Well, there's not a whole lot of big news on the Iraq front, according to the Vanguardia. The back-page interview today went to Pierre-Richard Prosper, who is, curiously, American. With a name like that he should be writing semiotic criticisms of class and gender roles and their dysfunction in a post-socialist society, but he's the "U.S. Ambassador to Try War Criminals", which is something I'd never heard of before. He's been trying war criminals in Rwanda, the ex-Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. He really doesn't say too much you haven't heard before except for his explanation of what's happening in Guantánamo. "We have divided the 600 Taliban prisoners into three groups. The first group, of 11, were released because they did not represent a danger toward the world. Then there are those who are a threat but should be tried in their country of origen...(the others) are those who said under interrogation that they would attack the West as soon as they could. They, and the group who should be tried in the US because of their leadership role, must stay at Guantánamo." The other good bit is when the interviewer asks him, "And Kissinger? What do you think about Judge Garzón's attempt at interrogating him?" Prosper's answer is, "Ha, ha." Says the interviewer, "Doesn't that worry you?" Prosper answers, "Ha, ha."

The Gang of Eight's letter has had a pro-alliance effect on European opinion, especially the fact that the universally respected Vaclav Havel signed it. Here's the Vanguardia's page two lead editorial signed by Alfredo Abián. It's titled "Havel and the anti-imperialists" and is in italics below.

The Alliance of Anti-Imperialist Intellectuals, who turned the Goya awards (Spain's Oscars) into an antiwar protest, would probably condemn Vaclav Havel for his alignment with the United States. Although the Czech dramatist, who left the presidency of his country yesterday, cannot be denied his status as an honest intellectual. The problem is that Havel's personal experiences and discourse are excessively sophisticated for those who consider that capitalism is the leading world terrorist. Havel was a prisoner of the Iron Curtain: censorship, arrests, five years in prison. This is why he scorns the slogans and rhetorical flourishes that real Communism used in its day to capture so many honorable people. but he also knew how to keep the idealism that led him to call for a world in which the voice of the poets would be as powerful as that of the stockbrokers, although directly afterward he warns against those who want the planet to become a poem by the hands of pipers and troubadors. Havel understands that politics must benefit humanity and that therefore one must act consciously without paying attention to criticism or the polls. He defends attacking evil in its own lair, even through the use of force. Among other things, because he has always thought that the Second World War could have been avoided if Paris and London had not made concessions in order to appease Hitler's Berlin.