Picture it: sullen Taliban prisoners pick through the handy stash of guns and grenades in their fortress-jail. An argument breaks out, voices are raised, we hear a shout in Arabic, which translates roughly as "Oh yeah? Well I can whip the infidel imperialists with both hands tied behind my back!"
And thus, we must surely be meant to believe, was born the "uprising" of the Tied-Up Taliban of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Since the triumphant entry into Kabul, the media credulity about claims from the US and Northern Alliance side has turned into full-fledged gullibility. And nowhere was that more evident than in the reports of the "prison riot": early in the week, RT╔ radio was happy to relay Alliance claims about the events as if they were eyewitness gospel, when everyone I know who heard the story said "yeah, right". (Some of us even managed to recall the "take no prisoners" schtick from the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, last week.) Even when Amnesty International started raising questions about the alleged riot, RT╔ wasn't attaching any caution about the unverified, one-sided nature of its reports.
On Wednesday, journalists visited the scene, where an AP photographer - straying beyond the perimeter indicated by General Dostum - came upon scores of very dead, very very tied-up Taliban (with Alliance men running around cutting their bonds). Such has been the success of the demonisation process that membership of the Taliban is widely understood in the media to be a capital offence (indeed, October's first days of bombing established that Mullah Omar's young children were legitimate targets), and there was all too little wimp-talk of the Geneva conventions.
One of the visiting hacks at the fortress, the BBC's Angus Roxborough, made it clear on Wednesday's 5 Live Drive (BBC Radio 5 Live, Monday to Friday) that there had definitely been some sort of fight here, to be sure. How else to explain the dead Alliance soldiers, and that awkward "US government employee" (confirmed as CIA during Roxborough's report)? Roxborough also unintentionally confirmed that most Western journalists will be loyal to the party line even when there isn't one: he readily speculated, way beyond what the CIA would ever do, about what a US spook was doing at the prison, and it was ever so nice.
"He would have been providing intelligence to the Northern Alliance, and, uh, would have been providing signal intelligence to guide US air strikes." The more likely prospect that the dead CIA man was there to provide electric shocks to Taliban testicles seems never to have entered Roxborough's mind.
Ironically, a handful of thoughtful, memory-equipped print reporters have been trying to check out the claims of US-inflicted civilian casualties made by the Taliban during the earlier bombing campaign - when they were delivered to us coated with Western-media "health warnings". And what do you know? They turn out to be horribly true, though that hasn't stopped the likes of Joe Duffy on Liveline (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) from waffling about a war of surgical precision. Joe has yet in my hearing to plumb the depths explored by Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday), who told us Tuesday how the marines were arriving from off "the coastline of Afghanistan". (We await Gerry's excited eruptions about the battle for strategic ports - maybe we can discuss it at my friend's beach house in Cavan.)
Duffy hasn't exactly been a model of surgical precision himself: his verbal battering of peace campaigner Margaretta D'Arcy on Tuesday included the earnest but completely inaccurate assertion that "the Taliban ran all the NGOs out of Kabul". I like opinionated, feisty presenters, but perhaps they could try to know what they're talking about the odd time.
Duffy's feistiness also let him down when pro-war callers were brought in to bash D'Arcy. My favourite had to be the man who said: "Joe, I am a complete pacifist. But there are some situations when you just totally, utterly have to use violence." This was a caller who got a good long run at knocking "anti-Americans", but Joe never got around to asking him if his use of that phrase was as surgically precise as his definition of "pacifism".
So have the last three months, with the diligent efforts of censorious politicians, presenters, producers and editors in the Irish media, put paid to the concept of this country speaking to the world with a genuinely distinct public voice? Ah, who knows. (Let's give 'em a chance to compensate with reasonable coverage of this afternoon's Dublin peace march.)
Certainly we can't draw any conclusions either way from the fact that BBC Radio 4 has done another one of its picturesque Irish commissioning projects. All this week, Afternoon Reading (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday) has consisted of new Irish short stories - from Dermot Bolger, Marian Keyes, Frank Delaney, Maeve Binchy and Maurice Leith.
Bolger's Let's Dance on Monday started with a striking passage from an equally striking perspective for anyone trying to locate Ireland in the global village of 2001, as a woman's voice reads: " 'Shake it again,' I tell my great-grandson. Age 6, he's thrilled that someone so ancient as me should love the snow-globe souvenir he chose for me on holidays in Spain. Cahal places the globe on the computer as his father instructs . . ."
Shake it, indeed. Any assumption from the story's title or its opening words that we might be in rockin' Jerry Lee Lewis territory are apparently dispelled when the narrative quickly leaps into an early-20th-century flashback - the old-woman narrator, Eva, suddenly remembering herself as a posh 12-year-old picnicking with family and friends on a Donegal beach. But what do you know. Even though the dancing that eventually ensues is of a sedate sort, this story has shades of the piano-stomping "Killer" in other ways: it's positively packed with pubescent sexuality. Young Eva is what her mother calls a "virago", and her days and nights are filled with repressed and conflicted urges directed at her brother, Art. (The latter is presumably named for the benefit of future Bolgerian scholars . . .). Eva is never explicit, but this is really an Awfully Nice story of incest fantasies transmuted into images of violence: Eva reaches crisis point after she sees Art splattered with blood that is shed during the repulsive death agonies of a shoal of misdirected mackerel trapped against Killybegs pier. Yuck. I think there might be some symbolism there all right, and we'll permit Bolger the heavy indulgence. It's too bad all our blood-splattered images this week weren't in the name of Art.