The first NS story, Shamed, by Martin Bright, gives an overview of the Amnesty report. Two other stories are not available on the NS website, but your good Uncle Burlesque has kindly provided you with the texts.

The first of these, When Even Actors Aren't Safe, details the remarkable story of Rizwan Ahmed, who played a leading role in the award-winning new film, Road to Guantanamo. Ahmed played one of the Tipton Three, young Britons who were railroaded into Bush's concentration camp and held there for years, despite a plethora of evidence for their innocence. (I first wrote about them in March 2004: The Pentagon Archipelago: Trapped in a Net of State Terrorism). Ahmed was returning home to Britain after the film's celebrated showing at the Berlin Film Festival when he was nabbed at a UK airport and given the treatment. He was lucky not to have ended up in Guantanmo himself.

The other story, Squandering a Precious Heritage, is from Philippe Sands, one of Britain's leading human-rights lawyers (who, ironically, serves in the same law chambers as one Cherie Booth, better known to the world as Mrs. Tony Blair). Sands has also written an important new book, Lawless World, detailing the reckless destruction of the system of international law built up after World War II.

In many respects, Blair's Britain is actually more publicly draconian than Bush's America. Of course, this is partly due to the fact that Blair still feels bound to codify his degenerate practices -- to actually put them into law -- while Bush has decided that a president can blithely ignore any and all laws: so what's the point of changing them? (Heck, let those anti-torture, anti-aggression, Geneva Convention-type things stay on the books; they look real good on paper, and you don't have to obey them nohow.) But there is a fertile and sinister cross-pollination between these two oh-so-Christian "leaders" as they drag their nations down into a dark pit of lawlessness, repression, militarism and stinking fear.

I'm not sure that our present-day colleagues on the Express would discover any of this but that's not the point. In the movie, our planet had been blasted off course - and was now heading towards the sun. The governments, of course, tried to cover this up.

Now I remembered this creaky old film early this week when I woke up at my home in Beirut shivering with cold. This is mid-February in Lebanon and early spring should have warmed the air. But it hadn't. Up in the Christian mountain town of Jezzine, it was snowing fiercely. I walked to my balcony over the Mediterranean and a sharp, freezing wind was coming off the sea. Well poor old Bob, you might say. Better install central heating. (Most Lebanese exist like me with a series of dangerous and cheaply made gas heaters.)

But right now, flying around the world to launch my new book - travelling more than the average air crew - I'm finding a lot of odd parallels. In Melbourne last autumn, for example, the Australian spring turned out to be much colder than expected. Yet in Toronto at Christmas, all the snow melted. I padded round the streets of the city and had to take my pullover off because of the sun. It was the warmest winter in the records of a country whose tundra wastes are known for their frozen desolation.

I should add that those Canadians who welcomed this dangerous thaw seem at odds with reality; it's a bit like being cold and then expressing pleasure that your house is burning down on the grounds that you now feel warmer.

Then there are the air crews I was talking about. Out here in the Middle East, for instance, pilots have told me that head winds can now be so fierce at high altitude that they are being forced to request lower altitudes from air traffic control. As a flyer who knows how to be afraid on a bumpy flight - I am - I can tell you that I haven't encountered as much turbulence as I have in the past 24 months.

Now a deviation - but an important one. A British scientist, Chris Busby, has been digging through statistics from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment which measures uranium in high-volume air samples. His suspicion was that depleted uranium particles from the two Gulf wars - DU is used in the anti-armour warheads of the ordnance of American and British tanks and planes - may have spread across Europe. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but here's something very odd.

When Busby applied for the information from Aldermaston in 2004, they told him to get lost. When he demanded the information under the 2005 Freedom of Information Act, Aldermaston coughed up the figures. But wait.

The only statistic missing from the data they gave him was for the early months of 2003. Remember what was happening then? A little dust-up in Iraq, a massive American-British invasion of Saddam's dictatorship in which tons of DU shells were used by American troops. Eventually Busby, who worked out all the high-altitude wind movements over Europe, received the data from the Defence Procurement Agency in Bristol - which showed an increase in uranium in high-volume air sampling over Britain during this period.

Well, we aren't dead yet - though readers in Reading will not be happy to learn that the filter system samplings around Aldermaston showed that even they got an increase. Shock and awe indeed.

Back to our main story. I'm tired of hearing about "global warming" - it's become such a cliche that it's a turn-off, a no-read, a yawn-cliche. As perhaps our governments wish it to be. Melting ice caps and disappearing icebergs have become de rigueur for all reporting. After Unesco put the Ilulissat ice fjord on the World Heritage List, it was discovered to have receded three miles. And there's a lovely irony in the fact that the Canadians are now having a row with the United States about shipping lanes in the far north - because the Americans would like to use a melted North West Passage which comes partly under Canadian sovereignty. But I have a hunch that something more serious is happening to our planet which we are not being told about.

