text: Dyke demolition
  My heart leapt for joy when I read John Lloyd's superb demolition of Greg Dyke's rants that he was defending the freedom of broadcasters over the Gilligan affair (Business, last week). It was an excellent expose of the way Dyke has been trying to cover up for his appalling failure to do his job as director-general of the BBC.
  Dyke, who told managers at the BBC to run meetings with little yellow cards warning speakers to 'cut the crap', is hardly in a position to lecture Lloyd on journalism.
  I believe the one thing that makes a nonsense of Dyke's claims about defending the independence of journalism was his admission to Hutton that he did not send for a transcript of Gilligan's report until a month after it was broadcast. He brushed this aside by saying hindsight was a wonderful thing, but if he was so concerned to defend Gilligan he had to be sure of his ground: that was his responsibility.
  Gilligan made a very serious charge against the government: the sort of accusation that surely demanded that the DG take charge from the start and thoroughly prepare the BBC's response. Dyke has a nerve suggesting that Lloyd's well-researched and thoughtful book, What the Media are Doing to our Politics , is dishonest and fundamentally flawed. My guess is that the discussion it has generated is posing too many embarrassing questions for some of the so-called leading lights in today's media.
  Your article on the links between Abu Ghraib, private prison firms and UK prisons missed an important point. In 2003, Paul Bremer announced two new 4,000-bed prisons for Iraq costing of $400 million.
  Prisoners are likely to experience maximum technological surveillance and minimum interpersonal interaction. The firms' involvement is likely to further consolidate the developing prison industrial complex and normalise their role around the world.
  School of Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University
  The issue of whether nuclear radiation causes much more damage to human health than has so far been admitted has been muddied by petty accusations made by Professor Goodhead (News, last week), chairman of the Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters, which I set up.
  The issue is whether radionuclides inadvertently inhaled by those living near nuclear power stations are responsible for the known higher levels of leukaemia and cancer round nuclear installations. The nuclear industry says they can't be the cause because dose levels are too low. But that is based on the known effects of external bomb-blast radiation, not on the less well-studied effects of swallowing radionuclides which then discharge radioactivity into key body organs. The nuclear industry says the cause is 'population mixing'.
  After Chernobyl there was a big increase in leukaemias and cancers across Europe. Everyone agrees there is no other possible explanation for this than the nuclear fall-out. But as many studies have shown in Russia, Belarus, Germany, Greece, Scotland and Wales, the dose levels recorded were low. This indicates that received wisdom about the link between dose and cancer risk is wrong. The high rise in infant leukaemias can hardly be attributed to 'population mixing'. However, once that empirical evidence is acknowledged which shows that even very low radiation doses can cause big increases in cancer, then the explanation for the high levels of leukaemia and cancer round nuclear installations falls naturally into place.
  Neil Ascherson's review of the Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery credits the artist with too much perfection (Review, last week). When Mr Ascherson extols the 'sense of place and space' in the portrait of Pope Julius II, he seems to overlook that the quasi-heraldic acorns are unequal in width, and that the back of the papal chair is out of true. That Raphael was unaware of his solecisms would seem to follow from their appearance in the versions of the portrait in the Uffizi and the Pitti.