This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a man who thinks he is doing good. Such men are capable of the most dreadful horrors.

And it was such men who allowed and carried out the shameful torture which we now know for certain was inflicted by ‘our’ side in the great unending battle against ‘Al Qaeda’ or ‘ISIS’ that we are constantly told we are fighting.

This is why – as a patriotic Christian conservative from a Service family – I strive so hard to puncture and mock the ridiculous rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’.

The truth remains that it is more likely that an eagle will drop a tortoise on your head from the sky than that you will be affected by terrorism in your entire life. And in any case Mrs Theresa May and MI5, MI6, the CIA and GCHQ can’t protect you from either of these remote dangers.

If we continue to believe this self-righteous anti-terror rubbish, we will in the end be destroyed by our own hypocrisy.

If we, the self-proclaimed apostles of liberty and justice, freeze men to death, chained on concrete floors, or torment them into absurd confessions of non-existent crimes, or cram them without trial into maddening dungeons, then we will become the very thing we claim to fight.

And we will have been defeated by ourselves.

I know many do not like it when I say this. When, back in January 2002, I attacked the treatment of captives at Guantanamo on this page, my postbag and my email inbox seethed with angry denunciations.

I had written: ‘If you loathe terrorist murder and support the righteous use of force, then you ought also to feel queasy about the sight of a fellow creature grovelling in chains before his armed captors.’ The letters I received all said roughly the same. The shackled, kneeling prisoners ‘deserved everything they got’. In vain I wrote back to point out that we had no idea if they had actually committed any crimes. The righteous mood was so strong that revelations of torture – at the time – might well have met with cheers and applause.

But it’s at the time that you have to stand against these things. That is why each of us needs to rediscover the idea of absolute rules, rules we have no power to change, which simply prohibit some actions.

We think of temptation in terms of too much chocolate, or sex, or whatever it is that most makes us want to stray. But the temptation to do cruel things – or to witness them and approve – is in almost all of us, and has to be curbed.

Torture is not just invariably wrong, it is also useless and worse than useless. People will say anything to stop the pain and fear.

Waterboarding as my late brother Christopher discovered for himself in a courageous experiment, is much worse than it sounds, much like drowning only with deliberate malice added on.

The ridiculous dispatch of troops in armoured vehicles to Heathrow in 2003 – militarilyworthless posturing – followed the invention of a ‘plot to attack the airport’ by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who just wanted the agony and misery of waterboarding to stop. He would have revealed a plot to blow up the Moon if he had been asked to.

But I’ll add this: as far as I’m concerned, even if the information was right, torture is never, ever justified. It corrupts the society that allows it, and incidentally fosters endless hatred among the victims, which may return to harm or destroy us decades hence.

Evil is always evil, and always begets more evil.

An innocent man deserved my help and I failed him

One of my great regrets is that I did not stand up for Christopher Jefferies, the eccentric teacher falsely accused of the murder of Joanna Yeates.

I felt at the time that the treatment of this man was utterly wrong. I was amazed that members of my trade were breaking what I had been taught were absolute rules to uphold the presumption of innocence. But I never wrote a word.

I waited for someone else to stop it. And nobody did.

So – reminded of the whole ghastly thing by last week’s powerful ITV dramatisation – I offer my personal apologies to Mr Jefferies for failing to come to his aid when I had the power to do so.

I suspect that I may be a bit of an eccentric myself, and will become more of one as the years go by, and can easily imagine falling into the same pit of unjustified suspicion that so nearly engulfed him.

It was a disgrace. But the newspapers involved were severely punished for it. I doubt it will be repeated.

The police, on the other hand, seem to have got away without much scrutiny.

Their pursuit of Mr Jefferies was blatantly stupid and left a killer free to kill again for many precious days (thank Heaven he didn’t). We also have to ask if officers fed damaging rumours about Jefferies to media friends.

The drama’s portrayal of the police’s creepy friendliness as they humiliated an innocent man and single-mindedly propelled him towards a life sentence made me shudder for the state of justice in our country.

Amid all that DNA-testing, fingerprint powder and fingertip searching, there was not one ounce of the presumption of innocence on which all our freedoms depend. One of today’s uneducated teenage juries could easily have sent Mr Jefferies to prison on a majority verdict. He could still be there.

There is only one way to fix schools

How many politicians have now pledged to fix our state school system, having wrecked it in the 1960s and 1970s? The list of them stretches back in a roll-call of failure – from Shirley Williams to Michael Gove.

Time and again they have resorted to bludgeons, the national curriculum, the Ofsted terror, the GCSE, and the current modish fixit kit – ‘Academies’. None of them can change the simple fact that comprehensive schooling just doesn’t work. Without selection there can be neither discipline nor rigour. And ability is the only fair way to select.

Hence this week’s tragi-comic Ofsted report, which classified as ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ many schools that politicians wouldn’t send their children to (notably Burlington Danes in London, spurned by Mr Gove even though he lives practically next door).

It actually admits that 400,000 (out of 3.2 million) secondary schoolchildren go to schools where behaviour is so poor it is hard to learn at all. More than 170,000 are now in schools that even Ofsted says are ‘inadequate’.

We claim to be keen on freedom and democracy in the Arab world. In the name of this cause we have plunged Libya into a dark night of chaos, and devastated Syria.

In that case why (when we can barely defend our own coastline any more) are we opening a naval base in Bahrain, a nasty, repressive state which punishes doctors for treating wounded protesters?

Here’s a clue. We couldn’t care less about freedom or democracy, but we do like to suck up to Saudi Arabia, which hated Libya’s Gaddafi, hates Syria’s Assad, and is Bahrain’s close friend.