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But journalists always want proof for their stories; it is all very well for the Red Cross to claim confidentiality works - but if they take that policy so far they will not even give us any examples, it is hard to believe them. And we do know that silence has led the organisation into some serious moral quandaries over the years - in World War II delegates knew about the Nazi death camps, but said nothing for fear of jeopardising their access to prisoners of war. Subtle approach: I do wonder how people apparently motivated by their humanitarian convictions can bear to keep quiet in the face of such horrors. Florian Westphal says: "I've come out of some awful places and I've thought 'God I just have to get what I've seen off my chest', but who would it have helped? Me for sure, but not the prisoners. "We did speak out over Bosnia and Rwanda - and it didn't help at all." Instead, he says, the Red Cross goes about improving the lives of prisoners in subtle ways. "I went to a prison where the inmates weren't being allowed any fresh air," he said. "So every time I visited I told the guards I needed the prisoners out in the yard so I could count them. It worked, they were let out, and I could seem them stretching, looking up to the sun." That is the kind of professional satisfaction Red Cross workers can expect - no media limelight. They go public about their prison visits only when they think every last avenue of private persuasion has been exhausted, and they did not think they had reached that point with the United States and Abu Ghraib. There had even been some improvements, Florian Westphal said. Media demands:  Red Cross officials have been repeating the confidentiality policy like a mantra all week - to the intense frustration of journalists hungry for credible details about Abu Ghraib prison. But complete confidentiality will be almost impossible to maintain in high profile conflicts like Iraq. And if the Red Cross does bow to pressure to talk, how will that affect its work in all those nasty little conflicts the media is not really interested in? Rebel militias holding hundreds of prisoners may have just seen the Red Cross on television, talking about bad prisons in Iraq. That is what many ordinary ICRC delegates fear - not that they may lose a cosy, unscrutinised way of working, but that they may lose access to thousands of prisoners of war who desperately need help. -Imolgen Foulges