badgerx16

What if part of the prosecution case is a confession ? Does that remove doubt ? Sean Hodgson had a mental condition which led him to confess to a murder he could not have carried out, yet it took 27 years to clear him. What about cases where scientific advances come about years later, which cast 'incontrovertible' evidence in a new light ?

Bring two !!!

Stephan Kisko, Anne Maguire, Paul Hill........ It becomes a circular argument. If somebody can be in jail for 27 years before being cleared of a murder they never, in fact, committed, can we afford a cut-off point for determining that their 'guilt' is actually not in doubt and it is safe to assume they can be disposed of ?

Is that not the over-riding principle in ALL criminal cases anyway ? Who, in your opinion, decides whether the guilt is actually 'beyond doubt' if it is not the Jury at the trial ? The Police ? The presiding Judge ? The CPS ? The appeal Courts ? The House of Lords ? The European Court of Justice ? Or maybe we should just leave it to the baying, rabid, tabloid press, or we could have a Big Brother style telephone vote after having some 'B' list celeb presenting edited highlights of the trial on prime-time TV ?

Would the allegations against Kisko qualify ? The abduction, sexual assault, and murder of an 11 year old girl.

At the time the Maguires, etc were found guilty of being IRA bombers, blowing their innocent victims to pieces without warning. I think the problem with trying to draw a defining line in such circumstances is that it is only ever drawn in sand, it can never be legally and morally fixed.

Regarding the 'only when there is overwhelming evidence' line... The Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, and the Birmingham Six, along with individuals such as Stephan Kisko and Sean Hodgson, all had jury trials, were convicted according to the laws of the land of pre-meditated murder 'beyond a reasonable doubt', ( in Kisko's case the rape & murder of a young girl ), and after many, many, years in jail, were proved entirely blameless. Add to these Sally Clark, Sheila Bowler, Patrick Nichols, and Kevin Callan, who were all convicted of murders when in fact the deaths of the 'victims' were natural or accidental. The Police and prosecutors can make mistakes, or can even deliberately slew the system. Legalised murder is never the answer.

"Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." Romans 12:19 (King James Version)

Who is the commanding officer at Pippin Fort ? Which Russian President was played by Bob Hoskins in "Enemy at the Gates" ? Which of the following film and TV actors was born in Australia ? Leo McKern, Nicole Kidman, Russel Crowe, Mel Gibson, Olivia Newton-John ; ( born respectively in Sydney, Honolulu, Wellington, New York, Cambridge ) Who played the murderer in Columbo most times ?

Or for people who have been bullied and pushed so far by robbing capitalist barstewards that they feel they have no alternative.

Surely you mean ( before we had ) automatic chokes ? But if you want to add that, you could also list disc brakes all round, radial tyres on all cars, rear seat belts, in-car radios as standard, etc. "Memories, like the corners of my mind. Misty, watercolour memories, of the way we were."

Not wanting to p1ss on anybody's parade, but we have spent the last 6 matches bemoaning the lack of pre-season & match practice in the squad, yet as far as I can see all the selections above include Jaidi & Waigo- just remind me how much first team action either has seen in the last 6 months ? In my opinion Jaidi might well start, but how long will he last, and how sharp is he likely to be ? And I think Papa will be on the bench as an 'impact substitute'.

As things stand, it is going to be at least 8 games to have reached 0 anyway, ( at least 9 if we don't win at The Valley ), and a minimum of 9 before we catch any other team, assuming all other results go our way. This was always going to be a long haul, and the most realistic expectation has always been survival in L1 this term, promotion push next season.

I hope saint_clark is better at spelling and grammar:cool:

Sorry, H, but you are a bit out here, on the basis that the 33% was of those polled in 2006, and the 25% was a different poll the next year, you can't add them together. Mind you, if you polled 100 rednecks out in the midwest you would probably find about half who couldn't stick a pin in a map to show where Washington DC was, let alone tell you who was President !

