Few surprises here except that Drumheller seems to accept, at least in principle, the idea of extraordinary rendition. This worries me.

If you suspect somebody of terrorist activity then you should arrest him or put him under surveillance. But with rendition, we're talking about the kidnapping of a foreign national in a foreign country, with or without the connivance of the local government, and his transportation to a third country for secret interrogation and, we now know, possible torture. It may well turn out that the kidnapped person is totally innocent and is eventually allowed home, having been tortured and lost months or years of his life, with no apology or recompense. Oh dear, never mind.

This is NOT alright and the CIA, the US government and those European goverments who cooperated in this outrage should be deeply ashamed.

Short of invading and trashing your country, it's difficult to think of anything more likely to fan the flames of terrorism than this sort of casual and arrogant illegality.

More madness. Gary Kamiya says that Bush's vision of the Middle East is not shared by the people who live there. As a Brit, I can assure him that it's shared by precious few over here as well. I don't think even the delusional Tony Blair, well-known American lapdog and in the last gasp of his degraded reign, is on-side with this one.

Can it really be that all this is deliberate? That this is a calculated destabilisation of the entire region to induce the collapse of 'unfriendly' Arab states? And this will achieve... what?

Gary Kamiya is right that even if the US achieves 'victory', everybody loses except al-Qaida. The death and destruction likely to ensue if Iran is attacked just doesn't bear thinking about. This isn't just stupid, it's evil.

Well said.

Issuing uninflated soccer balls does seem a bit dim but, had they been inflated, how many hearts and minds would have been won?

We've just been told that the army would regularly round up a bunch of men and search houses, whether or not involved in insurgency; destroy a building if a muzzle flash was spotted; blow up an entire house if an insurgent was 'thought' to be inside; etc.

Maybe soldiers had to respond to threats like this, I don't know, but surely the chasm this opened between occupiers and Iraqis was unbridgeable. In another world, had things been different, dishing out a few footballs to the kids might have helped but it was far too late by then. If I were an Iraqi kid whose parents' house had just been destroyed, a football, inflated even, just wouldn't do it for me.

Too glossy, too melodramatic, too many beautiful people, too much sensation, not enough Roman 'ordinariness'. Dynasty in togas with added sex and violence. Not in the same class as 'I, Claudius', wobbly sets and all.

Goldsmith has been widely criticized in the UK by many people, including senior lawyers, for his lack of impartiality. He's strongly suspected of having been leant on by the government (ie Tony Blair) to provide legal cover for various Iraq-related issues.

He's been a good boy until recently and kept quiet about legal outrages like Guantanamo, but even he can't bottle this up any longer. Tony Blair must now be the only person in the world, outside the US, who hasn't criticized Guantanamo by now (the best he's managed is to call it 'an anomaly').

State-sanctioned assassination is outlawed in the US, but assassination by proxy seems OK. There are plenty of examples where the US has knowingly provided support (money, arms, intelligence etc) to states (eg Chile) or organisations (eg the Contras, the Taliban) which committed assassinations to an end, presumably, approved of by the US.

Is this OK? This may be Realpolitik and is, no doubt, no more than some other countries would do if they had the resources and could get away with it, but I'm not convinced this is any better than sub-contracting your torture requirements, which the current US administration also does.

As a Brit, I was dismayed by much of the reporting by the British mainstream media in the run-up to the Iraq war. There were some sceptical voices but the government (and US government's) line was accepted too readily by most.

But from what I saw of the US mainstream media, they seemed to have lost their critical faculties entirely and swallowed the administration's pronouncements completely uncritically. With a sinking heart, I could see that war was on its way.

Please, all you good Americans out there, do whatever you can to make sure it doesn't happen all over again!

I've read this article a couple of times and still can't understand what made Sara Miles turn to religion. You sense there's something missing from her life but she is not sure what it is. She seems to seek tenderness and compassion and an explanation for life's mysteries. But why God?

This is what I don't get, and perhaps I never will. Why do you need to invent a God to fill these gaps in your life and explain its mysteries? Life IS mysterious and complicated and wonderful and horrible. That's just the way it is. You don't need God.