Tortured

by PETER HITCHENS, Mail on Sunday

The most recent 'best case' for the war in Iraq was that we had overthrown a cruel despot who savagely oppressed his own people and ruled by terror and torture. The invading forces flung open Saddam's captured prisons so that we could imagine the horrors that had taken place there and congratulate ourselves on having ended them.

Now that the fabled weapons of mass destruction have failed to turn up, this is more or less the only justification left for that war. If that is so, how can we, a democratic-law-governed nation, possibly justify the use of torture by our own side in this war, and the lawless imprisonment of hundreds of men in the grotesque conditions of Guantanamo Bay? How can a British Labour