Madam, - In his article (June 4th) on the identification of the 91-year-old Mark Felt as Deep Throat in the Watergate affair, Conor O'Clery refers to "the Irish official who leaked me in advance the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights that Britain was guilty of torture in Northern Ireland", and concludes that "I expect him to keep his identity secret at least until he is 91".
Maybe so, but the name is, I suspect, known to the authorities. The reason I can say this with some confidence is that at the time (1976) I was attorney general Declan Costello's spokesman on the case. To put it mildly, the attorney general was livid about the leak and called in the gardaí. During lengthy interrogation I was able, by comparing Conor O'Clery's quotations from official documents with the varying drafts in my possession, to point the gardaí towards the source. Fortunately for the official concerned, Occam's razor cuts no ice as evidence.
Two incidental points. It is said that the leak "upset London's plans for a diversionary manoeuvre on the official day of publication", but even if Conor O'Clery accepts that this was the purpose (which I think he shouldn't), it had the opposite effect - The Irish Times scoop undermined Declan Costello's presentation of the verdict.
Secondly, the British government was not found guilty of torture, not at least as "an administrative practice", which is what mattered then and now. Had that been the verdict, the United States government and other democratic governments worldwide would have been left in no doubt about the legality of such techniques of interrogation as sleep deprivation, hooding and white noise. Their morality is, of course, another matter. - Yours, etc,
BRIAN LYNCH, Killiney, Co Dublin.