Personally I think the leadng lips of the party of the Seditious & Sleazy (a.k.a. Democrats) and their loud mouthed brethern, the league of the leftie/liberal parasites (a.k.a. the sad excuse for what passes as news media today along with their ilk in academia) had a lot to do with the beheading of Nick Berg...

These asshats with their clueless and asinine whining about how the war was wrong, Bush is in a quagmire and so on and so forth ad nauseam gave added impetus to the terrorist towel heads to commit the insane act of hacking away a human head and showing it on the video tape...

These terrorist towel heads know we have some weak, spineless punks supposedly in leadership positions who will cave at the slightest notion that there might have to be some serious investement in the was against terrorist towel heads...

So lemme get this straight - William Lawson is saying that the Army is saying the Army is getting what it deserves because it is prosecuting the perps? That this should have been covered up? That, in effect, the bad publicity is payback by the perps for having been caught and prosecuted rather than patted on the head and send to bed with a cookie?

Greyhawk - Col. Hackworth is reporting on WND.com that he was the conduit that delivered the pictures to the Sixty Minutes II team.

General Myers tried to prevent the murder of this hostage and was accused of suppressing the abuses at Abu Ghraib for his trouble.

It's certainly plausible that the murder wasn't caused directly by the Abu Ghraib story, but the reaction by our politicians certainly had to encourage the terrorists that they'd get maximum press from this horrific "PR stunt." If it's true that defense attorneys released the Abu Gharib photos to the press, they should be prosecuted along with their clients and given much longer sentences.

Our media can't seem to realize that they're playing puppets for the terrorists. Their "ethics" don't say anything about that. If people get killed, well it's just the price of the peoples' right to know. They just have to have those pictures.

In either case, whether Myers or Hackworth were the source, this is the reason they should not have been made public. Because it would simply give the enemy an excuse to do exactly what they just did, for the reasons they just did.

Thanks Seymore, and 60 Minutes, congratulations on getting someone killed. I hope you are pleased with yourself.

AST is spot on! Berg's murder was an entirely predictable response to the display of the "abuse" photos. The safety of prisoners in terrorist hands should have been the first consideration, but of course, the American media recognizes no such constraint on "the public's right to know." Every American should communicate his/her outrage to Hackworth (a piece of s**t), Hersh (ditto), and CBS (multiple dittos).

Follow-on thought: Any bets on who connected Gary Myers to Frederick? Uh, Seymour Hersh??

At least Greyhawk makes sense here when talking about how Sy Hersh may be presenting the defense case, an advocacy position that is inherently biased. Still, it was CBS's 60 Minutes that first broke the story.

Still, I'm disgusted by the comments of russ and others here.

All this whining and hand wringing over the media is ridiculous. Terrorists killed Nick Berg plain and simple, not the media. Censorship is unrealistic given modern technology. Quit bitching and learn how to deal with the modern media environment. Turn a weakness in to a strength.

Excellent comments natz.
One point that can be made regarding ant-war postions and the horrible Nick Berg execution. It was a brutal, horrendously awful piece of work by murders. We and other countries together lost some 3000 murdered people 9/11 by premeditated murder.

Since Bush's war was started in Iraq, maybe 10,000 Iraq civilians have been killed and given a normal injuried to kill ratio many times more Iraqi injured. As civilians they are innocents to various degrees, but young children and babies are pure. How many innocents have been killed so far by the coalition military in the conduct of Bush's war?

My queston for thought, is what difference does it make to the person or his/her family how they died, gruesomely like Nick Berg or gruesomely like Iraqi innocents bombed, shot or blasted to death while being bloodily mutilated with arms, legs, feet and hands blown or shot off and thrown into the dust and rubble, heads decapitated from mortar blasts and shrapnel and other ordinance, and bloody bodies ripped open and guts or brain spilled out? They are all dead, Nick Berg, 3000 9/11 souls and many thousand Iraqi civilians.

If it is not legal, at the very least Bush's war is very unwise and a black mark on America that won't go away soon, Too many people have died as a consequence with no proper and moral justification for the Bush war.

