Beheading dominates media worldwide
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| Wed, 05-12-2004 - 11:54am |
Wednesday, May 12, 2004 · Last updated 8:25 a.m. PT
Beheading dominates media worldwide
By MICHAEL MCDONOUGH
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
LONDON -- Amnesty International condemned the videotaped beheading in Iraq of American civilian Nick Berg, an act which Prime Minister Tony Blair's office described Wednesday as "barbaric." But Iranian radio accused Western media of using the slaying to distract attention from the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
Images from the film showing Berg and his captors just before the killing dominated TV broadcasts and newspaper front pages in many countries.
A Kuwaiti newspaper ran a picture of one of the killers holding the severed head and some Greek TV stations showed the actual execution, although they obscured the head. The full video was posted on an al-Qaida-linked Web site.
"Such acts are unjustifiable under any circumstances and constitute a serious crime under international law," London-based human rights group Amnesty International said of the slaying. "Those responsible should be brought to justice in line with international standards."
The masked men who killed Berg claimed they were angered by coalition abuses of Iraqi prisoners. The video, posted Tuesday, showed them pushing Berg to the floor, severing his head and holding it up. His body was found near a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday, the same day he was beheaded, a U.S. official said.
The video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American," referring to an associate of Osama bin Laden believed responsible for a wave of suicide bombings in Iraq.
Blair's official spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the killing as "a truly barbaric act," adding: "There is no justification for this kind of act in a civilized world."
In Greece, government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said the execution provoked a "sense of abhorrence. ... The Greek government condemns violence wherever it comes from."
Most Greek TV stations aired segments of the video, some stopping just before the beheading while others obscured the head during the execution.
Other broadcasters in Britain, Spain, China, Germany, Italy and Belgium showed images of Berg kneeling on the floor with his black-clad captors standing behind him.
"What follows is too cruel to show," said Belgium's VRT public broadcaster, which aired the video up to the point where Berg was thrown to the ground after one attacker took out a knife.
Germany's mass-circulation Bild newspaper ran a picture of Berg's captors holding up his severed head, eliciting condemnation from the German Journalists' Union.
"Naturally, newspapers have to report on this horrible act," union chairman Michael Konken said in a statement. "But the human slaughter recorded in the picture does not belong in the media."
Iranian radio accused the western media of showing pictures from the video for propaganda purposes.
"As a result, the issue of Iraqi prisoners' torture has been totally ignored by these media," the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran said.
"The American authorities too, have entered this news-making propaganda. These authorities have described the killing method of the American national as loathsome, and implicitly indicated that the American troops were justified to torture Iraqi prisoners."
Arab media reacted cautiously to the execution, with some newspapers conspicuously playing it down or even ignoring it.
Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the big two satellite networks, aired edited snippets of the video. "The news story itself is strong enough," said Jihad Ballout, spokesman for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television. "To show the actual beheading is out of the realm of decency."
Egypt's leading daily, Al-Ahram, ignored the beheading Wednesday. An editor said the news came too late for the paper to confirm the video's authenticity with the U.S. government.
Newspapers in Syria, where the government controls the press tightly, did not report the execution at all.
Five of Kuwait's seven dailies published the report with photographs on their front pages. The other two published brief reports. The Al-Siyassah daily ran two photos, including one with a masked militant holding up Berg's severed head.
(mm-rb-jl)
cl-nwtreehugger
Community Leader: In The News & Sports Talk
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And the names, "Operation shock and awe" come on now, that's sensationalism if I have ever heard it.
You do realize that was coined by the government/military...not the media??
cl-nwtreehugger
Community Leader:
I am sorry but this sort of disgusted me...even though you say it doesn't negate the horror that happened to Mr. Berg you go on to say that he was there at his own accord for some money. You are sounding like those you have been argueing with this whole time. By saying that and adding that in which is so "irrelevant" makes you seem you are saying in an idirect way that somehow this is HIS fault. Also how do you know he went over there with $$$ signs in his eyes? That is a scary place right now and I don't think anyone would openly accept the invitation simply because he was gonna make a few bucks....Gosh I wish you wouldn't have said what has no relevance on any of the tragedy that he and his family encounterd. Tell me would you have said that to his parents face? "He refused to leave when he had the chance. He went over there on his own to make money. Sadly, it was a risk he decided to take."
