If the US can't identify a British Cabinet Minister...

We are constantly being asked to believe that our governments have information that we don't and that, if we knew what they knew, we would willingly forgo certain rights in order to defeat this "threat to our very existence". Certain commenters here constantly imply that we ought to give the government the benefit of the doubt regarding torture and other activities and assume that they are acting legally unless we can deliver absolute proof that they are not.

Central to this belief is the certainty that the government are (a) honourable and (b) have much more information at their fingertips than we could ever hope to possess which is why that we must give them some leeway.

And then I read this:

UK's first Muslim minister, Shahid Malik on Monday said he was detained at an American airport and his luggage analysed for traces of explosive materials. Malik, UK's international development minister, whose parents come from Pakistan, said he was returning to Heathrow on Sunday after a series of meetings on tackling terror, when he was stopped at Dulles Airport in Washington.

Expressing his disappointment, Malik said he was searched and detained by the department of homeland security - the same department whose representatives he had been meeting on his visit to the country. Malik said: "After a few minutes a couple of other people were also taken to one side. We were all Muslims - the other two were black Muslims, both with Muslim names."

They can't even identify the British Minister for International Development returning from a series of meetings with themselves concerning ways to tackle terrorism.

And the British are their greatest ally in the war on a noun.

If they can't even identify the people who are on their side, what faith does that give you about their insistence that the people held in Guantanamo Bay are the "worst of the worst"?

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Tags: Shahid Malik, UK's international development minister, war on terror