I wouldn't say I was part of an anti-war campaign.

It's very easy to start a war but the muftah, as the Arabs say, the key to switch off a war, is very difficult to find.

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.

The dead cannot speak. But hitherto unknown information has emerged from the confidential archives of the Syrian presidency and foreign ministry, published in a new book by Bouthaina Shaaban, who spent ten years as Hafez's interpreter and is still an adviser to his son Bashar.

Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.

Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists.

Whether Osama bin Laden is doing it cynically and has no interest in these matters, or whether he's doing it out of genuine conviction, his voice has a tremendous resonance throughout the Arab world. One editorial in a Lebanese paper said it is a matter of great humiliation for the Arabs that the only man who can outline, truthfully, what our humiliations are is an Arab who has to say it from a cave in a foreign country.