Libya still hasn't found a job . . . I doubt he's even looking.

And have you noticed the bruises on Sudan's wife?

Sheesh. Don't even get me started about how she dotes on Saudi Arabia. No, in fairness, that's her bridge partner, the other Mary.

You'd think the planet's mother-in-law would find time to confront some of these problems, but no, she prefers . . . when not scolding your wife for not going back to work two weeks after having the baby . . . to nitpick about how you defend your family against people who are trying to kill you.

The problem with mother-in-laws of this type is that every fibre of your being screams at you to do exactly the opposite of what she says, even when she's at least partly right. (And before I'm served with divorce papers, let me make clear that my own motherin-law is the soul of generosity and reason. ) So it wasn't surprising when the US rejected out of hand the report from her old UN pals calling for the closure of the prison at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Then Mary chimed in and all the Bush administration could hear was "blah, blah, Bush is worse than Hitler, blah blah".

But the report has helped bring the issue of Guantanamo one step closer to a tipping point in terms of US opinion.

Kofi Annan distanced himself slightly from the report but agreed with the main point . . . "sooner or later there will be a need to close Guantanamo".

When "detainees" captured in Afghanistan were first sent to Cuba, it was met with approval by US public opinion, even with pictures of orange boiler-suited prisoners, shackled and prone. Planes had recently been flown into buildings, the funeral wreaths for thousands of cleaners, secretaries, salesmen, technicians and firemen had not yet wilted, and there was little disagreement about the need to do whatever was necessary to stave off the next attacks. But the approval was not unqualified.

These men were presumed to be trained killers with knowledge of future planned attacks to kill more civilians. Information needed to be extracted to save lives. Once the threat had been contained, we could beat ourselves up over how that was done.

In fact, we could congratulate ourselves on our restraint. Franklin D Roosevelt locked up 120,000 US citizens of Japanese ancestry after Pearl Harbour. It took another 40 years for the US government to apologise. Had there been successive waves of attacks, or Chicago's Loop been flattened with a small nuclear weapon, there would at this moment be camps holding at least that many people.

More than four years after Guantanamo opened, however, there have been no successful attacks by alQaeda on what is now creepily called "the homeland". That's the paradox of counter-terrorism. You only hear about the failures. And the longer it goes between failures, the less defensible become any methods not following Marquis of Queensbury rules.

So now there are some 400 Guantanamo "detainees". Many were turned over for cash rewards by warlords in the Hindu Kush, their only combat experience having been to duck when the Northern Alliance rolled through town. Four years on, none of them are likely to know anything about future attacks.

Before the UN report came out, the respected National Journal examined court documents of 132 Guantanamo prisoners . . . 75 had not even been accused of taking up arms against the US. Most of them aren't even from Afghanistan.

Many seem to be there merely for harbouring a vocal hatred of the US. If that were itself a crime, they'd have to lock up a third of the journalists in Dublin, never mind a Pakistani goatherd who'd been locked up for four years without just cause.

It has been years since Guantanamo had any conceivable intelligence or military value that could outweigh the damage being done to US credibility in contending for the larger stakes.

Pentagon planners this week rechristened the conflict they woke up to on 9/11 . . . 'The Long War'. They were quickly echoed by London Met police counterterror chief Peter Clarke's assertion that al-Qaeda has a "50-year strategy".

Nobody who gave qualified support to Guantanamo in the first place wanted people who pose no real threat to be locked away until they die of old age.

What passes for good news is that the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defence Review recognised that the enemy "cannot be defeated solely by military force", and that the battle is one of information and ideas as much as anything else. The spectacle of Guantanamo helps no one but the enemy and his apologists.

Which isn't terribly different from what motherin-law Mary now says. We really, really hate it when they're right.