Making fun of Deadeye Dick, as Mr Cheney is now being called, is payback for a bully of a vice-president who exploited fear of terror as a blunt instrument to subdue and quash domestic dissent.

Mr Cheney got a taste for blood politically in the dirty-tricks days of the Nixon period, only to see the right-wing of the Republican Party fall to the wayside as an assertive media at last succeeded in alerting America to the dangers of a cruel, unnecessary and unjust war abroad and the attendant war on civil liberties at home.

America's pained, soul-searching and tentative repudiation of its own imperialism was such a setback to Mr Cheney's imperial ambitions that he came to conclusions quite at odds with the lesson others drew from Vietnam and Watergate.

The media was the enemy, and to be immune to criticism, the executive branch had to be made drastically more imperial (except when the opposition was in power) so that a Republican president, which he himself fancied he might one day be, could be the law, if not above the law.

Forget the constitutional checks and balance of congress and the courts, forget the watchdog and whistleblower role of the media.

Mr Cheney's democratic vision has from the start so wrapped up in notions of secrecy, executive privilege, and unaccountability that the administration he currently represents, shapes and protects has become as unaccountable and as naked in its pursuit of partisan profit to the American public as his previous employer, Halliburton.   more »

American and British newscasters (perhaps mirroring audiences in their countries) report the news with a mix of horror and glee, barely concealing this undercurrent:

'Could "Muzlims" and "Islamists" make greater fools of themselves? Don't go anywhere! There's more to come.' And the protesters duly oblige.

Burning flags, throwing rocks, scaling embassy walls. They may think they're refusing to become muzzled Muzlims but their fury is but the snarling of a caged beast. Underneath: dead words, tighter chains.

Freedom can be selected like a television channel. Push the right button and be saved; push the wrong one and be condemned. But the picture unravelling on television screens is screened.

Many sediments are collecting in the churning, simmering waters of these two main tributeries: the double standards of the part of the world called 'West'; the complete inability of the part increasingly being pigeonholed 'Islamic' to articulate itself.

The war in Iraq is approaching its fourth year. The US and UK invaded a sovereign state on grounds that were blatant lies. President Bush and PM Blair should be impeached.

Instead, they put another murderer on trial, occasionally release tapes of Osama bin Laden, bomb villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- an 'alliance state' --, bully Iran, and warn against terrorist attacks.   more »

America does have vast, wealthy suburbs, huge shopping malls and a busy middle class, but it also has vast numbers of poor, struggling to make it in a low-wage economy with minimal government help.

A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world.

They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute.

Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.

Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster.   more »

The only real justification for the continued disgrace that is Guantanamo is that the government refuses to admit it's made a mistake. Releasing hundreds of prisoners after holding them for four years without charges would be big news.

Better, a Guantanamo at which nothing has happened in four years. Better to drain the camp slowly, releasing handfuls of prisoners at a time. Last week, and with little fanfare, seven more detainees were let go.

That brings the total number of releasees to 180, with 76 transferred to the custody of other countries. Are these men who are quietly released the "best of the worst"? No.

According to the National Journal one detainee, an Australian fundamentalist Muslim, admitted to training several of the 9/11 hijackers and intended to hijack a plane himself. He was released to his home government last year.

A Briton said to have targeted 33 Jewish organizations in New York City is similarly gone. Neither faces charges at home.

Guantanamo represents a spectacular failure of every branch of government. Congress is willing to pass a bill stripping courts of habeas-corpus jurisdiction for detainees but unwilling to probe what happens to them.   more »

Yesterday, what remained of the Rolling Stones strutted carefully out on stage in Rio to an audience of over one million people.

That the Stones are still allowed on stage at all is a shining example of what the music journalist John Strausbaugh has dubbed "colostomy rock" - the continued weight exerted by baby boomers on what was previously thought of as youth culture.

The idea of the baby boomers is an essentially American invention, used to describe the unusually large cohort of babies born between 1946 and 1964 and swollen by a surge of postwar optimism.

Both British and American boomers are now hurtling through the demographic turnstile towards retirement, and the first of them will hit 60 this year.

Since they revolutionised every stage of life through which they have passed, say the pundits, they are set to upturn the business of growing old.

Because they refuse to relinquish the attributes of rebellious youth, the new middle-aged continue to crave the attentions of marketeers and advertisers. They also, apparently, wield huge political clout.   more »

Women who are less than nine weeks pregnant can safely have medical abortions at home, according to the head of a government-backed pilot project.

Abortion services for the 20,000 women who seek a chemically induced abortion every year could be transformed should the Department of Health's official evaluation of the pilot confirm initial findings.

But it is also likely to provoke controversy from anti-abortion campaigners who will claim that home abortions would make the procedure easier and therefore lead to more women having terminations.

Shirley Butler, the project manager of one pilot which has tested the abortions with 172 women patients since 2004, told the Guardian:

"We haven't had any significant problems apart from one woman who had a slightly heavy bleed. In my opinion medical abortions outside of acute hospitals seem to be safe."   more »

We take a look at what lies behind the shocking images of torture at Abu Ghraib by turning to the history of the CIA and torture techniques.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the recently released images of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib show a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

The U.S. made a pledge against torture when Congress ratified the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994 - but it was ratified with reservations that exempted the CIA's psychological torture method. So what were the results?

A new expose gives an account of the CIA's secret efforts to develop new forms of torture spanning fifty years.

It reveals how the CIA perfected its methods, distributing them across the world from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals.

The book is titled "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror."   more »

17 FEBRUARY

Porn Culture: The Pop Tarts...Hardly Female Liberation

Cheney Scandal: Is the Laughing-Stock Already Brain-Dead?

The Trigger-Happy Bush Regime: From Quail to Iraq

Beware! Propaganda War on Iran Ahead

David Horowitz: On My List of "America's Most-Hated"

Cartoon Controversy: Europe's Contempt for Other Cultures

Cheney's Shit Hits the Fan

Abu Ghraib: Leaked Report Reveals Full Extent of Prisoner Abuse