Madam, - Reading Donald Rumsfeld's response to the UN report calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison, it is becoming worryingly apparent that the man and the administration to which he belongs have lost all contact with reality and how democracy as we know it should operate ("UN chief is 'just flat wrong'", says Rumsfeld, The Irish Times, February 18th).
It beggars belief that a country which trumpets its belief in freedom and human rights can round up people and throw them into what is effectively a concentration camp, apparently without a shred of evidence.
Would it not be far more effective from the American point of view to put these people on trial and let the world see the dastardly deeds and heinous crimes that they were involved in when all the charges are brought and evidence presented?
The snag, of course, is that if the proof is of the same standard as that which was presented to the UN prior to the invasion of Iraq concerning the existence of weapons of mass destruction, it is obvious why no trials will take place.
When one remembers now that Colin Powell stood before all the assembled heads of delegations in the UN and told them that some sweaty scientists were bumping over desolate roadways in the back of trucks trying to pour Anthrax into test tubes it seems simply incredible. But that is what happened and that "information" came from Rumsfeld and his cohorts.
It is extraordinary that the present US administration is so mystified that America is hated in the Middle East when one considers all the suffering it has inflicted on that area in the past. But then it has only lately tried its hand overtly at becoming a colonial power and therefore has a lot to learn.
The only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. - Yours, etc,
LARRY PARSONS, Whaley Lodge, Rathdrum, Co Wicklow.