Rendition to torture is not less vile than torture itself, and it is moral cowardice into the bargain.

Either torture someone yourself and acknowledge that that’s who you are – and therefore you’re no longer the good guys, you’re just another bunch of murderous thugs in a world which already has a superfluity – or put your hand up against torture in any form. Sending people away to another country so that they can be cut with razorblades while you slip notes under the door and salve your conscience with assurances of good conduct from regimes noted for bad conduct is not clean, it’s just pathetically craven.

That said, I can see how you could convince yourself it was necessary, if the environment around you was conducive – and it sure as hell has been in the UK over the last decade and more. I know about the Lucifer Effect. I’ve seen the Milgram tapes. I get it. And I have heard – though I do not agree with – the political arguments about the necessity of torture in combating terrorism. Never mind that the former head of MI5 does not agree. Never mind that the senior figures I’ve spoken to in this arena have no faith in information gained through torture and would rather mount an operation based on a soft interrogation. Never mind that the information we got from torture between 2001 and 2003 ‘confirmed’ any number of things which weren’t true.

Never mind any of that. Let’s accept, for a second, that there might be a rationale for sending someone away to be tortured.

Can somebody please tell me how anyone could imagine that sending their kids along with them was in any way at all the act of a government or a nation which deserves respect? Because it has to be acknowledged that kids do get tortured. They are not immune. Wives get tortured, too. It’s a great way to cause pain which never goes away. Grade A torture skillz.

But if there’s a way in which it’s not just frankly evil and criminal, I’m not seeing it.