Britbillsfan

Met chief on TV now. 6 explosions, 5 on tube, one on a bus. Many casualties. News elsewhere: Security scares in Swindon (where I am) and Brighton. Mobile Phone networks reportedly now down (as a response to possible detonation methods).

No big surprise, a number of attacks by the scum of the earth have been prevented in the UK, only a matter of time before some of the bastards got through. The bus looks a total wreck, and a large number of bombs elsewhere. Stuff the tossers reponsible.

Not ironic. Just predictable.

The bids were very similar, with the facilities, infrastructure (due to investment in new high speed rail links London's new infrastructure would match up closely with Paris) , venues etc being too close to call. What swung it was the presentation. The Paris presentation film was effectively saying Paris is a great city and as such a great city deserves it. The London message was more the Olympics are great and we wish to run an event that will be inspirational for the young globally. So the IOC members got to see the normal blurb, very well done mind you, from France (and the other nations) whilst the London approach was so different that it stood out and appealed to the voters so despite the feeling that Paris would pick up votes for persistance (2 previous failed bids in the last 20 years) London won. Of course with three failed bids in 20 years now maybe everybody just hates the French.

I am well aware of the junior level of de Gaulle at that time, it was just a what if..... The Germans in 1940 also had a whole heap of problems in 1940 and devised a stategem that essentially relied on the French being led by idiots. A gamble, but a highly successful one.

I personally prefer nerd......

The populace (not just the resistance, but gendarmie, workers, anyone with a gun hidden away anywhere) did have an uprising (similar to what happened in Warsaw) upon the approach of the allies. There is some footage of it around. There was some fighting in the liberation by the Free French (after all there were some pretty fanatical types in the German military/paramilitary forces), but the humane decision by the German commander von Choltitz not to destroy Paris & surrender against his orders saved Paris from widespread & serious damage. Some 1500 members of the uprising were killed in the fighting, so it was not merely a parade. de Gaulle led the Free French as the liberators and this was a political decision whereby the generals on the ground would have been advised to let the Free French have this honour, there were also practical benefits as well. If de Gaulle had been in charge of the initial defence of France Hitler would most likely have been stopped in 1940.

Now I'm going to have to get a recipe for this and use my Rhubarb and Strawberries from the garden, sounds like good stuff!

A good LT - so will go for Wolford. And also Kelly, because JP is a question mark (no matter how much I think he will be a good 'un). Ask me again halfway through the season and I can see Christie instead of Kelly (I hope) and if our OL miraculously turns things around then Bruuuuuce for Wil.

Well looking at it was not the problem, listening on the other hand.......

I would answer with a witty comeback, but I doubt you would understand it.....

Ah, this from the nation that gave Milli Vanilli a bloody musical award.........

The bloody thing seems to be on the TV ads every single break, sometimes more than once. Incredibly annoying, beloved of pre-teens, and those behind it deserve to be lined up and shot. Please take pity on those of us who have to endure this plague of frogs.

Iraq was a province of the Turkish, before the Brits defeated them and took over and later the place became the nation it is now. Iraq bing some sort of political/geographical entity has been around for a while.

I think there are only two or three of the normal England team playing - most of the rest are taking time off to recover from the long season (and the various niggling injuries they have picked up in that time) including the superb Steven Gerrard (who will likely still be recovering from the game on Wednesday) and Frank Lampard (who this year was probably the best midfielder anywhere (and it really hurts to say that - I loath Chelsea!)) with a whole host of others. With USA also fielding a weakened team the game should be interesting as their will be mistakes as the teams try to get used to playing alongside each other for the first time and bordeline players try to make an impression. The later game for Columbia will be a more usual line up with a couple of the regular English players joining the squad then havng finally been released to play the game from thier club.

Oh, well over a half a million scousers getting very drunk and very happy in the streets. Also it is a national holiday on Monday, so there will be some VERY hungover people in Liverpool come Tuesday. Incredible game.

To add to any paranoia about future economic super powers and Americas position as such but India has finally stopped being very dumb in its economic policies and its economy is taking off quite a bit as well. There are well over a billion of them and they have a democratic multi-party system in place (even if it is really corrupt in many places). One good thing about them though is that they and China are regional rivals, with one war and numerous skirmishes over the years since Indian independence, so there could be a willing partner to counter balance the influence of the other.

Come on - you have got to love the French giving the finger to their polical elite. Only snag is that it will likely scupper our chance of telling Blair to go F himself on the same issue (bloody politicians.....).

Jaded skepticism is fine, after all we are dealing with particular sick and twisted sh*ts. But I would still argue against using torture for sound operational reasons, not just moral ones. We can agree that the gathering information on terrorist groups is key to defeating them. The problem with torture, as has been proven time and again throughout history, is that the information gathered is not necessarily the truth but what the victim will believe will stop the torture. In other words they will make things up to stop the pain. Therefore its use can have some success, but equally can have you barking up the wrong tree on too many occassions. This is a real issue. Informants are largely the key to defeating the scum in the long term. I would not expect many (only a tiny number at best) of AQ fanatics to turncoat, but there are many muslims who see AQ as an abberation and evil (after all they kill more muslims than westerners by far) and do fight against them. There will be brave souls willing to risk their lives to infiltrate these groups IF they think they are doing it for the 'right' side. If the US & allies use torture or are responsible for the deaths of more innocent Iraqi civilians than the terrorists (which is the case currently) then they are not likely to risk their lives to support the US/allies. The pretty widespread use of torture is also a publicity coup for the terrorists. It attracts those who might otherwise not take up arms into their movements as it makes great copy and is easy enough to show as happening. Abu Ghraib was a godsend for their publicity efforts. But other stories of US/allied abuses stoke the fires of militancy. What really bugs me is the fact that these tactics are not helping the US/allies, but the really evil men we are fighting.

