[Blarg]

I don't think this makes sense in some ways. Do you not show footage of bombs going off in Pearl Harbor because someone wonders if one of their loved ones is being shown or could be shown? Or even knows their loved one was killed in a ship that got bombed? Or other war footage? No. In fact doing so can be asserted, and I think fairly and successfully, as an attempt to pretty up a reality the terribleness and impact of which we need to acknowledge, not suppress or paint a prettier picture of. How about Katrina's wrecked homes and lives, or those that resulted from the Asian tsunami?

Now if the violent death being shown was of a a single individual, or at least if the guy was recognizable, that's different. But this was death in the thousands, and who knows who that guy was? He was representative of the full measure of the terror and sadness of the event, perhaps more clearly, at least to me, than any other thing I've seen, heard, or read about 9/11. The enormously sad, frightening, terrible things like that which can happen to an ordinary unsuspecting non-combatant to me says a lot of what terrorism is all about. Not just here, but everywhere. It's as powerful at conveying that as perhaps anything I will ever see.

Those factors combine to make this seem quite newsworthy to me. I have talked to many people who didn't even know people were leaping, on fire, to their deaths on 9/11. That kind of mental image can shake you up. And I think it's necessary to get a stiff shaking, as we think about the true consequences of the roles our country plays in the world. I applaud anything that makes people really take it within them and start to think hard about it.

Now, in those mid-east kidnapping and murders, because we know exactly whose head is being sawed off with a knife, and it's only one guy, I would agree that we don't need to see his individual torture and final death and degradation at the hands of his killers.