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Very sorry to hear about the death of Charles Wheeler, Newsnight's finest journalist. Hope there will be a fulsome tribute to him tonight.

Christopher Hitchens subjected himself to waterboarding
Who Cares ?
You must be short of News eitors if this is how you consider spending the license fee last week it was cake - leave it to Roy Greenslade et al at the Guardian and they got no interest in Hitchens when they devoted two blogs to him so why is it a consideration for a flagship News programme

Bring back the Old Newsnight

Re Waterboarding, it would be interesting to hear from Christopher Hitchens re-his first hand experiences, as some form of antidote to Harmon's exploits in her stab-proof vest. I find attempts to personally plunge into these frightening situations, fascinating and courageous. I didn't feel that Grant Shapps got enough coverage of his experiencing New Year with the homeless on the streets of London.

Re the murder of the two French students, I've seen no comment from ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News as to why they/you condescended to report this hardest of hard-news stories, 4 days after the event.
Perhaps you could comment in your coverage tonght; or in 4 days' time.

If this is all that is on offer tonight, maybe Newnight should consider devoting the WHOLE of the programme to Charles Wheeler and how his generation of journalists shaped news reporting in the post-war era.

JUST WARFARE

Peter Hitchens' waterboarding portrayed in pictures - OK. We can all be righteously shocked as it is 'they' who do waterboarding.
But: as asked before on this blog: when will some enterprising war-zone cameraman make a video, using fibre optic, of an innocent trapped in rubble, dying slow REAL death courtesy of OUR bombing?
I know it FEELS nastier when the torturer is
standing by watching, but IS IT? We like to condemn the Nazi swine for going off to the opera after a days 'work', but don't the high altitude 'torturers' who flatten houses, go back to burger and chips while their victims suffer agonies of mind and body, on the way to lonely death?
When such a video is put on 'general release' maybe we will get a realistic handle on just what is entailed in 'just warfare'.

Today's leaked " rejected " badger cull ( against scientific advice ) policy is typical of a government which cares more about animals than people pandering to an eco-fascist brainwashed ten bob fat cat electorate.

Its all part of the eco-fascist master plan to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from rural areas. All farmers were asking for was that badger sets be tested and culled if TB was found, hardly indiscriminate slaughter as some would attempt to portray. Farmers are currently denied their basic human right to defend their property against a serious threat to their livelihood.

I suspect that the policy will change when the Corporate Nazi multinationals take over all the land despite local protests from eco-fascist leaning interlopers playing at " River Cottage ".

Sorry to hear about Charles Wheeler. He deserves full-some praise.

If water-boarding is torture, and I think so, then perhaps it could be used to raise questions about the extraordinary renditions flights that still, probably, pass through UK airspace. Or is it a thing of the past?

On Zimbabwe I hope that there is some attention to any factionalisation with Zanu-PF. If they realise that the game is up in the long run due to economic factors maybe they will deal with Mugabe themselves.

Today is the 232 celebration of the birthday of the United States of America, the day it declared it would throw off the chains of the brutal tyrnanny of the English Crown. It is also the birthday of the invention of democracy and freedom in the world that not only brought more happiness to more people around the world than any other but set the stage for America to largely invent the modern world in the 20th century we have come to take for granted today.

Were America's founding fathers around to see what results their great experiment had gotten, what the fruits of the seeds they had planted had been like, I think they would have been most pleased and surprised. They said they thought that one day America would take its place among the great nations of the world but how could they have known that in a mere two centuries it would dwarf all of them, in fact in many ways all of Europe combined.

The current problems in the world today notwithstanding and America's own current problems (it has survived and prospered after far worse) the US remains poised to continue on to even greater heights, leaving the rest of the world far far behind it.

Happy Birthday America.

Further to post #5: perhaps the best way to deal with the death of Charles Wheeler
is to stick to the normal running order and
commission a box set of his riveting reports.

A very fine tribute from Paxo though James
Cameron was also a pretty sharp reporter!

Wheeler will be missed ..........

But on second thoughts ........ I have just clicked on Charles Wheeler's report from
1992 LA riots on the Newsnight website:
clear the schedules and run it again ......!

What better case for electing Barak Obama?