None, and this IS a point worthy of discussion. To put it in a more real world alternative that may persuade some of you who appear to have a taste for torturing suspects..... The IRA were a bunch of racist marxist scum who would never have been able to run an awful campaign against mostly civilian targets. They blew up a wide variety of targets causing great loss of life in the civilian population. Early on in this campaign torture was certainly used to get information and confessions, upon which 'terrorists' were sent to jail for a very long time. End result - the Briitish managed to force large parts of the nationalist community into supporting the IRA, when they probably would not have done otherwise. We encouraged them by our actions and injustices. The shooting of civilians on Bloody Sunday led to over 20 years of bloodshed and the false imprisonment of 'confessed terrorists' (as in confessed under torture) aided this campaign of hate no end. Only when we got smart and stopped using these tactics of interrogation did we start having success against the IRA - we knew who the bastards were by the end of the campaign, but due to good intel, not the torture kind, we were able to so severely hamper the IRA operations that they were all but shut down as far as spectaculars went (you can never stop all attacks - that would have been a pipe dream). Recruitment of informers, largely due to dius-satisfaction with the IRA campaign and knowledge that the UK was now behaving like a civilised nation should, went right up to upper echelons of the IRA and the war was effectively syopped. The IRA are still a bunch of criminals involved in all sorts of crimes, but they are now becoming more and more a criminal network rather than self styled freedom fighters with every passing week. Their days are numbered, largely because they will begin to wear out their 'popular' support, allowing Sein Fein to become properly independent of them and become a real political party rather than the mouth piece of some really nasty types. And even today it is impossible to get information from an IRA terrorist under interrogation, but we only stopped the campaign by stopping our own barbarities first.

Where in the post did I say the US military was worse than the bunch of scum running around blowing people up. I clearly stated the vast majority are good people doing a difficult job in awful circumstances. Torturing an innocent man to death in the name of interrogation IS just as bad as butchering an innocent man on TV for whatever warped reasons those MFers have. Those responsible for the use of torture to commit murder are as bad as those doing the beheadings. But guess what, I do not consider the torturers to be representative of the US armed forces, but bad seeds alowed to run amok because of bad leadership. Torture is not only wrong, morally, but it is self defeating in the long run. The refusal to accept this is going to cause a lot more pain in the long run for the West, especially the US, because it is an ideal tool for future recruitment due to the hatred it is causing.

Which is a fair statement. Unfortunately a lot of media are obsessed with the dramatic and the trivial and tend not to highlight underlying problems (the US press in its chase for ratings has never been that good) then it is no surprise that important stuff like this needs a cartoonist (for Pete's sake!) to get some attention to it. What is scarey, to me, is the belief in some quarters that torture, long term, can solve anything. And the refusal to think that US personel can do this is astounding, even with Abu Ghraib. The mere size of the US (or even the much smaller UK) military means there are going to be individuals in it whos' character is, shall we say, less than ideal, despite the fact that I believe that the vast majority of servicemen and women are decent people who have to deal with some pretty awful things in their chosen career and deserve the utmost respect.

Short answer is No, ultimately, because torturing people, even the right people, will in the end cause more innocent deaths in the long term. Consider that torture is efficient in getting the subject to say anything that he thinks will make the torture stop rather than any real facts, it is a very inaccurate way of gaining real intelligence, even from known bad guys the intel can prove to be inaccurate in the long run and always will need substantive supporting evidence. And since the now widespread use of torture (since the US appears to be looking the other way more and more countries with REALLY bad records are taking advantage of the situation by basically saying that - well you are doing it, why can we not?) is only going to increase the amount of hate and vitriol towards the US (since the US is supposed to lead the way in human rights) then there is a case in saying that the use of torture will end up causing a lot more deaths of innocents than it saves. Like I said I do not care about the terrorist scum but it certainly appears this is getting to be a provocation to many, making them more likely to attack America / the west rather than being of any real help to the longer term war on terror.

Or how about a taxi driver who was just returning from a fare and passed by when an attack took place. Obviously he deserved the 4+ days of being tortured, beaten and then left to die without medical attention. Those scum taxi drivers deserve everything they get. And most his interrogators thought he was innocent too. I do not really give a flying f**k about the guilty, but it is becoming increasingly clear that abuses are occuring, that they are more widespread than the Abu Graib incident, murder by torture is occuring and some of those dead are innocent of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time or being pointed out as a terrorist due to faulty intelligence (some of which comes from tortured subjects who would say anything to get the torture to stop). An in case you are wondering I am aware that abuses are occuring amongst British forces too, I am in favour of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan but both Bush and Blair both overstated their reasons for going to war in the former case (to put it mildly). I also see the probelms as fairly widespread but neither see it as a problem (at the moment) that is indicative of the conduct of the vast majority of the military in both places but if action is not seen to be taken soon the problems in Iraq at the moment will seem like nothing compared to what will occur in the not too distant future.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4570631.stm The bit from Chained to the Ceiling goes into some detail about the 2000 page report. Also that one of the dead was believed by most of the interrogators to be a poor innocent sap that was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Torture is occuring, it is wrong, and innocents are being caught up in it. And some people are dying (8 deaths in custody in Afghanistan alone that have been admitted to by the US, I would imagine that there would be more elsewhere). The idea of the cartoon (IMO) was to highlight that bad things that should not happen are happening, and was not meant to be funny.