It's extremely hard not to celebrate the firing of Mr Morgan (especially for me, since under Captain Bob, the Mirror Group bounced a cheque and never redressed their failure to pay me!). When the messenger is as odious and smug as Piers, I'm all for shooting him, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that that is exactly what we are doing.
The Mirror published faked photographs (perhaps knowingly, perhaps without taking sensible precautions to ascertain their veracity) and should be condemned and even punished for doing so. At the same time, it must be recognised that the paper did so to illustrate a story which was based on a real issue.
One can only hope that this sideshow does not come to obscure the underlying story, as the Gilligan/Kelly/BBC/Hutton story came to obscure the fundamental underlying issue (that the Government took the country to war justifying its action on a premise which it knew, or should have known, to be false).
In this case, it is known that six Iraqis have died in British custody, and it must be acknowledged that the ICRC failed to draw a clear distinction between the US and UK when condemning the brutality exhibited by some elements within the coalition forces in Iraq. There is, therefore, a real concern that UK forces may be engaging in exactly the kind of behaviour which the staged photos purported to show.