Thursday, May 13, 2004
The brutality of Mr Berg's murder and very public way in which he was killed has stunned America and horrified his family, who collapsed sobbing when they learnt of the video's existence... One could argue that the pictures of Iraqi hospitals full of children maimed and killed by American and British cluster bombs are, in their own way, equally horrific, but that would miss the point. Most Americans - even here in the middle-class suburbs of Philadelphia - never see, or never choose to see, images that portray the horror the war has wreaked on Iraqi civilians. But thanks to the same digital technology that ensured the pictures of the abuse at Abu Ghraib were dispatched around the world, Mr Berg's five killers carried out what was, in effect, a public execution.
