As Anthony Kaufman wrote:

"In perhaps the most glaring and controversial example of Hollywood's refusal to toe the Bush party line, 'Vendetta's' hero is a terrorist -- a violent rebel on a mission to destroy his corrupt government in a blaze of explosives. Is this irresponsible? Does it glamorize terrorism? Perhaps. But for many progressives, whose anti-war protests have fallen on deaf ears and whose activism has been squashed by the powers-that-be, 'V for Vendetta' should feel almost cathartic.

Cathartic indeed.

"People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people."

Check out this Bush flavored trailer and then go get your revolution on - DVD just came out this month.

David DeGraw is AlterNet's video blogger.

With the death toll among U.S. troops now counting 2,600 and tens of thousands more servicemen and women wounded, it is understandable that the president may be frustrated. Not to mention the fact that Iraqis are dying by the hundreds every day, and with no visible light at the end of the tunnel. And if there happens to be a light in the proverbial tunnel, it's that of an oncoming train, or rather a brewing civil war.

Bush disagrees: "I hear a lot of talk about civil war. I'm concerned about that, of course, and I've talked to a lot of people about it," he said. "And what I've found from my talks are that the Iraqis want a unified country. And that the Iraqi leadership is determined to thwart the efforts of the extremists and the radicals."

True, some of Iraq's leaders may well want to maintain a unified Iraq, but that is hardly preventing the country from heading into what at least appears to be the start of a sectarian war. Bush may want to avoid calling it a civil war, but at the end of the day what you call it is really irrelevant. It's what is happening that really counts. If what is happening in Iraq looks, smells and feels like a civil war, as the saying goes, it must be civil war.

When Shiites are killing Sunnis and vice-versa, and when more than 150 bodies turn up every morning at the city morgue, it is safe to call it a civil war. More than 3,500 Iraqis were killed in ethnic violence last month, making it the worst month for civilian casualties since the war began in 2003.

"If you think it's bad now, imagine what Iraq would look like if the United States leaves before this government can defend itself and sustain itself," the president said. "Chaos in Iraq would be very unsettling in the region."

But Iraq was fine before the U.S. arrived, save for its megalomaniac dictator.

"You know, I've heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of 'we're going to stir up the hornet's nest' theory," the president said. "It just doesn't hold water, as far as I'm concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East."

President Bush was asked what Iraq had to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Nothing," the president said. "Nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a... the lesson of Sept. 11 is, take threats before they fully materialize."

"Wars are not a time of joy," said Bush. Hmmm?

Speaking at a White House news conference, President Bush then shifted his concern to the other Middle East trouble spot -- Lebanon. He urged for a quick decision to allow the deployment of a multinational force to back-up the Lebanese army in south Lebanon.

"The need is urgent," said Bush, referring to then need for an additional 13,000 troops for a UNIFIL Version 2.0, that in principle will have greater authority.

"The international community must now designate the leadership of this new international force, give it robust rules of engagement and deploy it as quickly as possible to secure the peace," said Bush. The president continued that the international force would help keep the militant Hezbollah organization from acting as a "state within a state."

And herein lies the problem. Most European countries are reluctant to venture into what can become a potential mine field, in more than one way. It's one thing to call for troops and criticize countries that are reluctant to place their soldiers in harm's way. France, who lost 58 soldiers in a suicide bombing in 1983, wants guarantees that its troops will not be attacked. The United States, which lost 241 servicemen to suicide bombing in Beirut, are also not about to deploy troops to south Lebanon any time soon.

"The United States will do our part," Bush said. But of course, the United States does not plan to contribute troops. Instead, it has pledged $230 million to help the Lebanese rebuild their homes and return to their towns and communities. The United States will provide intelligence support and command and control.

"These are challenging times, and difficult times," added Bush.

It used to be said that academic rows were vicious because the stakes were so small. That's no longer true in America, where a battle is underway on campuses over what can be said about the Middle East and US foreign policy.

