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this was barbaric in my view,

Of course. But the awful thing is that if such acts harden US popular opinion against the war they will have had the desired effect.

Violence sadly can work - the IRA showed us that.

I don't think he was a soldier. Nevertheless your comment is totally correct.

A truly shocking event which as usual British news organisations sanitised to the point where they completely failed to convey the true horror of what took place. All we were allowed to see was the poor guy sitting there while those thugs read out their statement followed by an announcement that they then killed him.

The report on Euronews while obviously not showing the actual murder treated us like adults and made it quite clear just how terrible this killing was.

As soon as the guy reading the statement finishes he is shown pulling out a knife and places it to the neck of Nick Berg who has been pulled onto his side. The worst part is hearing a few seconds of him screaming.

Extremely harrowing stuff but war and terrorism is a nasty business and it's time the authorities stopped censoring images under the guise of taste and decency - this is something highly respected journalists John Simpson and Martin Bell have been complaining about for years.

Two ways of looking at this- how would you feel if it was one of YOUR relatives being disembowelled live on TV, albeit as part of 'news verite'?
Alternatively, if the public see the true horror of war, nightly on prime-time TV, they might be less willing to supprot a war next time round.

Perhaps I should have said 'demonstrated their opposition even more forcefully'.
Electronic warfare means soldiers are becoming increasingly insulated from seeing the real effects of what they do- a very bad trend.

> Perhaps the media should fight against dressing war up as a
> clean thing.
I think they've been doing this for a long time- but they also have to fight their own bosses' agendas on this one.

This was the realpolitik pre-invasion: Iraq, a traditionally unstable area (witness the Brit's earlier cock-ups in the then Mesopotamia), is held together, however unwillingly, by Sadaam, no nastier a dictator than many others (and compare pre-genocide Yuogoslavia, under Tito, and the aftermath- or even Afghanistan), but a solely local and perfectly 'containable' threat. As a bonus, he is wildly opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, and keeps the oil flowing in order to buy more arms from the West.

The US administration's conflation of 9/11 and Sadaam was fatuous, and that piece of flawed (flawed? cracked, more like) logic,Bush's weird sense of missionary zeal, and the US' largely unspoken desire for control of their oil-producers, has brought us to our present pass.