Madam, - Your Editorial of June 7th calling for the Guantánamo Bay prison camp to be closed immediately and its inmates charged or freed is very welcome.
Guantánamo is the most visible - albeit far from transparent - part of a global detention web that the US has spun in the "war on terror".
In the most comprehensive accounting to date, six leading human rights organisations have published the names and details of 39 people who are believed to have been held in secret US custody and whose current whereabouts remain unknown.
The paper reveals how suspects' relatives, including wives and children as young as seven, have been held in secret detention. In September 2002 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's two young sons, aged seven and nine, were arrested.
According to eye-witnesses, the two were held in an adult detention centre for at least four months while US agents questioned the children about their father's whereabouts.
Similarly, when Tanzanian national Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was seized in Gujarat, Pakistan, in July 2004, his Uzbek wife was detained with him.
The list - drafted by Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law, Human Rights Watch and Reprieve - draws together information from government and media sources, as well as from interviews with former prisoners and other witnesses.
We are calling on the US government to put a permanent end to the CIA's secret detention and interrogation programme, and to disclose the identities, fate and whereabouts of all detainees currently or previously held at secret facilities operated or overseen by the US government as part of the "war on terror". - Yours, etc,
NOELEEN HARTIGAN, Programmes Director, Amnesty International Irish Section, Fleet Street, Dublin 2.