The interrogation room in Guantanamo Bay, Christmas Eve 2002. Detainee 063 – an Al-Qaeda suspect called Mohamed al-Kahtani, who may or may not be that sought-after 20th 9/11 hijacker – is crying in his chair. It is his 33rd day of continuous interrogation – a month with almost no sleep – and the interrogators have started up with the white noise again and are pouring water over his head.

Maybe the snarling dogs will come back too, or he’ll once more be humiliated by some woman pressing up against him while he’s told to stand or crouch naked for hours on end. He’ll be yelled at, shaved by force and made to act like a dog and will have instructions bellowed at him from a distance of 2in. He’ll be so terrified and exhausted that he’ll wet himself.

Happy Christmas, Mohamed. Good Christian men, rejoice.

Mohamed, who really is a bad ’un, believe me, does not know this yet but there’s only a fortnight more of this misery – torture, some would call it – to endure. Afterwards there’ll be a scandal about the way he and one or two others were being treated and the US government will say: okay, we’ll call off the dogs – it was just our people on the ground overreaching themselves, being a bit too zealous. We’re a democratic government; we don’t do stuff like that – despite the sort of provocation we have to endure. If only we had known, and so on.

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The thing is – they knew. It was the US government’s explicit policy to wipe away the Geneva conventions and subject the supposedly most dangerous captives to what were euphemistically called “aggressive” interrogation techniques – techniques that flouted international law. The people behind the policy are therefore, according to the British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, criminals who may well face charges should they choose to take a holiday in, say, France or Germany.

And who are they, these people? Top government lawyers who – at the behest of Donald Rumsfeld, the then defence secretary – cooked up a means of bypassing Geneva and in effect allowed the interrogators on the tip of Cuba to do whatever the hell they wanted. And, at Guantanamo Bay, lowly, inexperienced lawyers on the ground who were left isolated to provide the legal regulation for what might constitute humane treatment and what might not.

Meanwhile some of the top military brass, including General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, were hoodwinked about what was really going on.

We may have suspected that the US government had approved all this stuff, but we didn’t know for sure until the publication last week of a remarkable book by Sands, who works at Matrix chambers alongside our own lovable Cherie Booth QC, the wife of a man who – according to her fellow QC – knew full well what was being done at Guantanamo and did nothing whatsoever to urge a halt.

Full article here.