FC: Iraq posts its version of the Saddam-Dan Rather int'v online

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

---

Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 21:15:19 -0500
To: declan () well com
From: Brian McWilliams <brian () pc-radio com>
Subject: Iraq posts its cut of the Saddam-Rather interview

Hi Declan:

I thought you & Politech might be interested to know that the Iraq 
government today posted its version of the Feb. 24 Rather-Saddam interview 
on its web site. As you may recall, CBS had to rely on Iraq for the tape of 
the interview.

To my knowledge, this is the first "full" version of the interview 
available on the Internet -- it runs about 94 minutes. I believe it's also 
the first to include Saddam's full answers in Arabic, rather than English 
voice-over translations.

Unfortunately it's still not an uncut version of the interview, because 
most of the English translation has been edited out! As a result, the video 
probably isn't of much use to people who don't speak Arabic. On top of 
that, the streaming video and audio quality (34 Kbps) are quite poor.

But I think the Iraqi version provides an interesting counterpart to the 
video and transcript published at the CBS site. (For some reason, the CBS 
transcript does not include any text directly attributed to Saddam. 
Instead, the transcript consists of Rather's questions along with what the 
translator said in English on Saddam's behalf.)

Iraq's video is contained in three RealMedia files that are linked from 
http://www.uruklink.net, the home page of the Iraq government.

Since Uruklink.net can be flaky, and the admins didn't set up the files to 
stream properly, I have temporarily mirrored the three files at

http://www.pc-radio.com/rather-saddam.html

(Fwiw, there was no copyright information in the files' Clip Info area.)

Brian




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------