Digital Dying By: Justin Nobel

Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro was posting details about drug traffickers to Twitter and a social media website called “Nuevo Laredo en vivo”. Her body and severed head was found last September, one of 46 journalists killed in 2011 according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Mukarram Khan Atif was number two. The second journalist killed so far in 2012, that is. He was gunned down while praying at a mosque in Shabqadar, in northern Pakistan. A terrorist group called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility. Atif worked for a Pakistani TV channel and served as a stringer for Voice of America. “We have been warning him to stop his propaganda against us in the foreign media,” said a TTP spokesman. “He did not include our version in his stories.” The spokesman warned there were several more journalists on their hit-list.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 895 journalists have been killed since the group began counting journalist deaths in 1992. In 2011, 46 journalists were killed, including the well-publicized deaths of two of the West's most talented war photographers, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, killed while covering the uprising in Libya. But amidst the barrage of deaths occurring each day across the world's hot spots, many journalist deaths go unnoticed. Here are some of the more haunting ones from 2011...

Rafiq Tagi, freelance journalist in Azerbaijan – On November 19 Tagi was returning to his home in Baku, the capitol of Azerbaijan, when an unidentified man ran up behind him and without saying anything stabbed him seven times. Tagi underwent surgery for a damaged spleen but was recovering well and in stable condition when on November 21 he suddenly died. He was 61. Just ten minutes before his death doctors had checked on him and found him to be fine. His colleagues suspect foul play. In May 2007, he was convicted of inciting religious hatred and sentenced to three years in prison in connection with an article he published in an independent Azerbaijani newspaper. It stated that Islam was hampering the country's economic and political progress. Last October, he published an article criticizing Iranian authorities for their theologically based policies and suppression of human rights. The Iranian embassy in Azerbaijan denied involvement in Tagi's death. But the Iranian cleric, Mohammed Fazel Lankarani, published a statement saying that Tagi had received a “just sentence”.

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Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, social media user in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico – Castro's headless body was found along a road near Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican city on the Texas border and drug trafficking hot spot. She worked at a local newspaper there but also posted details about drug trafficker movements and drug gang lookout locations to Twitter and a social media website called “Nuevo Laredo en vivo”, using the pseudonym, “La NenaDLaredo” (The girl from Laredo). Her severed head was found on a large stone piling, with a note beside it that read: “Nuevo Laredo en Vivo and social networking sites, I'm The Laredo Girl, and I'm here because of my reports…” It is uncertain how her killers discovered her identity. According to CPJ, it is the first time a journalist has been killed directly because of something published to a social media site. She was 39.

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Hadi al-Mahdi, Iraqi radio host – Al-Mahdi was shot in his Baghdad home by an assailant using a pistol with a silencer. He had spent 18 years in exile and returned to Iraq in 2008, to live with his wife and three children. He hosted the show, “To Whomever Listens”, which aired on independent Radio Demozy. The show covered social and political issues and he often criticized politicians, including the former prime minister Ayad Allawi, and the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Mahdi regularly organized pro-democracy demonstrations via Facebook and publicized threats that he received. During Arab Spring protests Al-Mahdi and four other journalists were picked up by security forces and driven to the headquarters of the Iraqi Army's 11th Division, according to a Washington Post article. There they were beaten, given electric shocks and threatened with rape, then asked to sign a statement saying they were not tortured.

Growing fearful of his safety, about two months ago Al-Mahdi stopped his radio show. He told a friend that he believed Prime Minister Maliki had assigned mercenaries to stab him on the street. The week he was killed he had been preparing for a pro-democracy protest in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. “I will take part in the demonstrations,” he wrote, in a post on his Facebook page left just hours before he was killed. “The political process embodies a national, economic, and political failure. It deserves to change, and we deserve a better government. In short, I do not represent any political party or any other side, but rather the miserable reality in which we live.”

Up until the early 19th century British females convicted of treason were burnt at the stake. Sticks and straw were piled up to the level of the calves, then lit.

The last criminal hanging in Britain was in 1964 but according to an opinion poll taken after the recent riots 65 percent of Brits are in favor of bringing it back. “I want hanging, or some form of execution, brought back, for criminals who kill police officers in pursuit of their crimes and terrorists who kill in pursuit of their political aims,” said Brian Binley, a British MP. Although his words seem extreme, it was just 200 years ago that England executed men convicted of treason by hanging drawing and quartering. And although the US is criticized as the only first world nation that still enables execution, historically cruel and unusual forms of execution were common across the world.

SUICIDE MACHINES AND OTHER DELIVERANCE CONTRAPTIONS

Hanging drawing and quartering was one of the most brutal old ways of execution. The criminal was tied to a wood frame, dragged behind a horse to the place they were to be killed, put in a noose and hung until they were almost dead. Then they were laid out upon a table, disemboweled and castrated. The criminal was still alive at this point and their entrails were burnt right in front of their eyes. They were then beheaded and their body cut into quarters. Females convicted of treason were burnt at the stake. Sticks and straw were piled up to the level of the calves, then lit. First the legs would burn, then the hands, torso, forearms, breasts, upper chest and face. Usually victims did not die until the head caught fire.