I think that Bush and the other cowards (who could have chosen to fight for America in VN, but chose not to) and warmongers were caught flatfooted after being warned of the danger from OBL and doing nothing substantial about it. They were not paying attention to the business at hand, i.e., the reality of OBL's threat. When caught with thier collective "pants down," they reacted in a panic with fury and terrible, faulty judgment to get back at OBL and the Arabs. Panic because if Bush did't do some thing dramatic he would lose his presidency. Hence war. It was ill advised in the first place, but also it was rushed and ill prepared as we are now seeing.

Why should Bush have more and more people killed to help him try to win the election? Why should our soldiers be put in harm's way for a partisan political purpose? Fortunately I am too old to be taken into the military and my two children are too old to be drafted, but if it were otherwise I believe I would be asking Bush, why I and mine would have to fight for his benefit if I would not even vote for him.

"Terrorists killed Nick Berg plain and simple, not the media."

But Nick's dad said is was George Bush's sins!

pete - "maybe 10,000 Iraq civilians have been killed"

I have two problems with this. First, how should we compare the systematic killing of Iraqis under the more orderly dictatorial regime of Saddam with the less stable rebuilding of Iraq? If Saddam would have murdered more Iraqis in the past year, does it make it ok? If remnants of Saddam's regime and foreign Islamists are responsible for the deaths of the majority of those 10,000 is it ok? Is this the "At least Hitler made the trains run on time." critique?

How many died in the Kurdish and Shia uprisings after the first Gulf War fighting for the opportunity they have today? How should we compare that number with your 10,000?

If I'm currently serving in the active duty military and support this war and Bush's re-election, does it then make your criticism of "cowards" moot? If I would support what we are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, under the same conditions, even if Gore was President or if Kerry becomes the next President does it make your opinion moot, or expose it as blatantly hot air partisanship?

Maybe for some of us, it's not about Bush. Maybe for you it's all about Bush?

Tim:

Have a meaningful dialogue with you here would be interesting.

As to your first problem, my comments were not addressed toward Saddam's conduct. Are we Americans, who had a choice to start a preemptive war or not, are able to see the horror of war for all civilians whether Americans or Iraqis. I am not addressing "what if" as if we did not invade Iqari. What evidence do you have that foreign Islamist or leftovers from Saddam's regime would have been responsible for the deaths of a majority of Iraqi civilians deaths since the start of the Bush war? Even if they were, there must have been thousands of other civilian Iraqis killed by the coalition. Certainly those dead people count for something, as much as Nick Berg in terms of human life. War kills. While the situation was gruesome and unforgivable in Berg's situation and his is connected to US by nationality is his beheading any more gruesome and noteworthy than watching a Iraqi child's head being splattered all over the place by a coalition troop bullet or a piece of shrapnel? My comment was not about "trains running on time" or Saddam.

The Kurd and Shia uprisings has everything and nothing to do with my previous post. Yes, people get killed in war. But the killings in those uprisings only reflect that some leaders/dictators will kill when angry and vengeful and scared of losing their hold on power.
If fits Bush pretty well.

There is no comparison of the uprising with the Bush war as to the reasons for having occurred.

I don't think there is any circumstance that my comments would become moot, certainly not under you described conditions. I am anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush.

It is about Bush for me,he is a bad President, leader and Commander-in-Chief. It is not just about the war, but also about the taxes, the debt we are incurring, the costs of this wrongful war, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft and the slippery slope he wants to lead America down to restrict and remove the civil rights we now enjoy, the environment, a type of government new to America, one that uses the big lie technique and "the black is white" means of deceiving the public, the overall administrations deceptions, lies and double talk and Bush's at the top of the pyramid incompetence and deceptions.

pete:

I'm glad to have the opportunity to discuss this with you. I'll try to answer each point.

If I understand your first point, we should judge the impact of our action in Iraq seperate from the context of what happened there before 19 March 2003. I'm not sure you can intellectually argue from that position unless you take a purely isolationist or pacifist stance. If you are an isolationist or pacifist, then there is no way you would find this war justifiable.