Douglas Giles is a recent casualty. He used to teach a class on world religions at Roosevelt University, Chicago, founded in memory of FDR and his liberal-inclined wife, Eleanor. Last year, Giles was ordered by his head of department, art historian Susan Weininger, not to allow students to ask questions about Palestine and Israel; in fact, nothing was to be mentioned in class, textbooks and examinations that could possibly open Judaism to criticism.

Students, being what they are, did not go along with the ban. A young woman, originally from Pakistan, asked a question about Palestinian rights. Someone complained and Professor Giles was promptly fired.

Leaving aside his boss's doubtful qualifications to set limits on a class of comparative religion - her speciality is early 20th-century Midwestern artists such as Tunis Ponsen (nor have I) - the point to grasp is that Professor Giles did not make inflammatory statements himself: he merely refused to limit debate among the young minds in front of him.

This might be seen as a troubling one-off like the story involving the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, who suggested that innate differences between the minds of men and women could be one reason why fewer women succeed in science and maths careers and was then ousted. But Giles's sacking is far more important because it is part of the movement to suppress criticism of Israel on the grounds that it is anti-semitic. A mild man, Giles seems astonished to find the battle for free speech in his own lecture theatre.

'It may be sexy to get on a bus and go to DC and march against war,' he said to me last week. 'It is much less sexy to fight in your own university for the right of free speech. But that is where it begins. That is because they are taking away what you can talk about.' He feels there is a pattern of intolerance in his sacking that has been encouraged by websites such as FrontPageMag.com and Campus Watch.

Joel Beinin of Stanford University is regularly attacked by both. Beinin is a Jew who speaks both Hebrew and Arabic. He worked in Israel and on an assembly line in the US, where he helped Arab workers understand their rights. Now, he holds seminars at Stanford in which all views are expressed. For this reason, no doubt, his photograph recently appeared on the front of a booklet entitled 'Campus Support for Terrorism'.

It was published by David Horovitz, the founder of FrontPageMag.com who has both composed a bill of rights for universities, designed to take politics (for which read liberal influence and plurality) out of the curriculum and a list of the 100 most dangerous academics in America, which includes Noam Chomsky and many other distinguished thinkers and teachers.

The demented, bullying tone of the websites is another symptom of the descent of public discourse in America and, frankly, one can easily see the attractions of self-censorship on the question of Middle East and Israel. Read David Horovitz for longer than five minutes and you begin to hear Senator Joseph McCarthy accusing someone of un-American activities.

At Harvard, a few weeks after what was called Summers's 'mis-step', a much greater row ensued when John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard published a paper called 'The Israel Lobby'. Brave because the alleged distortion of US pro-Israel foreign policy is unmentionable in American public life.

Their paper was printed only in the UK, in the London Review of Books. In America, there then followed what has been described as the massive 'Shhhhhhhhh!' Apart from the mud-slinging from sites such as Campus Watch and FrontPageMag, it has had little mainstream circulation and there has been no real debate.

I have read it several times and cannot disagree with an early point made by the authors. 'There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel's existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.' That is the crux. All Americans, to say little of the British who have been reluctantly welded to US policy, surely deserve the chance to know about the influence that lobbies such as the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) exert at times like these.

'The bottom line,' say Mearsheimer and Walt, 'is that AIPAC is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy is not debated there, even though the policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel.'

Later they say: 'The lobby's influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face, including America's European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorist and sympathisers and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.'

You could add that the lobby's influence may, in the long run, be very much against Israel's interests.

That is my belief, but these things are rarely discussed in America. People look vaguely queasy when you raise the subject of the Israeli lobby, as though the only concern in American discourse is not to appear anti-semitic, a fear which, I suggest, is sometimes shamelessly played upon.

The right of people like Mearsheimer, Walt, Beinin, Giles and even Summers to say what they think must remain inviolate if we are not to lose the values the West insists its fighting for. A little boldness is called for on both sides of the Atlantic to question the pressure coming from both Jewish and Muslim quarters not to discuss issues openly because of various sensibilities.

In Britain, we should deplore with equal vehemence the temptation to give into special pleading from, for instance, the Muslim businessmen who do not want the film of Monica Ali's Brick Lane made in their area. They have no right to dictate to this ancient democracy of ours - now theirs - and so stifle free expression.

