Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.

Just when the Ched Evans debate couldn't get any lower, up pops Gordon Taylor OBE. No matter how much anyone prayed that the Ched Evans "debate" had completed its race to the bottom this week, it was never going to have done so until we'd heard in full from Gordon Taylor . That pleasure was always in the post , and yesterday the PFA chief delivered, with what we might painfully cast as football's version of Godwin's law: a comparison with Hillsborough . "He wouldn't be the first person to be found guilty, maintained his innocence, and been proved right," Taylor opined to the BBC . "We know what happened with Hillsborough." Oh, man  ... Gordon Taylor . Or rather, GORDON TAYLOR OBE, as his name appeared in my inbox when he emailed me once . Sensationally dim, wantonly self-interested, wildly over-remunerated and frequently morally compromised, Gordon functions as an auto-satire on all the worst things people think about football . Reputed to be the highest paid union official in the world, and one who has been in his job for just the 33 years , Taylor has now said he didn't mean"to upset anybody" , though I need hardly add that he has no plans to consider his position after his latest display of incompetence . In which case, I hope he'll forgive my considering it for him - an act that has become as essential an annual event for me as putting up the Christmas tree or rewatching the early work of Steven Seagal . Unless Taylor's presence is dramatically revealed as the second-highest-profile instance of affirmative action for idiots in public life - the first being Iain Duncan Smith's position in government - then it hardly needs pointing out again that Gordon is no longer fit for purpose , if indeed he ever was . But more on his record shortly . That Taylor should have rifled through his Rolodex of metaphors and alighted on the absolute archetype of victim-blaming in order to continue obliquely victim-blaming in the Ched Evans case ... well, perhaps there's a mirthless laugh to be had there . But it would take a stronger stomach than mine to manage it . The sadness - or rather, one of many acute and diverse sadnesses - is that this was a week in which football was crying out for an intelligent and sensitive advocate, finding itself once more cast in a role it should never be required to occupy in a truly civilised society . All manner of people appeared convinced that the game should mitigate the deficiencies of the criminal justice system , just as a worrying number were keen to say Evans was absolutely welcome to work again - flipping burgers or sweeping the streets . These are the jobs that are fit for rapists , we must infer , which must feel hugely complimentary to those non-rapists who are putting in shifts doing the same for minimal pay right now . Meanwhile , as the Mail's Martin Samuel pointed out, footballers - footballers!-"are placed in the same bracket as doctors, teachers or legal professionals" . If that seems to you like a view of society worth shoring up , the week will have felt distinctly encouraging . As for football fans - the great "them" of many debates - they have spent the week being cast as too thick and impressionable to be able to make their own judgments about a convicted rapist . Evans could have been nothing but a role model, presumably to the vast tumult who turn out at Boundary Park each week (4,415 on average last season) . It's as depressing as it is disturbing . Such toxicity and lunacy have attached themselves to football and its place in our society that those who love the sport as well as those who play it really need the calm, cool intellect and charm of a Shami Chakrabarti to lobby in their real interests and those of the game . Instead ,  they have Gordon Taylor , whose focus was memorably dismissed by Peter Schmeichel during one stage of the Paul Gascoigne saga . "Instead of getting great deals on cars and other luxury goods for members," the former Manchester United and Denmark goalkeeper fumed,"PFA should commit more time and funds to help the like of Gazza." Taylor was stung - into self-defence, of course . "Peter doesn't know what we've done for Paul," he announced to the Press Association,"a lot of which has to be confidential." It certainly does . Except Gordon just couldn't bring himself to keep it that way . The next few days were spent with this union leader giving detailed interviews on Gascoigne's mental state and past treatment , in which he divulged telephone calls with the player, made off-the-cuff pseudo-clinical diagnoses, and - unbelievably - used the union's own website to warn : "If we're not careful , it is going to be akin to George Best." Then again, Taylor had form with sharing details of members' treatment, having done the same with Joey Barton only a few months previously . Anyway, on we go . In 2013 came the revelation that Taylor had amassed a? 100,000 debt to a bookmaker - almost an inevitability to those who recalled him pontificating about a "zero tolerance" approach to betting among players just a couple of years before . And no round-up of Gordon's greatest hits would be complete without a look at that endlessly intriguing confidentiality deal he signed with News International , which awarded him a? 700,000 settlement for phone-hacking in return for his silence . As the News of the World's lawyers later had it in a letter to the Commons culture, media and sport committee, Taylor's lawyers had informed them that he "wanted to be vindicated or made rich" . Given that he reportedly earns? 984,000 a year (maybe more these days) , you might judge him to be rich already - but of course ,  we know which option won out, a deal that precluded Taylor from breathing a word about phone-hacking to any of his union's members , who he might reasonably have concluded could have been victims themselves . As they were eventually proved(by others) to have been . So there you have him: the pastoral carer who reveals details of his members' mental health in the noble cause of self-defence . The gambler who wishes to outlaw gamblers . The ur-phone-hacking plaintiff who agreed to take the? 700,000 and say absolutely nothing about the matter, despite being responsible for players who of course turned out to have been targeted too . And now he is the victim-blamer's victim-blamer, in a week where, you might have hazarded, even Katie Hopkins couldn't have contrived to make a grim situation worse . Still ,  experience would indicate that Taylor ignores his detractors at the very opposite of his peril . So all that remains is for me to take the early opportunity to apologise for next year's inevitable appearance of this column, and bid Mr Taylor a cordial au revoir .
