Syria? Russia? God Only Knows

“The world ain’t what it seems, and the moment you think you got it figured out, you’re wrong.”
— Levon Helm as Mr Rate in the movie Shooter

I often find it hard to be sure that the putative perp did the dirty deed. In the early 1980s I was foreman of a jury in a trial of a young man charged with receiving stolen property. He had plead guilty to a number of other receiving charges, for which he had been given a non-custodial sentence. If he were found guilty this time around he would almost certainly go to jail. It was touch and go in the jury room. But I thought that there was reasonable doubt. He was acquitted.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that exactly the right decision was made. But I know that I would have wrestled much more with a decision to find him guilty rather than ‘innocent’. It comes, I think, from being a sceptic across the whole gamut of life. I look for proof. Sometimes I find it hard to believe anything with that deep and abiding certainty that I…