DISGUSTING! Guardian online has a pic of Saddam hanging from a rope on its main page

[glee]

@Illuminatiprimus

glee Okay so you know the reality of working in government - so why did you spend your entire post saying everything I wrote was wrong simply because it wasn’t addressing the question “is the Guardian a tabloid”. I was trying to widen the discussion but clearly that wasn’t welcome.

I not only know about UK Government, but also about justifying claims.

You originally claimed the Guardian is a **‘pack of lies’ ** and compared it to tabloid newspapers.
So far you have come up with a complaint that your Department (which you admit hides its regular fuck-ups from the public) has been misquoted, followed by a retraction from the Guardian.
Pathetic.

You claim I spent my post ‘saying everything you write is wrong’.
I do find it appalling that someone like you is paid out of my taxes, and this is yet another example why.
I wrote that ‘I sympathised with your reason for staying anonymous.’ Please explain how this is compatible with your claim above.

I am all for widening a discussion. I asked you about Private Eye criticising your Department and how the Deepcut and other shootings affected your claim that we have ‘an almost entirely uncorrupt legal system’.

I also am waiting for an answer to your astonishing claims to be protecting us all from tyranny:

@glee

**You think that your efforts make the country wonderful because no-one gets killed for speaking out against the Government? **
Is that your job?
When did someone last get killed for speaking out against the Government? When did people die in the gutter under a previous administration?
When was it considered right to hurt other people?

In case you wonder why I get so annoyed, it’s because you originally had a fair point about whether the Guardian should have published those pictures, but have since made wild claims with no evidence and then treated us like a bunch of schoolchildren who don’t know about current politics.

[bonzer]

@e-logic

More criticism in the letters pages of the Guardian…

And their main leader today includes their justification for publishing the photo:

“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man,” wrote George Orwell after witnessing a hanging. Proximity to death, which shocked him as a police officer in pre-war Burma, has been brought to the world in a different form at the start of 2007 through the images and sounds surrounding Saddam Hussein’s execution, recorded on a camera phone and released on the internet. John Prescott, who yesterday described the manner of the dictator’s death as “quite deplorable” in an interview with the BBC, would not have been so outspoken had coverage been restricted to the official, edited and silent film.
Even in the still form used by some newspapers, including this one, after consideration, the second film has confronted the world not just with the brutish circumstances of Saddam’s death but the wider reality of present-day Iraq. Mr Prescott’s off-the-cuff response to it yesterday was authentic, just as Margaret Beckett’s initial statement that Saddam had been “held to account” (which Downing Street said came on behalf of the whole government) was inadequate. The new film of events at dawn inside the former offices of Iraq’s military security service has produced a more realistic understanding. The boundary between justice, however unpleasant, delivered by a responsible, sovereign government, and sectarian mob violence, was crossed in an explicit form …

The pictures are shocking because they serve as a graphic conclusion to the terrible story of the rise and fall of Saddam, a story in which this country has played a part. For all the talk of Iraqi sovereignty, the former leader was tried by a special tribunal shaped by western forces, and was kept by the US until the final hours before his hanging. His body was flown to Tikrit on a US helicopter and US embarrassment over the bungling of his death has put pressure on the Iraqi government to investigate. The mayhem revealed in the new film, like the wider mayhem across most of Iraq, is in part mayhem that we have created. Like the image of Saddam’s statue being toppled in 2003, and pictures of torture from Abu Ghraib prison, the illicit pictures of his death will come to define the conflict, evidence of just how disastrous the whole project has proved.

I’d still expect Ian Mayes, their Readers’ Editor, to discuss the decision and the reactions to it in more detail in his next regular piece.

[Wallenstein]

@bonzer

And their main leader today includes their justification for publishing the photo:

I’d still expect Ian Mayes, their Readers’ Editor, to discuss the decision and the reactions to it in more detail in his next regular piece.

FWIW, although I personally have no problem with publishing the image, I think the Guardian have misjudged the mood of their core readership on this occasion, and will have come in for some serious criticism.

Still… one of the benefits of reading a “proper” paper is that they treat their readership like adults, and don’t shy away from potentially unsettling content.

The downside to this approach is that sometimes they overstep the mark - rather that than the sanitised, two-dimensional approach adopted by the Torygraph and the other right-wing papers.

[Wallenstein]

For those who may have been following this thread - the Guardian’s Readers’ Editor has published an explanation of the decision to show the images.

Ian Mayes: Open door