Verbal

Sheesh! hypo, you have my sympathies.

The taliban are a security issue for the planet? I doubt it. Al Qaeda is/was - although mostly they are a security issue for other Muslims, who make up most of their victims, even taking into account 9/11, the Luxxor massacre (pre-al Qaeda), Bali (freelancers who trained in Malaysia), Madrid & London (also freelancers, trained in Pakistan and Algeria respectively). But the taliban, as awful as they are, don't pose a threat to the West. As knuckle headed as they are, the taliban leadership know well enough that they were swept from power because of their association, as reluctant hosts, with al Qaeda. In any case, Afghanistan is presently a sideshow, at least as far as international security is concerned. The real battle with those who internationalize militancy is going on in Pakistani territory - in the the tribal areas, Baluchistan and Swat. Most of that is being done with a combination of special forces, drones, local militias and the Pakistani army. All of which suggests that the wisest investment in fighting the clear and present danger has to be in intelligence, influence-peddling with local powers, equipping and training special forces and the sort of high technology that's operated by joysticks in Maryland. The days when you could respond effectively to some terrorist outrage by loosing off a bunch of cruise missiles from a submarine or warship are long past.

To claim that Wright's argument is 'merely an assertion' is pretty breathtaking. And if there is 'substantial evidence' that the Americans funded Bin Laden, where and what is it? If the answer is a series of links to American conspiracy theorists, then you can forget it. It's an article of faith among these idiots that the known links between Bush and various Saudi higher-ups, including the highly influential Bin Laden family, is evidence that the US funded Osama. Which is nonsense. OBL dissociated himself from his family - and they from him - years ago. Long story short, the picture of the poor girl on the Time cover owes nothing directly to American interference in the region. (You can claim all kinds of indirect links - but you'll just end up going round in circles.) The Taliban neanderthals who did that to her grew up in Saudi-financed maddrassas in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or were recruited by people who did. These maddrassas were financed by the Saudis and spread throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan as a result of the (admittedly American-backed) Zia al Huq's decison to accept their money and 'Islamicize' (his word) the region. As 'Charlie Wilson's War' makes clear, American support for the mujahadeen was sporadic and opportunistic - and conducted by mavericks, not mainstream CIA operatives. Even so, they supported mujadeen leaders like Ahmad Shah Massoud, the 'Lion of Panjshir', whose relationship to OBL was clearly demonstrated by the fact that OBL sent two men, posing as a camera team, to murder him on September 10, 2001. Incidentally, I'd be curious to know who your prof was at university.

By the way, why have I been downgraded to 'registered user', having just received notification from paypal that saintsweb has deducted £5?

As scandalous as that sounds, most of it isn't true. Saddam, yes. But the Taliban for example were entirely established and financed by the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, as a means of fighting a proxy war with the Indians (both compete for influence in Afghanistan). In fact, the Taliban (which means 'student') began in the Saudi-financed madrassas of northwest Pakistan. One of the great myths about OBL is that he was American-financed. He wasn't. He was supported, and at one point actually in the employment of, the Saudi intelligence service. Unlike the mainstream mujahadeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, OBL and his merry band were also notoriously useless. (For chapter and verse on this, read Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower'.) If an American Stinger missile had by any chance ever found its way into OBL's hands while he was supposedly fighting the soviets, he would only have succeeded in firing it up his own ar$e. His success with 9/11 had everything to do with the money he was able to throw at the project (together with Khaled Sheikh Mohammad's planning) - and most of that had come from a mix of re-directed Saudi intelligence funds and income from the family business.

To all those making bizarre claims about knowing the recent whereabouts of Venables, and threatening violence from behind their computer screens, Venables has been living until now in Cheshire. So any 'violence' actually perpetrated down here would have been against a perfectly innocent man. Utterly, utterly pathetic.

Lost in the noise that this was Venables, with all his notoriety, is the fact that he was convicted of downloading child porn, not creating it. As bad as that is, the worse offence, surely, is that committed by those who actually staged and photographed the images in the first place.

It seems the officer who beat Tomlinson to the ground has form. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/g20-summit/7905549/G20-riots-policeman-who-stuck-Ian-Tomlinson-faced-two-previous-aggression-inquiries.html

All the discussion about whether Tomlinson was merely 'pushed' is beside the point. The point is that a trial by jury is the accepted way of dealing with outcomes like this. Then it would be for a jury to decide whether the 'push' was a cause of his death (in which case a manslaughter verdict is certainly a possibility, regardless of intent). The jury would also hear the scientific evidence on which 'experts' allegedly cannot agree. The principal one of these, the pathologist who carried out the initial post mortem, is presently on a serious disciplinary charge of misconduct. Justice must be seen to be done, not applied differentially to the police who, yet again and extremely predictably, walk away after the death of someone whose only crime appears to have been to be walking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The 'capability' of Trident, as you put it, is to wipe out civilisations. No one in their right mind is ever, ever going to fire it. Get rid of it and all the 'facilities' that go with a lethal piece of junk that symbolizes a ludicrous keening of politicians of a middling nation to be at the nuclear 'top table'.

We should aspire to be like Belgium.

Chop Trident altogether (and allow women on subs, as I predicted, to much misogynistic and jingoistic bleating on here!). Cut the MoD to the bone - the most wasteful, useless department in Whitehall. And model a defence force on comparable (ie 'middle order') those of states like Belgium, Spain or Canada - and one that is equipped to deal with the exigencies of modern warfare, rather than holding on to the exorbitantly expensive fantasy that we're still fighting the Cold War.

'English' or 'white'?

Brilliant! And it's in the first language of our cretinous royals!

Ask someone like Anoushka Shankar or Nitin Sawhney to come up with something that reflects the country's multi-ethnicity.

Life's a piece of sh!t When you look at it. Is a good verse to get to earlier. That's the only problem I can see with the obvious choice.

"No person in their right mind would try to sit on a 5m crocodile." Good line for a tombstone.

Hadith. Getting confused with Cadiz presumably

Sadly, the majority of women wearing the full burqa in this country are from South Asia (or of South Asian descent), where historically there is no tradition or requirement to wear the damned thing. Until the 1970s it was pretty common in Pakistan's cities to see women in midriff-baring saris. And anyone who went on the hippy trail until about 1970 will confirm that miniskirts were not uncommon in Kabul. And yes, you're absolutely right: most muslims wear ordinary clothes!

No it doesn't. View of his Bottom is right for once. But in any case, arguments about what's in founding religious texts are ultimately pretty futile. The Quran was written from the 'memory' of Mo's dream revelations about 100 years after he had them. In the meantime, all manner of petty rivalries and scores were being settled in the drafting of the religious documents associated with the birth of Islam. This is especially true of the 'hadiz', which are the actual source of all this veil nonsense, and which had largely been forgotten about until the Saudis decided to export Wahhabism, a particularly nasty and crude version of the religion.

Arguing with you is (as someone once said) "like trying to nail jelly to a greased piglet". Is it ever possible for you to stick to the subject at hand?

0 for 2, as the Americans say. Perhaps you could try something a little less ad hominem?

I thought 'The Ghost' was pretty good. A far worse crime was 'The Tenant'. But none of this is the point. This is not about defending his actions - nobody would. It's about due process, both in the US and internationally. Compare the Swiss court's and government's actions with those of the British government in the case of Gary McKinnon. The Americans thought they could win extradition by simply getting on their high horses - and were prepared to refuse Swiss requests for documents that related to the original plea bargain. My guess - actually more than that - is that the British government would still have folded in the face of such a refusal.

Did you read the NY Times article?

Well, maybe this is better than long post, no time...!