The inquiry evidence is clear enough. There was totally unacceptable violence: "whipping on the soles of the feet, burning with lighted cigarettes". Victims had "leather thongs tied round their necks and were dragged along the ground". Perhaps 170 more prisoners were involved: at least 32 emerged badly injured. Another case for concern of the kind that besets the MoD in increasing and worrying numbers if weekend reports speak true? No: actually this is the detritus of Northern Tanganyika 1953, when young district officer Brian Hayward and 21 men were dispatched to "screen" any wandering Kikuyu who might have crossed colonial borders and brought the infection of Mau Mau with them.  Faded stuff, creeping into irrelevance? Who, you might well ask, cares any longer about the East Africa of half a century ago - or remembers what happened before Nyasaland turned into Malawi? Who, for that matter, gives a moment's thought to the shade of Sir Gerald Templer and the ruthless ways of his Malayan "emergency"? Mr Gordon Brown, stepping out boldly where only Tony Blair usually goes, tells us to stop apologising for our colonial past. Britain's legacy - of law, freedom and honour - is something to be proud of, even before he opens his chequebook. And that is true, in a way, if truth is a basket of apples. More Metropolitan commissioners of police than I care to contemplate have lectured me over the years about the inevitability of the occasional bad apple. A few cops on the take or a prisoner bruised and battered in his cell? Sorry, but in a force of so many thousand, there are always going to be a few bad Coxes, old boy. It appals us, just like you: but keep it in perspective, please. Don't let isolated horrors taint the dedicated work of the great majority of officers.  That's an utterly reasonable pitch - as obviously valid as the editor of the New York Times claiming one Jayson Blair doesn't make a barrel of rancid cider in his newsroom. But you can't stop there and turn away, for sometimes the tale of the odd rotten apple is also a rotten defence of a rotten regime.  There's the point, for some of us, in repeatedly raising the lessons of Caroline Elkins' new book Britain's Gulag, about the Kenya of the 1950's where tens - maybe hundreds - of thousands of Kikuyu died, where well over a thousand were summarily hanged, where 300,000 or more were thrown in and out of 50 detention camps without trial, sentence or foreseeable end to their ordeal. We don't want to spoil Gordon's breakfast (or stop him becoming foreign secretary, if the travel bug bites again). We simply think that he should eat the whole apple pie.  Nobody, looking back at the final throes of colonial withdrawal, can escape seeing a pattern of events endlessly repeated: too many deaths out of reach of justice, too many cover-ups and self-serving "reports" into manifest atrocities, too many ministers back in London washing their hands.  And all because, as Professor Elkins says, the perceived "bestiality, filth and evil" of the victims rendered them "subhuman, and therefore without rights". These were enemies in war and enemies of civilisation. Anything went for them, just as seemingly, for instance, anything goes in Abu Ghraib.  Putrefying pippins on a bough far out of reach? That is the convenient answer over decades - convenient not just for politicians in a muck sweat, but also for we ordinary Joes who like our squaddies cheery and our coppers honest. We want to believe the best of them. We're horrified when we feel ourselves let down. We bow meekly enough before the word of the Met or Hoon or Rumsfeld. Other countries, to be sure, have their problems.  Remember the French in Algiers or the legions of the lost in Argentina. Remember Auschwitz, Harry. Thank heaven that we, in our civilisation and tolerance, can never slide so far. Thank heaven that all our difficulties, however distressing, are merely apple dumplings.  But it's not good enough any longer: simply not good enough. The reality of the matter, the reality we need to face, is both more complex and more banal. Have awful, and continuingly awful, things gone on at Guantnamo Bay? Of course: the inmates are subhuman makers of terrorist war wallowing in their own filth. And Abu Ghraib? Make that a dismal ditto. And Basra? Well, we'll see what the court martial decides, but every picture tells a story - and didn't an order called Frago152 from Army Legal Services warn commanders that "detained people should not be assaulted"?  In short, on the British army's own evidence, there was alarm that things might   go disastrously astray once the Iraq war itself was over: the first days of peace were edgy, going on ominous. But where, pray, did this message "to commanders" go next? Not, apparently, to some crumbs at the bottom of the basket. Not, in Abu Ghraib, to corporals and privates filling their photo album.  So there we go back once more to the colonies of long ago. Young Hayward served "three months hard labour", keeping accounts in a hotel. Guys higher up the chain who'd beaten prisoners into submission got OBE's or Whitehall jobs in intelligence. Nobody important could take the rap because that would suggest the violence was sanctioned.  Now history, eerily, repeats itself (for the little corporal of Abu Ghraib, amongst others). And we have one more chance to learn: not that this or that war was evil, or this or that back deserved to be flogged; not that our boys are better or worse - or that the war itself was right, wrong or indifferent. The lesson says there is no superiority here, nor any bland assumptions of civilisation. The lesson says we can all be subhuman, too.