Just for the sake of accuracy, the Lancastria was sunk on 17th June 1940, 2 weeks after the Dunkirk operations ended, and she went down off St Nazaire, on the French Atlantic coast. One telling quote from WSC is allegedly "The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today, at least", presumably responding to the news that Marshall Petain had just ordered the French to sue for 'honourable peace terms'.

I wasn't trying to find their motive, I was pointing out that they are not "mindless", in that from their perspective they actually have a perfectly valid motive. Unless, and until, we can understand their motivation, and learn to take account of it, our response to their actions will only serve to promote the same old merry-go-round of action and retribution. After all, this is what ended the troubles in Ulster, sitting down and actually talking to each other.

Historically, there has been no better way to distract from domestic problems than having a 'foreign adventure'. After all, that's what led the Argies to invade the Falklands. Of course, the Yanks have, since Vietnam, tended to pick on the real 'big boys,; Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, etc. Oh, but then they got their fingers burned in Somalia, didn't they.

What complete and utter tripe. Over 300,000 troops came back from Dunkirk, let alone the naval, RAF, and even civilian crews involved. Do you think they all came back and kept shtum ? Of course some of them might have, but Joe Public isn't stupid; they saw the BEF go off to France, saw them come back with their tails between their legs, and then experienced the Luftwaffe bombs being dropped on them. Yet during that period, the 'Dunkirk Spirit' was followed by the 'Blitz Spirit', and civilian morale went up, exactly as it did in Germany 3 years later. Unless of course the media managed to completely suppress all news of the bombing to keep it out of the public mind. People aren't as stupid or gullible as you assume, ( but then you do live in the US of A ).

The media in the 30's & 40's was far more tightly state controlled, if not explicitly, them by the social 'norms' of that era.

But the people initiating the wars would expect us to keep supporting them, paying for them, and even signing up to be killed in them. Why can't we know what is being done in our name, with our money, and with the lives of our relatives and friends ? Why can't we know exactly how much 'collateral damage' is being done ? How many innocent civilian deaths justify the extermination of one Taliban leader by a drone bomb or cruise missile ? Whe can't we be told that our troops are being sent out in 'snatch' landrovers in areas where the Yanks are using bomb proof vehicles ? Or that there are not enough helos to transport them safely, exposing them instead to the IEDs ?

He was previously held hostage in Iraq in 2004.

There are very few 'mindless acts" of terrorism. The people who plan and carry out these acts are living, breathing, thinking, and quite often highly intelligent human beings, who do so generally out of a sense of injustice; real or imagined is open to interpretation dependant on which side of their argument you stand. How aggreived would you have to feel to do something like this ? To carry out a hijack knowing that your death was at the end of it, not at the hands of some law enforcement agency, but at your own hands. There is some very powerful motivation involved here, and as has been evidenced by this week's court case, we are still failing to prevent others taking the same stance against us.

What did we do before all that ? We had one third of the world map painted red and called the British Empire.

I remember watching CNN on t'Interweb at work as both the BBC and ITN news channels failed due to network traffic. ( Was going to put that they 'crashed', but that would have been in poor taste ). The additional 'unseen' bits just added to the surreal quality of the events; hundreds of people just standing in Times Square staring at the big screens in shock. Then we got the predictable 'we should go in and kill all the Arabs now' reaction, together with a couple of scenes that seemed to show 'innocent' people being attacked on the sidewalk for no apparent reason, other than possibly retribution. Also watched bits of Flight 93, and found the launch of the air defence ( defense ?? ) flights mildly amusing; one pair fighters went off in completely the wrong direction, and the other was launched unarmed - cue desperate calls for authority to 'ram and eject' when engaging the hijacked planes. I still think the most telling visions of that day were the clips of dubyah, sitting in a primary school and looking completely brain dead, ( nothing new there though ), as the unfolding events were relayed to him.