World BBC

Reading about the British SBS being involved with Italian commandos in recsuing two Italian soldiers along from Afghan kidnappers, the British sources said the Italian victims may have been tortured. Gasp, how nasty torture is when it is committed by shifty, shabby Afghan bad guys, all of whom no doubt were hunchbacks. All a far cry when the squeaky clean USA and the US's Afghan allies torture in the American gulag archipelago because, of course, torture is then legitimate and the Geneva convention is 'outdated'. In these 'Freedom Camps', such as Guantanamo Bay or bounty hunter dens in Kabul and Herat (where people have been known to have been hung on meathooks to extract a confession), everything is ship-shape. And nothing is professional. I go by the Israeli secret service, Mossad. They believe torture is useless because the person under interrogation could be innocent, but were they to be tortured they might give untrue details and divert valauble security attention just to make the torture stop. Too many idiots in the USA and UK (e.g. Tony Blair) believe that anyone arrested must be guilty of something, as if security services are infallible. No smoke without fire, they chant, but that smoke will be caused by smoke canisters used by the police. Mossad knows what works because they are professional.

As to what works, Jeff Randall, formerly BBC business editor, now working at the Telegraph, complains the BBC promotes a 'liberal consensus'. Along with other rabid right-wingers, he is first and foremost a hypocrite, since he probably follows the US line of 'competing biases' for a quick read of the Telegraph would leave no-one in any doubt that it is not impartial. It may be the only broadsheet, but the size is misleading. The BBC won two Emmy awards for its news coverage today, both of the only international prizes available. the real reason for the attacks of Randall and others is that they want to shift the mainstream further right, mimicking the US way they so fawn over. But as we've seen with possibly the most distrastous presidency in living memory (because Tricky Dicky was authoritarian but competent), trying to implement nutty right-wing ideology is an unmitigated failure. As BBC executives often say, being attacked by both sides of the political spectrum means they must be doing something right. This is proved that trust in it is higher than any of the rags that attack it.