Rajiva Wijesinha

“ A professional Foreign Office needs better leadership than it has now, it needs better agents than the Times in its current phase of amoral secretive falsehood. It is no wonder that other journalists said there was no reason to worry about the Times, since its circulation was very small. But still, as with Browning on Wordsworth, Byron on Venice, those who remember past glories can only weep at what the current management of the Times has done, in enslaving past glory to New Labour manipulation. ”

“ What is bizarre is that, if the Times, albeit through a series of what are in effect self-effacing double negatives, grants that the Tigers got the doctors to make things up, it now blames the government for having the doctors issue a corrective. ”

“ Thus the Times claims that ‘The United Nations found that more than 7,000 civilians were killed between January and May. Subsequent aerial photographs of beach graves, revealed in The Times, suggested that the figure was more than 20,000. World outrage embarrassed the Colombo Government. The doctors were swiftly arrested and nothing further was heard of them until Wednesday.’
This ignores the fact that the ‘revelation’ in the Times, passed off as having UN authority, occurred at the end of the week in May in which the New Labour initiative in Geneva had so dismally failed. ”