As the world awaits the departure of Barack Obama (Cheers, tears and fears: proud Obama passionately defends US democracy, 12 January), it’s worth reflecting on the outgoing president’s human rights legacy. It’s distinctly mixed. Mr Obama will be remembered for his significant healthcare reforms, ought to be recognised for introducing protections for LGBTI people, and deserves credit for trying to tackle the blight of police killings. However, despite high-profile promises, his administration failed to close Guantánamo Bay. And instead of dealing with the dark history of CIA torture, it ruled out prosecutions and proper accountability over waterboarding and other horrific abuses.
Further afield, secret US drone strikes have killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan, while US arms manufacturers have been allowed to export vast quantities of weaponry to countries with appalling human rights records. Yet even now Mr Obama could right several wrongs. He could accelerate releases from Guantánamo, and order a pardon for the exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden and the release from jail of fellow whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
None of the above should detract from the legitimate fears many people have over a Donald Trump administration. But it goes to show that when it came to human rights, Mr Obama said “we can” but often demonstrated that he couldn’t.
Kate Allen
Director, Amnesty International UK
• Natalie Nougayrède says that “torture inflicted severe damage to America’s image” (Europe is between a rock and a hard place, 7 January). And there I was thinking that the damage was inflicted on the victims. People who torture are not good guys with a bit of an image problem. They are not on the side of “individual liberty and the rule of law”. We should be ashamed that Britain collaborated in torture by facilitating renditions.
We have to take off the blinkers and stop regarding the US government as always being a force for good in the world. The US dropped 26,171 bombs on other countries in 2016, up from 23,144 the year before. Perhaps President Obama is vying for the record for the most people killed by a Nobel peace prize laureate (versus Henry Kissinger, bomber of Cambodia, and Fritz Haber, inventor of chemical weapons). But evil deeds are evil, whoever commits them; there are no good warmongers and torturers. We rightly condemn Isis and their like for using torture; we have double standards if we don’t condemn our allies when they do the same.
Martin Lyster
Oxford
• Cornel West (Obama cheerleaders deny it, but Trump is his grim legacy, 9 January) overlooks one dramatic failure by Barack Obama to deliver a key promise. The citation for the Nobel peace prize Obama was awarded in November 2009 stated the committee has attached “special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons”. Yet in October last year at the UN when 123 nations voted to begin negotiations this year on a new treaty to prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons – the so-called “Ban treaty”, the US voted no; and indeed led the opposition to this treaty, closely followed by the UK, Russia and France.
Instead, the Pentagon under Obama has developed outsize plans to modernise the entire nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years, including aircraft, submarines and warheads, at an estimated $1tn. However, president-elect Donald Trump stated in 2015 that “the biggest problem we have is nuclear – nuclear proliferation and having some maniac … go out and get a nuclear weapon … that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now”. He also told People magazine that pushing the nuclear button would be such a last resort, and he would be “very, very slow on the draw” and would be ”amazingly calm under pressure”. Indeed, surprisingly, as long ago as 1987, he told Manhattan, inc magazine he wanted to find a way to halt a national security policy based on nuclear mutually assured destruction “before a wild-card nuke deals death to millions”.
Nuclear disarmament did not seem to be on foreign secretary foreign secretary Boris Johnson’s agenda when he met with the Trump transition team. But just maybe we can achieve it, under Trump.
Dr David Lowry
Institute for Resource and Security Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• The Donald Trump quotation “We’re a second rate economic power, a debtor nation. We’re getting kicked around” in Polly Toynbee’s 1988 interview (Trump disclosed his political dream to me in 1988, 13 January) is a direct lift from Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech from the film Wall Street about dubious corporate raiders, which was released at about that time. By coincidence I watched the film this week, and then turned over to the news which was covering Mr Trump’s nominees for top jobs. For a moment I thought I was watching out-takes or an epilogue.
Dr Martin Price
Dinas Powys, Vale of Glamorgan
• Perhaps president-elect Trump, in his dealings with President Putin and his acolytes, should be mindful of the Russian maxim much favoured by Stalin: “You may always walk with the devil till you get to the end of the bridge.”
Paul Faupel
Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire
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