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.
