Conventional wisdom about the distant or quite recent past was seldom conventional wisdom at the time. The perceptive commentators (Trotsky and Churchill on Hitler, for instance, not to mention those who opposed the Iraq war before it began, those who initially said that British exams were being devalued, those who warned against university expansion, those who refused to accept that Gordon Brown was a competent Chancellor, I could go on) were in small minorities when it mattered, and only became recognised as wise when it was far too late. Mr O'Brien must have heard the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. Most people who hear this story think they would have realised the little boy was right. Experience tells me that most of them would have sided with the crowd, and believed the fake tailors. The curse of Cassandra was to be always right, and never believed.

Legal and judicial reform is one barometer of social change, but so is popular culture and Bryant must have been extremely sensitive to it. A quick scan through 1970s popular culture reveals how its ideas about sexuality, gender, and relationships were a radical break from the past.

IF anyone thinks that someone is obliged to produce scientific proof of God's existence for him or anyone else, he overestimates human capacities. No-one has ever suggested that such proof was available, and I don't know why anyone would look for such a thing in such a place. All the arguments about the existence or non-existence of God are very old, and none of them has ever persuaded anyone who didn't want to be convinced in the first place. What I'm interested in is the motives people have for belief - and unbelief.

Anyone violating the sanctity of the Holy month of Ramadan will be arrested under the Jordanian Penal Code number 16, article 247 from 1960, the police department in Ramallah said Wednesday.

"The only man convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 arrived in Libya today after he was released by the Scottish government -- drawing ire from heartbroken family members of the 270 victims who felt they had to relive the searing pain of loss all over again." Drawing ire? The families (through their association) sold their loved ones for cash payments from Qadhdhafi. (To be fair: there were families who were opposed to the deal, but the majority prevailed).

NATO should be more involved in protecting its members' energy resources, the alliance's top diplomat said Thursday amid concerns that fuel supplies face threats ranging from terrorism to supply cuts by disgruntled exporters.

NATO has a "role to play in this field," Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a gathering of ministers and senior diplomats from almost 50 allied and partner nations.

Some NATO allies want it to consider a military role in protecting pipelines, oil platforms and sea routes bringing oil and gas to Europe and North America. Poland, which is heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas imports, has suggested a pact to support allies whose supplies are
threatened.

If you’re a deskbound general continually demanding more men, more weapons and more money to subdue Afghanistan, you get endless air time, a peerage and a gold-plated pension.

If you’re a humble squaddie with service in theatre, whose doubts about the war are so serious you go Awol for two years, you face disgrace, a court martial and possibly jail.

Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, 27, of the Royal Logistic Corps, has been charged with desertion for refusing to return to Afghanistan, and faces extra charges for speaking out about a war he (and plenty of his mates) say is unwinnable.

When MoD top brass say the same thing it makes headlines, not a charge sheet.

Rarely has the class distinction between officers and men been so clearly defined.

Nobody - but nobody not the Queen, not the so-called captains of industry, not the bosses of the BBC or any other public body, not the brain free footballers of the Premier League, not the so-called celebrities on our TV screens and most emphatically not the pigswill brigade who run the privatised utilities, deserves more than the Prime Minister's salary of £195,000 a year.

If you can't live on that - and millions of people have to get by on much less than a 10th of that - then quite frankly you deserve to die.

When on his recent visit to Turkey President Obama called for Turkish entry into the European Union, he put his finger on a strategic and cultural sore spot. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking for the majority position in Europe, was quick to respond: Turkey may one day enjoy a privileged relationship with the EU, but full membership is out of the question. Turkey is not European – geographically or culturally.

Interpretations of the US stance are numerous and contradictory, but they highlight deep tensions within Europe on the issue. Some believe the US is concerned primarily with securing access to the energy reserves of the Caspian basin; others suspect Washington of using Turkish alignment with American policy (by way of Nato) to exert pressure on its European allies; still others see an attempt to weaken Europe by placing a Turkish economic, demographic and cultural millstone around its neck.

