American beheaded in Iraq

[Dreadsox]

I have seen them and they are in the minority.

And we all know that those in the minority are always wrong.....

 

[melon]

And we all know that those in the minority are always wrong.....

Mob rule!

Melon

 

[rivergoat]

My curiosity finally won out over my common sense. I woke up about 5 hours early this morning, and for some reason, felt compelled to download and watch the beheading video. I just have one thing to say.

To those of you who are thinking about watching this video - DON'T

It's very hard to shock me - I watched 9/11 on the television and felt almost nothing at all. I have seen people die bloody deaths right before my eyes (while working with emergency ambulance services). I can handle all that and sleep at night.

I don't know what to say about it.. there are no words to describe how horrible it is. There IS pure evil in this world.

DON'T WATCH IT. I'm not kidding. You don't need that darkness in your life...

goat

 

[Scarletwine]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE22Ak03.html

weirder & weirder

Berg beheading: No way, say medical experts
By Ritt Goldstein

American businessman Nicholas Berg's body was found on May 8 near a Baghdad overpass; a video of his supposed decapitation death by knife appeared on an alleged al-Qaeda-linked website (www.al-ansar.biz) on May 11. But according to what both a leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation appears to have been staged.

"I certainly would need to be convinced it [the decapitation video] was authentic," Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, said from New Zealand. Echoing Dr Simpson's criticism, when this journalist asked forensic death expert Jon Nordby, PhD and fellow of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators, whether he believed the Berg decapitation video had been "staged", Nordby replied: "Yes, I think that's the best explanation of it."

Questions of when the video's footage was taken, and the time elapsed between the shooting of the video's segments, were raised by both experts, reflecting a portion of the broader and ongoing video controversy. Nordby, speaking to Asia Times Online from Washington state, noted: "We don't know how much time wasn't filmed," adding that "there's no way of knowing whether ... footage is contemporaneous with the footage that follows".

While the circumstances surrounding both the video and Nick Berg's last days have been the source of substantive speculation, both Simpson and Nordby perceived it as highly probable that Berg had died some time prior to his decapitation. A factor in this was an apparent lack of the "massive" arterial bleeding such an act initiates.

 

[nbcrusader]

I'm sure this is a comfort to the Berg family

 

[Angela Harlem]

While nothing can take away their pain, him having died in a less violent way might be easier to come to terms with.
My heart goes out to them.

 

[speedracer]

Um...I saw the video.

Berg sure looks alive before the thugs shove him to the ground, and there's a massive gush of blood when they cut his jugular...

 

[Dreadsox]

Conspiracies will rise about this no doubt.

 

[Seabird]

I don't understand why when it's something done to us, there's always some conspiracy that it's fake, but if it's something we do it's true. For that matter how do we know the prisoner abuse pics aren't staged? The guys have things on their heads and their faces are never shown, how do we really know who they are? I haven't seen any Iraqi uniforms either. No I don't really believe this, just giving an example of how ridiculous these theories can be.

Like speedracer said, if you see it, you would believe. No I haven't seen it and don't want to but I know a guy who did and the way he described it was like what speedracer and rivergoat said. He is very disturbed by it. No Bush didn't pay him to go around saying that

 

[meegannie]

I've seen it and I had a lot of doubts about it too, but I'm not going to sit here and go over it detail by detail. They're aren't just conspiracy theories when it's 'us.' Some of the photos published by the Mirror here in the UK of British troops torturing prisoners were proven to be fakes.

 

[Salome]

That's exactly what the people whose acts are being condemned do -- regard others as subhuman and therefore have little difficulty in humiliating or killing them. It just perpetuates a cycle of violence and hate.

I tend to agree

I saw a documentary today on a search and destroy action that took place during the war in korea
some of those soldiers said that they saw people getting scalped by other soldiers
babies and elderly people were murdered
it was horrible

but it was still very much a human action
that they made sense of in their own minds


this is a terrible loss to everyone close to Nick Berg though
and my sympathies do go out to them

 

[rivergoat]

After reviewing the video over and over again, I can come to only one conclusion: Berg was alive when the video was made. I don't even have to go into gory details... several times during the four minute speech beforehand, Berg moves his head, rolls his shoulders, even flexes his toes.

As for the beheading itself - again, without going into gory details, the only thing I will say is this: there is a five second 'jump' in the timer on the video, beginning when a seeming crowd of people all jostle in front of the camera. This occurs while.. well, before the actual beheading and after Berg was attacked. I am sure conspiratists would make something more of it - perhaps someone turned off the camera and was told to turn it back on, because after this 'jump' the crowd clears and Berg is seen face-down on the floor with his attackers still on top of him. In this part of the video, one can see things that make it clear that the 'massive arterial bleeding' those folks were looking for had already occured. (That's about as detailed as I am going to get on a public board.)

As much as I would wish for the video to be a fake, there isn't anything to indicate to me that it is. The only reason I watched it again was to try to prove to myself that it wasn't real. I can't.

goat

 

[U2Kitten]

I can't understand what the purpose of it being faked would be. They DID kill Berg, and his head was cut off So do the conspiracy theorists believe they were kind hearted and humane enough to cut the camera, kill him in some other way and then cut his head off? I don't think they would bother to do that. They obviously had no feelings for him or they wouldn't have done it in the first place. I don't see why they would 'fake' part of it to spare him any pain or torture, that's what they were after, and the shock value.

 

[verte76]

I admit that I never watched the video, but I'm suspicious of the theories that Berg wasn't beheaded. The guy who supposedly did the beheading is a cold-blooded who'd absolutely cut the throat of an "enemy", and drew the condemnation of Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, all of whom accepted that he'd been beheaded.

 

[nbcrusader]

I bet the conspiracy theorists want to blame GWB for the beheading....

 

[Salome]

looks more like Michael Moore's work
since you should be able to turn on a camera