There are advantages-a few-to being west of the Suez, as I find myself at the moment. And no, it's not consumer choice, the latest films or the taste of beer, although I must confess the latter is somewhat pleasant. No, I like being where I am at the moment because of the rich variety of information and comment in the British press-easily the most unfettered and lively of the world's newspaper scenes.

My first port of call, of a morning in London or Liverpool, is the old faithful Guardian. Unique among the major daily newspapers of the world, the Guardian is a non-profit organisation, run by a charitable trust and charged by the trustees with a mission to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. That's the way all journalism should be, but isn't. American newspapers-even the best of them-strive to a painstakingly ridiculous degree for something called "objectivity". What that means in practice is that reporters and editors go to ridiculous lengths to find the centre of any argument and then hover there like broken helicopters, shifting ever rightwards as fanatics and politicians move the goalposts from their end towards the erstwhile centre. Ask Ariel Sharon or George W Bush just how useful that sort of behaviour can be.

No such scruples are found at the Guardian. Not that the paper pushes polemic, far from it. Its commentary pages seethe with all reasonable sides of any argument, including the agonising of the principled supporters of Israel. But the Guardian's news-reporting manages to be both hard-hitting and sensible. It finds facts, looks at them with a human perspective and annoys the protectors of shibboleths of all sorts-be they lovers of the appalling sport of fox-hunting in Britain, or the apostles of purist market forces in all walks of life.

My Guardian story of the week is somewhat more disquieting, however. Amid the furore last week at the resignation of the Dutch government-faced with an official report detailing Holland's complicity in the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrinica in 1995-Guardian reporters uncover even more horrendous information. The Dutch report on Srebrinica is as long as any encyclopaedia, and its authors had unprecedented access to their country's intelligence information from the 1990s. So determined were the Dutch, apparently, to get to the bottom of the horrific events at Srebrinica.

Buried deep within the report is the revelation that the American Defense Department trained al-Qaeda-related jihadi groups as late as 1995, even cooperating in the airlift of weapons into the former Yugoslavia in defiance of United Nation sanctions. The report paints an eerie picture of the Pentagon cooperating with Iran-part of the "axis of evil" last time I checked-to help the Bosnians. The CIA and British intelligence were deeply wary of the whole thing and chose not to get involved. The Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency ran the operation.

On now to The Independent, a newspaper founded in the 1980s to live up to its name and to shun the usual fodder of Fleet Street, home of the British press. There I read an unbelievable counterpoint to the Pentagon-al-Qaeda story. Even as France digests the shocking result of its general election, the people of the French republic, snap up a little tome that purports to explain the entire 11 September episode as a function of the odd relationship between American generals and the jihadis. The book-according to The Independent-says a car bomb and not a plane destroyed offices and killed workers at the Pentagon on that horrible day last year. A series of photographs of the alleged impact area are an invitation to readers to spot debris or evidence that an aircraft full of fuel crashed into the walls of the world's largest office building. The Independent dismisses the book as French conspiracy-mongering but there's more than a hint in the paper's tone that there are still things that we "need to know".

And finally the Cumberland Times catches my eye, a local paper of the Lake District in northern England. The banner headline here proves that sanity reigns somewhere, that people at peace can get their priorities straight. "Furniture Store to Close, employees distraught." No mention of conspiracies and nobody is blaming the Americans. Yet.

Now I'm of to the pub with a copy of Private Eye, the world's greatest deflater of political and professional egos to learn all about who's lying to who. Who needs anti-corruption legislation when you have magazines like this one?