Wickham's musings from Chalke

Initially I was against London's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games because it was to be in Hackney which has the worst transport links of any London borough. It has no tube line, is served by old crowded trains from Liverpool Street station and has atrocious road congestion. I had visions of athletes struggling in traffic to get to the most important race of their life in time.

However, it seems the waste land earmarked for the games has enough room for an athletes' village and provided they can all be within walking distance of the stadiums this should be fine.

A new tube line has been planned to go through Hackney for many years and there should be just about enough time to build it in eight years provided it is started now. The Jubilee Line was late for the Canary Wharf office workers and they had to struggle through road traffic or use a very small Docklands Light Railway for years until it was finished. Even then it had an old signalling system because there was no chance of getting the newer and better system installed and tested in time.

I am now very much in favour of the bid and I hope all the work can be completed in time. Athens has obviously not managed to get everything ready for August this year so the games there will be probably staged somehow in a building site.

Since we have only been short-listed and won't know if we have been selected until 2005, building work wouldn't start until well after that. This would still leave enough time for stadiums and a village to be built, but the tube line ought to be started now. It is needed whether we win the bid or not.

The first pictures of prisoners hooded and beaten in the back of an army truck proved to be fake, having been posed by soldiers in a barracks in Lancashire. The clothes were too clean, the soldier's floppy hat wasn't of the type used in Iraq, the gun was the wrong type and too clean with no sling, the truck was too clean (no sand or dirt) and it was a particular type of truck that had never gone to Iraq. The actual truck was identified from scratches.

Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror, stood by his statement that the photos were true, then said that they truly represented what was happening in Iraq, but was nevertheless sacked. It isn't known yet why the photos were staged, but it may have done some good in highlighting that British troops have also been mistreating prisoners, although on a lesser scale than the Americans. Our troops don't seem to have been under the same pressure from American military intelligence but have just been much too rough, beating prisoners.

The papers have had plenty to shout about recently. It seems that the Americans in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq have been badly mistreating prisoners. There are investigations to determine how far up the chain of command the authorisation to do this goes. Donald Rumsfeld, the defence minister and a hard line character, seems to have at best turned a blind eye to what has been going on.

The military intelligence have been putting pressure on ordinary soldiers to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation and it has gone much too far. We haven't heard much at all about mistreatment of prisoners in Afghanistan because it has been kept secret but because of Guantanamo Bay and now Iraq, Afghanistan is under scrutiny too.

America's enemies in the Balkans and the Middle East kept prisoners in very basic conditions, starved them and then murdered them quickly. An American civilian hostage was beheaded last week in Iraq but it didn't appear that he had been tortured first. The Americans have adopted slower and painful techniques, not as bad as those Saddam Hussein used but completely inhumane nevertheless.

The first batch of photos showed prisoners naked and hooded, chained to prison grilles or in odd sexual positions. Some were forced to run while hooded until they crashed into a wall. Others were chained in a stressed crouching position for hours, others were humiliated by being forced into sexual contact in various ways, others were just badly beaten over the head while hooded.

Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the American base on the coast of Cuba, were paraded naked in front of prostitutes who molested them. Where did these girls come from? Cuba? Hardly likely. Were they imported from the States just for the maltreatment of prisoners or were they there already for the benefit of the camp guards? Other Guantanamo prisoners were kept hooded for 72 hours at a time and often beaten according to two British men recently released and flown back to Britain.

Most softening up procedures have now been banned, like sleep deprivation for more than 72 hours, but that means that some softening up is still allowed.

I'm always amazed that private Jessica Lynch wasn't raped. She was the diminutive blonde American reservist who was injured and captured at the start of the war. She was taken to an Iraqi hospital where a spy told Americans that he thought she was going to have an amputation, so the Americans stormed the hospital and rescued her to give her less drastic treatment. There were rumours that she had been raped while in hospital but it seems these reports were false. Middle Eastern men go crazy over blondes, but she seems to have been safe in the hospital. In this instance the Iraqis behaved correctly but I wouldn't trust the Americans in a similar situation. I remember how the Americans operated in Vietnam, raping constantly.