I did not, and still do not, see this war as preemptive. It has been my opinion that Iraq has been in serious violation of our cease fire agreements for a decade. I was a supporter of regime change in 1991 during the uprising by the Shia and Kurds which clearly violated the cease fire. I was a supporter of regime change after the 1993 assassination attempt. I wanted regime change after 1995, when Kamel defected providing proof of Iraq's deception and continued efforts in it's WMD programs. I was supporter of regime change in 1998 when the Clinton administration was debating a response to Iraqi hostility and violations. So, I was pretty much in the frame of mind that we had the option of calling the cease fire a joke and cutting our losses on the whole containment/sanctions/oil-for-food fiasco with any of those provocations. If North Korea starts taking frequent shots at us across the DMZ, I think we should pop their cork as well.

I also think preemptive is misused in this case. This was not a pre-emptive war in the sense of foiling an imminent attack. It was never a case of intercepting the Japanese navy in the Pacific on 6 Dec 1941. Bush did quote Kennedy from October 1962, describing the threat that the USSR posed during the Cuban missile crisis. You can certainly debate whether Iraq, the combination of Iraq and terrorists, or the geo-strategic position of Iraq is analogous to nuclear-capable ballistic missiles (and warheads as we learned later) in Cuba.

I also think a serious consideration of the war on Iraq depends on whether you took a maximalist, minimalist, legalistic or masochistic point of view after 9/11. Fallows describe the maximalist and minimalist views in The Atlantic Monthly, which I've described here.">http://www.freerepublic.com/~optimisticallyconser/#attack">here. A legalist reflects the tit-for-tat point of view that is comfortable with the regime change and killing in Afghanistan but not with Iraq. The masochists were trying to figure out how to please the sadists that committed 9/11.

I was definitely a maximalist. Taking down Afghanistan was a good start, but a war on terror eminating from the Middle East was meaningless if we stopped there IMO. Iraq was on the top of my list from a legal, military and geo-strategic point of view.

Most of our wars/conflicts have been fought by choice - including the European campaign of WWII. I've described above the reasons for this having occurred.

Next I'll discuss casualties.

Saddam is estimated to have been killing between 47 and 548 Iraqis per day. In addition, according to the Iraqi Body Count database, a majority of the 10,000 civilians killed were victims of Iraqi crime and anti-coalition attacks against civilian, NGO and other non-military non-coalition targets.

It's a hypothetical and moral question. If someone had killed 5,000 Hutus in the beginning of the Rwanda massacre, but ended it before 800,000 had been killed (not knowing that 800,000 would have been killed) would that have been a good thing?

If thousands of civilians have been killed by direct coalition action, or even indirect action, but by ending sanctions, improving hospitals and medical care, ending Saddam's mass murdering "justice" system, etc., the death rate drops from 6.02/1000 in 2002 to 5.84/1000 in 2003, is that a good thing?

I've been asked about the difference between "collateral" deaths, sometimes in comparison to people who target and kill civilians.

There is no comparison. A coalition soldier that aims at and kills a non-combatant (your child) is no better than the terrorist that kills civilians. One of the reasons that I do not favor giving insurgents/terrorists that use the civilian population and buildings for cover Geneva Convention/Protocols protection is because those treaties were specifically drawn up to protect those combatants that protect civilians and to leave combatants that endanger civilians unprotected.

I've learned the world is unkind and unfair in the ways lives are taken. From people taking machetes to each other, to murdering women and children for honor, to just being at the wrong place at the wrong time. We should never ask our military to fight with the intent of killing unarmed civilians. We should never fool ourselves into believing we should never fight because unarmed civilians may die as a direct or indirect consequence of killing those that would try to kill them.

So far, this war has not escalated in brutality that all other wars have.

I have no problem with you voting against Bush for whatever reasons - real or imagined.

Forgive me if I don't buy into the imagined ones or leave them unchallenged.

Let the light shine in!

pete -

The (Im)morality of war: http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000386.html