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How about MSNBC?

Islamic Web site shows beheading pictures
Iraqi militants claim Egyptian was U.S. military spy
NBC NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Updated: 8:38 a.m. ET Aug. 13, 2004

CAIRO, Egypt - An Islamic Web site posted still pictures Friday that purportedly showed Iraqi militants beheading an Egyptian man who they claimed was spying for the U.S. military.

There was no way to verify the authenticity of the images, and there was no record that the man, identified on the Web site as Mohammed Fawzi Abdaal Mutwalli, had been kidnapped. The pictures are apparently stills from a video on the site that could not be accessed. The date of the beheading was not given.

A second Web site, an English-language site that does not appear to have political links, carried the video of the beheading. Neither site gave a date for the killing. Story continues below ↓ advertisement

Police officials have said Mutwalli, 45, went to Iraq in 1986 to work as a car mechanic. He is single and comes from the village of Saqr in Dakahlia province in the Nile Delta, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials.

First reports came Wednesday Reports of the beheading had first surfaced Wednesday, and Egyptian government officials could not confirm it. Friday's edition of the opposition newspaper Ahrar quoted the Egyptian Foreign Ministry as saying it had received no news of Mutwalli's kidnapping or killing.

Until Friday, there had been no evidence of an Arab hostage having been beheaded by Iraqi militants acting for political motives. A Lebanese Muslim hostage, Hussein Alyan, was killed this year, but his kidnappers may have had criminal motives as they made no political demands to spare his life.

The images show three masked men standing in front of a banner carrying the name and golden-sun logo of Tawhid and Jihad, the group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that has claimed responsibility for the beheading of other hostages in Iraq _ including American Nicholas Berg and the South Korean translator Kim Sun-il.

The pictures showed a man, with a mustache and an Arabic robe, sitting in front of the three masked men with his hands tied behind his back. Captions on the pictures of the hostage say: "From the Arab Republic of Egypt. Mohammed Fawzi Abdaal Mutwalli. I was working as a spy with the Americans in Iraq."

A statement that appeared on the Web site alongside the pictures said: "This is the story of the Egyptian traitor spy."

"This criminal confessed"
"This criminal confessed that he was taking electronic devices from the Americans to throw them into the Mujahedeen's (holy warriors') locations so the Americans could identify the targets and raid them with planes and missiles."

The sequential pictures then show the man lying on the ground. A militant decapitates him with a knife and places his severed head on his back.

In the video shown on the second Web site, the militant who kills the hostage says in Arabic: "Today we are executing God's punishment on this criminal by beheading him."

The site shows only the video of the beheading, not the hostage's purported comments beforehand. It is an English-language site that offers recent beheadings in Iraq and Saudi Arabia as well as pornography.

The morality of killing Muslims who work for the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq has long been debated on Islamic extremist Web sites, but generally it has been considered justifiable.

A Turkish hostage, Murat Yuce, was shot dead by Tawhid and Jihad militants in an Internet video that appeared on Aug. 2. The kidnappers claimed he supported "the occupier."

Opinions have been mixed on taking Muslims hostage and beheading them, with some saying "fellow Muslims" should be spared and others saying they should be killed to deter Muslims from becoming "allied with the devil."

The alleged spiritual leader of Tawhid and Jihad, Sheik Abu Anas al-Shami, posted an audio tape on the Internet on July 28 in which he defended the killing of Muslims who work for "infidels" without opposition.

Link to source

Q.E.D.

Is the New Yorker mainstream enough?

Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh slams Bush at McGill address
By Martin Lukacs
The McGill Daily

“The bad news,” investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, “is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America.” The good news? “When we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day.”

Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government for nearly 40 years. Since his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which is widely believed to have helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War, he has broken news about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia, covert C.I.A. attempts to overthrow Chilean president Salvador Allende, and, more recently, the first details about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

During his hour-and-a-half lecture – part of the launch of an interdisciplinary media and communications studies program called Media@McGill – Hersh described video footage depicting U.S. atrocities in Iraq, which he had viewed, but not yet published a story about.

He described one video in which American soldiers massacre a group of people playing soccer.

“Three U.S. armed vehicles, eight soldiers in each, are driving through a village, passing candy out to kids,” he began. “Suddenly the first vehicle explodes, and there are soldiers screaming. Sixteen soldiers come out of the other vehicles, and they do what they’re told to do, which is look for running people.”

“Never mind that the bomb was detonated by remote control,” Hersh continued. “[The soldiers] open up fire; [the] cameras show it was a soccer game.”

“About ten minutes later, [the soldiers] begin dragging bodies together, and they drop weapons there. It was reported as 20 or 30 insurgents killed that day,” he said. If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.

“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”

Hersh came out hard against President Bush for his involvement in the Middle East.

“In Washington, you can’t expect any rationality. I don’t know if he’s in Iraq because God told him to, because his father didn’t do it, or because it’s the next step in his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program,” he said. Hersh hinted that the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq lies with eight or nine members of the administration who have a “neo-conservative agenda” and dictate the U.S.’s post-September 11 foreign policy.

“You have a collapsed Congress, you have a collapsed press. The military is going to do what the President wants,” Hersh said. “How fragile is democracy in America, if a president can come in with an agenda controlled by a few cultists?” Throughout his talk Hersh remained pessimistic, predicting that the U.S. will initiate an attack against Iran, and that the situation in Iraq will deteriorate further.

“There’s no reason to see a change in policy about Iraq. [Bush] thinks that, in twenty years, he’s going to be recognized for the leader he was – the analogy he uses is Churchill,” Hersh said. “If you read the public statements of the leadership, they’re so confident and so calm…. It’s pretty scary.”

{Here the MSM merely supports the people who behead, blow up, kidnap, torture and execute their victims by demonizing our guys. Again, one does not have to say "Beheading, it's great!". When one provides sound bites for Al Jazeera to quote as propaganda, they are supporting those doing the beheading. Speeches, articles and broadcasts have consequences. Your MSM love this guy.}