Sensationally dim, wantonly self-interested, wildly over-remunerated and frequently morally compromised, Gordon functions as an auto-satire on all the worst things people think about football

Punishment, not apology after CIA torture report. What a dark day for the United States . Five years and nine months after Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kit Bond, the chair and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced a review of the CIA's detention and interrogation programme in the so-called "war on terror", the 500-page executive summary of that report has been made publicly available . Its conclusions are shocking . As Feinstein explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times at the weekend,"We have to get this report out. Anybody who reads this is going to never let this happen again." Let us hope so - and let us also hope that senior officials in the Bush administration, as well as senior CIA personnel, will eventually be held accountable for their actions . The CIA's torture programme, initiated almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, remained a closely guarded secret for many years . An early revelation was a June 2004 leak of a memo which purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA . The memo was written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) , who was close to Dick Cheney . The CIA's "black sites" in Europe were not publicly exposed until November 2005 . The Bush administration still refused to openly acknowledge the programme until September 2006 , when then President George W Bush announced that, with the arrival of 14 "high-value detainees" at Guantanamo from various "black sites", the programme he had denied the existence of until that time had now closed down . That statement, we subsequently learned, was not entirely true , as a few other prisoners arrived at Guantanamo from CIA custody in 2007 and 2008 , but the torture report provides conclusive proof . "By March 2006," the report states,"the programme was operating in only one country. The CIA last used its enhanced interrogation techniques on November 8, 2007. The CIA did not hold any detainees after April 2008." After the arrival of the "high-value detainees" at Guantanamo, numerous attempts were made to pierce the veil of secrecy that surrounded the programme . In 2007, Swiss Senator Dick Marty published an influential report for the Council of Europe about secret prisons and rendition in Europe . In February 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted that three "high-value detainees" had been subjected to waterboarding . In December 2008, the Senate Armed Services Committee published a powerful report about how the policies for dealing with prisoners in the "war on terror" had developed - including detailed analysis of how the US military's SERE programme (intended to train US personnel to resist torture if captured by a hostile enemy) had been reverse-engineered for the "war on terror" . In April 2009, harrowing interviews with the 14 "high-value detainees", conducted by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were leaked , and in August 2009 an internal CIA report from 2004 into the agency's detention and interrogation policies after 9/11 was released containing details of how one prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (one of the three men waterboarded, along with Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad), was physically abused and threatened with a gun and power drill while hooded at a "black site" in Thailand . In 2010 I wrote a detailed analysis of the secret detention programme for a UN study , in which I sought to ascertain the identities of the 94 "ghost prisoners" in CIA custody - including 28 subjected to "enhanced interrogation"  - who were referred to in a memo from 2005 by OLC lawyer Steven G Bradbury that was released by the Obama administration in April 2009 . Another major report, by the Constitution Project, was published in 2013 . And yet , although some of the gruesome facts about the torture programme were known , the Senate Intelligence Committee's report provides far more . In its "Findings and Conclusions", for example, the report states :. There are many more examples . The report states :. In addition , "sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours" , and although some "experienced disturbing hallucinations", in at least two cases the CIA continued its abuse . These examples - and many more in the summary - demonstrate clearly the committee's conclusion that the interrogations "were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others" . Perhaps more importantly, however, the committee also concludes that torture was "not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees", that the CIA made "inaccurate claims" about the "effectiveness" of the programme in an attempt to justify it and that it led to friction with other agencies that endangered national security, as well as providing false statements that led to costly and worthless wild goose chases . The report also concludes that non-approved techniques were used widely , and that "[a]t least 17 detainees were subjected to CIA enhanced interrogation techniques without authorisation from CIA headquarters", and that "multiple detainees were subjected to techniques that were applied in ways that diverged from the specific authorisation, or were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques by interrogators who had not been authorised to use them" . The committee was also critical of the central role played by two contract psychologists from the SERE programme , even though neither of them "had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialised knowledge of al-Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise" . The committee also concluded that Steven Bradbury's numbers were wrong, and that the CIA "detained at least 119 individuals, of whom at least 39 were subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques" . Moreover ,  of these 119 "at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard" in the still-secret Bush administration memorandum establishing the programme in September 2001 . In the days and weeks to come, there will be concerted efforts by the CIA and by former Bush administration officials to defend their actions , but the report makes clear that any kind of defence is untenable . Crimes were committed, authorised at the highest level of the US government , and , although Obama came into office in 2009 expressing "a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards" , that is not acceptable . The Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report - all 6,700 pages of it, costing $40m and involving an analysis of more than six million pages of classified documents - must be the trigger not just for an airing of apologies, but for those who instigated and authorised the torture programme to be held accountable - up to and including President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney .
The Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report - all 6,700 pages of it, costing $40m and involving an analysis of more than six million pages of classified documents - must be the trigger not just for an airing of apologies, but for those who instigated and authorised the torture programme to be held accountable - up to and including President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney

Fearmongering in Sydney. Australians turning on their televisions Monday morning to watch breakfast and cooking shows were instead greeted with news channels beaming minute-to-minute fearmongering of the ongoing siege at a chocolate shop in Sydney . When customers and employees were taken hostage by a lone gunman , and a flag with"There is only one God" inscription in Arabic was held in the window , it was enough to hold the rest of the country hostage to their fears and TV screens . Should it be that way and what should an appropriate response look like? First ,  consider what this violent thug had designed our reaction to be . The site of the siege was likely no afterthought - located in the heart of the Sydney CBD and directly opposite a major television station, the shop had made it ideal for the media to report on . Streets were cordoned off , public transport diverted , and a strong contingent of police sent to the Opera House . All made for good visuals of the incident and terror in an otherwise peaceful city . Even the most left-leaning and progressive members of parliament, like Greens MP Adam Bandt, who have repeatedly defended the Muslim community from unjust discrimination and generalisation, tweeted to their followers in the first hours of the siege that it was "terrifying" . Was it really? Was it at all terrifying for you personally, Adam? If it was , I'd hate to know what the hostages experienced, including the two who were murdered . A strike in the public's dark . For once, Prime Minister Tony Abbott had a more mature response than his colleagues on the opposite side . Such a situation can "scare people out of being themselves", he said in his first press briefing, before urging all Australians to go about their business as usual . Although he told the public to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activity to the authorities , he said so with calm and caution . Vitally, he avoided using the t-word at this early stage, or any formulation thereof . No doubt we have since learnt a lot more about this deranged outsider and his motives , and it is clear he had terrorist intent . His website, which was shut down during the final hours of the siege, had a message dated December 14, which described why Muslims "fight against the oppression and terrorism" of the US and its allies, including the UK and Australia . The rampant speculation before this was unnecessary and unhelpful, however , and letting the siege sow fear, enough so to publicly describe it as "terrifying", was handing a victory to an extremist . With the hot Australian summer setting in, many people's minds turn to beer, barbeques, family, and Christmas presents, not the possibility of "politically motivated violence", as Abbott wisely phrased it . Intriguingly, Australians fear terrorism more than a foreign invasion, despite many believing we'd have no hope of fending off the latter and despite us never directly experiencing the former . Given the opportunity to attribute a complexly motivated act to terrorism , it's no wonder this all-too-easy escape mechanism which avoids rigorous thought or objective analysis was adopted en masse . The most noted incidents in Australia's experience of terrorism have been mostly foreign tragedies, like the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005, or the 2004 Australian embassy bombing in Jakarta . Although the September raids and arrests of suspected domestic terrorists in Sydney and Brisbane set a new landscape and brought the thought of an attack to our own shores , they merely raised the thought, not the authentic actuality . The raids sparked limited local backlash against peaceful Muslims at the time , and this was both unwarranted and unwanted . Though it only goes to further support my thesis ; Australians just aren't used to this sort of thing and thus are unpractised in their response . That said , it hasn't stopped thousands on social media to show solidarity with minorities through the #IllRideWithYou campaign . When the Abbott government raised the domestic terrorism threat level to high before the September raids , many local commentators criticised what they branded as political theatre (both before and after the arrests) . To consider this is to suggest an even baser type of political animal than is presently expected by even the most cynical of observers . Would any rational actor toy with people's lives for short-term political ends in what was an unimportant political week? What end does that even achieve? Plainly, none, and it is sensationally conspiratorialist to suggest otherwise . To protest against such raids and continue looking at them through a political lens was just as unwarranted and unwanted as the racial-profiling and racial- hatred which events like these have sparked . Terrorism isn't something that we should let foster, anywhere , and the public reactions to the raids were unjustifiably sceptical in comparison to the response to the Sydney siege . Even so ,  the authorities' heed for caution may have come too late for some . Slipshod media reports that the flag held in the shop window was an ISIL flag - when it was not- may have already fuelled the imaginations of too many . Whatever the outcome of the full investigation, one thing remains clear : This was a tragic learning experience for the Australian media, public, and politicians . Keep calm and carry on, though pay a thought or two to how we ought to respond to events like these in the future .

Even the most left-leaning and progressive members of parliament, like Greens MP Adam Bandt, who have repeatedly defended the Muslim community from unjust discrimination and generalisation, tweeted to their followers in the first hours of the siege that it was "terrifying"