Last week, during Jon Snow's fascinating Channel 4 documentary about Muslim attitudes in this country, a woman said that British society was too decadent for her to allow her children to integrate completely. A moment's thought suggested that British democracy had much to offer over the appalling civic values found in most Muslim countries, the oppression of women in Islam, the untold domestic abuse and the tens of thousands of children sold into bonded labour in Pakistan - her husband's country of origin. Her prim separatism fails to grasp the value of our democratic institutions when set against societies run by Sharia law and so undermines them.

My view is that in America and Britain, we should think of free speech as an article of faith, as one of the ways that we define our civilisation against the forces that were to be unleashed on us this week, as well as the influences that stifle criticism of Israel and so enable the disgraceful actions in south Lebanon.

The interests of extreme proponents of Muslim and Jewish faiths combine in one way or another to assault our ancient democratic traditions and we must resist them.

Let the students like those in Douglas Giles's class ask whatever they like.

"Imagine [the Toronto group] was not penetrated," was his advice to Canadian lawmakers. "Even if a plot has been uncovered, you must treat the threat as if the plot had succeeded."

Mr. Halevy conceded that such a mindset would necessarily lead politicians to consider racial profiling, short-term preventive detentions and other measures that would seem anathema to democratic civil liberties.

"The price is a high price," he conceded. "Socially, politically, internally, internationally, it's a high price to pay. But the alternative is even more horrendous."

His remarks stand in contrast to many of the prevailing opinions in the West. High-profile controversies -- examples include the Guantanamo Bay prison experiment, the U.S-led invasion of Iraq, the so-called extraordinary renditions of terrorism suspects to face imprisonment or torture in foreign states -- have prompted judges, politicians and citizens to call for anti-terrorism measures to be reined in, not expanded.

Even some of Mr. Halevy's contemporaries agree, to a point.

"We don't profile because it's fundamentally stupid," Canadian Security Intelligence Service chief Jim Judd said last week.

"The wartime approach made sense for a while, but as time passes and the situation changes, so must the strategy," Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain's MI6 from 1999 to 2004, told the Atlantic Monthly this month.

But Mr. Halevy lamented that not enough is being done to fight al-Qaeda-style terrorism. Sooner or later, he said, Western democracies will have to realize that.

"This is a third world war. I would disagree entirely with the premise of Dearlove," he said yesterday.

While Israeli civilians have been constantly targeted by attacks, Mr. Halevy observed, countries that have never been attacked refuse to accept the fact that they may be in danger. He finds that even countries that have been hit, such as Britain, tend to become complacent within months of attacks.

Mr. Halevy was in Toronto yesterday to promote his memoir, Man in the Shadows, published earlier this year. In the book, he argues that the threat of international terrorism is growing, leaving Western democracies no choice but to team up and aggressively root out terrorists wherever they can be found.

But he also pointed out that recent years have elevated the status of a group he calls "the professionals," security chiefs who advise politicians, as he did. Their roles are rightly growing ever more important, he said.

A pragmatist, Mr. Halevy met many Arab and Muslim leaders through his work, and said that he would not close the door to talks with Hamas, Hezbollah or even Iran. But he says the threat posed by al-Qaeda's ideology is by far the most sinister one that exists today.

Its goal, he said, "is to disrupt societies of the free world, to cripple the economies of the free world, to force the free world to get out of the hair of the Muslim states, to facilitate the advance of Islam so that ultimately Islam will reach the goal [where] the world as a whole will be the world of Islam."

Yet he fears that many Western democracies, including Canada, will fail to pay adequate attention until they are attacked. Even then, the window for new laws will be short, he said.

"But I can assure that if there were such an event in Canada, for two to three months, the government could get through certain measures it could never get through before," he said.

"The key is, in my opinion, to line up in advance all the measures you think are necessary. Realize you can't get them approved until there is an act. Hope for the better, that there will be no such act, but be ready."