Considering events inside Iran from June 12 on, it seems highly likely that many of Iran's more affluent, urban-activist and technologically savvy youth had concluded that they could achieve their political objectives best, not at the ballot box in June 2009, and not by arguing their case before the rigid bodies of Iran's executive branch, but by tailoring their messages of dissent to foreign audiences, taking to the streets to provoke repressive responses by state authorities, with every action of the state serving to delegitimize it in the eyes of the West's metropolitan centers, whose recognition and validation the protestors have sought above all.


Indeed, the West is where we find the real streets the demonstrators want to control. Not "from Engelob Square to Azadi Square," as Robert Fisk reported it, but how Engelob Square and Azadi Square, Evin Prison and the Basij militia, play in the United States and other Western powers, where 98% of the "internationalists" wouldn't blog, "tweet," text-message, or take to their own streets to stop a single NATO missile from striking a wedding or funeral party in Afghanistan, however much they cheer Iran's dissidents.

This is that these people are not, as idiotically claimed by much of the media, a 'right-wing' revolution against a 'left-wing' old-style Labour. They are practical men and women of the New Left, uninterested in nationalising the railways, gripped by sexual, social and cultural revolution and hostile to national sovereignty. They grasp that their revolutionary objectives can after all be achieved by Parliamentary means, not least because most in the media are either sympathetic to them, or so dim and uninstructed in the ways of Marxism that they cannot see what is going on in front of their noses.

But it’s generally the others who go. That’s why the stupid war goes on unquestioned, and why politicians, never in our history so ignorant of war, have allowed the debate about whether we should be there at all (we shouldn’t) to dribble away into an argument about helicopters.
Next time, they should lay the coffins on the despatch box in the Commons, right in the faces of the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet, and make all the MPs look at what they have done, while they debate their stupid war.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama in Cairo in his heralded address to the Muslim world. John Pilger, he says the continued expansion of settlements has to stop, your response? And an overall to his entire address?

JOHN PILGER: He says the continuing response, but what about all the settlements, the so-called settlements, colonies, that have so honeycombed the Occupied Territories over almost two decades? I thought the most significant aspect of that statement was he referred to the continuing settlements, leave the ones that have already been built. Let’s stop building them now. Of course, the Israelis, ever resourceful in this area, got around this very quickly. by issuing building licenses to those settlements that were about to be built and hadn’t been built as if they had been built so they would not fall into President Obama’s category.

The crime always is independence. Iran is an independent state and has almost miraculously maintained itself in forms that we might not approve of, certainly, but it has maintained itself as an independent, major state in the Middle East. That is absolutely intolerable to the U.S. State.

And Obama has not shifted from that at all. He has made a number of patronizing appeals to the Iranians, but now, as he is in effect saying, the protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Tehran. Turn that around. What if it was suggested that protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Washington? But that of course is another side of double standards. I don’t believe anything has changed. If it is going to change in the Middle East as in other parts of the world, there has to be greater pressure.

No mention is made of the enormous American army of mercenaries who are in all those theaters of war, and Special Forces. No mention is made of the special forces operation inside Iraq come inside—I beg your pardon, inside Iran. $400 million was allotted to that particular secret war by Bush, in one of his signing decrees, which money has gone to both the Kurdish and Baluchi separatist movements. The whole region is being crafted, if you like, for a very, very long American colonial presence. Eventually, it will not need a standing army there. That is the future in that part of the world, as I say, unless people become aware of that and start to bang on the doors of government, of Congress, and of power in this country to expose it.

His reaction hasn’t been perfect: unlike France and Spain, he hasn’t withdrawn the US Ambassador yet. He supports the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which are vast brakes on Latin American democracy, and he bad-mouths Chavez while arming the genuinely abusive Colombian government. But it is a vast improvement on Bush and McCain, who would have been mistily chorusing “We are all Honduran Generals now”.

