Round-up of the week

In the absence of an entry since Wednesday on the grounds of too much work and too little energy for composing one, here's a round-up of this week's news, insha Allah:

• The Guardian printed this piece, originally from The Nation, compiled from interviews with US Iraq war vets. Really, what can I say? When they wreck people's houses on a whim and spray bullets at a car for driving a bit too fast near a checkpoint, can we really believe the story that the "insurgency" is actually a Saudi Wahhabi-dominated plot to re-establish a global caliphate?
• Still on the subject of the alleged "war on terror", Clive Stafford Smith in the current New Statesman explains how one of his clients, abducted in Pakistan and sold to the Americans, was repatriated to Tunisia, a notoriously repressive country with a long record of unjust imprisonment and torture, to face a 23-year jail term (we're not told what for, but it was held while he was unable to defend himself) before his lawyers could see him in Guantánamo. It's these sorts of countries our government want to send alleged terrorists back to. Sickening.
• On a quite different subject, the "super casino" plan for Manchester has been put on ice. This is really good news ma sha Allah. I don't know why anyone thinks casinos equal regeneration when they are dumped in a deprived area; if anything, recent evidence shows that gambling shops are a sign that an area is going down-hill, simply because they fill up with people desperate for money. The only way to regenerate any area is to invest in it with real industry.
• Don't know how much news this was in America, but the conviction of Conrad Black for fraud was big news in the UK. Obviously I don't object if he has stolen shareholders' money and used it for his own ends and gets locked up, but I don't believe that a jail sentence in double figures is justified for a non-violent property crime. In this country, he would get five years or so – and, no doubt, be barred from company directorships and face other public disgraces, as Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken did.