One of the released captives was picked up in a Taliban jail, allegedly after being taken prisoner when the van driver taking him to Iran from Pakistan on his way backl home to England, took a road that went through a part of Afghanistan which was a long way away from any war zone.

When he got back to England he was immediately released, because there was no reason even to suspect him.

Of course there are three issues here. One is whether there was any reason for the people out in Afghanistan to have some suspicions about what they were doing there, and what they might have been doing. And I think most people would agree that there was reason enough.

But the other thing is whether holding on to them and interrogating them for two years was proportionate. On the basis of the information that has come out, that doesn't seem right.

And the third is the wider one - if is it true that the conditions under which prisoners have been kept and the way in which they have been treated have been as described in these accounts, thinking does anyone really think that this is how a civilised country should behave? As I have pointed out, even at the end of a brutal and savage war, we didn't treat the Nazis like that. There are rules for how people taken prisoner in a war should be treated, and they don't include the kind of stuff we have been hearing about.