There is a popular slogan seen stencilled on American gun trucks: "We do bad things to bad people." Prince Harry had those words on the back of his cap. In the Afghanistan War, the difficulty is working out who those bad people are. An even tougher question is: which of them to kill, and which to put in positions of power and authority?

Winning the war here is not for [...]

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded us that, for the KGB, modern psychology made the infliction of medieval-style physical torture redundant. Psychological tortures, devised by doctors, were just as painful and effective. As Bisher al-Rawi, just released back to Britain after four years in Cuba, told me recently: "I think the psychological effect of this experience, in my opinion, far outweighs the physical. I think physical [effects] you can [...]

Those who campaign against torture and extraordinary rendition could hardly be more in need of a filip. The political momentum to get justice for thousands incarcerated without trial - and to bring the torturers to account - is looking pretty stalled.

They might get a boost from the 19 October countrywide release of Rendition, Hollywood's star-studded take on the CIA torture programme in which an evil-sounding CIA boss, played by [...]

Sana'a, Yemen. By the gates of the Old City, Muhammad Bashmilah was walking, talking, and laughing in the crowd - behaving like a man without a care in the world. Bargaining with the spice traders and joking with passers-by; at last he was free.

A 33-year-old businessman, Bashmilah has an impish sense of humour; his eyes sparkled as he chatted about his country and the khat leaves that all the [...]

A couple of years ago, in talking to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, then Tony Blair's envoy to Iraq, I casually referred to him as Britain's senior representative to occupied Iraq. "No," replied Greenstock. "Paul Bremer is Britain's man." The invasion and occupation, he explained, was legally a joint endeavour by America and Britain and other allies. So it was Bremer, as proconsul to the occupation and head of the Coalition Provisional [...]

The conversation was typical. I was chatting to a producer at a leading American TV show last summer, trying to interest him in the CIA's programme of "extraordinary rendition", the transfer of terror suspects to countries such as Egypt and Syria. "I hear what you're saying. I realise these guys may be tortured," he said. "But how can we prove these people are innocent? That's what will interest our people."

It was at about 3am when they came to Muhammed's home in the poor Khalija el-Arabi district of Basra and took him away. "There were about 20 men who burst through the door," said his brother Faisal. "Some of them were wearing police uniform. Others were in commando jackets and others wore civilian clothes," he said. That was New Year's Eve 2003; Muhammed has not been seen since. His crime [...]

Osama Hamdan wears an ordinary business suit and hands out an ordinary business card with his e-mail address and telephone number. But he never carries his own mobile - just in case Mossad tries to put explosives inside it again.

Hamdan is in the downstairs bar of an elegant Beirut hotel, talking to me and to Bobby Muller, an American Vietnam veterans leader and a joint winner of the 1997 [...]

My friend Mohaned, an Iraqi doctor, writes from Baghdad. "It's a horrible place these days," he says, "no public services at all, six hours of electricity, and finally, no tap water at all since six days. Very nice circumstances for a happy elections!" Like most Iraqis, he despairs of what has happened to the country since the Americans and British invaded and "really can't imagine" what the future will bring.

On a cold winter's night in Iraq, a young shopkeeper stands outside in the driving rain, his storefront illuminated by a sputtering petrol gen-erator. It is a flickering pool of light in a city of darkness. Basra has been getting barely four hours of electricity a day - one year after the British army announced the restoration of round-the-clock power.

The young owner, Mohamed Hussein, shows us a poster, plastered [...]