Letters | 11 June 2015

The long arm of the FBI

Sir: The White House may be less willing than it was to play the role of the world’s policeman in international affairs, but the FBI seems eager to be the world’s cop. No doubt, as Martin Vander Weyer has noted (Any other business, 6 May), the US Attorney General has been ‘careful to assert that many of the allegedly corrupt schemes of the Fifa officials so far arrested were planned in the US, and that US banking and “wire” services were used.’ Still, we are told that the FBI is also investigating matters such as the award of the next two world cups to Russia and Qatar, where there is no evident US involvement.

Charles Moore, reflecting on the manner in which Fifa officials were arrested in a dawn raid on their hotel in Zurich (Notes, 6 June), sensibly asks whether we ‘are really satisfied that the US authorities should behave in this way outside their jurisdiction’. Are we? Has the FBI suddenly acquired extra-territorial authority? If so, when and by whose leave? And is the FBI’s record so clean that we should welcome such a development?
Allan Massie
Selkirk, Scotland

Fall of the Brussels empire

Sir: Neither James Forsyth (6 June) nor David Cameron should worry too much about the outcome of the promised EU referendum. It will not yet have dawned upon the Brussels bureaucrats or the politicos that all empires end in tears, through arrogance, greed, incompetence, or simply becoming too big for their boots. This monstrous European empire will, in due course, go the way of all others. It will be brought down by tensions between East and West, prosperous states and poor ones; between the eurozone and those outside it, between Schengen and non-Schengen areas — and because it never listens to its ‘citizens’.