sTmykal

As before with Sadam's sons, we're being pummeled with images of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's bloody shell. "Look" says the media "a corpse worth viewing! This makes us better than Aljazeera and their parading of war torn bodies and headless hostages across the screen on a regular basis." But it's not really enough to say that the bad guy is dead and to give proof of the demise. This little tid-bit shows up on Yahoo's main page as "important news".

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lived for 52 minutes after a U.S. warplane bombed his hideout northeast of Baghdad, and he died of extensive internal injuries consistent with those caused by a bomb blast, the U.S. military said Monday.

So... what you're saying is that he died in pain?

"It was very evident he had extremely massive internal injuries," Caldwell said.

Al-Zarqawi died 24 minutes after coalition forces arrived, he said.

Jones said the autopsy conducted Saturday showed that al-Zarqawi died from injuries to his lungs.

"Blast waves from the two bombs caused tearing, bruising of the lungs and bleeding," he said. "There was no evidence of firearm injuries."

So he didn't just die in pain, but probably a tremendous amount of pain. Why is this news? Unless... This is really a "cover our asses" story where they found the man, already incapacitated from the blast, but really wanted to make sure that he was going to die and helped him along his way - hence the "there was no evidence of firearm injuries" line. Hrm... hell - who knows. It just struck me as odd.