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Is Mikhail Saakashvili a war criminal, and if not why not? If somebody killed a couple of thousand US citizens would they retaliate or raise a motion at the UN?

The key things for me regarding Musharraf is will the army now go beyond "shooting their guns" sometimes and go after the Taliban. Also is the political stability there. To me it is, it looks fractured but the players are bright and sophisticated and can see what is at stake.

On water and finite resources I would love to see a piece on how prepared we are for the carbon shortfall projected for circa 2020.

Also how about a piece on the lab at Cern?

Going back to last week's report by Andrew North of the family that was shot escaping from Gori when they took a wrong turning:

The husband (a German) said that one of the bullets which injure his wife was "a dum dum bullet".

These were outlawed under The Hague conventions and before that in 1868 by
the Declaration of St Petersburg - which
Russia signed but the US didn't.

Perhaps you could ask the Russian peacekeepers whether they will be investigating what actually happens
in this incident with a view to court
marshall proceedings if there was
(as was alleged) Russian negligence in allowing such incidents to occur .......?

On the water story, why not contact the Unesco Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science at the University of Dundee? This
is led by a very dynamic Canadian woman.

I agree with neilrobertson about the dum dum bullet.

There does appear to have been extra judicial actions like burning of Georgian houses in South Ossetia. Taking off Georgian military equipment, probably worryingly including signals equipment, is also questionable.

But is Georgia signed up to the ICC? Could Saakashvili be prosecuted? Does the ICC have a view?

As I understand it it about ten Russians to one Georgian. That does not quite stack up with the 1968 comparisons.

Musharraf's 'resignation': This is all about geo-political strategy. The Socialist International want their people (the PPP) on Iran's Eastern border just as they wanted neocon groomed Saakashvili between Russia and Armenia. We know about Afghanistan to the North and Turkmenistan is still a one party state, albeit not a member of the CSTO.

Neocons both here (the SI) and abroad have demonstrably shown the world through the anarchism they've exported in the name of liberal-democracy that they don't really care what's best for the Pakistani, Afghan, Georgian, Russian, Iranian or Iraqi people, they just care about their own hegemonic/economic agenda.

thegangofone (#4) as another NN blogger has astutely, repeatedly, drawn attention to in the past, please see the USA and the ICC.

Ed., please note, no more anti-Soviet rants like Emily's last week and too numerous to mention speeches by Bush that made NN look like Fox news, you should know better and we deserve better.....

ICC AND USA

If they don't announce a date straight after the funeral, please put someone from NuLab on the spot about when they're going to hold the Glenrothes by-election. This week-end's media has been all over the place with advice to delay and to go ASAP.

With all the polls, bookies and runes showing a Labour loss is a near certainty, my penn'orth says get it over with, but what do NuLab have to say for themselves after the unseemly rush "to ensure the electorate are represented" over Glasgow East.

Especially if NuLab won't come clean, you could ask the SNP whether they will follow "convention" and wait for NuLab to call or it or whether they will call it themselves.

Us expats can't see Newnight Scotland because of the iPlayer restrictions, so we only get Newnight London via the old streaming mechanism.

What of Miliband and Brown? There must have been discussions by now about challenges and the conference.

#4 I was referring to 10 to one deaths by the way.

In a democracy vile holocaust deniers do get more freedom than I like. Some do get locked up on other charges like the paedophile would-be nail bomber the other month. But then again the more rope they get and the more they gush the more people can see them for what they are.

THE INCORRIGIBLES

thegangofone (#10) "In a democracy vile holocaust deniers do get more freedom than I like."

Which rather suggests that you're not quite as liberal as you would like either?

The essence of scientific/rational/intelligent enquiry is to try to falsify what one believes, not to try to prove it, or accept it uncritically. There is a logic to this, in that it's the only way, in the long run, to learn and to minimise error. Those who don't do this tend to be the dogmatists or idologues. They don't listen to anyone but themselves and their beliefs. They're the incorrigibles.

Some additional reading for Emily Maitlis??!

(Ian MacWhirter in The Herald)


("Why Russia has called our bluff over countries we cannot defend" by Neal Ascherson)

Paxo fishing in Scotland, now that's what I call brave .....

The Scottish Cabinet is meeting today in Pitlochry (just in case you want to do an
interview with Alex Salmond next to the
leaping salmon on Pitlochry's fish-ladder):

Re #10.
"Vile holocaust deniers." Marvellous example of the condition known as propaganda-overkill. Do keep chanting your
scripted mantras old chap. So much less trouble than thinking.
Rest assured that millions of British people have no interest in your delusion that you should sit in judgement on how much freedom they should be allowed.
I remember listening to Michael Buerk interviewing a Jewish chap in the "On The Ropes" series on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 4, who explained that both his parents had been in Nazi prison camps in WW2. Their view, as I recall it, was that there were no Death Camps,but Labour Camps, where conditions deteriorated as Germany lost the war. This man, an academic in New York, had the temerity to pass this opinion on to his peers in a paper; where upon he was hounded out of his post and his home, and generally harrassed by the holocaust establishment. Presumably, that man would qualify in the estimation of the mighty G of 1, as a "V H D." I should add that an old Jewish bloke I knew well until his death 18 months ago, had a great knowledge of the period, and he insisted on the truth of the opposite view, and that was good enough for me. But debate is an awful thing isn't it ? Much better to have the certainties that G of 1's lofty perch affords.

