Wonkette

Last night, ABC and NBC News interviewed Getty photographer John Moore who (along with Farooq Naeem of Agence France-Presse) took the photos I published yesterday. During the interview, they showed one of the photographs I swore mainstream media wouldn’t show you (and the one the editors of the New York Times had the stones to put unedited on the front page above the fold this morning). But, did they really show you? Their still, and the original, after the jump.

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When something like today’s assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the suicide bombing of her and her supporters occurs and it actually makes the nightly news or the papers of record, you’ll usually see a photo like this, conveying the shock and horror of another observer to the carnage without showing you the carnage. This doesn’t show you that the photographer is standing in a pool of blood from someone recently deceased, or the mutilated bodies at this man’s feet because an editor somewhere has decided that you don’t need to see it to understand. Maybe they’re right, but having seen the raw photos, I don’t think so today.

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Reports are already in of Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al Qaeda’s commander in Afghanistan, taking responsibility for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan today. Al Qaeda already took responsibility for the first unsuccessful attempt on Bhutto’s life back in October. In some slight potential good news, they are claiming they did it just because they disliked her and her desire to root them out of western Pakistan and not as a favor to current PM Uncle Pervy before possibly attacking us (like they did for the Taliban back in 2001). Yeah, no, we’re not really sure that it makes us feel safer, but we’d it like to. [ABC News]

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today in Rawalpindi, Pakistan after attending a political rally. After someone pumped her full of lead, a suicide bomber detonated his load in her crowd of supporters, probably to slow emergency services enough to assure the shooting was successful. We would normally probably snark, but we also recall that Al-Qaeda assassinated Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud as sort of a favor/thank-you gesture to the Taliban on September 9, 2001 to ensure their continued protection, so we’re sorta just going to hide under the covers for a couple of days. [Washington Post]