Wickham's musings from Chalke

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.