Amber Lyon:
Video of US-ally Syrian rebels committing brutal murder makes NY Times editors physically 'sick'!
‘These images ought to be a wakeup call for those who think Syria is headed for a better future under the rebels.’
The raw video was so grisly, and so barbaric, that the New York Times staffers who watched and edited it for online publication were made “physically ill,” according to the newspaper’s spokeswoman.
Shortly after the Times posted it in the wee hours Thursday morning, the video went viral, leading the influential Drudge Report, proliferating on Twitter, Tumblr, and other social-media sites, and dominating cable news and broadcast outlets. It also became a tricky problem for the Obama White House.
CNN Exposed, Emmy Winning Former CNN Journalist, Amber Lyon Blows The Whistle, Let me repeat that.CNN is paid by the US government for reporting on some events, and not reporting on others. The Obama Administration pays for CNN content
http://beforeitsnews.com/blogging-citizen-journalism/2012/10/cnn-exposed-emmy-winning-former-cnn-journalist-amber-lyon-blows-the-whistle-2444190.html
Syria Video Turns the Debate on U.S. Intervention
by Lloyd Grove Sep 6, 2013 4:30 AM EDT
The tape made ‘New York Times’ editors sick. Lloyd Grove on the footage of a rebel slaughter that’s upended talk of an authorized U.S. intervention.
The raw video was so grisly, and so barbaric, that the New York Times staffers who watched and edited it for online publication were made “physically ill,” according to the newspaper’s spokeswoman.
130905-nytimes-execution-tease
via The New York Times
Shortly after the Times posted it in the wee hours Thursday morning, the video went viral, leading the influential Drudge Report, proliferating on Twitter, Tumblr, and other social-media sites, and dominating cable news and broadcast outlets. It also became a tricky problem for the Obama White House.
The scene of Syrian rebels standing over seven soldiers of the Syrian regular army while the rebel commander recited a bloodthirsty poem—and pointing rifles and a pistol at the heads of their prostrate, shirtless, and badly beaten prisoners—was shocking enough. Times video editors tactfully blackened the screen as the rebels—who, just like the United States government, oppose the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad—began to execute the soldiers; the only indication of the slaughter taking place was a noisy fusillade of 10 seconds in length. Then an image flashed of the broken bodies in a mass grave.
The top of Thursday’s Times front page carried a five-column color photo of the ghastly scene, a screen-grab from the video, alongside a lead story about the horrifying footage. And, as is frequently the case, the pictures were far more powerful than the words.
‘These images ought to be a wakeup call for those who think Syria is headed for a better future under the rebels.’
“That why Human Rights Watch now has a multimedia department that extensively engages in the use of imagery as a way of conveying information and trying to increase the impact of that information,” said Carroll Bogert, executive director of external relations for the nongovernmental organization that globally investigates violations of international law and personal rights, including atrocities of war. “The tools are in the hands of everyone” who uses a smartphone and the Internet, giving them the means to document atrocities and share them with the world.
“What’s amazing to me,” Bogert told The Daily Beast, “is that the authors of [various crimes against humanity] often photograph themselves in heroic poses at the scene. That was true in the 1999 massacres of Kosovo, the guards at Abu Ghraib, and now the rebels in Syria. It’s the same kind of macho and bravado that leads the perpetrators and killers to boast about their acts—and it’s our job to make sure those pictures come back to haunt them.”
The video—which the Times reported was obtained a few days ago from “a former rebel who grew disgusted by the killings” and smuggled it out of Syria—is suddenly haunting the Obama administration, and it could not have surfaced at a more inopportune moment. For the past six days, President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and other officials have been waging an all-hands-on-deck public-relations and lobbying campaign to gain congressional authorization next week to punish the Assad regime with a military strike for its illegal use of poison gas against thousands of Syrian civilians, including young children.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for The Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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