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Length: 3:44
BRENT SADLER, CNN
CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In a Baghdad hotel room,
this Western journalist views horrifying video sent
to him by an Islamic insurgent group in Iraq that
carried out a recent terror attack.
MICHAEL WARE, "TIME": Oh, my God. I have not seen
this. They've been filming this stuff from the
beginning.
SADLER: Michael Ware, an Australian reporter working
for "Time" magazine, is walking a professional
knife-edge, an unlikely go-between for anti-Western
militants.
He's viewing what purports to be the gruesome attack
that killed four American security contractors in
Fallujah some three months ago, when the bodies were
dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge.
WARE: This video is straight from the Mujahideen.
This is the Blackwater killings. They talk about
planning it.
This is the seventh tape I've received in the last
three or four days.
SADLER: Including the release of this tape. It
illustrates how insurgent groups have developed the
technique of using video to record attacks. A group
called Unity and Jihad led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
the most wanted terror suspect in Iraq, claims to
have made this presentation.
WARE: They have reached a level of organization and
sophistication that we have not seen previously. They
have become incredibly savvy.
SADLER: What is claimed to be a Zarqawi camera
catches this disturbing sequence of a suicide bomber
bidding farewell to fighters and boarding a tanker,
wired to 3-1/2 tons of explosives, for
start-to-finish coverage of the attack.
WARE: Something the last few months has now got them
filming the most intimate graphic attacks, like up
close and personal. They're trying to tell the
Western public this is what your boys are dying for.
This is what they're up against. Terrorism is about
instilling terror. That's a part of what this is
doing.
SADLER: Ware says he holds secret meetings in
dangerous places with wanted men.
WARE: Whether you think I'm fortunate or whether you
think I'm doomed, the point is I've been given a
window into something that no one else has.
SADLER: A window, he says, that opened after 12
months of contact, with access to unexplored
territory, straddling a moral and ethical minefield.
WARE: This kind of thing is never easy or
comfortable. It doesn't sit well with you as a human
being on many levels, but that's what covering war is
like.
SADLER: Ware denies he's being used by terror groups
and says he filters what he learns, regardless of the
source.
WARE: This is a war. It has two sides. I feel an
obligation to discover as much as I can about both
sides. I feel that's what we're here to do.
SADLER (on camera): Do you worry that you're getting
too close to this, that one day they might shoot the
messenger?
WARE: I worry about that every waking moment and
every sleeping dream and it terrifies me. It
terrifies me on a personal level and it terrifies me
in terms of what we're up against.
SADLER: And the danger involved.
Brent Sadler, CNN, Baghdad.