Mr Woolas, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, was speaking at a follow-up meeting of community leaders from various faiths, to check on the progress of a raft of government measures to combat terrorism after the July 7 London bombings.

"We see this fight against terrorism as a perpetual fight," he said at the event in Bolton, Greater Manchester.

"This is a generational thing. We are determined to protect civil liberties. But we can't solve it on our own.

"The terrorists will use whatever argument they have got to pull the wool over susceptible people's eyes, but their goal, as [former US President] Bill Clinton said, is to destroy the idea of a pluralist society.

"Get across the understanding that what these people are about is destroying the idea of society and creating a mono-theocratic dictatorship."

Mr Woolas's comments came as a ICM poll for the Guardian today revealed that 72% of people questioned think government foreign policy has made Britain more of a target for terrorists and only 1% of voters believe it has made Britain safer.

Since the July 7 attacks, the government has set up a number of advisory bodies and forums to "engage" the Islamic community and steer young Muslims away from extremism.

But there has been criticism of the alleged slow progress on many of the 64 recommendations made to combat terrorism since the outrage.

The initiative has been given added impetus by the alleged plot uncovered last week to blow up passenger jets.

But Mr Woolas said the government was working hard.

"We have implemented or are implementing the vast majority, we have got a clear, mature process going on involving tens of thousands of particularly young people, to work together to attack this ideology of terrorism.

"The government is very clear that the vast majority of Muslims want to defeat this terrorism carried out in the name of religion.

"Don't fall into the trap, don't allow yourself to be used by the terrorists, don't believe that the government doesn't understand your fear -of course we do.

"But the solution is to defeat terrorism, and that's the main goal of the government."

The meeting in Bolton is the first of a number taking place across the UK over the next month, including events in London, Burnley, Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford.

Later in the week, Mr Woolas's departmental boss, Ruth Kelly, will launch the new Commission on Integration and Cohesion, to help build greater understanding between communities in Britain.

The government is also expected to announce that imams should be officially accredited and trained to prevent "extremist preachers" from radicalising young people at mosques.

I AM THE SON of a teacher of mathematics and a professor of measurement. When I was a boy it was quite normal to come down to breakfast to find an animated discussion taking place about the fact that a centimetre isn't a proper SI unit of measurement, or to eat my cornflakes while someone provided a top of the head estimate of the number of 330ml cans that ought, theoretically, to be able to fit into a refrigerator of a given volume.

Maybe I am worrying about nothing, but it has recently occurred to me that perhaps this sort of discussion wasn't quite as common around other people's family breakfast tables as I had always presumed.

Anyway, my siblings emerged from these morning discussions as impressive mathematicians. I was left merely with a tendency to believe that every social or political issue that I encounter has a mathematical dimension.

I tell you all this to explain my attitude to a recent newspaper debate, the one that began after the police uncovered an apparent terrorist plot to blow up aircraft on their way to the United States.

The Government's reaction to the arrests provoked two sorts of articles. The first kind advanced the view that the Government was overreacting to the threat from terrorists. This argument was, naturally, put most lucidly by Matthew Parris on these pages. He argued that, in the end, the terrorists "can never amount to more than a big, bloody nuisance" and that we should treat them as nothing more. The alternative view, set out in The Times by Mary Ann Sieghart among others, is that this attitude is complacent, as the necessity for arrests conclusively demonstrated.

My view? Let's do the maths.

In a powerful paper for the libertarian American think-tank the Cato Institute, Professor John Mueller provides strong support for the Parris argument. He points out that "in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States". He adds that even including the September 11 attacks, the number of Americans killed by terrorists since records on this were kept is about the same as those killed by lightning, accident-causing deer or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

To this evidence he adds the research carried out at the University of Michigan that suggests that an American's chance of being killed in one non-stop airline flight is about one in 13 million. Apparently there "would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out" between travelling by plane and by car.

Mueller's conclusion is that "assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally does not do much damage" and "the costs of terrorism very often are the result of hasty, ill-considered and overwrought reactions". Both the expense of over-the-top anti-terror measures and the damaging impact of panic on liberal institutions are greater than the cost of the terrorism itself.

