As I said, I haven't read all the UK papers. I read The Guardian and The Observer and watch the BBC news and read its web site, and I have seen no mention of this. Maybe I missed it. I wouldn't read the Daily Telegraph or The Daily Mail if you paid me.

And regarding the Queen of England - I believe that is her correct title, even though she is the head of state for the whole UK.

Torture is a barbaric practice and should not be contemplated by any society that calls itself civilized.

End of story.

You say that if torture 'worked' then it would be the government's duty to consider using it. I strongly disagree.

Not only is torture illegal but it is vile, barbaric and morally bankrupt. It is a cancer eating away at the heart of any society that uses it. It chills my bones when people from a supposedly civilized country attempt to justify it.

I've read most of what he ever wrote, from The Crystal World whose images still live with me now, to his last book, A Miracle of Life, a sort of autobiography in which, right at the end, he casually announces that he's dying.

A fantastic range of work that made you wonder where that inspiration sprung from but which was partly answered by his semi-fictional account in The Empire of the Sun of his astonishingly surreal childood experiences of Shanghai under Japanese occupation in WWII.

I always eagerly anticipated the next Ballard but, sadly, they'll be no more.

So that's all right then is it?

Waterboarding is torture and all torture has a psychological impact on people. There are people all over the world, many of whom guilty of nothing, who are not only broken in body through torture but whose mental health has been wrecked and their lives ruined because of it.

But that's OK, it's just psychological. Lieberman's a sick man.

In my view Empire of the Sun is as 'Ballardian' as anything else he wrote.

It might be a more conventional narrative but it still has that sense of dislocation and the disturbing mix of the everyday and the bizarre.

In the sound-bite-sized time allotted for 'discussion' of this hugely important issue you did as well as could be hoped.

Don't let them fudge it, keep them focused on what this is about: it's torture, it's illegal, it's an enormous stain on America's reputation that must be fixed.

The media and most pundits are still managing to steer the torture debate down the blind alleys of 1) is it or is it not torture, and 2) but what if it 'works'?

Until this attitude is shot down in flames nothing will be resolved.

Waterboarding and other 'enhanced interrogation techniques' are torture - no question. Torture is illegal. Those who broke the law should be prosecuted. Civilized countries don't torture. Everything else is a side issue.

It's no justification to use torture, or illegal weapons, just because you're fighting an unscrupulous enemy.

America and Britain did not use torture in WWII even though the Nazis and the Japanese did. Bombs were raining down on British cities every day, killing thousands, but torture was not used on captured Germans.

If there is no price to pay for this illegality then it will happen again.

This is torture we're talking about, committed by the state on behalf of all Americans. It breaks God knows how many national and international laws, most of which America helped formulate.

You can't just let this go unpunished.

I like it. That sums up the world view of Cheney and his ilk.

But being wrong didn't stop them then and it won't stop them in the future unless it is made clear that there is a price to pay for pursuing your obsessions while ignoring reality and trashing national and international law to achieve your ends.

What's interesting to me is that Rachel Corrie's death seems not to have been such big news in the US, especially given that she was American.

Here in the UK, it was widely reported and I remember reading a piece in the Guardian or Observer (can't remember which) which covered this in detail. The clear conclusion was that she was illegally killed. And, no, this was not down to the 'inveterate anti-semitic bias' of the UK press.

Why wasn't this bigger news in the US? If an American citizen had been killed, possibly illegally by an organ of the state and with an apparent official cover-up, in any other country in the world, I imagine this would have been big news, no?

In principle you should of course be allowed to express any ideas you want. But sometimes you do run up against messy political reality.

The trouble is that some people really do incite violence. Here in the UK, there have been a few Muslim clerics who really have preached hate and violent jihad against the 'infidel'. They are in a very small minority and are deplored by most UK Muslims, but a small number of impressionable young men really have been radicalized by them and have gone on to commit, or attempt to commit, terrorist acts in the UK and elsewhere.

I agree it could be the start of a slippery slope to consider banning this sort of hate speech, but the political reality, in Britain at least, is that Islamic jihad is regarded as a hot-topic security issue and the government had to be seen to act, even though it may be wrong.