If you gave much thought to this unfortunate brig rat, allegedly en route to a short sentence Stateside for a minor offence, it was probably to note that his presence here wasn't such a big story in the end. The problem with him being in Ireland was a technicality about missing paperwork. Only for the World Cup traffic he'd probably have gone through Germany, where presumably permissions are granted routinely. He wasn't an "extraordinary rendition". Your own answer to the question, "Can we trust the Americans over Shannon?" was unlikely to have been affected one way or another.

But the pathetic image returned to me as the EU enjoyed one of its regular summit stints on the moral high ground, "standing up" to George Bush over Guantanamo and CIA flights. Except of course EU leaders didn't stand up at all; indeed they barely mouthed off. The flights keep landing and taking off, uninspected.

As for Guantanamo and its 460 prisoners, the tip of the iceberg of illegality and immorality in the US war on/of terror . . . well, if Camp Delta didn't exist, the EU would have had to invent another peripheral issue to whine impotently about for the benefit of disgruntled Europeans, while continuing in every substantial way to aid and abet US imperial policy.

In fact, the body that has been doing the most well-informed whining about the CIA flights, the Council of Europe, has nothing to do with (and is far more impotent than) the EU, which has largely kept its head down.

It was not surprising during the week to hear the typically puffed-up John Bruton boast that US relations with Europe have been fully and fruitfully engaged in recent years. He's right. The EU provides useful "diplomatic" cover for American belligerence, at least by the bar-room definition of diplomacy: whispering "he means it you know", while your pal shouts threats at anyone annoying him.

This role is most conspicuous in relation to Iran. Entirely compliant, as far as anyone knows, with its obligations under the NonProliferation Treaty, Iran was sucked into suspending its legal activities by a European "troika" (Britain, France, Germany) who told Iran they could get the Yanks to talk sensibly. When it became clear they couldn't, Iran reasonably withdrew from the deal, and the West cried foul. There can and should be a peaceful outcome to the dispute, but don't expect it from European "diplomacy", revealed as simply another instrument of US pressure.

The idea of the EU as some sort of global moral compass is absurd once you give it a moment's thought.

Would we ever begin to believe such a thing about our own State's government? About Britain's?

Italy's? Germany's? What could possibly transform the usual collection of corrupt, self-interested national politicians into a collective embodiment of geopolitical virtue?

On global trade issues, for example, the EU plays as hard and dirty against the developing world as the US does, looking after the interests of a slightly different list of corporate players. Check out one of the vaunted achievements of this week's transatlantic meeting of minds: a new agreement to tackle "counterfeit" goods. The real achievement here is to convince us to adopt the language of counterfeiting over this issue . . .

what's fake is the idea that a "genuine" swoosh or alligator or downloadable song denotes quality or morality for which it's worth paying extra.

Trade policy costs enough lives, God knows. But Europe, and Ireland, assist more directly in murderous policies. EU states, for example, facilitate the ongoing occupation of Iraq. We may not know much about what went through the minds of the marines who slaughtered at least 24 Iraqi civilians in a killing spree in Haditha. But we can be virtually certain that they went through Shannon Airport. Did some of them come home on the plane carrying their shackled brother?

Who really believes Haditha was an aberration, an isolated incident, rather than an accidentally publicised one? (My Lai, one of countless similar massacres in Vietnam, was the centre of a similar myth of uniqueness, with token prosecutions to purge America's sins. ) Europe's moral compass on the question can be gauged by the widespread welcome here for the way the US brought "justice" to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the nasty piece of work whom the Americans hyped into the personification of the Iraqi resistance. Aerial bombardment is now, it seems, a legitimate mode of arrest, and anyone else on the scene a legitimate collateral corpse, unlike the dodgy ones at Haditha. And another outcome: beheading, which other factions had persuaded Zarqawi to abandon last year, made a grisly return as the preferred punishment for a pair of captured US soldiers.

Meanwhile, back on the scene of the original occupation, the EU was congratulating itself for finding a way to get some aid to Palestinians while bypassing the duly elected Palestinian Authority, "using its influence to persuade" (ie, attempting to bribe) Hamas into changing its democratically endorsed positions to bring them into line with US and Israeli demands. Those demands were also, of course, backed up by plenty more bombardment, such as the Gaza beach killing caused by what RTE quaintly called a "stray Israeli artillery shell".

The notion that the world's problems, and the violent ways they are exacerbating, are essentially down to George Bush is mildly comforting: he'll be gone in twoand-a-half years. But the monstrous, rapacious greed that stalks the planet is bigger than Bush, and here in Europe we are shackled in the belly of the beast.