'The extensive and growing collaboration with the European Union is an essential part of President Bush's strategy for fighting terrorism." That's what the White House believed when the US and EU last held a joint summit on "co-operation to combat terrorists" in 2004. But that collaboration looked very distant last week: the EU declared one of the most basic forms of co-operation with the US in the fight against terrorism "illegal", because it "failed to respect human rights".

What had the US done to incur the wrath of the EU's rights watchdogs? Had it tortured people suspected of terrorism and handed over by the EU for trial in the US? No: the US couldn't do that if it wanted to, because the EU will not hand over anyone for trial in a country, such as the US, where they might face the death penalty.

Had the US discriminated against EU citizens on grounds of religion or race? No: both kinds of discrimination are illegal in the US too, and the laws prohibiting them are probably more zealously enforced there than they are in many EU countries.

What had irked the EU regulators was that the US had been allowed access to records of international bank transfers by Swift, the company that oversees most of them. Swift had thought it was acting responsibly: the point of co-operating had been to help the US in its effort to track down who was transferring money to terrorist bank accounts, and stop them doing it...

The American programme, which has been going on since 9/11, has been surprisingly successful: US law-enforcement officers have managed to identify and freeze well over $200 million in terrorist-related bank accounts, thus preventing the terrorists financing some of the incidents of mass murder that they had planned.

You might have thought this would generate appreciation rather than censure from the EU. After all, the networks of Islamist terrorism are global, as are its financial tentacles. We all benefit when it becomes harder for the terrorists to finance their operations, because that makes it more difficult for them to pull them off. But that's not how the bureaucrats in Brussels see it. They insist that in allowing the US access to some of its transaction records, Swift wrongly put "security interests ahead of norms of human rights".

It is difficult to understand how it can be more important to keep bank transactions private than to prevent mass murder. Unless, of course, you are a terrorist intent on mass murder. What makes the EU's stance even more difficult to understand is that it does allow that "an important public interest" is enough to over-ride the "right" to keep bank transactions secret: the European Commission's Working Party on the Protection of Personal Data stresses that "tax and customs administrations" could take a peek at bank transfers without any rights being violated, as could "the services responsible for social security… and the supervisory bodies in the financial services sector".

So it's fine for the authorities to be given access to the details of the money you have transferred in order to ensure you pay your taxes. But it's a violation of human rights for the state to look at what money you've transferred if the purpose is merely to decrease the chance that someone gets killed by a suicide bomber...