Your liberal crap makes you seem so silly (“The US doesn’t have the right to decide who is or isn’t a PoW”, January 18). You should pick your pompous ass up and come on over for a front-row seat at ground zero. Then we can talk about how inhumane it is to hood a prisoner. You’d be speaking German right now if it weren’t for the United States so show some respect. Dan Ribreau, US
Who are you to condemn the US for the way prisoners are held? Do the almost 3 000 have a say in the way they are buried at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon? I think not. These savages have vowed to kill Americans.
God bless America! And stay out of our business. Remember, you need us, we don’t need you. Thomas Weir, New York
I suggest that the Taliban combatants in US custody be locked in a building which is then destroyed by an airliner crashing into it. Survivors may then be allowed to live next door to Michael Byers and his family. Fred LaVenuta, Fargo, US
I have listened to reports of the detention of US captives with growing disquiet.
Michael Byers lists some violations of their rights. If verified, they confirm the fears of many. Byers says America “has occupied much of the moral high ground since September 11”. Without doubt. America has long argued their rightness, their moral superiority, and claimed that as their might. They take the Arthurian romantic tenet “right is might” a step further. Their rightness, they assert, gives them the right to might.
The dark irony is that the US claims its global rights and its global supremacy by virtue of not being a repressive or vindictive regime, of treating all as innocent until proven guilty, of tolerating the widest range of human manifestations and convictions, of upholding the human rights of others throughout the world. It has a right, and is right, by virtue of respecting the rights of others. How can the US now present its human-rights ethos as justification for violating the rights of others? How does it claim its supremacy now? How does it convince others of the justness of its cause and superiority of its culture? How does it maintain that it is better than the regimes it seeks to overthrow? By asserting, in a twist of the clich associated with King Arthur and his round table, that when right loses its might, when its defences are breached and its vulnerability exposed, then might becomes right? Barbara Loon, Orange Grove