As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting show, it’s a constant theme of mainstream journalism that America is never the aggressor always the victim.

As if.

“Optics!” hissed the NATO summit staffer. “Jesus Christ, optics!”

He was right to panic. It was Sunday evening, 6 sharp, the end of the first day of the NATO summit in Chicago. A swarm of global press was gathered around the convention hall’s lone display, a slick industry-sponsored video exhibit of NATO’s ballistic missile defense system. Any minute, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and his entourage would come sweeping out of a nearby tunnel for a tour the installation. It was the last photo op of the day.

There was just one problem. The televisions lining Rasmussen’s entrance path were turned to CNN and looping fresh footage of Chicago police raining nightsticks down on the skulls of protesters. The waiting press was glued to the screens, pointing and murmuring about the violence in a dozen languages. Also drawing attention was a very public huddle by NATO staff. “Shut off the damn TVs!” one of them said. “The optics might be worse if we shut them off now,” said another. But it was too late. Before a decision on the TVs could be reached, Rassmussen entered the hall trailed by a gaggle of attaches and military men. The world’s cameras snapped away.

It reveals much about NATO and the media coverage of the Chicago summit that images of protest are “bad optics,” but not what came next. What came next was this: Rasmussen received a guided tour of the missile defense exhibit not by senior NATO military officials, nor by the scientists developing the technology, but by senior executives from Raytheon and Thales, two of the program’s leading private contractors. Under the gaze of the world’s media, the three men strolled through the bright illuminated walls surrounding a life-size interceptor missile. Each was titled for aspects of the system — “Potential Future Capabilities,” “Interceptor Systems,” “Land and Sea-based Sensors” — and contained photos of the technologies in action. Below each photo was the logo of the company holding the contract. Raytheon and Lockheed were most common, followed by Boeing and the French firms MBDA, Thales and Astrium.

“If you are looking for a case study on defense industrial interests shaping NATO policy, missile defense is a good place to start,” says Ian Davis, the London-based director of NATO Watch and the organizer of a recent NATO shadow summit in Washington, D.C.

Standing not far from me and watching with pride was Linda Stanfel of Sterling Strategies, a boutique public relations agency contracted by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency to promote missile defense. Stanfel was very proud of the installation, which she had put together with contributions from the system’s contractors. While waiting for Rasmussen’s arrival, I overheard her chatting with Raytheon vice president for business development Thomas Vecchiolla. “Back in the 1980s [the Pentagon] used to spend all this money on disaster management, correcting everything the press got wrong about missile defense,” she said. “This is the kind of thing we need to be doing more of.” She was upset that Northrop Grumman had declined to contribute to the installation. “They’re the only ones who don’t seem to get it,” she said with a frown. But the joke was on anyone but Northrop Grumman, who left Chicago with a $1.7 billion deal to lead the 13-nation team producing a new Alliance Ground Surveillance System.

Iraqi maternity hospitals are seeing a new born trend: children given “neutral” names that don’t reveal their family’s religious or political affiliations. Because in Iraq, having the wrong name in the wrong place can still get you killed.

On a Tuesday in mid-May the office at the entrance to the Salam Hospital in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul is full of people. This is the office where births are registered and it’s located next to the delivery and operating rooms, near the main entrance.

A male clerk there is doing his routine work: he receives forms on which new born babies’ times of birth, sex, fathers and intended names are written. And this clerk has noticed a significant trend: parents are giving their newborns names that don’t give away which sect of Islam their family belongs to, Shiite or Sunni Muslim.

They’re calling their children names that are either neutral – so it’s impossible to say whether the child’s family is Shiite or Sunni – or they’re being christened with totally new monikers that have no such history, the clerk says. “And people are giving their newborns names I’ve never heard about before,” the clerk points out, “like Inaq and Qasim.”

This news is therefore unsurprising. It’s how these people see the world; PR is a substitute for human rights. It pays far more, too:

He has produced four volumes of diaries, become a prolific blogger, starred in a one-man show, appeared on the after-dinner speaking circuit, raised funds for charity and followed his beloved Burnley FC around the country.

Meanwhile, in Australia Serco is loving the increase in asylum boats. The more the merrier. Yesterday’s Australian records the screams of joy from the Serco board-room:

The private contracting company that runs Australia’s immigration detention centres has reported record profits, as the number of asylum-seekers rises to levels not seen in more than a decade.

New figures show Serco’s revenues reached $692 million last year, up from $369m in the previous calendar year.

While many companies in Australia are doing it tough, Serco reported a $59m profit after tax, close to a 50 per cent increase on its $40.5m profit in 2010.

Serco Australia is part of the global Serco Group, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The company renegotiated its contract with the Department of Immigration late last year after an increase in the number of detention centres.

It signed a $370m five-year contract in June 2009 to manage seven immigration detention centres and provide transport services.

There are now more than 20 centres and Serco’s contract is worth $1 billion.

With reports yesterday that the number of asylum-seekers was returning to the levels last seen in 2001, Serco is likely to further profit from the surge in arrivals.

Rivalling the $1bn detention centre contract is Serco’s $1.3bn contract with the West Australian Department of Health to provide services to the Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth.

The company employs 3564 people and as well as running immigration detention centres also provides “systems engineering work and related services” and “equity investment management”. It has $81m in cash and cash equivalents on its books, borrowings of just $7.6m and net assets of $157m.

Serco also has a five-year contract with the Queensland Department of Corrective Services managing the new South Queensland Correctional Centre in Gatton. Serco values that particular deal at $100m.

The company also has a $500m contract with the Royal Australian Navy.

Sure, it took an extra year or so, but Northrop Grumman has finally penciled in the first flight of the giant surveillance airship it’s building for the U.S. Army. The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle — a football-field-size, helium-filled robot blimp fitted with sensors and data-links — should take to the air over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the first or second week of June. K.C. Brown, Jr., Northrop’s director of Army programs, crows: ”We’re about to fly the thing!”

It’s fair to say Northrop and the Army are crossing their collective fingers for the flight to actually take place, and smoothly. Giant airships promise huge benefits — namely, low cost and long flight times — but it’s proved incredibly hard to build and equip the massive blimps with military-grade sensors and communications … and fill them with helium.

The Air Force’s highly computerized (and potenitally missile-armed) Blue Devil 2 airship recently ran into integration problems, forcing the flying branch to cancel a planned test run in Afghanistan. (Although the service had never been too hot on airships in the first place.) The Navy meanwhile grounded its much smaller MZ-3A research blimp for a lack of work until the Army paid to take it over. The LEMV seemed to be losing air, too, as Northrop and the Army repeatedly delayed its first flight and planned combat deployment originally slated for the end of 2011.