Strong, in which he blended a sense of personal loss with an awareness of more public themes, though he was deeply distrustful of “polite and politic men”. His elegy for Bevan (recently voted Welsh Hero of all time) ends with the memorable line: “We fail our heroes, that’s what they are for.”When, in 1975, the Welsh Arts Council decided to mount an exhibition in the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff to mark the 20th anniversary of Dylan Thomas’s death, John Ackerman was the obvious choice for curator. The catalogue he put together, Welsh Dylan, now a collector’s item, was a fascinating album of photographs, manuscripts and other artefacts, many of which had never been seen in public before and on which all subsequent biographies have drawn. Ackerman turned up at the reception at which the exhibition was opened by Aeronwy, the writer’s daughter, with a Wildean carnation in his lapel, hardly able to contain his delight that so many wished to see the fruits of his meticulous research.He was born John Ackerman Jones – Wales is a country where the surname Jones can be dropped to no great disadvantage – in the mining town of Maesteg in 1934. His father, a slaughterman and butcher with a stall in Bridgend Market and a van taking meat to outlying villages, soon left his mother and he grew up in the company of numerous aunts; Ackerman described his father as “a ruthless, crooked, remote, confident, energetic, and violent man” and his loathing never diminished. The family, being “trade” in a society where almost everyone worked in heavy industry, was comparatively well off and all its members of independent spirit.His matriarchal grandmother Florence, an autodidact of strong left-wing convictions and literary tastes, presided over a kind of salon in the Lamb, the local pub, where she would address customers on questions of the day before reciting such music-hall favourites as “The Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight” and “The Women of Mumbles Head” and Utopian poems like Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” that speaks of “the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world”. Because it concerned the intimacies of our relationship with our closest ally, and because it came under the politically-charged phrase “terrorism”, it seemed as if politicians found it embarrassing to ask.Why? Cast aside even questions of legality, the simple fact is that we fought alongside the Americans yet our nationals taken prisoner were treated quite differently.

Besides Charles Kennedy of the Lib Dems and a couple (although not all) of the prisoner’s local MPs, the Government’s evasions and half-truths have gone unchallenged in the home of democracy. And all to please the Americans, to make it look as if the behaviour of these men warranted imprisonment without charge and without access to lawyers for a full two years.Not the least disgrace of this shameful, and still unresolved, episode is the way that the British parliamentary system has so failed to rise to the legal outrage. Then go to Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, when the subject on the front page of every newspaper and the lead item of every newscast was not even mentioned in Tony Blair’s grilling at the dispatch box: not a query about what happens to the remaining four, not a vague note of concern about the manner in which four of the five returned prisoners were put straight into a police station for 48 hours of questioning before release. Worse, the mere fact that they have not been released will give them the pall of men who have clearly done something wrong.And if you think that this is too bleak a prediction, then look at the headline in yesterday’s Times: “Home and free: all Camp X-Ray Britons may be out by Friday.” So that’s that, then The abandoned four no longerexist. After Iraq, who will ever believe claims from US intelligence, especially as a justification for pre-emptive war?. Democrats will naturally seek to use the missing Iraqi WMDs to dent Mr Bush’s image of trustworthiness. But neither Congressional inquiries nor the veiled accusations of Mr Tenet, nor even the replacement of Mr Cheney on the Republican ticket will make good the gravest damage done by the affair.

Although Mr Cheney’s popularity has slipped among Republicans, there is no sign that the President (scion of a family famed for its loyalty to faithful retainers) intends to ditch him – or that Mr Cheney will use his history of heart problems as a convenient pretext to withdraw.In a sense, moreover, it does not matter. The White House commission will not report until March 2005, when Mr Bush will be either well into his second term or in retirement, clearing sagebrush at his Texas ranch.It would be nice to think that Mr Tenet’s remarks will pull the rug further from beneath the vice-President, whose wild exaggerations of the threat posed by Saddam have been matched only by his own obsession with secrecy. The Congressional committees will do much of their work in secret. Both Senate and House of Representatives, moreover, are controlled by the Republicans, thus ensuring that nothing too embarrassing will emerge to damage the leader of their party in the months before the November election. On paper, the White House commission and two Congressional committees which are examining what went wrong with the pre-war intelligence add up to more than anything under way in London where, after the high drama of the Hutton committee, the matter has been shunted off to a committee headed by a former cabinet secretary, which will conduct its business behind closed doors.But expect no theatricals here. Nonetheless, when Mr Cheney and Mr Bush went too far in their public speeches, the CIA director (in private, of course) did his best to correct the record.But, it would seem, to little avail. And there is little sign that any Senate or House investigation will have any greater retrospective impact.

This velociraptors’ network provided far scarier assessments of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capabilities and of his links with al-Q’aida than anything emanating from the CIA’s own analysts. To hear Mr Tenet tell it, he was firmly out of this particular loop. But on several occasions, he had taken Mr Cheney and others aside when he believed they had publicly exaggerated the data they had been provided with by the CIA.Between the lines, moreover, Mr Tenet confirmed the existence of a parallel intelligence channel, stretching from the Pentagon’s now infamous ‘Office of Special Plans’ directly to Mr Cheney’s office. No, he assured, President Bush and his top advisers had not misrepresented intelligence to justify the war. On Capitol Hill, he had to walk a fine line between loyalty to his latest masters, and making sure that his agency is not made the scapegoat for the WMD d?cle Deft bureaucrat that he is, Mr Tenet did so expertly.