point, I read Senator Marty's report and there is little doubt that the category A level is the very least objectionable of the levels, but it still is beyond what we understood was happening. I hope the Minister of State will give serious consideration to accepting this motion tabled by Senators Norris and Henry.