Des Browne said he now regrets the decision to allow the British sailors who had been held in Iran, to sell their stories to the media. It was a "mistake", he said, to allow them to be paraded on British TV and in the tabloids. Funny how he hadn't realised that beforehand, when it was obvious to most of the public and also many in the defence force...

Apparently it occurred neither to Blair nor Browne, that having condemned the "parading" of the sailors on Iranian TV, that allowing them to do what amounts to the same thing here, was only likely to expose even further the government's lies and lack of concern for those it sends to fight its criminal war in the Gulf.

But then, what does it really care about the mental disarray of the men and women who were ordered to turn their weapons against the Iraqi people they were supposed to "free"? Or the ordeal experienced by wounded soldiers returning from Iraq, which may still be shrouded in secrecy, but is, nonetheless, nothing short of a scandal. And moreover, what does it care about those who lose their lives, just to tighten the stranglehold of a handful of big City players over the Middle-East?

If this government had any concern for the fate of these 15 sailors, the MoD's huge budget would be more than enough to grant them more dignified compensation, including a decent job away from the bloody chaos of Iraq. But in fact, the whole point of this is elsewhere. For the past 4 years, Blair and Brown have been waging a criminal war against the Iraqi people. But, at the same time, they have been waging a propaganda war against the rest of us.

This media business is part of this propaganda war - to give credit to the idea that the Iranians are the "bad guys" and British commanders the "good guys". The trouble is, that whatever ministers may say or get the soldiers to claim, no-one will ever believe that they were closer to Britain's territorial waters than to Iran's!

The point is that British troops have nothing to do, not anywhere in the Middle East, and they should all be withdrawn now!