Ian Cobain notes (UK among allies fearing revelations over role in rendition programme, 9 December) that the nature of the involvement of the UK in the CIA’s “war on terror” torture and rendition programme “remains unclear”. The resulting injustice is multiple. First, there are the victims of practices that were illegal and immoral, and which the US Senate has also found to have been “ineffective”. Where is their “closure”? Second, there are those in the UK who authorised and participated in these practices. The current position means that many of them are still in post, administering and in some cases legislating, and all the while untroubled by any requirement to account for their actions. Third, however, is the injustice done to those who opposed this civilisational collapse in the face of pressure from a US government in the grip of neoconservative hysteria.
Some officials in the US are known to have resisted the slide towards barbarism. One thinks of Alberto Mora, US navy general counsel, who warned William Haynes, counsel to Donald Rumsfeld’s defence department, that Rumsfeld’s own position was threatened if torture was adopted as an instrument of policy. Philippe Sands QC, in his book Torture Team, memorably records Mora as telling Haynes – lawyer to lawyer – to “protect your client” (p.168). Who were the Moras on this side of the Atlantic? They as much deserve to be exonerated as those who colluded deserve to be exposed.
Roger Hallam
London
• Hot on the heels of the US Senate report on abuses by the CIA, Brazil’s truth commission published its report into the abuses of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964-85 (Report, 10 December). Human Rights Day was deliberately chosen for the ceremony. There are also interesting contrasts. The Brazilian process was initiated, not by parliamentarians, but by the head of state, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and continued by his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, both victims of the military dictatorship, and Rousseff wept on receiving the report. The Brazilian report is available in full on the internet.
Brazilian transparency, perhaps defective in that an amnesty law for the moment prevents prosecution of alleged abusers, should still encourage those in Britain who campaign for full disclosure of British complicity in US abuses.
Francis McDonagh
London
• In the context of auto-da-fé, or the brutality of colonial powers such as the British and the French in the 1950s and 60s (the French favoured the use of a blowtorch applied to captive Algerian resistance fighters, as I recall), the torture of suspects by the CIA was frankly “torture-lite”, however disagreeable it might have been to those on whom it was inflicted.
Of much greater concern is the way in which the US administration dispensed with the rule of law and due process – individuals kidnapped and abused at the discretion of their captors, without any legal oversight. A continuing disgrace – compounded by Obama’s assurance to CIA personnel that those who “followed orders” had nothing to worry about – not an acceptable excuse for Nazi concentration camp guards at Nuremberg.
The US lost a few thousand civilians in the 9/11 attack – a drop in the bucket in the context of annual deaths in the US by homicide and automobile accidents – and the US government played right into the hands of the perpetrators, spending trillions in revenge, to no permanent effect and engendering a new generation implacably hostile to the US. At the time some US commentators asked, apparently sincerely “why do they hate us so?” without stopping to answer their question. All quite mindless behaviour.
Andy Smith
Kingston upon Thames, Surrey
• Surely this is now the time for Obama to use his authority as president, as he claims he will (Report, 10 December) and close Guantánamo as promised at his inauguration. Terrible tortures continue to be inflicted there on men, like our own British Shaker Aamer, who have been cleared of all charges and should be released immediately. The truth is now out and the evidence that Shaker and others can provide about their treatment should no longer be a barrier to their freedom.
Margaret Owen
London
• It’s great news that David Cameron has found his conscience again. In 2009 he said: “It is vital that we get to the bottom of whether Britain has been complicit in torture.” In power, he set up the Gibson inquiry. A year ago, Gibson concluded there were 27 key questions that the government needed to answer. Maybe he could make a New Year resolution to start filling in the detail. We don’t need general condemnation; what’s required is some detailed answers to very particular questions. The Americans have done it. Now it’s our turn.
Paul Francis
Much Wenlock, Shropshire
• I’m glad that the weasel words of Jack Straw and David Miliband, on the subject of rendition and torture, will now come back to haunt them. And I’m glad Labour elected the right brother after all.
Tim Grollman
London
