The friend wrote:
“I think I can understand why the Home Office are so hard on U — he is pretty well the only one they have not managed to break yet. All the others seem to have been driven to some sort of mental breakdown at some stage, but U is incredibly stoical, and I’m sure that gets right up their noses!”

We all know, of course, that it’s deliberate policy to “break” prisoners, on the cruel presumption that, if pushed hard enough, they may voluntarily opt to be repatriated, sparing the government the effort of having to justify breaking the universal torture ban — although in many cases, of course, the effect has been counter-productive from the government’s point of view, as (in Gareth Peirce’s words) several of the men have been driven into a state of “florid psychosis” instead.

Again, I find the comparisons with Guantanamo uncanny, as the intention there was to “break” prisoners. This was ostensibly for intelligence-gathering purposes, but behind it lies the same absolute disdain for leaving the matter of punishment to a judge, should a jury deliver a guilty verdict after a fair trial, and the same presumption that, because “the gloves came off” after 9/11 (Cofer Black, CIA) or “The rules of the game have changed” (Tony Blair), punishment is now an extra-legal matter, to be dispensed by modern versions of the medieval kings.

Certain pedantic types take exception when I mention the betrayal, since 9/11, of habeas corpus and 794 years of protection from arbitrary imprisonment, pointing out — correctly — that it took many hundreds of years for habeas to be extended to the common man, but those later developments built on the inestimably important principle, established in 1215, that, in matters of judgment and punishment, no one was above the law — neither the King nor his present-day successors: the President, the Vice President or the defense secretary of the Bush administration, and successive Home Secretaries in the UK.