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by Justin Nobel

Condolence letters arose during the Civil War. With no relatives around dying soldiers were attended to by their comrades. They watched them die, dug their graves and wrote letters to their families explaining their deaths.

In 2009, two weeks into his second tour in Iraq, Army Specialist Chancellor Keesling committed suicide. His family decorated a wall in his Indiana home as a tribute to him. They placed his uniform and the flag from his burial service, leaving a space for the expected condolence letter from President Obama. But it never came. A dated policy disallowed soldiers that committed suicide from receiving them. Keesling's father wrote President Obama and the Army chief of staff requesting the policy be changed. His son's suicide was a result of what he was exposed to during war, he said, not because he was weak. Earlier this month, President Obama reversed the policy. “It is simply unacceptable," said the president, "for the United States to be sending the message to these families that somehow their loved ones' sacrifices are less important.”

HOW TO DEAL WITH A SUICIDE

Condolence letters arose during the Civil War, a time when the deathbed was a sacred place. “Family circle closed round its loved one to offer comfort and reassurance,” says Civil War enthusiast Mark Dunkelman, in an essay on Civil War condolences titled, With a Trembling Hand and an Aching Heart. “The war irrevocably disrupted those conventions.” With no relatives around, dying soldiers were attended to by their comrades. They watched them die, dug their graves and wrote letters to their families explaining their deaths. The letters followed a formula: offer sympathy, discuss money matters, give details of the passing.

Some were more creative. The 154th New York Volunteer Infantry, a regiment from Cattaraugus and Chautauqua counties, lost 232 men in the war. The families of every single one likely received a condolence letter but only about a dozen still exist. One is to the family of 22 year old Private Edward Shults, of Ellicottville, New York. He died at the Odd-Fellow's Hospital, in Washington, D. C. on the morning of February 15, 1863. “I thought you might be gratified to hear more of the circumstances of his sickness and death,” read the condolence letter, written by an attendant named Andrew Kemmisen. “It was painfully interesting to hear him pray and sing and shout…[we] did all we could to sooth his pathway to the grave; but we trust he had a friend that was better to him than father or mother, brother or sister.”

BURYING THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIERS OF BYGONE WARS

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by Justin Nobel

Hunger strikes have become a powerful method of political protest, occasionally strikers actually succeed in starving. Santhara, the Jain practice of fasting to death, is done for religious purposes.

Dorothy and Armond Rudolph, both in their nineties, were recently evicted. The Rudolphs, who had met at church in 1941 and were living at an assisted living facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico decided to stop eating and drinking in order to hasten their deaths. “Life is miserable,” Dorothy told reporters. “You name it, I've had it.” Armond was suffering from spinal stenosis, a painful narrowing of the spine; both were in the early stages of dementia and had increasing mobility problems.

The facility told police the Rudolph's were attempting suicide and terminated the couple's lease. Their children moved them into hospice care, where they carried out their intentions. “It's not suicide,” said son Neil Rudolph. “It's controlled death. They have the right to stop eating and drinking.” Last week, Dorothy and Armond both died. Fasting to death is an uncommon way to go in the US but that's not the case in other parts of the world, where the practice occurs as either a sanctioned religious act, or a defiant political one. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Mohamed Bouaziz's self-immolation in Tunisia brought about dramatic political change. The practice has roots with Buddhist monks in Vietnam, Quakers in America and Christians in Siberia.

On December 17, 2010 a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouaziz set himself on fire, just weeks later the country's government was toppled. Seeing a human body erupt in flames is just as disturbing today as it was in 1963 when Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc sat still in Saigon while fellow monks doused him in gasoline and set him ablaze, an event which inspired copy-cat self-immolators around the world. But the practice by no means began there.

JAPAN'S MUMMY MONKS RISE AGAIN

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by Justin Nobel

Immediately after Lenin died his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum in Red Square, in the center of Moscow. Two-thirds of Russians now think he should be buried.

In the passenger seat of a car parked outside a home in Costa Mesa, California police recently found a mummy. The body belonged to a female special education teacher, down on her luck. A local real estate agent had encountered the teacher in a park and upon hearing that she had nowhere to live, offered the woman her car to sleep in. The teacher indeed began sleeping in the car, only at some point she died. The frightened real estate agent did not tell authorities about the body. Instead, she covered it up with a blanket and some clothes and placed a box of baking soda in her car to mask the smell. When police found the body the teacher had been dead for ten months and was completely mummified. She weighed just 30 pounds, “little more than skin and bones,” according to one news article. Read the rest of this entry »