George Orwell always springs to mind when you consider the attitude of the American media towards torture.

'Torture is OK when we do it but not when anybody else does it', or 'Torture is wrong except when it's right'.

If that's not a prime example of Orwellian doublethink I don't know what is.

it's about American disregard for non-American lives.

Michael Jackson is just a convenient point of reference: his death - the death of one man - is still ricocheting emptily round the airwaves while the deaths of many, many innocent Afghans at the hands of American troops goes unmourned and largely unreported in the American media.

Under Obama, American policy now - i.e. put the people first and not the bad guys - is surely right. But it is far too late. Afghans who have lost friends and relatives at weddings and funerals to American bombs are not just going to forgive and forget. Would you?

This will haunt America for many years to come, yet many Americans will still not understand why.

I know that the UK press routinely calls it torture, whether it's torture performed by or on behalf of America, or UK complicity in torture.

From today's Guardian for example, a piece headed "CIA's London chief to face jury over waterboarding torture tapes", begins

"Senior CIA officials, including the London station chief, have been called before a grand jury in Virginia investigating the potentially illegal destruction of 92 video tapes recording the torture and interrogation of al-Qaida detainees."

And she was a vice-presidential candidate? A narrow escape, America.

I enjoyed this article. It was a clear-sighted review of what sounds like a clear-sighted history of Communism.

I think many people in the West were attracted to the idea of communism because it was not capitalism. The inequities and raw consumerism of Western capitalism repelled some people and they saw in communism another, less avaricious way of living.

It also meant, of course, they turned a blind eye to communism's failures, and it wasn't until the fall of the Berlin Wall that Communism as an ideology became almost universally discredited.

"ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review"

This is pre-Magna Carta stuff.

Incredible.

"Companionship? Hey, stay single, dude, you’ll have a lot more money, and then you can buy companionship."

Sad.

In fact, Iranian abuses are being reported in many, many articles by news organizations throughout the world.

The point is that does Salon need to do it as well? In article after article?

Salon's reputation to a large extent rests on reporting events, such as governmental malfeasance, that are little covered in American mainstream media because of journalistic timidity and establishment collusion.

The abuses in Iran are being shouted from the rooftops - rightly - by all and sundry media. What is Salon adding to this?

In the meantime, American missiles killed another 50 - yes, 50 - people in Pakistan. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8115814.stm.

I don't want to exaggerate it, but NPR and the rest of them do really do have similarities with the toothless Soviet media in the days of the old USSR.

When NPR refuses to call a spade a spade because it might get in trouble with the ruling party or its apparatchiks, then the Fourth Estate in America is in big trouble.

Because this article is a worthless exercise in evasion and obfuscation that anybody could better.

You probably want to correct that.

The American neocons don't care one iota about the Iranian people except when it suits their agenda to pretend to do so.

When they're exhorting the US to bomb Iran, the effect on the Iranian people is irrelevant; when the Iranian people are demonstrating against the despised Ahmadinejad, then of course they're just thinking about what's best for the Iranian people (well, some of them anyway - Ahmadinejad supporters should still be bombed).

It's transparently clear that it's not about the Iranian people at all but about some warped geopolitical idea about what shape the Middle East should be and the willingness to use American force, short of nothing, to bring it about.

The same thing has struck me many times. You often hear Serious American commentators talk about imprisonment, abduction, torture, bombing - whatever - as if it were just some abstraction.

It's as if these things that happen to strangers far away aren't actually happening to real people in the real world. You can imagine the outrage if anything like the punishment meted out by Americans to nasty foreign people were to happen to Americans (and quite right too). But that's different. Apparently.

Why this attitude? Is it a terminal lack of empathy or what?

The release of more torture photos presumably would make people angry, and not just in the Arab world. Increased anger could well translate into increased terrorism.

But that is not a reason to withhold the photos.

Until the US really and truly shows that it rejects the human rights outrages of the Bush years - by exposing them - then terrorism will always be a significant threat.

Have you ever tried parking in Rome? The Cinquecento's ideal.

I see on the BBC that Nick Griffin of the BNP has just had to abandon a press conference outside Parliament because demonstrators pelted him with eggs. Good for them.