So let me remind you how The Day the Earth Caught Fire ended. Russian and American scientists were planning a new and joint explosion to set the world back on course. The last shot in the movie was set in the basement printing rooms (the real ones) of the Daily Express. The printers were standing by their machines with two headlines plated up to run, depending on the results of the detonation.

One said "World Doomed", the other "World Saved", As that great populist columnist John Gordon of the Sunday Express used to write: makes you sit up a bit, doesn't it?

The documents include an admission by John Scarlett, head of SIS, the secret intelligence service (also known as MI6), that one of the July 21 suspects was tracked on a trip to Pakistan just months before the attempted bombings.

Until now it was not known that any of the July 21 suspects, who are awaiting trial, were familiar to the intelligence services. It has been disclosed that MI5 had placed two of the July 7 bombers under surveillance before their attack, but judged them not to be a threat.

The new documents show that MI5, which is responsible for national security, allowed the July 21 suspect to travel to Pakistan after he was detained and interviewed at a British airport. Once in Pakistan he was monitored by SIS, which gathers intelligence overseas.

MI5 then conducted what the leaked memo says was "a low-level short-term investigation" into the suspect, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

It stopped monitoring him because it said "the Pakistani authorities assessed that he was doing nothing of significance".

Scarlett revealed details of the operation to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) last November. The committee, comprising MPs and peers picked by Tony Blair, is conducting a secret inquiry into the "lessons learnt" from the July attacks. It is due to be completed in April.

The Scarlett memo - marked top secret - was leaked by the dissident officers who want a public inquiry similar to that undertaken in America after the 9/11 attacks.

They believe it would highlight the need for MI5 and SIS to be given more resources to deal with Al-Qaeda. They are critical of Blair, who has ruled out an inquiry saying it would distract the security services from fighting terrorism.

The leaked memo refers to Scarlett as C - the traditional codename for the head of SIS. It states: "On the events of July itself, and the question of whether intelligence was missed, C noted that SIS had previously been involved in an earlier investigation of one of the July 21 (suspects) in Pakistan.

"This had been at the Security Service (MI5)'s behest and should be discussed with MI5."

Another document, MI5's November 2005 memo The July Bombings and the Agencies' Response, has also been shown to The Sunday Times.

It names the suspect who was the subject of the 2004 investigation and shifts responsibility for the decision to stop monitoring him to the Pakistani intelligence authorities.

"(The suspect) had been the subject of a low-level short-term investigation concerning a visit he made to Pakistan after he was interviewed on departure from the UK," it states.

"However, the Pakistani authorities assessed that he was doing nothing of significance in a terrorist context."

The assessment echoes a decision by MI5 to halt surveillance on two of the July 7 bombers 16 months before the attacks. Both were filmed and taped by MI5 agents as they met two men allegedly plotting to carry out a terrorist attack in England.

After making what an official called "a quick assessment", MI5 concluded Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were not immediate threats. As the MI5 memo puts it: "Intelligence at the time suggested Khan's purpose was financial crime rather than terrorist activity."

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "These leaks show that the need for an independent inquiry is incontrovertible."

There is a growing consensus in Whitehall that the intelligence services will be seen to have made critical errors in failing to assess adequately the threat from at least three of the July suspects.

Scarlett conceded to the ISC that his agency had reacted too slowly. "Summing up the position before July 2005, C noted SIS were conscious of the size of the target, but equally conscious of what we did not know; we were thinly spread in North and East Africa; we were looking at new ways of increasing our reach; and we had sought funding to grow as fast as we thought feasible.

"Turning to the lessons learnt, C noted that SIS had understood the nature of the threat and that there was a great deal that we did not know. SIS had developed strategies to meet this threat.

"The attacks had shown that our strategies were correct, but needed to be implemented more extensively and more quickly," the memo noted.

Scarlett said that even before the attacks, SIS had planned to expand overseas. "C concluded by explaining how post-July SIS were speeding up implementation of the pre-July strategy." He said the agency did not want more money for staff.

The dissident officers believe the buck-passing revealed in the memos demonstrates that there should be closer co-operation between the agencies.

They support calls for a unified department of homeland security, along the lines suggested by Gordon Brown, the chancellor, this month.

Stevens's team has asked the country's domestic intelligence service, the DST, to surrender all its "agent handling" files on Henri Paul, the chauffeur, to establish whether he was doing any work for his French intelligence bosses on the night of the crash.

Paul crashed the car, killing himself, Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in a tunnel in central Paris in 1997. It has previously been claimed - and strenuously denied - that he worked for SIS, the secret intelligence service, also known as MI6.

