A bit wordy wasn't he? Even with the paragraph breaks. By which I mean he took an awful lot of time to get round to saying anything.

The Geneva Convention was thrashed out as a way of outlawing some of the horrible things people have done to prisoners in the past. Nations, including the United States of America signed up to it as a way of defending their own soldiers. You don't throw away something like that unilaterally because you got out of bed on the wrong side.

When Maggie Thatcher, for her own reasons, decided to take away POW status from IRA prisoners, this was seen as contemptible by many people all over the world. It also turned out to be of enormous help to the IRA and to the Republican movement.

Al Qaida is a very unpleasant organisation, with some very dangerous members, and it is quite possible that among the prisoners are some who should be tried on criminal charges. (Maybe they all should be, though from what has been allowed to come out it sounds as if some at least of the prisoners are people who were just fighting in a civil war in which America became involved on the other side.)

The same was true of the Nazis - and what the Nazis achieved in the way of mass slaughter of innocent people was vastly worse than anything Al Qaida did.

And that is not trivialising September 11, it's reminding us that, to scale September 11 up to Nazi levels, you've got to multiply it by a factor of thousands. That's how bad the Nazis were.

And yet countries like America took pride in the fact that the Nazis were treated in a civilised fashion as prisoners, and where there was evidence against them of war crimes, they were tried by an international tribunal.