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May 13, 2004
THE LOOKY-LOOS, THE PENTAGON, THE PIX
CNN reports: The Malaysian company hosting "the al-Qaeda-linked Web site that first posted the video of Nicholas Berg's beheading shut down the site today "because it was drawing too much traffic." By now, of course, the decapitatiion nightmare can be seen elsewhere on the Internet.
In the meantime, the Defense Department is still deciding whether to let the general public see the Abu Ghraib photos that it screened privately for the Congress. The inclination to hold them back strikes Jimmy Breslin as worse than dumb.
In a column headlined "The ultimate reality show," he writes, "At that hour," when the prison photos were being screened in a secret room in Washington, "people everywhere in the country were looking at an American being beheaded, in live action. And on Internet or television screens or on trains and buses where people held cell phones with video screens.
"The prison pictures they [the politicians] watched in such secrecy belong to the public whose taxes pay for this war. These utter fools in suits and uniforms, some smooth-faced liar from the Pentagon, or a general who should be in a grand jury himself, try to control the free speech of the nation and commit a war crime. They also show complete ignorance of today's life."
Breslin wonders, too, how anybody can watch the TV reality shows, which are programmed "in prime time for the Low IQ brigades, when real reality is good action footage of our team torturing Iraqis and their team decapitating an American?" That irony also works in reverse.
Posted by at May 13, 2004 03:54 AM
