Toppling Hitler was the Right Thing to Do

Sad to say, it seems that even in the glory days of victory in the last great war for civilisation, the great British barrel had its rotten apples. Photographs have been released showing men who had been subjected to "months of starvation, sleep deprivation, beatings and extreme cold" - nothing Condi would disapprove of - at a British interrogation centre in occupied Germany. The rotten apple - a Royal Navy officer with an inadequate grasp of the British virtue of discretion -took some snapshots. "A few" of the inmates - how few is apparently either not declassified or not significant - "were starved or beaten to death, while British soldiers are alleged to have tortured some victims with thumb screws and shin screws" requisitioned from the Gestapo, perhaps courtesy of Allied personnel like Klaus Barbie. "The men in the photographs are not Nazis, however". However?

Despite the allegations that British soldiers used Gestapo toys on the men, the men are, however, "suspected communists, arrested in 1946 because they were thought to support the Soviet Union". The beginning of the Cold War was a little more prompt than that of the War on Terror, you see. In the latter case we had to wait more than ten years after the demise of the previous Great Satan; in the former case, barely as many months. The War Office was "seeking information about Russian military and intelligence methods", while doubtless reminding its starved, sleepless, beaten and frozen inmates that the Lubyanka would be a lot less fun. They did this "apparently believing that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable", which is of course the only conceivable explanation for such behaviour. Nothing but a definite belief in the imminent outbreak of war could possibly cause the British War Office - later, let us not forget, to become our glorious Ministry of Defence - to countenance the utilisation of such ill-mannered information-gathering techniques.

Asked to apologise and pay compensation to the survivors, our glorious Ministry of Defence said that "questions about the interrogation centres were a matter for the Foreign Office". The Foreign Office had been holding onto the file, from which the photographs had been removed at the request of our glorious Ministry of Defence. Documents about a similar interrogation centre which was open for business in central London between 1945 and 1948 are still unavailable because our glorious Ministry of Defence is concerned about the health of potential readers; the files have been contaminated with asbestos. Perhaps the Foreign Secretary might be persuaded to intervene when he comes back from his honeymoon with Condi - always assuming that he isn't too busy mending punctures on his bicycle and that the dog doesn't eat all the files while his back is turned.