So, Guantanamo Bay is an "anomaly" is it Mr Blair? Caging, manacling, beating, isolating, threatening, terrorising, torturing 500 - fathers, brothers, husbands, sons - seems to you just an oddity, an eccentricity, a peculiarity then?

How could you not choke on your own words and splutter with shame even as you uttered them.

For four years they have hovered between life and death, some now praying for the latter, as I would too. They have to endure existence without time and reason, submit to brute power, pray in open enclosure while they are bitten and burnt, denied basic human dignity.

Only nine inmates have thus far been charged. Having won their right to Habeas Corpus and to make their pleas in the US Supreme Court, that other dishonest charmer, Senator John McCain had that right removed. You, Mr Blair, know evil and collude with it. Your faithful oligarchy and obliging journalists are no better.

Human rights lie bloody and tattered in the US, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, secret "extraordinary rendition" centres on the European mainland and in our own prisons. And all the while you swish the cloak of virtue.

If it wasn't such a scandal it would be funny, Bush and you, as Batman and Robin, flying through the skies to save the world.

IMAGINE HOW MUSLIMS FEEL

This week, I have been at three events where the majority of people in the audience were educated, sharp Muslims, some exceedingly rich and good friends with key politicians and Prince Charles. Guantanamo Bay and the civil strife in Iraq are topics that now madden even these establishmentarians.

One gentleman took my elbow, shuffled me to a discreet corner and whispered: "I have been here for 40 years, dined with royalty. Today if I was young, I would go straight to Bin Laden. Mr Blair is a war criminal.

"Don't put my name down, but tell him we detest him." He then said my watch was too cheap and that he would be honoured to give me one more befitting my status. No thanks I said, I didn't need a bribe to say what I feel more every day.

What a waste of hope. Remember the idealistic young Prime Minister? We believed he would take us into a more equal, ethical and accountable Britain.

He did deliver in some areas of social policy but all of that now hardly matters as Guantanamo Bay (and Iraq too) once again rise, refusing to be buried by good news.

A searing new film, Road to Guantanamo, by Michael Winterbottom (to be shown on Channel 4 on 9 March) tells the story of three young, innocent British Muslim men from Tipton in the West Midlands who spent time in that hell. Their ankles still show indentations from the shackles.

Many people, including me, have asked, how could British citizens bomb London? Not enough have asked that other equally disturbing question: How can Britain consent to this violent injustice meted out to its citizens and others?

For Blair the answer is obvious. it is payback for 11 September, when "everything changed" and presumably anything goes.

A man fond of targets and numbers, he has not yet told us how many lives need to be paid for each of those poor people blown up in the US. How much bloodshed before the blown up are appeased?

We, the people, witness this arrogance and incessant dissembling and are helpless. Is it any wonder millions have lost faith in politics, honour, in language itself?

Today, Baroness Kennedy's Power Inquiry releases its findings on the democratic health of the nation. It is the biggest-ever national study of political engagement. Britons are not apathetic but are disengaging from a democracy which has turned into its own enemy.

Real democrats are protecting themselves from the diseased body politic and its raving behaviour that is spreading a pandemic of fear. Guantanamo Bay is the boil.

Never mind bird flu, it is Bush and Blair fever we must contain before it ravages the world.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown @ Independent via Global Echo