Here is the Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the allegedly awful treatment of Binyam Mohamed, anything which might cast light on his background conveniently omitted:

The UN Convention against Torture states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.”

That absolute injunction still stands whatever happens to us in the West, including further terror attacks. And if we don’t hold its principle precious all is lost and there can be nothing left for any of us to live and die for.

Here is David Aaronovitch in the Times, taking a more nuanced view:

Of course, it would be easier to demand that security heads should roll if we knew that Mr Mohamed had been wrongfully detained in the first place and that he was not, and had never been, a jihadi. I have longed to have this question put directly to Mr Stafford Smith in one of his hundreds of interviews, but in vain.

And here is Powerline, giving us some useful background on this one case:

According to the summary-of-evidence memo prepared for Mohamed’s combatant status review tribunal at Guantánamo, Mohamed was an active participant in the plotting. He proposed "the idea of attacking subway trains in the United States."

But al Qaeda’s military chief, Saif al Adel, and the purported 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), had a different idea. Al Adel and KSM allegedly told Binyam that he and Padilla would target "high-rise apartment buildings that utilized natural gas for its heat and also targeting gas stations." Padilla and Mohamed were supposed to rent an apartment and use the building’s natural gas "to detonate an explosion that would collapse all of the floors above."

My view?

Not many readers of the Times or the Independent or Powerline will have heard of Anna Brandt, Karolina Gluck and Monika Sochocka.

They were the three Polish victims of the 7 July 2005 terrorist atrocities in London.

As HM Ambassador in Warsaw I attended their three separate funerals in different locations across Poland. Each one an unimaginable family tragedy.

These needless deaths were caused by hardened Islamist fanatics. The only thing preventing more such deaths is the flat-out round the clock work by Western and other security services.

And precisely because the people scheming to kill more people for evil jihadist purposes are hardened fanatics, they are trained to lie when caught and to do everything they can to avoid revealing the scale and reach of their plotting.

Terrorist training 101: Allege torture as loudly as possible! Try to get gullible human rights activists on your side! You might get released and have the chance to try again!

Far away from the busy, principled concerns of the media and the UN Convention against Torture are thousands of families in London and around the world, people of all faiths and none who every day shed a painful private tear for their close relatives murdered by Islamist terrorists.

And who have to watch as the media swarm for the most part gushingly over people who may well have been linked to those very murderers, in organisation, ideology or ambition.

Yes, torture is really bad.

It comes in many forms these days