Justice by the pound

Listen carefully and you can hear the cloven hooves of lawyers galloping towards Binyam Mohamed - the Ethiopian claiming to have been tortured by the US authorities.

I am not condoning torture but there are quite a few unanswered questions in all of this irrespective of whether the claims are correct or not. Mohamed arrived here from Ethiopia in 1994 and left for Pakistan in 2001 on a false British passport - his picture stuck on someone else's' document - and went on to Afghanistan, where he attended a training camp, before being eventually picked up in Pakistan on a false passport.

He claims to have been tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan before ending up at Guantanamo Bay so if you were a betting man, where would your money be on where Mohamed, or his lawyers, will be making their mega-money claims? The countries that facilitated the torture? The countries that carried out the tortures, led by the USA? Or just go for the big one, the USA who held him and flew him around the world to be tortured?

Don't be silly - it will be odds on it will in here in Britain, suing the British Government, with lashings of legal aid paid for by us as we end up paying royally for both sides. The lawyers will have their snouts in the trough for as long as they possibly can and then the judiciary will come up with their own Alice in Wonderland interpretation of the Human Rights Act.

I am not even sure why Mohamed became our case in the first place as he is not a British citizen and left us on a bent passport so would not have been able to legally return in any case.

Calls for an inquiry into claims the Government knew that torturing was going on might have some political capital in embarrassing the powers that be for a day or so but that is about all. This lot have skins to make a rhinoceros look delicate and a ruthless ability to lie without batting an eyelid.

If they agree to an inquiry then they will dictate the terms and we will probably end up with a quick whitewash job along the lines of the charade into the death of Dr David Kelly - anyone who believed that lot of old cobblers probably breeds by cell division.

If they want to lose the inquiry of course then the alternative would be another Saville Inquiry which is in its 11th year having knocked up a cost of £400million or so. The Bloody Sunday inquiry has become a lawyers' mutual fund pension plan, all paid for by the tax payers. Such an inquiry of course would mean that Foreign Secretary David Miliband would have grown up and left school by the time it was over so would be out of the firing line.

With a court case and an inquiry on the breeze the air is thick with fees which is why you can hear the lawyers hovering ready for the feeding frenzy. Justice might hold the scales but is the lawyers in charge of the till.