Little Green Footballs is running slower than a mule on Valium this morning, apparently because of a link in an article at the New York Times that’s sending us a deluge of people looking for the cellphone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution: Hard Choices Over Video of Execution.

Confronted with a second, unofficial and more graphic video account of the moments leading up to the execution of Saddam Hussein, and the hanging itself, executives at television news organizations made a series of what one executive, President Steve Capus of NBC News, called “delicate editorial decisions” about what they would put on the air on Saturday night and Sunday to augment the first pictures of the execution.

The new video, almost certainly shot by a cellphone camera by one of the guards or witnesses at the execution, includes exchanges between Mr. Hussein and either the witnesses or guards leading up to the moment when the trapdoor opens and he falls. No national American television organization has thus far allowed the moment of the drop to be shown.

But the same niceties were not observed on numerous Web sites, which have posted the complete video, including the moment that Mr. Hussein, noose around his neck, falls, and a close-up of his face afterward. Some prominent sites, like Google’s video site and the conservative blog Littlegreenfootballs.com, have posted the complete cellphone coverage of the execution, including the moment Mr. Hussein falls from view.

In his haste to take a slap at the “conservative” blog LGF for not observing the same “niceties” as mainstream media, New York Times writer Bill Carter failed to notice that the “complete video” is not posted at LGF, and never has been. Elementary fact-checking, anyone? Did Carter even look at our site before writing that, or was he going for the cheap smear based on nothing more than his own fevered imagination?

Here’s the video at Google Video, if you want to see it.

(I’m redirecting visitors who click the link in the NY article to this page, so they’ll be sure to see the truth.)

UPDATE at 1/1/07 4:17:10 pm:

Goldstein and Riehl weigh in; Dan points out a previous New York Times article that defends the posting of jihad videos at YouTube, showing the killing of US soldiers.