RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: Imagine being George W. Bush's "adviser on Islam". You are led into the Oval Office (having been checked for pretzels), then carefully clear your own throat and begin: "Ahem, Mr President, about those prisoners in Cuba. According to Islam, they really need to be rotated to face Mecca five times a day."
And thus are the Muslim nations of the world kept sweet and the wacky religious needs of those terrorists sensitively met.
Hamza Yusuf took on the advisory role with Bush in the period known to us in the media as "in the aftermath of September the 11th" (you can call it "recently"), and one suspects that near the top of his list of qualifications was his standard-American, non-threatening accent. Same adjectives apply to his ideas, as revealed in Heart and Soul - Brushes with Death (BBC World Service, Tuesday).
Yusuf was on the show because he was nearly killed in a car crash at 17, a "wake-up call" that turned him from plain old Mark Hanson, a suburban west-coast boy out "partying" with his friends, into a very nice, chat-show-friendly philosopher-sheikh, who rather enjoys peering at the constellations through his telescope and contemplating the wisdom of the universe.
It was not recorded what Yusuf's Islamic advice was on Bush's defence-spending increase this week.
The US military budget will rise by $48 billion; as James Lindsay of the Brookings Institute pointed out on Newshour (BBC World Service, Monday to Friday), this increase - just the increase, mind - is in itself more than the combined annual military spending of Russia and China. The total military spend in the US is now nearly $400 billion. Call it the W man's burden.
Careful American liberal that he is, Lindsay wasn't really prepared to criticise the spending himself, merely to suggest that some people (not many of them in the US, it seems, especially not politicians in a congressional election year, with money pouring into military bases and weapons factories in their districts) might be just a tad disturbed.
So when the Newshour presenter made a rather unexceptionable observation along the lines of: "$48 billion - isn't that enough money to feed the whole world?" Lindsay could only reply along the lines of: "Indeed, it's quite possible that some international observers will be making that very point."
The subject of international observers, experts at a range of thousands of miles, brings us to Kevin Myers. This column was, I believe, the first place in Ireland to carry a mention of Prof Marc Herold's database of civilian-death reports about US bombing in Afghanistan. Herold himself first discussed his work on the syndicated and Internetted Democracy Now! radio show in early December.
This week, my colleague Myers got around to trashing that research, based on the Myersian denigration of Herold as a women's studies academic, tee-hee (he is, in fact, professor of economics and women's studies at the reputable University of New Hampshire) and on the fact that many journalistic reports from a vast war zone are likely to be unreliable hearsay.
I've no argument with the latter point, and - like Herold - would only describe the professor's numbers as a first plausible attempt to shed light into the Afghan darkness, not as anything remotely resembling "gospel". However, there are two indisputable facts that lead me to believe that Herold's figure of 3,700 civilian deaths caused directly by US weapons up to the first week in December is probably conservative.
First, while it has perhaps not "indiscriminately" attacked civilians à la Hiroshima or Vietnam, the US has been happy to hit civilian targets where it says there are Taliban or Al-Qaeda people, and has also, of course, let some bombs fall astray and left unexploded bomblets littering the landscape.
Second, when Western journalists have managed to get to some sites of alleged civilian carnage, they've found that it's US military statements about events there that have been the bald-faced lies, not those accounts by any "worthless scoundrel" from the Taliban.
You don't need too many of these deliberate targets, operational errors and official lies for the numbers to approach and exceed those of the Twin Towers massacre. The correct Myers line about the inadequacy of media accounts also cuts both ways: there is bound to be quite a number of incidents that we've heard nothing at all about.
And the thousands who are starving in the snow because autumn aid couldn't move are all too real as well; Myers could have read about them last month in the Sunday Telegraph, which he also writes for.
Vincent "no relation" Browne has been making similar points, but on Wednesday's Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) he was getting forensic about another matter - and again demonstrating his unparalleled value as a digger behind the headlines.
Undoubtedly it was important that a conviction for involvement in a terrible atrocity was secured. Nonetheless, the media spin that emerged from the judgment on the first Omagh conviction was extraordinary: the low profile granted to the devastating conclusions about Garda misconduct in this case was disturbing.
Enter Vincent Browne, who, with the help of our Jim Cusack and a Limerick law lecturer, gave the best account I've heard about what went wrong in the investigation and what it might mean. Certainly there was no suggestion that all the gardaí involved were tainted by the misbehaviour of two, but a disquieting question remained: would a jury, as opposed to a set of judges, have convicted Murphy in the circumstances?