C Hitchens report will no doubt be scathing of the US torture technique, but that will be an easy task for most, let alone Hitch. I would imagine that he probably would not last five minutes under the water boarding torture but i have heard he has quit the cigs so he might be somewhat fitter and last...oh 10min. Was he pickled in this report or has he quit the demon drink as well?
If your scrambling around for interesting reports or analysis; hows about inviting Chrisophers brother Peter on the show; he can discuse the criminal justice system and why it has failed us wholesale thanks to the zealot-self-serving-strategist AKA our Parliamentarians who never had a good strategy for the rest of us. Maybe Peter will reveal to us that the rise of English nationalism is due thanks in all parts to that great unchecked immigration policy Labour 'stratagised' for the rest of us and with the looming recession creeping nearer... hells gates will open and the inevitable terror will follow..doesn't anybody at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ read history and its subsequent lessons learnt? ..no!..thought not..too many media grad students who have not done a real days work in their lives or experieced life's hard knocks but are so quick in telling us how to live ours and how we must think..i don't want to put words in Peters Hitchings mouth on this hypothetical guest slot on Newsnight but i think that would be his angle of attack: truth and logic, something the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has increasing difficulty with even though they are constantly out-flanked with reasonable debate and that there stance on certain issues(some say many) is boardering on collective madness.

And another thing: watching the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ news is fast approaching like it's a really bad episode of Blue Peter. Please stop doing that 'auntie knows best' routine, its wearing thin and your jobs are not guranteed like it was in the corps heyday... don't make any long term financial commitments ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ staff as many of us feel the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is coming to its natural end, as the spin, sanitized news reports as well as the often unreported news due to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's need to stay within the Political Correct framework has not gone unnoticed by the rest of us.... Johnathen Ross's recent lucrative contract never went down well with the licence fee payers either..remember, your on borrowed time. I'll see you all at the soup kitchen.


thecookieducker 43, father of 5, oppressed and er.. a Daily Mail reader...can't you tell?

Re #9. MarcusAurelius it's a very profond analysis that make and you well turn out to be correct. But for me, America is well past its peak, economically and militarily, and the peace dividend squandered, in pursuit of Israeli foreign policy, in cahoots with Blair and others like him.

USA AND ETS

MarcusAureliusII (#9) "Were America's founding fathers around to see what results their great experiment had gotten, what the fruits of the seeds they had planted had been like, I think they would have been most pleased and surprised."

They may be surprised, but I doubt they'd be pleased.

How many have taken what's spelled out below on board? Not enough I suspect. Not a peep out of Newsnight yet.

Anyone reading this who hasn't looked into this .... I suggest they do. Much the same is happening here, but again, all too few seem able to take it on board (i.e. lots of people are in denial, and can't see that the freedom they revere comes at a very high price).





Search for 'Perfect Storm' above.

NOT EVEN DENIAL

Well put (above) Jaded Jean. I think you are closest to the truth with mass ignorance and incomprehension. The path from conception to Mammon is not conducive to any degree of maturity; children do not address grave issues and, under stress, want something soothing. The bizarre spectacle of McCavity Brown trying to find the lost lollypop while his little chums vote for more cake, just about sums things up.

Re #12. Particularly agreed wish your comments on the future of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. I hope it can change in its news reportage, rather than be swept away. Loads of good people in there; plus sudden change usually produces something worse. Improvement shouldn't be beyond the wit of man-they've only got to start telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Don't feel isolated in your oppressed state. There are millions of us.

I don't know why two young men were so brutally murdered. It seems impossible for a single person to render two healthy young men helpless simultaneously. Thinking about possibilities, it doesn't seem conceivable that a simple robbery was the motive. One thinks of terrorism involvements. Did someone think their studies involved weapons or other knowledge of value to enemy powers? Was it something to do with spies, either political or commercial. Was it some evil, fanatical political movement? A young man was killed in Germany a few years ago, and to this day his mother tries to trace the murderers.

THE BRUTAL MALE (# 17)

Young males, heavily primed with testosterone and lightly dusted with cultural constraints, are on a hair trigger.
All the more so if disinhibited through alcohol or drugs. Men have killed men for as little as a misconstrued look. There are far more men than women in prison. Nature approves of aggressive man but the modern world tends to wind him up.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

SIN BIN AGAIN JADED JEAN!

Get thee to a unisex nunnery! Now I have to exercise my intuition yet again. What luck that, as my testosterone disappears over the hill, my feminine side is emerging!
Would it be a good idea to double post? One for the SB and a brief sanitised teaser, to get through? More power to your whip-arm.

MINISTRY OF TRUTH MEMORY HOLES

Barrie (#20) It does sometimes seem that one's being shaped to join an ever swelling legion of Winston Smiths.



And yet, despite all the recent improvements to the glorious Ministry, we still have usename clickable user profiles.