Donald Rumsfeld's Wax House of Horrors
Bodies of Uday and Qusay displayed
By Sally Pook
(Filed: 26/07/2003)
The American military has shown journalists the bodies of the men it has identified as Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, following "facial reconstruction" with mortician's putty to make them more recognisable.
Journalists visiting a morgue in Baghdad found that Qusay's uncharacteristic beard, seen in the original picture, had been shaved off, leaving only his traditional moustache. Uday's beard was still intact, but a facial wound had been repaired. Both bodies had suffered more than 20 bullet and shrapnel wounds each.
US forces partly rebuilt the faces of the bodies they claim are those of Qusay [left] and Uday Hussein
Photographs showing the original contorted, bloodied faces were published throughout the media yesterday but prompted relatively few complaints from the British public.
The Press Complaints Commission said it had received 16 calls and emails yesterday. But this "paled into insignificance" when compared with the immediate reaction to photographs of Marc-Vivien Foe, the footballer who died during a game last month.
However, 92 people complained to The Daily Telegraph, although about half of these said their chief complaint was that the pictures were used on the front page.
The BBC, which used the photographs on its main bulletins at 6pm and 10pm, also said it had received only a handful of complaints.
"We believed the pictures were an important part of reporting from Iraq that day," a spokesman said. "There was plenty of warning about their graphic nature. They were also shown on ITV and Sky and by other broadcasters."
Every national newspaper carried the photographs of Uday and Qusay Hussein yesterday, although The Independent chose to obscure them by overlaying them with text.
Simon Kelner, its editor, said he was in the minority among his executives yesterday in not wanting to use the photographs.
"I was not going to use them at all. But I thought that what we did recognised the iconic value of the pictures but without actually [allowing us to be] accused of taking any sort of voyeuristic pleasure in them, or being accused of doing the bidding of the American military.
"I broadly support the decision to release them in Iraq but I don't think they had anything other than a voyeuristic appeal for readers in Britain."
The Daily Mail, under a front-page headline "Barbaric?" was highly critical of the American decision to release the pictures, and in a comment piece compared the display of the bodies to "distasteful triumphalism".
The newspaper did, however, use both pictures in colour inside. "This grisly exhibition of the dead, no less than the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, are actions this fundamentally decent nation may come to regret," it said.
Only the Daily Mirror, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian used both photographs on their front pages.
The Times used only Uday's eyes on page one, printing both pictures inside the paper. In a warning on its front page, it said readers might find them disturbing.
A spokesman for The Guardian said it wanted to give readers the opportunity to make up their own minds as to whether the photographs showed Saddam's sons.
"We felt there was an overwhelming public interest in using them as the identity of the two bodies was central to the whole story. We took a great deal of care to use them only large enough, in our view, to be able to make a useful comparison between library pictures of Uday and Qusay Hussein in life."
There had been much debate in Washington over releasing the photographs as the United States does not usually publish pictures of dead combatants and objected when dead American troops were shown on the Al-Jazeera television channel during the war.
In America, television networks did not hesitate to show the photographs.
The major cable television news networks - CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC - broadcast the pictures repeatedly after release. In some cases, viewers were warned of the pictures' graphic natures in time to turn away.
In Europe, at least one newspaper objected. An editorial in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a liberal German daily, said: "We are talking about human dignity. Independent of the crimes that Uday and Qusay were accused of, the display represents a violation of the basic principles of the civilised world."
Link: (To view the neat wax figures)
telegraph.co.uk |
