'Beyond humanity'

After all the monster-behind-every-door tripe we are constantly fed in the United States about "international terrorism", an important but often overlooked aspect of the vile and confounding anomaly called Guantanamo is that everyone there is actually a "suspect". No-one there is yet proved to be guilty of anything, even while being treated individually and collectively as the worst of all depraved human beings.

Their captors, jailors, interrogators and torturers however, wish us to think of them – the handlers – as angels and superb human beings of the very best kind. The Canadians who visited 15-year-old Omar Khadr (your report, 16 July) from the Canadian Security Intelligence Services showed no discomfort with their role as interrogators, despite the obvious signs that the juvenile Omar was near exhaustion and clearly a child. He was a suspect.

When eventually released to their home countries (ie, Great Britain, Australia) many of those freed Guantanamo detainees who endured four or five years of senseless deprivation and imprisonment proved to have been seized under the most improbable of conditions, had been innocent bystanders or travellers in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their subsequent humiliations at Guantanamo defy any moral compass. It has apparently turned all skewed there – a land beyond humanity, gone all wrong, talking only to itself.

MICHAEL BILLINGSLEY

Brattleboro

Vermont, USA