Fair enough, Wolfgang. Since I haven't been a hostage in the hands of Lebanese terrorists, or an "illegal combatant" (or someone accused of being such) in the hands of the US authorities), I'd probably have been better to have said "comparable to", in the words of Terry Waites and John McCarthy, rather than "worse than. (Of course if the treatment of prisoners by our allies in the "Northern Alliance " is included, "worse than" would have been pretty clearly true.)

And so far as the run of German prisoners in 1945 is concerned, it's probably no more accurate to talk in blanket terms about them as "Nazi prisoners" than to refer in the same all-embracing way to those who fought in Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance and the invading forces as "Taliban prisoners". Moreover I accept that many of these German captives will have been treated in ways that offended against the accepted standard. Real senior Nazis were of course treated much much better.

But the correct standard to apply for Guantanamo Bay is not the conditions which may hold in US domestic prisons, but those internationally agreed, and contained in the Geneva Conventions. In a sense, it is the business of the US authorities how they run their own domestic prisons, subject to their constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" - but that is not so when it comes to prisoners taken in foreign wars, where internationally agreed standards are applicable.

As for "survivors", that seems a very fair term to use for people who have survived this kind of experience. The number of physical deaths is not the only mesure of this kind of thing. (Though again, three of those released had been in the infamous massacre in lorry containers early in their captivity - "early in their ordeal they survived a massacre perpetrated by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance troops, who herded hundreds of prisoners into lorry containers and locked them in, so that people started to suffocate. Iqbal described how only 20 of 300 prisoners in each container lived, and then only because someone made holes in its side with a machine gun - an action which killed yet more prisoners.)