#15 grumpy-jon

Have you ever visited a camp like Lublin, where the gas chambers are still largely intact? If so, what do you thin they were built for? If not, how can you be so sure?

the uk should be a water superpower then.

but watch the govt do nothing except keep selling it to foreign multinationals. after all for them water, gas, oil and food are not strategic commodities. why are they the odd ones out? no other country thinks so. Is HMG super intelligent or super dumb?

Re #16. Brownedov.
With respect, if you read my post, I don't say that I am sure. My point, and that of other posters abused by G of 1, is that I reject the idea that this topic be placed beyond discussion, by those who claim to have all the answers. I know that I don't, having been subjected, like everyone else, to thousands of feature films, documentary programmes, articles and books, all from the same viewpoint, and for decades never saw one solitary programme suggesting another balancing perspective. When programmes started to be made suggesting alternative views, guess what? The establishment wants to ban it. Now you believe what you like; but where I come from that tells me that someone has been lying to me, and they want to prevent me finding out about it.

#18 grumpy-jon

OK. I agree that suppression of all discussion is a bad idea, if only because we risk future generations forgetting it, and I certainly don't believe everything I read in the press.

OTOH, if you tend to the "myth" view, I strongly urge you to go and look for yourself and Poland is a good place to do so. It's also an extremely interesting country in much of its other history and well worth a visit in its own right. Being a very catholic country it certainly doesn't overstate the plight of its Jewish population during WW2.

Lublin is a very good place to start as it is much less photogenic and touristy than places like Auschwitz-Birkenau and has much more of the original camp left than places like Sobibor. It's only a couple of hours drive or a short train ride from Krakow.

RECOGNITION OF INTEGRITY

Miliband D (a notable Blair Boob) has declared, in his wisdom, that 'Russia recognises the integrity of Georgia's borders'.
Would that be as measured on the 'Blair Scale' of integrity?

Thought so.

Just a pause to consider . A mirror image?

"I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do Evil in return."

W.H. AUDEN, "September 1, 1939"

Re #19. Brownedov.
I take your point. Will try to do as you suggest, and am sure it will be very illuminating.
I wouldn't say I tend towards the 'myth' standpoint, but being constantly subject to analysis from the one same viewpoint, I do retain my own natural scepticism in the face of Govt and the establishment telling me that this and only this, and this in its entirety, is the truth. So, I almost never raise the subject, but am constantly berated about it, when demanding fuller debate of immigration-policy re-my own country.
I can imagine that 40 years ago, I'd probably have felt that the Death Camps were criminally under-reported in WW2 analysis. Now, I'd say something close to that is true of people, like the Jewish academic I mentioned. Similarly, when Bobby Fischer, a New York Jew and not an unintelligent man although an eccentric one, is hounded around the world for decades, for voicing his view that 'the holocaust is just a money making scam for the Jews'(haven't time today to ref the details here, but I don't think I'm far off), I was astounded. And I was astounded again that the response was not to reply to him, but to try to shut him up.
Anyway, cheers for suggested itinerary, and I take it as you meant it.

A LAND WITHOUT A PEOPLE (acknowledging #21)

Like South America to the Southern Europeans and North America to the Northern Europeans. The indigenes had to stand aside or be killed - God was on the side of the invader.

As I have said before: "Power, Opportunity and Male Destructiveness". The short time between birth and puberty should be given over to civilising of the 'Ape Confused by Language' to facilitate emergence of a mature humanity. It isn't. Don't expect anything to change.

Re #21. Ed Iglehart.
Thanx for those refs. Both new to me.

Brownedov (#16) "Have you ever visited a camp like Lublin, where the gas chambers are still largely intact? If so, what do you think they were built for?"

Don't you mean reconstructed delousing chambers? What may they have been reconstructed for? Might it be possible that as a museum, they were for and Or is that absolutely inconceivable, i.e. just too vile to consider even as a possibility? Even more vile than the idea that German evil-doers made people into soap and their skin into lampshades (both notions long discredited, but once collated as IMT exhibits by the USSR).

Can anyone today tease out what's really going on here? After all, 'Stalinists' (read old Civil Service Public Sector before PFI and The Third Sector NGOs etc) are not 'liked very much' by the . But the latter are allegedly the good guys pushing for internationalism (but, paradoxically, isolation of 'Stalinists' who don't agree).

That such 'educational' (read propaganda) trips are funded the way that they are must surely raise a few sceptical eyebrows and prompt some to think about what's really being done? Particularly given the spin on other abuses.