"Have you left no sense of decency?"

A few days after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the New Statesman ran a notorious editorial in which it asked whether the bond traders murdered at the World Trade Center had been "as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants". Its answer: "Well, yes and no."

There are many things that could be said of this. Jonathan Freedland wrote some of them in his Guardian column. The timing stank; the tone was gross; the hypothesis the editorialist assumed was itself, in Freedland's delicate understatement, "shaky at best". I would put it slightly differently. A man who can write such a sentiment, and at such a time, merits the question directed to Senator Joseph McCarthy by his nemesis Joseph Welch: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

That editor (Peter Wilby) has gone. His replacement, John Kampfner, has distinguished himself by giving the cover story of this week's edition to John Pilger, illustrated with a picture of a rucksack and the title "Blair's bombs". Not al-Qaeda's bombs, mind: Blair's bombs.

Pilger is Pilger: a man who identifies in the Bush administration "the Third Reich of our times", and whose career as an investigative journalist has encompassed such triumphs as 'buying' a five-year old girl in Thailand to illustrate a documentary on child labour only to find he'd been duped by a hoaxer. The responsibility for a cover describing the bombs that killed 56 people in London a fortnight ago as "Blair's" lies not with Pilger but with his editor. As a friend and broadsheet political columnist observed to me this afternoon, that cover alone requires Kampfner's resignation.

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