News Priorities: Torture

This is a recurring annoyance for me- news priorities. Today on Sky News, the top stories are, (as of publishing, in order of apparent news worthiness):

• 1: Michael Jackson’s Death Ruled ‘Homicide’
• 2: ‘Heroine’s Welcome’ For Gender Row Runner
• 3: ‘Legal Highs’ Banned In Drugs Crackdown

So in order, that’s Celebrity news, sports news (with added Schrödinger’s penis novelty), and drugs news. You might argue the drugs story is important, (although I strongly suspect it wouldn’t have got so high in the running order had an attractive blonde female student not died after taking it.

However, nowhere in this running order is the publication of the previously hushed-up CIA report that the US knowingly tortured, going far beyond acceptable bounds:

… including threatening an al-Qaida leader that his children would be killed and hinting to another suspect that his mother would be raped in front of him.

The report also documents staging a mock executions and strangulation, whilst on MSNBC last night, leaked information suggesting that the retracted parts of the report included accounts of unauthorised techniques that led to the deaths of detainees.

Given the strong likely hood that the UK Government was aware, and possibly complicit in these actions, this is serious stuff and it should carry more weight then Michael Jackson.