If those Mirror pictures are fakes, Piers Morgan will have to resign

Are the Daily Mirror’s torture pictures fakes? Most of my friends, whether anti-war or pro-war, think that they probably are. Such is my own inclination. But let us for a moment try to see things from the point of view of Piers Morgan, the Mirror’s editor. Whatever fine words Nicholas Soames may declaim in the House of Commons, the British army has, in fact, used torture in other civil emergencies. Look at what the Black and Tans did in Ireland before partition. Or the torture and murder of Mau Mau detainees, more strictly by the British prison authorities, at Hola Camp in Kenya. These things have happened. Nor is the depiction of the British squaddie as a public-spirited, gentle-hearted chap necessarily always correct. I have come across quite a few members of Her Majesty’s forces in my travels and, although I yield to no one in my admiration of our army, it cannot be denied that some of them are hard nuts, often recruited in the bleak streets of our northern cities.