I saw the Nick Berg execution video earlier. The full version, unedited, as was originally shown on the “al-qaeda related web site” which has since gone offline. It was disturbing, no doubt about it.
I’m not going to describe it in detail; let it suffice to say that this is no Saudi “chop-chop square” execution, but something far more savage than can be seen with some regularity in Riyadh’s infamous place of Shariah punishment.
Seeing the particular method employed frankly makes ones wonder about what someone must go through in order to be so, well, inhuman as to do this sort of thing. This is not some posturing of the type you see US politicians employing all the time either; the act depicted is not only devoid of all humanity, but is beyond beastly, which is certainly one of the reasons no one’s talking about it in detail despite it having been seen by at least hundreds and probably thousands (that’s p2p technology for you).
At the same time this sort of extreme savagery and barbarism is not unknown. Men have committed those acts before, recently enough in Rwanda and Algeria. But this was poignant in that the terrorist Zarqawi appears to be going out of his way to show the audience how savage he is. I don’t mean to be facetious here, but generally speaking cutting off a head on camera gets the message through; waving the head at the camera after really goes to demonstrate the incredible depravity and pure evil which dominate Zarqawi’s actions. It achieves absolutely nothing, yet it’s an essential part of the performance.
It’s essential because the intended message is that he (Zarqawi) and a number of others are willing to engage in depravity and desecration to almost unimaginable degrees, and go to show how that band of subhumans celebrate death and acts of violence which even the basest of animals (save, evidently, humans) wouldn’t stoop to. That message, evidently, is meant not for those American fighters whom Zarqawi evidently fancies he can go up against, but for civilians, both American and Iraqi. This was not a soldier, but a communications technician who hadn’t even managed to find a job in Iraq and would have been on his way home before he was kidnapped, were it not for an unfortunately-timed arrest by US-controlled forces.
Will this somehow “work” in intimidating Iraqis? That doesn’t seem likely. Zarqawi isn’t an Iraqi. In fact he is precisely the kind of scum which Iraqis respected Saddam for keeping out of the country. Now evidence has surfaced that the US could have gotten Zarqawi before the war but decided not to do so, as he lived freely in Kurd-controlled northern Iraq. In fact no one’s even trying to argue that there are less foreign terrorists in Iraq now than during Saddam’s bloody rule.
Will it impact America? It has already started to do so, but, as usual, not really for the reasons I would think, having seen what happens in the video. The video was not shown on TV here, probably never will be, and so the reactions are almost entirely based on very sparse abstracts of what goes on in it. In fact the current outrage on the subject is that were it not for the fact that Berg was arrested by CPA-controlled Iraqi police in late March Berg would have been out of Iraq before April; as things turned out he was kidnapped on April 9, apparently a day after being released. Berg’s incarceration was at first denied, then partially confirmed, then denied again; yet another story, one that seems to cover all the bases, was offered by the US government yesterday, although with the myriad of stories emanating from official US channels these days it’s hard to trust anything the authorities have to say about it.
All in all, however, this is, to use the vernacular, an incredibly fucked up story. We’ve heard stories about whole populations going after one another with shovels and machetes, but the fact that this usually happens in large crowds goes to diminish the impact of the acts themselves. To see a video such as this, where basically one person acts with such barbarism upon one other, really brings home the fact that inhuman savagery and evil live deep in the hearts of some who still claim to be “men”.