This morning’s Observer column on the ‘citizen reporting’ of the London bombings. Excerpt

I find it astonishing – not to say macabre – that virtually the first thing a lay person would do after escaping injury in an explosion in which dozens of other human beings are killed or maimed is to film or photograph the scene and then relay it to a broadcasting organisation.

Especially when one realises what was in this ‘amateur’ material. Some of the cameraphone video clips sent to ITV News, for example, were so graphic as to be ‘unusable’, according to the channel’s editor. I haven’t seen the clips, so can only imagine what they contained.But I can guess: images of human beings blown to pieces, missing limbs, intestines, perhaps even heads – sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters whose privacy has been invaded in the most intrusive way, even as they lay dying.

I suppose there will be arguments about how this imagery and footage is justified because it conveys so vividly the horrors of which terrorists are capable. But I don’t buy it, and I don’t think broadcasting organisations should either.

I’ve had some feedback already from this, mainly from people saying that I shouldn’t blame the technology. I agree: the problem is what the technology reveals about human nature.

John Howkins drew my attention to this extraordinary interview in Time Magazine. Unfortunately, you need to be a subscriber (or be willing to pay $1.99 for a peep) to read the piece in full, but here’s a sample:

One day soon, this somber young man plans to offer up a final prayer and then blow himself up along with as many U.S. or Iraqi soldiers as he can reach. Marwan Abu Ubeida says he has been training for months to carry out a suicide mission. He doesn’t know when or where he will be ordered to climb into a bomb-laden vehicle or strap on an explosives-filled vest but says he is eager for the moment to come. While he waits, he spends much of his time rehearsing that last prayer. ” First I will ask Allah to bless my mission with a high rate of casualties among the Americans,” he says, speaking softly.

What’s striking is the discrepancy between the calm enthusiasm of this chap and the prevailing portrait in the British media of suicide bombers as carpet-chewing psychopaths. (Which is one reason why I was puzzled by reports that the CCTV footage of the suspected London bomber at King’s Cross station allegedly showed them laughing and joking even as they went to their deaths.) We’re never going to make headway against this until we try to understand what makes these people tick. (And even then, of course, we may not be able to do anything about them.) Grim realities.

Frank Rich, in a wonderful NYT Op-Ed piece on the scandal enveloping Karl Rove and the Bush White House.

WHEN John Dean published his book “Worse Than Watergate” in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse “gates” thereafter. But it’s hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.