Philip Ruddock tells us the long detention of Mamdouh Habib by US forces at Guantanamo Bay was done "in accordance with the laws of war". George Bush isn't the only American president to use the fact of war to justify suspending such long-sanctioned legal principles as the right to habeas corpus (no indefinite detention without giving just cause).

Abraham Lincoln suspended these rights - with clearly defined sunset clauses - in the border states between Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. Yet here the comparison ends.

At no point did the Lincoln administration condone, even covertly, the use of torture to elicit confessions, or allow its jailers to practise systematic abuse to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.

What we have to worry about is the vagueness of the so-called "war on terror", and the ad hoc, often slipshod, way it is being prosecuted.

Is there a conceivable end to this "war" ? Or is it a handy (and never-ending)excuse to limit rights and freedoms through a calculated public campaign of fear and terror, as in Orwell's prescient vision of the world presented in his literary masterwork 1984?

In a phantom "war" that offers no clear-cut resolution, and little logic in its strategies, at what point will we be able to define the boundary between an acceptable limitation of rights "in accordance with the laws of war", and a slide into semi-totalitarian, politically driven control of public opinion and expectation?

Howard and Bush do have an obligation to explain to their citizens what was done to Mamdouh Habib, and what is still being done to David Hicks.