The Staton Jones Report

I suffered through the video to see it for myself and was surprised at how little blood there was. I would believe that the video was misleading in that Berg was already dead. This appeared to be the case with the Daniel Pearl video.

A very practical reason for doing this is that performing a neck-severing execution with Hollywood-style ease is probably impossible, unless you used a power tool on a victim who is completely immobilized. In both the Pearl and Berg videos, the victim was kneeling with bound hands, and the killer merely held his head steady with a grip on his hair. This leaves a lot of opportunity for the victim — amped up on adrenaline and fighting for his life — to flail around and make it generally difficult to kill him gracefully. In the Berg video, the killed throws him down and pins him to the floor. He doesn't put up any visible defense.

There may be other reasons for this — such as Berg being too weakened to fight. Still, given the setup, you'd expect to see the killer wrestling desperately with Berg trying to hold him still. After succeeding in cutting Berg's neck enough to kill him (this is where there would be a lot of blood) there would be a gruesome few minutes of blood-soaked hacking at the now-dead victim's neck in order to finish detaching the head. It would be gory and unbearable — unless you liked "The Passion of the Christ," in which case it might seem a little tame — but it would also look like a lot of work. The killers wanted to appear capable of taking a life with little effort or fanfare.

With the Daniel Pearl video, it was pretty obvious that he had been pre-killed. On the Berg footage, we here him speaking, but that could have been a tape playing in that background. The video quality is wretched. (C'mon Al Qaeda, you can buy first class plane tickets for 20 guys, but you can't buy a decent camcorder? Some of us have big-screen monitors here! And next time, letterboxed would be nice.)

Never forget Occam's Razor. Don't attribute to evil (let alone conspiracy) what can be adequately explained by (for example) incompentence or idiocy.

You hear a lot of silly conspiracy theories bandied about, often by people who are so invested in believing that Bush and his cronies are the root of all evil that even the slimmest coincidence (or lack of evidence) is evidence of a vast conspiracy.

My father-in-law (who's in other ways a great guy) is one such person; I carefully avoid discussing these sorts of things too much with him. Trying to explain to him why the Trade Centers were not an "obvious" planned implosion (given his lack of science/engineering background) is a lost cause - he's read too many books/etc (mostly vanity-press type deals) that expound on one or another theory that it was all a plan of the Bushes. And that it was a US missle that hit the Pentagon. etc, etc.

When the author of a "primary reference" appears regularly as "Conspiracy Con" and has talks that are followed by people who are certain that reptilian aliens are hiding in our midst and running the country... one has to be a wee bit skeptical. :-)

As for Nick Berg - I have no interest in watching the video. He was a native of West Chester, very close to where I live. But early reports indicated there was a delay of several hours between the statements read with him sitting there and the beheading. And it's certainly believable that they might kill him first before doing this for the camera.

I'm more interested in things like the story of the Iraqi-born Swedish citizen who was robbed and held at Abu Ghraib for months and abused until a guard helped him sneak out. Saddam had imprisoned him there from 1980 to 1985. He's now in the US suing the government. (NYTimes, Sunday May 23, International section, page 12)