This argument is too strong simply to be ignored. Nor can it be refuted by pointing to the possible danger posed by a single alleged plot. Even if such a plot had been successful, Professor Mueller's argument would stand: the chances of a British or US citizen being killed by a terrorist are tiny and the risk of it happening is far smaller than other risks that we regard as reasonably tolerable - being killed on the road, for instance. He is, no doubt about it, quite right.

But while I think he makes an open and shut case against panic, when it comes to the need for a vigorous policy to combat terrorism Professor Mueller's maths is less convincing.

First, the probability of an event is not really the thing you should be worrying about. In his excellent book Fooled by Randomness, the mathematician and Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses what he calls the issue of asymmetry. He explains (rather impatiently since he regards the issue as obvious) that you may believe, say, that financial markets will probably go up, while you behave, sensibly, as if they will go down. The reason? Because you think it very likely that they will go up a little, but, in the unlikely event that they go down, you think they will go down a great deal.

"How could people miss such a point?" he complains. "Why do they confuse probability and expectation, that is probability and probability times the payoff?" The probability of, say, a nuclear terrorist attack might be tiny but the consequences, the "payoff" as it were, would be huge. It is expectation, not probability, that should determine policy towards terrorism.

The second problem with Mueller's paper is simple: the low incidence of terrorist outrages occurred when there was already a firm policy in place to prevent it. His argument, the "bloody nuisance" argument, depends on the idea that, without additional measures domestically and internationally, the number of terrorist incidents is unlikely to rise greatly.

There is, however, lots of evidence that crime doesn't work like that. Instead of falling gently or rising gently in response to policy measures, crime behaves like a contagious disease. Potential offenders catch the idea of offending from each other. And just like a disease that starts with only a few people and becomes an epidemic, once it reaches a tipping point the amount of criminal behaviour explodes.

If successful suicide bombings became even slightly more common, can we really be confident that other fundamentalists would not copy that behaviour? We already know that ordinary suicides increase when there are front-page stories about people killing themselves. And if there were such an increase, might it escalate as one group copies another?

So Matthew Parris is right but also wrong. Without minimising the horrendous suffering of individuals, terrorism might well be little more than a "big bloody nuisance". But should we treat it as if that was all it was? Absolutely not.

A number of the suspects, British-born citizens of foreign ancestry, who are married, are fathers and who had no criminal records, were arrested by the British police before the spectacular plot could be carried out. The investigation reveals that the suspected terrorists had planned to execute their dirty work by using highly-noxious liquid explosives hidden in their hand luggage.

But beyond the emotions provoked by the event, relayed continuously and in a way that didn't fail to resuscitate the obsession with terrorism and the destruction that goes with it, and along with all the unbearable images that one could not possibly support, there are nonetheless questions that with all necessary care, common mortals must not fail to ask.

At the very moment that Lebanon and Palestine were being subject to Zionist barbarity with the blessing of the indecent Bush-Blair tandem, we are told (could this be a coincidence?) that this "big catch" was made possible thanks to amazing detective work and an investigation that reaches back six months. All of which didn't fail to cause doubt and skepticism among a majority of British Muslims who see only a subtle attempt, yet another set-up, designed to distract global opinion from the methodical genocide taking place in the Middle East.

Even the reputable British press began to point out the lack of transparency, in a case where the proofs looks far too skimpy.

After all, can one grant credit to a "couple" which, in the past, had macabre "ingeniousness" to give birth to a plot of a width without precedent, After all, how can one grant the benefit of the doubt a "couple" who have had the macabre ingeniousness to give birth to a plot of unprecedented scale, plunging Iraq into the abyss of despair and decline ... and this under the very nose of the U.N., which too has been drained of all credibility? ...

How can one explain that at a time when Great Britain maintains its highest-possible terrorist alert, followed by a number of other capital cities, the White-House chief and the boss of 10 Downing Street have not even considered, as would normally occur, shortening their vacations? The last of the two, imperturbable, enjoying his time under the Caribbean sun in Barbados ... an indecent bit of leisure that apparently drove 150 members of parliament to sign a petition demanding an end to the parliamentary summer break and a meeting to discuss the Blair government's position on the Israeli-Lebanese conflict.

