Madam,- A strange and profound shift has taken place in the United States, which has gone all but unremarked on in Europe. The mainstream of the Republican Party - the party of Lincoln and Grant, which commands the support of roughly half the American electorate - has come out as unashamedly in favour of torture, and, most bizarrely, against the Constitution of the United States.
In a recent debate, presidential front-runners Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani either explicitly endorsed the Khmer-Rouge practice of "water-boarding" or vacillated over whether it really constituted "torture". Giuliani wants interregators to employ "every means they can think of" against terror suspects, while Romney wants to double the size of Guantánamo Bay. This from men who would claim to lead the world's greatest democracy.
Even more troubling was a recent speech by vice-president Dick Cheney at West Point Military Academy, in which he portrayed the Geneva Conventions, and the US Constitution, as devices by which al-Qaeda can defeat the United States.
"Capture one of these killers," he said, "and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away."
The implications here - that al-Qaeda has no truck with the "delicate sensibilities" provided by the Constitution, so why should the American military, and that the Geneva Convention is an obstacle to defeating terrorism - are truly disturbing. The vice-president is, in effect, disregarding what, in his oath of office, he swore to uphold: "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic".
It is the Constitution - not the territory or the citizenry - of America that must first be defended: that is, the system of liberty that has been enshrined since the days of the nation's founding. That Cheney regards that document merely as an instrument of terrorist manipulation does not augur well for its defence. Indeed, it bodes ill for the future of liberty itself. - Yours, etc,
SEAN COLEMAN, Lindisfarne Lawn, Clondalkin, Dublin 22.