I still think it highly instructive that we challenge the wisdom of this war on the basis of casualties that we have endured, and never the countless civilian casualties that we are responsible for as a result of our actions.

We will now see a debate, covered uncritically in the media on the war in Afghanistan which is centred on its cost to us. A free press would surely be lambasting the political class for this outrage. Much like the commentariat here, the debate in Russia during the invasion of Afghanistan was invariably about the cost to the aggressor. The US/UK was calling for the withdrawal of Russia regardless of the security situation in the country.

I know how unpopular a view this is in Britain but the invasion of Afghanistan is just a war crime and we have no right to be there. The sooner we bring our 18 and 19 year olds from the front line of this phony war the better.

It’s based on my reading of what I believe is happening in Iran. This, in my judgment, is a post-ideological generation. My generation was divided into third world socialists, anti-colonial nationalists and militant Islamists. These are the three dominant ideologies with which we grew up. But if you look at the composition of Iranian society today, 70 percent of it is under the age of thirty—namely, born after the Islamic Revolution. They no longer are divided along those ideological lines.


And if you read their newspapers, if you watch their movies, if you listen to the lyrics of their underground music, to their contemporary arts, etc., which we have been doing over the past thirty years, this, to me, is a civil rights movement. They are operating within the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. They don’t want to topple the regime. If you look—come outside, from the right of the right, in the US Senate to the left, is waiting for yet another revolution to happen. I don’t think this is another revolution. This is a civil rights movement. They’re demanding their civil rights that are being denied, even within the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. From their chants that they are doing in the streets to their newspapers, to their magazines, to their websites, to their Facebook, to their Twitters, everywhere that you look, this is a demand for civil liberties and not—


There are, of course, underlying economic factors, statistically. The unemployment in the age cohort of fifteen to twenty-nine is 70 percent. So this is not a class warfare. In other words, people that we see in the streets, 70 percent of them, that a majority of them are young—70 percent of them do not even have a job. They can’t even rent a room, let alone marry, let alone have a family. So the assumption that this is a upper-middle-class or middle-class, bourgeois, Gucci revolutionaries on the side of Mousavi and poor on the side of Ahmadinejad is completely false.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

It is bad enough that the ghastly Blair creature might rise from the political tomb, hands clasped in pious prayer, upper lip trembling with fake emotion, pockets crammed with money from the lecture circuit, drivel streaming from his mouth. That would perhaps be the only thing that might make the nation warm to Gordon Brown again.

Gaza's forced separation from Palestine, and its miserable condition, have been almost entirely consigned to oblivion, an atrocity to which we should not contribute by tacit consent. Israeli journalist Amira Hass, one of the leading specialists on Gaza writes that "The restrictions on Palestinian movement that Israel introduced in January 1991 reversed a process that had been initiated in June 1967. Back then, and for the first time since 1948, a large portion of the Palestinian people again lived in the open territory of a single country--to be sure, one that was occupied, but was nevertheless whole... The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel's military superiority... Since January 1991, Israel has bureaucratically and logistically merely perfected the split and the separation: not only between Palestinians in the occupied territories and their brothers in Israel, but also between the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and those in the rest of the territories and between Gazans and West Bankers/Jerusalemites. Jews live in this same piece of land within a superior and separate system of privileges, laws, services, physical infrastructure and freedom of movement" (April 24, BitterLemons.org).

There is much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information -- the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured US pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986 after shooting down his plane delivering aid to Reagan's contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty, and then sent him back to the US, as they did. Rather, they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, no small matter for a tiny and poor country under terrorist attack by the global superpower. And Nicaragua should certainly have done the same if they had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then Ambassador in Honduras, later appointed counterterrorism Czar, without eliciting a murmur. Cuba should have done the same if they had been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what victims should have done to Kissinger, Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda far in the distance, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further "ticking bombs."