14 July 2005 The Bombs Had Nothing To Do With Anything By Gwynne Dyer It’s official: the four suicide bombs that killed over fifty Londoners last week had nothing to do with anything. The family and friends of the young men who committed the atrocity, all British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent, insisted that their actions …
7 July 2005 London: Not Exactly the Blitz By Gwynne Dyer Tony Blair flew down from the G8 summit in Scotland especially to be with Londoners in their time of trial, and you can hardly blame him for that. It’s not that we needed him to take charge — it was only four smallish bombs, …
3 April 2005 My Greatest Journalistic Moment By Gwynne Dyer In the days to come we will be hearing a great deal about Pope John Paul II’s impact on the Catholic Church, the candidates for the succession, and what kind of straw they burn with the ballots to get that black smoke. This is also …
11 July 2004 Perfidious Albion and Diego Garcia By Gwynne Dyer “In accordance with current regulations, no type of attire with degrading or obscene comments may be worn on or brought to Diego Garcia. This includes pictures, phrases or slogans depicting drug paraphernalia, anti-war slogans….” It’s not clear from the website whether the British customs …
18 April 2004 The Courage of the Clerk By Gwynne Dyer I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left or right. Don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp. Mordechai …
27 November 2003 Destroying Pitcairn By Gwynne Dyer “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” as some US officer allegedly said during the Vietnam War. British justice is now about to do the same thing to the Pitcairn Islanders. In an attempt to avert that outcome, defence lawyer Paul Dacre recently …
28 August 2003 The Futility of Inquiries By Gwynne Dyer “The government lied every time it skewed, misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated the Iraq story,” said Andrew Wilkie, a senior intelligence officer in Australia’s Office of National Assessment until he resigned last March in protest at the way the Australian government was distorting intelligence to …
13 January 2003 The Last Rock Hero By Gwynne Dyer I wish he had not done it. I believe that his motives were good, but I never thought I would see the day when Pete Townshend would have to say: “I am not a paedophile.” Let me tell you a story about the Who. It …
30 November 2002 The End of ‘The Smoke’ By Gwynne Dyer This week is the fiftieth anniversary of the last of London’s great fogs, a pea-souper that killed over four thousand people. Visibility dropped to about two feet (half a metre) and some died just by falling into the Thames and drowning, but most died …