Spot the difference, Mr Blair

Along with joy and relief at the news the 15 British sailors are coming home after their capture at sea by the Iranians, we should be asking some serious questions.

First of all, whose negligence allowed them to be taken prisoner in the first place?

They were taking part in a boring, routine anti-smuggling operation. They were supposedly guarded by a warship bristling with technology and a helicopter flying overhead.

HMS Cornwall and its like are supposedly “the eyes and ears of the Royal Navy” so why was it fast asleep when the Iranian gunboats surrounded our boys and girl?

And why was the helicopter miles from the scene of the action at the precise moment when it was wanted most?

Who was asleep on the job? Who is responsible? Why on earth to we support – morally as well as financially – our armed forces when they allow their own sailors to become victims of their crass incompetence and lack of preparedness?

Our sailors would never have fallen into Iranian hands if the Royal Navy had been alert to the risk – a risk we have experienced in the past – and taken basic precautions to prevent just such an ambush at sea.

You could go back even further and ask why on earth our servicemen and women are obliged to behave as customs officers trying to cut off untaxed shipments of Honda car parts anyway?

Still, that raises another question – not why we are in Iraq at all (that’s a question for Tony Blair alone) but can we really believe our own Government when it says the sailors were in Iraqi, not Iranian, waters?After all, if our Government and our secret services were happy to lie to us about the biggest question of all – the justification for war – surely they are quite capable of lying about the location of inflatable dinghies in the Arabian Sea?

We now know, long after the event, that the war was not justified. Saddam Hussein did not possess any weapons of mass destruction. And even if he had, he could not have deployed them at 45 minutes’ notice.

Those were claims made up by Tony Blair’s liar-in-chief Alastair Campbell to justify a decision that had already been taken to go to war in Iraq as part of some perverse “war on terror” even though, at the time, Iraq was not a haven for terrorists.

It is now, of course. But that’s entirely thanks to Mr Blair and President George Bush and the collective failure to have any clue at all about what to do with Iraq once it had been invaded.

Meanwhile there is another question we must demand an answer to from our Government, our Prime Minister and our Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett.

They rightly fulminated impotently about the violations perpetrated on our sailors by their Iranian captors. They complained about the way the sailors were paraded on the media, forced to make confessions, denied any representation, falsely imprisoned and so on.

All these complaints are reasonable. But how can we reconcile our Government’s outrage with its acquiescence – indeed its support – for the far more evil disregard of human rights that is Guantanamo Bay?

The numbers change but as recently as last November there were 435 people incarcerated there of whom 110 were due to be released and “more than 70” faced trial.

That leaves 250 or so detained without charge, without trial, without representation, without basic human rights, “at the President’s pleasure”.

This is a sickening injustice which shames the entire western world and every Government which fails actively to oppose it.

Our sailors were forced to confess to being in Iranian waters whether or not they truly were.

But why is that worse than, for instance, the confessions forced out of the “Tipton Three”, who were held without charge at Guantanamo Bay for two years before being set free?

Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul claim they were forced under torture to confess to taking part in a meeting with Osama Bin Laden even though they were in Tipton at the time.


No doubt most Guantanamo prisoners are terrorists. But if that’s the case, prove it. Bring them to trial – in a reputable jurisdiction, not a kangaroo court set up and run by the US military.

Charge them in public. Give them decent legal representation. Let the case against them – and the case for the defence – be heard. Let justice be done and let it be seen to be done. Justly, openly, fairly.

Until we insist on an end to arbitrary imprisonment without trial of this kind we are no better than the Iranians who captured our sailors and detained them illegally, to the outrage of an entire nation.

You can’t fight wars and pretend to support the self-appointed world policeman of the United States and retain any fig leaf of respectability if you behave with a complete lack of respect for the basic demands of legality and justice.

Guantanamo Bay reduces every nation which connives in its existence to the same low level as the vile terrorists it purports to defend us from.

It is a question of morality. If we are to claim any moral superiority, any rightness in what is done in our name, any sense of justification for our actions, it is essential that we uphold the highest standards of civilised behaviour.

Fair trials, open trials, free and fair justice available to all – these are among the most basic demands. And we can’t meet those demands.

So who is Tony Blair, who is Margaret Beckett, to complain about the Iranians? They are more guilty than the worst terrorist – more guilty because, unlike many a terrorist, they should know better.