Well-placed sources say requests by the Stevens team for information about Paul's activities on the day of the crash, and demands for complete records of tests taken on his blood after he died, have become bogged down by the "incredible bureaucracy" of the French justice system.

The delays mean the £4m inquiry, ordered by the royal coroner in 2004, is certain to stretch into the latter part of this year and may not be completed before 2007.

French police concluded the crash was an accident, caused by Paul driving the Mercedes in which Diana was travelling at high speed away from paparazzi while under the influence of drink and drugs.

The role of Paul, who was deputy head of security at the Paris Ritz hotel, and what he was doing in the hours up to the crash are central to the inquiry. Mohamed al-Fayed, the Harrods tycoon and Dodi's father who also owns the Paris Ritz, has claimed Diana and his son were murdered by British intelligence.

Scotland Yard sources disclosed last week that the French government had finally confirmed Paul's employment by the DST during discussions last year.

A Yard source said: "We now know he was working for the French secret service and the French have got to give us access to the records of what he was doing. It's an issue. We want to know where he was and what he was doing that evening."

After Paul's death French police discovered he controlled secret accounts containing more than £100,000 in 14 banks across France.

The Stevens inquiry has been complicated by the apparent refusal of the French authorities to allow Yard detectives to see several key witnesses to the accident.

Stevens has said he is determined to "leave no stone unturned" in his investigation. He needs to establish beyond all doubt whether or not Paul was drunk and under the influence of powerful antidepressant drugs when he crashed the Mercedes.

Concerned that there may have been a forensic mix-up, Stevens is trying to persuade the French public prosecutor's office to disclose all records of how Paul's blood was analysed. The Yard team has also had to wait for a new report by Dr Gilbert Pepin, the French toxicologist who analysed Paul's blood after the crash.

After a wrangle over the size of his fee for acting as an expert witness, Pepin has only recently supplied Stevens with a full account of his analysis of the blood taken from Paul's body as it lay in the central Paris mortuary.

Stevens is also waiting to interview the female laboratory technician who took the blood from Paul's body.

Fayed has claimed that MI6 agents visited the morgue on the night of the crash to plant evidence suggesting Paul was drunk, by substituting his blood for the alcohol-contaminated blood of a suicide victim. Sources say there were 25 bodies in the morgue that night.

After two years of investigation, Stevens still takes the view that Diana's death was an accident. However, he is conscious of the fact that many people still believe she was murdered.

One night a furry, blue monster named Sulley is followed by a child through her closet door into Monstropolis and panic ensues. In the midst of it, Sulley discovers that she isn't toxic at all. His frantic attempts to conceal the girl he nicknames "Boo" and to return her to the human world only make her laugh. When she laughs, power surges brighten the city lights.

Sulley's boss, Mr. Waternoose, knows that children are not toxic and schemes to increase the energy available to the city. He will have children kidnapped and brought back to Monstropolis, where scream machines will suck out all their screams.

Monsters, Inc. is a useful analogue for understanding the main purpose that President George W. Bush's "war on terror" serves. Since September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq have served as useful monsters in generating screams from the American public. The resulting enhancements in federal government power have enabled the Bush administration to use the military forces of the United States to invade and occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq and to install puppet governments in both countries. It is inconceivable that police in any city in the United States or members of any federal civilian or military agency would be routinely permitted to kill anyone harboring or even being in the vicinity of a domestic fugitive. The enhancement of federal power that the "war on terror" has provided has enabled the adoption of Rules of Engagement by U.S. military forces that permit exactly that treatment of civilian targets in Iraq. The result has been the killing without distinction of an estimated 100,000 Iraqi men, women, and children.

The enhancement of federal power provided by the "war on terror" has also led to the incarceration of military captives for indefinite periods, the violation of Geneva Convention strictures on the treatment of prisoners of war, the deliberate torture of prisoners, the kidnapping of foreign nationals, and the "rendition" of kidnap victims to other countries where they can be tortured out of the view of the U.S. media. Even the recent revelation of the unlawful spying on U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency has resulted in more public expressions of support than condemnation.

George W. Bush is our Mr. Waternoose (although the cartoon character looks more like Dick Cheney). Unfortunately, he and the "scarer" monsters in his administration have succeeded in strapping the American public to a scream machine and are extracting more screams to provide more power to the executive branch. Their latest ploy is the demonizing of Iran, the creation of yet another monster for further power enhancement.

American foreign policy would better serve the domestic needs of peace and security if it were used to cultivate friends rather than enemies and create trading partners rather than areas to pillage. One of the first positive steps in this direction would be to withdraw all military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and to close every U.S. base in every foreign country. U.S. troops should be on U.S. soil unless they are fighting a declared war that someone else started.