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‘FOR Staff Sergeant Simon Cullingworth, 36, and Sapper Luke Allsopp, 24, read Uday and Qusay Hussein.

Black Beauty and the beast

After Tony Blair’s professed ‘horror’ at Arab broadcaster al-Jazeera’s move to broadcast images of the bodies of the fallen British soldiers, and talk of a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, the Telegraph says that the US plans to release pictures of the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s killed sons.

And hold any thoughts that the shots might be triumphalist in any way.

George Bush has some words on the matter: ‘Now more than ever, all Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back’.

This is some news for those who thought the regime’s head was called Saddam and not Uday or Qusay.

But when Bush speaks his colleague Tony Blair can never be far from a microphone.

The Guardian duly hears Tony say that the killings are ‘a very important step forward’ and a ‘great day for the new Iraq’.

Surely a better step forward would have been to have arrested the pair and asked them where those weapons of mass destruction could be found, if there are any to find.

The second question could have asked them where ‘dad’ was.

But there was little chance of the Hussein boys walking out of their three-storey sandstone and red-tiled house alive, not after the Times sees their hideout ‘pulverised after five hours of bullets and shells’.

The papers then gives a version of the gun fight, in which US soldiers fire with ‘scattergun inaccuracy’ at the house, leaving the place and surrounding lime trees ‘shredded’.

It could be that the Americans have found those weapons of mass destruction – and learnt how to use them.

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Posted: 24th, July 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink