Madam, - Mark Steyn misses the point ("Why I cannot share the outrage over Abu Ghraib", Opinion, May 17th).
He quotes a US senator asking why there is more indignation over a "photo of a prisoner with underwear over his head" than over the brutal decapitation of Nick Berg last week. The point is that we expect higher standards from a democratic government than we do from Islamic terrorists.
The targeting of civilians in car bomb attacks, the inhuman abuse meted out to those four contractors in Falluja, the horrific murder of Nick Berg and the deliberate targeting of a UN building are outrages against civilised behaviour. But I do not see many cheerleaders in Europe for fundamentalist fanatics. Such people are so far removed from any moral compass that we cannot empathise with them; but Americans are our friends and we see them losing their way.
We see the self-professed "leader of the free world" engaging in systematic torture including sodomy with chemical lights, death threats, and setting attack dogs on prisoners. We read of at least three Afghans killed while under "interrogation" by the US. We see the virtual abolition of habeas corpus with up to 7,000 people held without charge or access to legal process. We see a member of the UN Security Council undermining that institution by presenting deliberately falsified "intelligence" to the UN General Assembly and by engaging in systematic espionage against the UN. We see an erstwhile friend metamorphosing into a renegade state engaging in an illegal war, perpetrating war crimes and effectively tearing up the Geneva conventions by declaring prisoners of war "illegal combatants".
That is why so many of us are outraged and praying for "regime change" next November. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID O'DONOVAN, Pembroke Road, Dublin 4.
Madam, - Mark Steyn (Opinion, May 17th) opens an interesting line of argument: he wants our - and, I suppose, his own - health care "to be measured against London or Oslo, Geneva or Vancouver", i.e. against best practice in the world.
When it comes to the prisoners of Iraq, however, he wants their treatment to be compared with the worst practices in the region.
Could he tell me what he would like his own style of journalism measured against? - Yours, etc.,
Dr HEINZ LECHLEITER, Glenbourne Park, Leopardstown Valley, Dublin 18.
Madam, - What we have seen in those awful pictures from Iraq is almost certainly a specially and sadistically designed method of torture, sanctioned at a far higher level than the rank of those soldiers who were photographed. How else can one explain the perpetrators' willingness to allow themselves be pictured at their depraved work? - Yours, etc.,
NOEL BROWN, Woodbrook Park, Templeogue, Dublin 16.