Sunday, January 07, 2007

Mobile phone captures Iraq's cruelty

By Patrick Jackson and Olivia Macleod

The phone camera footage of Saddam Hussein's execution may prove to be the most controversial media disclosure from Iraq since snapshots of US guards abusing prisoners inside Abu Ghraib were published in 2004.

While those pictures were revealed in the US media, the Saddam video appears to have been a purely Iraqi affair.

As foreign news organisations downloaded it from the internet, it was already being swapped among ordinary Iraqis on their mobile phones.

The Iraqi government's own, edited version, was undermined by the ugly audio of the shouted sectarian Shia slogans.

The mobile phone, that symbol of freedom and independence, had come into its own in Iraq in the most dramatic way.

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