THIS column on Saturday finished by asking: "How much more mistreatment of prisoners has gone unseen?"

Even as those words were put to bed, an answer was coming in over the wires as reports of alleged brutality by British soldiers started to arrive.

There are questions about how genuine those reports and pictures are. The Daily Mirror, which published them and promises more revelations today, will face huge criticism if they turn out to be fake.

Indeed, it will be the victim of one of the greatest hoaxes in publishing history, and it will - literally - have blood on its hands. For those pictures - of a British soldier urinating on an Iraqi prisoner - have understandably raised the tension in Iraq and will, probably, provoke an increase in violence.

Because of this seriousness, it is curious that the pictures - if they are genuine - should end up in a newspaper. We have to hope that the people who released them are motivated by a desire to stop such barbaric incidents - rather than a desire to profit personally from cheque book journalism.

We have to hope that senior Army officers, had they been presented with such explosive evidence before it appeared in a newspaper, would have investigated it immediately and fully. We have to hope that there were no blind eyes being turned which forced those who held the pictures to become whistleblowers.

Of course, worse atrocities have been perpetrated in Iraq - the abuse meted out to the corpses of the four US security guards in Fallujah springs immediately to mind.

Yet our soldiers cannot sink to those levels, not if they are to win hearts and minds, and maintain the moral high ground.

We invaded Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, but also to remove Saddam Hussein's murderous regime. We also hope that by transplanting our values of democracy and justice into this corner of the Middle East, they will spread throughout this troubled region.

Yet if our values condone urinating on petty criminals, our values are worthless.

We have to hope - in fact we have to believe - that British soldiers are better than that.