Why should we pay compensation?

MY eye was caught by a feature on "preppers," those folk who believe the world is about to be consumed by plague, warfare, tsunami or asteroid impact and are arming and provisioning themselves to be ready for Armageddon. The photo showed a grim-faced British prepper with a large cache of Heinz baked beans and a gas mask. Curious.

FOR years, scientists have been promising the "magic bullet" to seek out and destroy cancer cells without harming healthy cells. It's all gone quiet on the magic-bullet front but researchers in Manchester now claim to have developed a "grenade" which travels around the bloodstream dropping drugs on any tumours it encounters. And if that doesn't confine cancer to history, how long before we see the boffins unveiling cancer-killing howitzers, helicopter gunships and neutron bombs? The medical arms race may speed up but the number of cancers has soared by a third since the 1970s and the disease still kills 160,000 Brits each year.

I WAS in my local a few days ago when news came through of Shaker Aamer's release from Guantanamo Bay. There was a spontaneous round of applause. Every drinker in the place rose to their feet to celebrate our British sense of liberty, justice and fair play and to toast the health of a blameless British resident, free at last. Only kidding.

THE truth is that most Brits wonder what the hell Aamer has got to do with us. He is not a British citizen. He is a Saudi Arabian whose last address was in Kabul. He was captured, held and interrogated by the Yanks. So why are British taxpayers expected to give him £1 million in compensation? Because he was tortured while British agents were present? Who says so? Beware of double standards. Shaker Aamer's supporters tell us he is innocent because no charges were laid against him, he was never put before a court and never convicted of any crime. What happens when we apply that same yardstick to the allegations that Aamer was tortured? No charges have yet been laid against anyone, no-one has been put on trial and nobody has been convicted. You can't have it both ways. The same legal criteria which tell us Aamer is innocent surely tell us that his alleged torturers are innocent, too. So why the £1 million payout?

EVEN his most fervent fans have difficulty with the curious fact that Shaker Aamer, described by his lawyer as "a great family man," decided in 2001 to uproot his family from the safety and security of England and settle them in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. If extreme stupidity were a crime, he'd be guilty as charged. And while his supporters claim he now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, are we expected to believe he was behaving entirely rationally before he was captured and incarcerated? Sane people leave Afghanistan to live in Britain. Only loonies and religious fanatics go the other way.

THEY say there is no such thing as a new joke. In Cuffs (BBC1) the cops are chasing the bad guy's car. Up ahead, another pair of bobbies are deploying a Stinger tyre-shredding device. The cars race towards the Stinger. The Stinger team hear them approaching. And then both cars hurtle by on a road running parallel. Oops, they have Stingered the wrong road. Anyone else reminded of the famous chandelier scene in Only Fools and Horses?