By Philippe Sands/NEW STATESMAN, Feb 27, 2006   Amnesty International’s report coincides with the 60th anniversary of a famous telegram. Writing from Moscow on 22 February 1946, the diplomat George Kennan painted for his masters in Washington the classic picture of the vast scale and sinister character of the postwar Soviet threat. But he concluded on a note of caution. “We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society,” he declared. The greatest danger was that “we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping”.Today’s British government would

Rizwan Ahmed was part of a prizewinning team at the Berlin Film Festival. When he got back to Luton Airport, however, he was a terror suspect. By Clive Stafford Smith/NEW STATESMAN, FEB 27, 2006When Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival on 19 February, Rizwan Ahmed, one of the stars of the movie, was there. “It was an emotional experience,” he told me later. “The film had an amazing reception and on some levels it felt like the Tipton boys had been vindicated.”The Tipton boys, better known as the Tipton Three, are Asif

The original version appeared in the Feb. 22 edition of The Moscow Times.

BERLIN, May 12, 2153 – Within the ivy-covered walls of Farben University, a great battle is now raging. But although the Reich’s ancient capital has seen its share of warfare down through the centuries, today’s combatants have no swords, no guns, no bio-disrupters – just words and pictures, marshalled on either side of a fierce debate that has split the staid academic world in two, and is beginning to spill over into national politics as well. It