On Prime Ministers Questions today Gordon Brown was asked whether the election of Barack Obama would signal an end to extraordinary rendition and the torture of terrorist suspects. Brown replied that Obama has already announced that he'll be closing Guantanomo. That is welcome news and I've no doubt Obama will close the book on the whole grisly business of torture and rendition.

However, Brown's response ignores the silent culpability of Britain and other countries in not denouncing Bush's regime of torture in the first place. Why the USA never became an international pariah over this I do not know. Well, perhaps I do. In the words of Woody Guthrie, "Uncle Sam got every nation in this world in his long old leather money bags".