The Transport Security Administration oversees safety in the American skies and maintains a list of items you can and cannot take on a plane in the USA. It’s so illogical.

Permitted items include
Screwdrivers up to 7in long
Scissors up to 4in long
Up to four books of matches
Nitroglycerine sprays (up to 4oz)
Knitting and crochet needles
Corkscrews

Forbidden items include
Duty free alcohol
Fruits or vegetables in cans or jars
Pudding
Whipped cream
Yoghurt
Gel shoe inserts (but gel bras are OK)

Not mentioned
Snakes

Since the July bombs on the tube, the police have been out in force every morning and evening at Liverpool Street, always with a perky-looking spaniel that seems to appreciate the attention.

I

This story appeared on the front page of CNN this afternoon:

And at the same time this one appeared on the front page of the BBC:

That 3,500 member troop increase is an enormous number when you realise that the UK currently has only 850 personnel stationed in the country. They are being sent as part of the Nato peacekeeping mission, but you can’t help but wonder, on past analysis, whether this is as much for the benefit of the US as it is for those who live in Afghanistan.

Why didn’t they just put a big banner over the door to the cinema: ‘Vote Kerry’. Or at least I assume that’s what The Village is about.

The following contains spoilers.

Without giving away the twist at the end, the plot is a fairly simple alegory on the so-called war on so-called terror. The people of a village (America) cut themselves off (isolationist policies of the early Bush administration) from the towns on the other side of the woods (countries on the other side of the oceans). However, when they are attacked from within their own village (September 11) they send out an ambassador to get help from the outside world (‘you’re with us or without us’) because suddenly they realise they can’t survive on their own. When she gets there she meets someone who works for Walker Security (Walker is the W of George W Bush, of course) whose job is to ‘protect and preserve the border’ of the nature reserve in which the people live (the border of America).

It gets far more political than that, though. The leader of the village even speakes in George W-ish blocks of – two words – at a – time and – no more. He also talks about the death of one of the villagers as having served a good purpose because it made people keep on believing the stories about the monsters that were out to get them so they will be able to scare everyone into continue believing that the rest of the world outside the village is evil and bad and so they must preserve their current way of life as it is.

I could be wrong about all that, of course, but until I spotted that going on in the background I was finding it all thoroughly unengaging. From then on, though, I was hooked.

The Voice of America is America’s version of the BBC World Service, but while the World Service manages to produce very balanced output, which is as likely to criticise the UK and its government as it is to promote it, every time I have listened to VOA it has presented a very one-sided pro-US stance. I guess that is to be expected, considering its name.

This week, it has posted a story on its site about the latest US government report on Human Rights, and saw no hypocricy in the following statement:

The State Department’s latest report on human rights says rights abuses worsened dramatically in communist-run Cuba last year. (Source: VOA News)

Naturally, the full report doesn’t even talk about the US itself, but then perhaps that, too, should not have been surprising.

Meanwhile,

Pentagon officials have confirmed that Guantanamo (Cuba) detainees may still be kept in detention, even if they are found not guilty by a military tribunal… A lawyer appointed by the US military to represent one of the first detainees at Guantanamo Bay to be charged has also voiced his concern… “This is unlike any system we have seen since at least World War II – except perhaps similar military commissions in other countries that we frequently criticise as fundamentally unfair,” he said. (Source: BBC News)

Meanwhile in Downing Street, Tony Blair adds Andrew Gilligan to his Christmas card list.

Or does he?

The government has got pretty much everything it wants in the wake of the Hutton Enquiry: an apology from the BBC, being cleared of ‘sexing up’ the report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, validation of its reasons for going to war and, perhaps the biggest prize of all – a stick with which to beat the BBC.

Tessa Jowell, overseeing the review of the BBC’s Charter says the outcome of the Hutton Enquiry will impact on the renewal of the BBC’s charter.

That, surely, is good news for every MP.

And a potential disaster for the British media.

It is no secret successive governments have wanted to exert control over the BBC, although they have had little way of doing so because of the way it is run. At a guess, though, I’d think the most likely outcome this time around would be the disbanding of the Board of Governors, which regulates the Corporation’s output, and responsibility for overseeing what the BBC produces being given to Ofcom, the communications regulation body, which has control of everything from mobile phones to national TV and radio stations.

