The only way these kidnappings and robberies could be tackled, he said, was if the people who were targeted alerted garda immediately.

Anybody who responds to kidnapping by giving into it "encourages more of it", he said.

A few weeks ago, following a garda operation which resulted in the arrests of a number of people involved in a kidnapping and robbery, McDowell spoke on the subject again. "The only way that it [the kidnapping craze] will stop is if they are detected and intervention takes place, " he said. "And that's what I'm glad about in this case; that gardaA- were in a position to take action.

Everybody must be vigilant."

McDowell's own vigilance was partly demonstrated last week when he announced details of the government's proposed new criminal justice legislation. Among the measures suggested is one which would allow somebody suspected of being involved in an armed kidnapping to be detained in a garda station for seven days.

The message from McDowell and the government about kidnapping therefore is loud and clear: new powers are needed to deal with it;

we must all be vigilant; we should contact the gardaA- if we are aware of it; and if we do anything that could be perceived as giving in to it, we will only encourage the kidnappers to do it again.

I wonder what Abu Omar would make of that. On the morning of 17 February, 2003, Abu Omar, an Egyptian citizen who had been granted asylum in Italy, was walking down the Via Guerzoni in Milan to take part in midday prayers at the local mosque. Also on the Via Guerzoni that morning, a woman called Merfet Rezk was walking home with her two daughters.

In a subsequent conversation with Italian investigators, Rezk recalled that she had been forced to cross the street because a light-coloured van was blocking the pavement. In front of the van was a dark-haired man dressed in a tunic. Another, Western looking, man in sunglasses was examining his papers. Rezk was reported to be terrified in her interviews with the police and refused to say what happened next. Her husband later reported on what she had told him. The Arab man had "struggled and cried for help while being grabbed and forcibly made to enter a van, " he said. The van then drove off at high speed.

That was the last anybody in Italy heard about Abu Omar for 13 months, until his wife received a phone call informing her that he was alive, in Alexandria on the Egyptian coast. Subsequent investigations in Italy, which involved the tapping of phone conversations as well as interviews with Abu Omar's friend, Mohammed Reda Elbadry, pieced together what had happened to him that morning in February.

Abu Omar had indeed been kidnapped and taken to the ItalianAmerican airbase of Aviano, where he was handed over to people he believed were Americans. He was later flown a short distance, taken off the plane and put in another one with US insignia, which took off immediately. It later landed at Cairo, where Abu Omar was held for the following 13 months.

While in Cairo, he was severely tortured. The following account of what happens to him is from Elbadry, and is quoted in Stephen Grey's brilliant book, Ghost Plane: The Inside Story Of The CIA's Secret Rendition Programme, which details the full story of what happened to Abu Omar. "The first measure was to leave him in a room where incredibly loud and unbearable noise was made, " Elbadry said. "He has experienced damage to his hearing. The second kind of torture was to place him in a sauna at tremendous temperature and straight after to put him in a cold storeroom. It caused terrible pain to his bones - as if they were racking? The third was to hang him upside down and apply live wires to give electric shocks to the sensitive parts of his body including the genitals. He received damage to his motory and urinary systems and became incontinent." Seven months of vicious torture followed, after which the severity of the violence tapered off. No charges of any kind have been brought against Abu Omar.

On Friday, arrest warrants were issued in Italy against 26 Americans who had been involved in the kidnapping of Abu Omar. The kidnap, the judge said, represented a "very serious violation to the national sovereignty that cannot absolutely be justified".

Ireland facilitated the kidnapping of Abu Omar. As Stephen Grey makes clear in Ghost Plane, the prisoner was placed on a Gulfsteam IV jet at the US airbase in Ramstein, Germany, at about 7.20pm on 17 February, 2003.

The plane took off for Cairo at 7.52pm and arrived there a little after midnight, Egyptian time. On 18 February, four years ago today, it returned to the United States, but not before stopping in Shannon airport to pick up enough fuel to get it home.

This flight is one of the 147 CIAoperated flights through Irish airports about which the European Parliament last week expressed concern. The parliament encouraged the government to hold a DA il inquiry into the use of Ireland by the US in its worldwide programme of torture flights, and criticised the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, for his failure to answer all the questions asked of him.

That inquiry will never happen and those questions will never be answered because such a debate would expose the wild inconsistency of the government, which facilitates the crime of kidnapping in one instance while issuing condemnatory statements about kidnapping in another. If you or I gave aid to a kidnapper while they fled the scene of the crime, McDowell would want our neighbours to be vigilant and the gardaA- to arrest us. When US citizens are the kidnappers, however, he and his government provide them with aid and dismiss anybody who objects as a crackpot. It's moral flakiness on a grand scale. And the TA naiste wonders why editors are indifferent and commentators are hostile?