There are a few times when the mainstream media does an excellent job, and it still has the ability to reach vastly more people than the blogosphere. Today’s work by the Guardian on the Guantanamo files is absolutely brilliant, and fully reveals the inhuman absurdity of the torture and suffering of hundreds of innocent people based on ludicrous “evidence”.

I particularly recommend the interview with Clive Staffod Smith. The whole is yet another example of the great work of David Leigh, whose brilliant reporting on BAE was perhaps the best investigative reporting in Britain for a generation.

But that is the conundrum of the Guardian. The British government under New Labour were actively complicit in the whole extraordinary rendition and torture system of which Guantanamo was a part. That in itself was but an adjunct of a policy of illegal war. The Blair years were years of illegal war of aggression, of torture, of extraordinary rendition and of destruction of civil liberties at home. And it was the Guardian which was the most reliable media cheerleader for Blair and New Labour as they carried out that dreadful agenda.

Two-faced doesn’t describe it. The Guardian’s compartmentalised indignation at civil liberties abuse is written on blood-smeared pages.