The government has been questioning the BBC’s right to have a web site with arguments that it is so successful it harms the viability of other sites in the UK, but then is that really a reason to can it?

If the BBC is regulated by the same body that oversees independent TV, what would there be to stop them taking the easy way out and forcing it to stick to a very rigid public service remit, closing down its more frivolous services such as BBC Three, and those that question the government of the day (including News 24) and instead fill the schedules with ‘worthy’ informative pieces.

Independent TV, meanwhile, would be forced down a completely opposite route so that they two do not clash with one another.

In both cases, it would be a disaster, and TV in general in the UK would suffer greatly. The same could be said for radio.

Some say it should lose the income it receives from the License fee on account of the fact that they don’t see why they should pay for the License if they themselves don’t watch the BBC’s channels. If they think this is a good reason for the BBC to be regulated by a central body then they clearly don’t understand the damage that would be done to the independent services if they were forced to compete with the BBC for advertising revenues. With the available revenue stream split in two neither would be able to survive on their current scale. The pool of available ad revenue in the UK is barely enough to support the independent channels on their own.

It all comes down to one thing: if the BBC was not so good, so trusted and so successful it would not find itself in the crisis it is weathering just now. Likewise, if it was a private company rather than a public body, there would have been no Hutton Report, and if there was, it would have been unable to do the damage that might be done to the BBC.

No wonder campaigns are already springing up on the web to save an institution of which we should all be proud.

There was a day when the politicians would be careful to brand themselves at all times. The Tories would only ever wear blue ties. Labour MPs would always wear red. So what’s going on here, with Tory leader Michael Howard on the left and Tony Blair on the right? Has the BBC been Photoshopping the ties of our party leaders this morning, or is this picture from a BBC photo gallery a more accurate representation of their beliefs than we might imagine?

From Metro:

an academic said yesterday that looters should be shot to deter raiding of Iraq’s achaeological treasures. Prof Elizabeth Stone’s appeal came as it emerged the national museum in Baghdad had lost about ten per cent of its artefacts. ‘I would like to see helicopters shooting bullets so people know there is a real price to looting this stuff,’ said Prof Stone, of New York’s Stony Brook University. ‘You’ve got to kill some people to stop this.’

If Saddam had said that, it would have been front page news. An American academic says it and it’s relegated to a footnote.

Regardless of whether or not it was right to go to war, doesn’t she understand why people despised the old regime.

Problems for Tony Blair:

BBC political editor Andrew Marr says very senior figures “right at the top of Whitehall” no longer believe the weapons [of mass destruction] are likely to be found.

Problems for George Bush:

On Tuesday the White House acknowledged that allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African state of Niger were based on forged documents.

You can almost see why governments feel the need to stage-manage news for the viewing public. Remember when Private Jessica Lynch was supposedly captured by Iraqi forces and then abused on her hospital bed until the American military stormed the building and saved her? The BBC has the real story:

Reports claimed that she had stab and bullet wounds and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated. [BUT] “There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound – only road traffic accident. They want to distort the picture. I don’t know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury.”

Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital. “It was like a Hollywood film. They cried ‘go, go, go’, with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital – action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan.” … The American strategy was to ensure the right television footage by using embedded reporters and images from their own cameras, editing the film themselves.

May it be a lesson to us all that what we see on TV is not always the truth.

In an unbelievable story in the Sydney Morning Herald an American judge has ruled that

“Iraq provided material support to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist group al-Qaeda for the September 11, 2001, attack and is liable to pay $US104 million … in damages to two victims’ families.”

Whether it is true that Iraq did have a hand to play in the attacks or not, and as far as I know that has not yet been definitively proven, wasn’t the whole argument of the Second Gulf War that the Iraqi people are oppressed and had no freedom? If so, it would be far more accurate to sat that it was the regime that provided “material support”.

If so, then it was the regime that should have been liable to pay the damages, which leaves only one question: as the regime has since changed should it not be the new regime that is making the payment rather than the impoverished Iraqi people?