The battle for hearts and minds

In one corner, the leader of the free world has Guantanamo Bay, where 385 men (allegedly enemy combatants, but there's no evidence required) have been held, without bail and without habeas corpus, over the past five years, and only ten have been charged with anything.

In the other corner, the leader of the axis of evil arrests 15 trespassing British sailors, keeps them for two weeks, and releases them in a "gesture of goodwill". During their captivity, the British media are apoplectic at the sole woman being shown in pictures wearing a headscarf. The rest of the world wonders what the fuss is about. The released sailors speak of psychological torture but are vague on details; videos show them playing ping-pong and chess. The situation is lampooned by everyone from Terry Jones ("It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills.") to Jon Stewart ("they were subjected to all kinds of horrors... forced to wear un-matching tracksuits.").

Yes, it's that easy now to score propaganda points against the US and UK. Ahmadinejad can do it. You can too.