The United Nations Charter requires the USA to protect human rights in Afghanistan

The first photograph is of a boy about 10 years old, depicted in adult victory pose, and chomping on a Palestinian flag; behind him is his slightly older whistling companion; the third grimacing child was depicted only from the bust up, at the back, and of similar age. The second depiction again has three Palestinian refugee children of the same age group apparently from the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, photographed in a supposed celebration of the massacre in New York. But this time under the watchful and approving eye of a clapping adult, while in the background, a few teenagers among other men and the head of a curious woman, are to be seen milling around at a street rally, most looking decidedly uncomfortable, or in a stance of disbelief.

A measured intelligence with humane compassion and a firm bent for human rights and security must insist they are only children without an adult potential for deeply considered understanding.

In the context of the children's known Palestinian home town circumstances, and the infamous history of the Shatila refugee camp, the photographs are crude propaganda with a propensity to incite hatred against Palestinians, or their supporters, among at least equally ignorant adults. The snaps exploit children, inviting bigoted inferences they are monsters or the children of monsters.

An equally grave issue is whether the media ought have an international obligation, in addition to currently enforceable human rights standards, to meet UN sourced global measures of objectivity designed to temper racial, ethnic and sectarian bias in media assessments of State policy (both domestic and foreign) that lie enmeshed in the web of such obscene and insanely evil terrorism.

The excess has forced the US, and the western democracies, to face the fact that Globalisation is not a one way yellow brick road, but has negatives as well as positives. One terrorist message is that the World Trade Centre, New York, was ripe for the picking. At a truly less raw time, the US will come to terms with the fact that the brutal harvest of the World Trade Centre and murder of thousands of its workers, will inevitably increase US GDP in line with capitalist economics.

The total US recovery cost will be used, in solely economic terms, as an input to the measure of aggregate increases in GDP, and the horror crashes may contribute more than a spike to growth.

Sadly, any diminution of the enjoyment of what little human rights are enjoyed today by poverty stricken civilian populations in the road of the US war on terrorism, will be not equally so count.

Freedom requires news about these grave issues of human rights, and their impacts for security, foreign policy and the economics of tragedy; and not more syndicated acts of religious, racial or ethnic hatred arising in race, ethnic and sectarian propaganda, parading as a free press and media.