Excuses

Iraq's Interior Minister is trying to spin his way out of the weekend's discovery that prisoners were being starved and tortured in an Interior Ministry dungeon by claiming that the reports were exaggerated and making excuses for the treatment. His chief excuse? That the prisoners were foreign fighters, "the most criminal terrorists". His implication is that therefore they deserved to be mistreated - starved, beaten, flayed alive - but the key point of those who object to torture is that no-one deserves to be treated like that. Not even people who try to excuse it.