Or they may have been none of these things but as their parents believe victims of the accident of place or of mistaken

Or they may have been none of these things but, as their parents believe, victims of the accident of place or of mistaken identity. In the hidden world of Pentagon procedures, you may be charged with being a member of al-Qa’ida or helping the Taliban, found guilty and find yourself facing the death penalty.But the law – international, British or mainland American – requires something much more precise and more answerable than this. It demands that specific charges be brought, that the accused is presumed innocent until proven otherwise and that he has the right to his own legal advice and access to the prosecution evidence, the right for his case to be heard by a jury of his peers and the right of appeal. And, if he is a UK citizen, he has the right to the full support and assistance of the British state.And that is what he is not going to get, however many gestures to “fairness” and due process under a US military commission in Guantanamo unless the British Government gets them repatriated for trial here.Tony Blair can put the pressure.

These are, after all, citizens of a country that fought with America in Afghanistan and Iraq. For British ministers to declare openly their concerns for a fair trial and a repatriation of the accused would carry weight, in the press and in Washington. As so often in the post-11 September world, we betray our own friends in America by being so nervous of offending the Bush administration. There are lawyers and legislators in the US just as concerned as we are by this impending travesty of justice. It would be difficult for Bush to refuse real public pressure from his ally.That is, if Mr Blair really wants to apply it.a.hamilton independent.co.uk
More from Adrian Hamilton. Smoking is not a right, but a freedom.

But freedoms are worth fighting for, too, and, if they are to be removed, they should be removed openly, and not eroded slowly and dishonestly

Smoking is not a right, but a freedom. The current tactics of the anti-smoking lobby are dishonourable, and their arguments both dishonest and highly misleading. Whether you smoke or not, this should be a matter of great concern: it is an attempt to gain control over what is essentially a private decision, and other such attempts will follow if this one is successful.
Something pretty odd happened two or three years ago, when I took a train somewhere and discovered that there were no longer any smoking compartments on any trains run by the company. I wrote to the company subsequently to ask why this step had been taken. They answered, as if it were unanswerable, that 80 per cent of their “customers” wanted to travel in a smoke-free environment.That I did not doubt, but I wrote back to ask in what way, exactly, the provision of one smoking compartment prevented the rest of the train from being a “smoke-free environment”.

To this letter I had no reply, from which I concluded that the company, for its own purposes, which had nothing to do with public demand, had interpreted this general preference as justification for preventing anyone smoking anywhere on the train It makes absolutely no sense whatever. You would have to be unusually mad not to be satisfied with the provision of an absolutely smoke-free carriage, but to insist that nobody anywhere on the train should be smoking; yet these are the wishes of the public, as interpreted by such surveys.The dishonestly conducted campaign continues. Health spokesmen have started arguing for a ban on smoking in all public places in this country: in bars and restaurants in particular. In many parts of the world, such a ban is already in place, and it must be said that the anti-smoking lobby has had great success in persuading a lot of such outlets in installing separate areas for smokers and non-smokers, and even in encouraging entirely non-smoking caf?and bars.As a smoker, I am not remotely troubled by this. For me, a coffee shop is somewhere where you can have a cigarette as well as a cup of coffee as you read the newspaper; therefore, I simply don’t go to non-smoking coffee shops. It would not bother me in the slightest if non-smoking bars, restaurants and coffee shops became very widespread: one would simply know where you can go and where you should avoid. Non-smokers who dislike being in a smoky atmosphere would be able to make exactly the same decision.If the polls touted by anti-smoking campaigners are correct, there would be a market demand for non-smoking establishments, and they would spread rapidly.