Let's suppose that the aborted plot was actually the handiwork of "Islamo Facists," according to the "measured" expression by President Bush, why then be astonished, after having sown the seeds of hatred among Arabic-Muslim youth, that one collects a harvest of human bombs prepared to give their lives as an offering to make up for the affronts that they are subjected to by Bush. He who, king of contradiction and incoherence, after having supplied the Hebrew State with precision bombs and fuel to destroy the Land of the Cedar, pretends to be shocked by the scale of the damage. And he even had the nerve to send Condi to shed a few crocodile tears in Beirut while in Israel, the U.S. Secretary of State stood like a piece of marble, when Olmert stated his intention to continue his fatal offensive.

Instead of calming emotions, the U.S. President and Blair's blind "follow-my-leader" attitude, are in fact building factories for terrorist and other jihadists. To regild their tarnished reputations, some politicians who, by virtue of long experience with semantic distortions, would not hesitate, to paraphrase Khrushchev, to ask the advice of a good gastroenterologist, to find out what else can be done to push even more down the throats of their citizens. And the metaphor is worth its weight in gold.

If the plot proves true, the police would have certainly saved the innocent lives of those traveling from the Old Continent toward the United States. And even in the opposite case [if it proves untrue], the crisis managed to divert the world's attention from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, which have been the targets of Israeli military aggression since July 12.

Undoubtedly, the news alarmed not only the authorities of the countries that were directly threatened, but also all persons that, for whatever reason, were to travel on the targeted airlines, as well as all countries having direct flights to the United States or Great Britain.

Even El Salvador has became involved in a series of actions and reactions that have affected travelers, and has issued its own alert, as we informed our readers in our edition yesterday.

This most recent terrorist threat has served to remind us that the peace all over the world is endangered. And that danger, obviously, is not exclusively due to threats associated with the forces of terrorism or what is considered by the great powers to be terrorism; it emanates from the great powers themselves.

For example, the fact that the great powers tolerate or encourage the indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon by Israel also endangers world peace; and not only because even at a distance one cannot ignore the suffering of civilian victims, but also because it provokes a reaction from nationalists, fanatics and terrorists, like the one announced yesterday [Aug. 10]. Let's recall that the fundamentalist group al-Qaeda called for attacks in retaliation for Israel's war on Arabs in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon. Obviously, the victims on both sides are always the civilian population: it is civilians who die, massacred in Lebanon; it is civilians being killed in Israel by Hezbullah's rockets; it is civilians who die or suffer in terrorist attacks, as happened on September the 11th of 2001 or on March the 11th in Spain.

And, although the answers may be complex, we must again pronounce that the key questions are: Why do some people want to crush others? Why do some maintain a silence that makes them accomplices? Why do some of the great economic and military powers wish to impose the rules of game? Why there are no forces of equilibrium that would enforce peaceful coexistence? Why does intolerance dominate reason?

El Salvador serves to foment all of this by providing troops of occupation to Iraq.

Sources said police would apply for more time to question a large proportion of those currently in custody in connection with the alleged airline terror plot.

Under new anti-terror laws, which only came into force earlier this year, terrorism suspects can now be questioned for up to 28 days. If extensions are granted today, it will be the first time any suspects have been held beyond the previous 14-day limit.

Police can apply for a maximum of another week today, and then a further week next Wednesday. However, it is possible that one or more of the suspects may be released. There was no official comment from Scotland Yard.

Yesterday, 11 other people being held in connection with the alleged plot to blow up a series of transatlantic flights made their first appearance in court after being charged with various terror offences.

Eight were accused of conspiracy to murder and preparing acts of terrorism, two of failing to tell police of terrorist plots they allegedly knew about, and a 17-year-old was accused of having "in his possession... a book on improvised explosive devices, some suicide notes and wills with the identities to persons prepared to commit acts of terrorism". All have been remanded in custody.