The fight over 44 torture images

Watch part two

We start our show with Barack Obama’s trip to Egypt. The US president delivered an historic speech in Cairo to a vast worldwide TV audience leaving a fire fight behind in Washington between the White House press office and the media.

The row centres on photographs that depict the abuse and torture of detainees held by the US in the so-called ‘war on terror’ during the administration of George Bush, the former US president.

Though more than 2,000 photos have already been released, Obama is refusing to make public an additional 44 images – and therein lies the debate: Obama is refusing to release the pictures for fear of creating even more anger over the torture issue.

What is more, Obama is backing a new law that would amount to a wholesale suppression of any pictures relating to torture and leaving it up to the Pentagon to decide what we should or should not see.

Our report will examine the Obama administration, the media and the fight to get at the truth of what really happened inside US prisons.

Jacqui Smith, the British home secretary, resigned over expense claims [GALLO/GETTY]

In part two The Listening Post’s Meenakshi Ravi reports on the newspaper scoop that exposed the “British MP expenses scandal”.

Every day for the last month, the Telegraph newspaper has been publishing the expenses of British MPs and naming and shaming those who have been found to have fiddled with them.

It is an impressively long list, which revealed that one MP charged £1,600 for a luxurious house for his ducks while another charged to have his moat cleaned.

There have been high level resignations and calls for criminal investigations in some cases.

The expenses scandal has left the ruling Labour party with the lowest public rating for any Labour government ever – which could usher in a new prime minister. A result you could say for the pro-opposition Telegraph who are said to have paid for the leaked confidential expense reports.

In this week’s Newsbytes: An opinion poll shows that the ratings for Alhurra, the Arabic-language American TV channel, are down in the Middle East, the US military publicises the enemy death toll in Afghanistan, Lebanese TV station LBC self-censor ahead of the Lebanese general election, Scientologists are banned from editing Wikipedia and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, is granted an injunction over photos of his New Year’s Eve party.  

Finally for our internet video of the week: During last year’s US presidential election, immigration was a bit of an issue – usually raised by conservatives who said that waves of immigrants were hurting the US. Not everyone agrees with that conclusion and we are guessing that people at the American Comedy Network are among the sceptics out there. They have taken the US national anthem – a song that goes back almost 200 years – and fitted it with some new lyrics on what life in the ‘home of the brave’ might be like  – if there were not so many immigrants there.

This episode of The Listening Post airs on Friday, June 5, 2009, at the following times GMT: Friday: 1230; Saturday: 1030, 2230; Sunday: 0300, 1930; Monday: 0030; Tuesday: 0630, 1630; Wednesday: 0130, 1430, 1900; Thursday: 0330, 2330.