How Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, with her derisive dismissal of the “comfortable” opponents of torture, must applaud SD Weinberg’s paean of praise to the barbarians of Guantanamo Bay (Letters, April 3).

Having, with her predecessors in this Labour administration, presided over the greatest erosion of our hard-won civil liberties since they emerged through generations of struggle from the Enlightenment, Mr Weinberg’s complacent endorsement of George Bush’s consignment of the Geneva Convention to the dustbin of history will surely cause her more than a mere frisson of pleasure.

As Nick Cohen, himself an eloquent supporter of the Iraq war, has recently pointed out, it is, and always was, the authoritarian and essentially anti-democratic Left that proves keenest to trade-off the liberty of the citizen for the supposed benefits of (ever more elusive) “security”.

In his apparent contentment to further the aims of the terrorists – who are, of course, the implacable enemies of the West’s freedom of speech, liberty and transparency – perhaps Mr Weinberg would care to explain to the now partially blinded Omar Deghayes of Saltdean how his four years in Guantanamo represented “a small price to pay to keep us all safe”?

But for the eternal vigilance of the Fourth Estate, well illustrated by The Argus’s exemplary, long and hard-fought campaign to free Mr Deghayes, and the refusal of a handful of MPs, such as David Davis, to be fobbed off with Government spin, I fear Mr Weinberg would be less sanguine about MI5 and MI6’s alleged complicity in torture and more alert to the ever-present possibility of Big Brother’s midnight knock on the door.

Stephen J Williams
York Road, Hove