And you chose to read it the wrong way with the wrong emphasis.
>"What is that supposed to mean?"<
Who asked me to explain my post?
Your position in your posts is how America is "doing it wrong" and simply choose to concentrate more on the poor Iraqi's then any American soldier whose life is lost.
No, I mourn every American soldier, I am just able to see the corrolation that exists between slaughtering thousands of Iraqi people = having to watch more American soldiers die.
James
janderson_ny@yahoo.com
CL Ask A Guy
James
janderson_ny@yahoo.com
CL Ask A Guy
I am what you may call a "right-wing" so that would include me in your statement no?
Family of Executed American Angry with U.S. Govt.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=5123275
Family and friends of the American civilian executed by Islamic militants are angry about U.S. government denials that their son was ever in U.S. custody in Iraq, a family spokesman said on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the body of Nick Berg, a communications tower businessman, arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, funeral director Carl Goldstein told reporters outside the family's suburban home in West Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.
Neighbor Bruce Hauser, who has acted as a family spokesman, said, "The community feels that if the government had Nick Berg in their control they should have sought to release Berg back to his home country."
"I have to believe that the American government had him in their custody. The Bergs knew that Nick was in their custody and the Bergs wanted the government to release him so he could come home," Hauser said.
On April 5, nearly two weeks after Berg disappeared in Iraq, the family sued in federal court in Philadelphia and named Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as responsible for their son's disappearance.
Berg was missing from March 24 until his release on April 6, when he told his parents he had been detained by Iraqi police in Mosul. He disappeared again on April 9 after telling his parents he was looking for a safe way out.
Dan Senor, spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, said on Wednesday that Berg had not been in U.S. custody before or after his arrest. But U.S. authorities in Iraq are nominally in charge of Iraqi police and the military.
VISITED BY FBI
Senor said Berg was visited three times by the FBI for possibly suspicious activities but determined he was "not involved in any criminal or terrorist activities."
A Web site video on Tuesday showed a masked man cutting off the head of Berg and said al Qaeda's leader in Iraq had personally carried out the killing in revenge for abuses against Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison.
Seven soldiers face charges in the prison scandal that exploded around the world two weeks ago with the publication of graphic pictures of mistreatment.
The video is similar to the one made in 2002 of the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Islamic militants in Pakistan. Pearl was forced to say before his killing that he and his parents were Jewish.
Berg, who was also Jewish, did not make any statement about his religion. He named his parents Michael and Suzanne and siblings David and Sara and said he was from Philadelphia.
The funeral director Goldstein said a memorial service had been tentatively scheduled for Friday at a West Chester synagogue.
Berg went missing on April 9 around the time dozens of foreigners were seized by guerrillas after U.S. Marines began a crackdown in the city of Falluja.
"I still hold him (Rumsfeld) responsible because if they had let him go after a reasonable time or given access to a lawyer we could have gotten him out of there before the hostilities escalated," Michael Berg told WBUR public radio station on Tuesday.
In the suburb where Berg grew up, he was remembered as a stocky, intelligent man with a crew cut who had worked in Africa before going to U.S.-occupied Iraq with the idealistic mission to help with reconstruction.
The execution unleashed impassioned reactions from sympathy for his family to a desire for revenge to anger at the Bush administration, to attacks on both Muslims and Jews.
A sampling of hundreds of e-mails reacting to Tuesday's beheading displayed a nationalistic impulse for quick revenge and a growing resentment of Muslims living in the United States.
Others directed their anger at the Bush administration, blaming the killing on the invasion of Iraq that has fueled the fury of Muslim fundamentalists against the United States.
I am what you may call a "right-wing" so that would include me in your statement no?
I would certainly include you in that statement considering you have repeatedly posted that we don't care about the American lives that are lost.
James
janderson_ny@yahoo.com
CL Ask A Guy
I was talking about a civilian...not someone who enlisted knowing that there was a risk that they would be assigned hazardous duty.
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If this continues to be a CONTEST of what's more horrid, then the inhumanity in BOTH situations continues to stay lost.
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So is sodomizing a prisoner with a light-stick.
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"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- B
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