Brendan O’Neill

Brendan O’Neill

Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.

Not a shred of evidence

Did Saddam Hussein really use industrial shredders to kill his enemies? Brendan O’Neill is not persuaded that he did Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Even George Bush no longer believes that they are there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam’s ‘people shredder’, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of the Baathist regime. Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of Indict, a group that has been campaigning since 1996 for the creation of an international criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of the shredder in the Times on 18 March — the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons and three days before the start of the war.

How we trained al-Qa’eda

For all the millions of words written about al-Qa’eda since the 9/11 attacks two years ago, one phenomenon is consistently overlooked – the role of the Bosnian war in transforming the mujahedin of the 1980s into the roving Islamic terrorists of today.