Ben Roberts

It’s nice to see <a href="http://news.bbc .co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4741780.stm”>Lord Falconer, Lord Goldsmith and Peter Hain condemning the Guantanamo camp. What a shame it’s taken them four years to get round to this! Of course Tony Blair still refuses to openly condemn the U.S. actions here, preferring only to call the camp an ‘anomaly’. Hain claims this is ‘part of a general approach to speak quietly to the Americans and not make big public statements’.

Phil points to a John Simpson piece that claims that only about 5% of the prisoners in Guantanamo were actually captured by the Americans. Simpson doesn’t cite his source other than to say ‘a thorough analysis by an American law professor’, so he won’t be getting a good grade for this essay, but the actual report appears to be here. The policy of internment for terrorists is of doubtful efficacy at the best of times, but when you have little reason to suppose that the majority of the people detained really are terrorists it becomes clearer than ever that this is purely a PR exercise for domestic consumption. The sad thing is that it appears to have worked for Bush.