Verbal

The fact that a giant multinational should stoop to hiring Barry the Briefcase just goes to show you what lowlifes NI are. Mulcaire was a heavily paid contractor to NoW, undertaking specifically ordered tasks and receiving very high fees for carrying them out. He may have been a 'saddo' as you call him, but that doesn't alter the rather easily checkable 'fact' that he was acting under instruction from NoW execs. It's a great shame that the Select Committee didn't ask Brooks the direct question: what instructions did you give Mulcaire? I guess we'll have to wait for the trial.

The meetings records with all other newspaper groups have been released by the government. They show that NI was by a country mile the most frequent visitors - and that the meetings tended to be with NI executives rather than journalists.

Hard to imagine a more mealy mouthed, sneering piece of crappy racism than this. The way this site is sometimes dragged down into a cretinous pit by the usual suspects is just appalling. Is this stuff being modded at all? How about locking, and shutting this garbage up?

I certainly hope that's not true.

Many of them had us favourites to win it.

It's a wind up.

What utter crap. You were laughing at him - your claim (and that is putting it at its best) that you didn't know the precise nature of his disability is beside the point. You were laughing at him, and what made it funny for you was that he 'talked funny' because of a disability. Your odd behaviour on this thread also suggests someone who's found a welcome distraction from the uncomfortable fact that your extremist views coincide at far too many points with those of a mass murderer. So why don't you go off into a corner, hang your head in shame, and allow some proper discussion, rather than attempting to hijack the thread with childish finger-pointing.

They don't know as much as we do.

You avoided any reply on the original thread. Here you're 'denying' laughing. That's surely a bare-faced lie, isn't it?

So what interpretation DO you put on this?

I think you mean psychology, trousers - unless the fumble was the result of the sudden onset of a new form of football-related mental illness.

Keeping quiet about the transfer probably helped.

Watching you trying to be a liberal is like watching a walrus trying to do the ironing.

Did you just do that?

Plastic Bertrand's legacy is more lasting.

Okay stop teasing. You clearly have stone cold evidence that the Taliban have trained and are training kamikazis ready to drop on the West. Let's see it.

Succinctly put.

It was done and dusted by March 2002.

Ajax always seem to be broke - I can't recall a £20 million signing or anything close in recent years, and their youth programme, which remains brilliant evidently, is what keeps them afloat and in good supply of promising players.

Actually, the first part of my post is inaccurate - I meant to say 'former'. And no, they're really not training people to commit terrorist acts against the UK. It's not about naivete so much as experience of travelling in the region for the last quarter of a century. Part of that experience includes having someone who was working with me kidnapped by the Pakistani Taliban and held hostage for six months under conditions which aren't quite described with words like 'appalling' and 'inhuman' (my friend had the misfortune to be a Hindu). I know who does the training, where the money comes from, etc - and it isn't the Afghan Taliban. If you can find one single piece of hard evidence that they are training 'martyrs' to attack the West in the West I'll happily agree I was wrong. If the Taliban were to regain control of Afghanistan, it would be a tragedy...for the people of Afghanistan. But not because they would allow Al Qaeda back in. The strong likelihood is that they wouldn't for their own selfish but very good reasons - the same reasons that led them, too late, to try and get rid leading up to 2001. South Asian politics are arcane at the best of times. It's always best to assume therefore that what might seem 'obvious' is least likely to be true.

I didn't get that either, but didn't spend any more time worrying about it because it was part of what was obviously (to me at least) a gormlessly racist post.

Some of it will descend into chaos and some of it won't. Kandahar has always been likely to fall into the latter. The worst of it is that the West's justification for being there has never made any sense - or only did for a few short months. Blair/Brown/Cameron et al have always relied on public ignorance and apathy to get away with the false claim that the Taliban represent a threat to the West. They don't - they are a nationalist movement built on Pashtun tribal customs. Al Qaeda did constitute a threat while in Afghanistan but no longer do, and haven't since early 2002 - almost a decade ago.

What happened to all the teams in between?

But we've already been told it's NOT 'Athletic' and it's not "Bilbao' either. In fact nothing that would describe a city or a football club at all. I'm not sure it's even permissible to pronounce the name in Klingon.

Evidence?