History Prof Juan Cole yesterday put up a nice little summary of the relations between successive US administrations and today's extremist Islamic fundamentalists.

You can read it here:
http://www.juancole.com/2005_08_01_juancole_archive.html

Scroll down to August 2nd. There's nothing new in it, but pulled together, it makes interesting reading.

Alan Moore

The final sentence is striking:

'The American Right, having created the Mujahideen and having mightily contributed to the creation of al-Qaeda, abruptly announced that there was something deeply wrong with Islam, that it kept producing terrorists.'

Alan
From your link
quote
"Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man's honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner."

According to the Sunday Times, Steve Vincent, a happily married man, was not involved romantically with his translator and friend, Nooriya Tuaziz. Steven wrote a scathing article for the New York Times describing local Basra police carrying out religious/political assassinations. Two days later he and his interpreter were kidnapped by "policemen" in a marked police car and they were sunbsequently found shot. Steven died but his interpreter, Nooriya, is recovering in a Kuwaiti hospital.
It would seem to be more a political assassination than a religious one.

Fourbrick: The part you saw was added after I had posted. It isn't at all clear to me why this particular reporter was murdered. Cole suggests the "honor killing" explanation, and it's certainly possible, however, armed shi'ite militias operate freely in and around Basra -- the UK military force has basically given them responsibility for maintaining civil order -- and the reporter in question had already published at least one article highly critical of the Shi'ite fundamentalists who are running the south of Iraq generally and Basra in particular.

Alan Moore