Ok, Ok, I know I said that I wouldn’t be posting anything for a few weeks; however I’ve a few hours to kill before my flight and I just read a footnote of a story on page 38 of The Times. The newspaper reports that Abdulah Salih al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti freed from Guantanamo Bay last year, blew himself up, along with seven civilians, in Iraq last month. He is the thirty sixth former Guantanamo inmate to have been killed or re-captured whilst committing acts of Jihadi terrorism. Now I am as opposed to the use of Guantanamo Bay as anyone, but let’s not kid ourselves, few of the inmates are potential winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. The majority of inmates are Arabs and Europeans who were captured in Afghanistan in 2001-2002; call me Mr Cynical but I doubt they were in that blighted country to visit the Buddhas of Bamyan or the Minaret of Jam. Other inmates include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Hambali, as well as other alleged top-level Al Qaeda commanders. I deplore the use of detention without trial and the use of torture; even the most evil human beings have the right to a fair trial. Worse, several apparently innocent men have been incarcerated for years on end. However few of those left in Guantanamo are the type of people you’d invite home for a (halal) Sunday lunch.

Furthermore those who criticise the United States' legal approach to terrorism forget how it tackled Al Qaeda before Bush’s election. The U.S. spurned several chances to kill Bin Laden because assasination was deemed to be illegal. Several plans were devised to kidnap Bin Laden and Government lawyers ensured that his handcuffs wouldn’t be too uncomfortable, that any duct tape used wouldn’t chafe his skin and that a special padded chair was constructed to keep the Al Qaeda leader comfortable during his flight to the US. The plans were all cancelled because the Government was worried that Bin Laden might accidentally be injured or killed during the operation. Indeed the U.S. used impeccably legal methods to prosecute those responsible for 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, the 1999 Millennium Plots and the 2000 USS Cole bombing, as well as the Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui cases. Interestingly Ramzi Yousef, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for planning the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre, has reportedly converted to Christianity and rejected the ideology of Jihadi terrorism. Perhaps he realised who the true criminals are.