The Nick Berg Beheading

The Nick Berg Beheading
The body of Nick Berg, a well-meaning social worker and peace activist, was discovered May 8, 2004 on an overpass in Baghdad. The body had no head. On May 11, a video appeared on a site* allegedly linked to Al Qaeda. Although the western media and public absorbed the video with uncritical horror and outrage, attentive physicians were skeptical. Prominent medical experts later described the taped sequence as "staged.' Mr. Berg was clearly already dead when the head was cut off from the body. There was a complete absence of arterial bleeding during and after the operation. The corpse, as well as the perpetrators would have been covered by blood spurting from the carotid arteries.
There is a relatively long list of other suspicious (not to say damning) elements in the video. First, the white plastic chairs, the decor of the walls, and the orange jump suit in which Mr. Berg was clad were all standard features of Abu Ghraib prison. The perpetrators, moreover, cried "Allah Akbar" in what some commentators described as imperfect Arabic, they stood at military "Parade rest," and some had gold rings on their fingers - an impossibility for someone following the strict form of Islam attributed to "terrorists."

Nick Berg alive in chair (left), dead on floor (upper right), and beheaded (lower right)
The tape is composed of two parts, with a cut between them. In the first part Mr. Berg sits in a chair, apparently alive and confronted by his captors. In the second part, Mr. Berg sits on the floor, his back to the wall, quite possibly dead. His captors lean over, guide his body to the floor, and proceed with the grisly operation of removing the head.
How did Nick Berg get into such a fix? In March 2003, Berg was detained and imprisoned by US forces in the city of Mosul for what they claimed were irregularities in his papers. Back in the US, Berg's father became thoroughly alarmed at the news of his son's detention and began lobbying for his immediate release. Berg was subsequently released on April 6. The beheading must have happened within 24 hours of the release.
The origin of the tape appears to have been Abu Ghraib prison itself. There are unsubstantiated claims that the digital signatures of the beheading camera were the same as those recording the Abu Ghraib torture scenes. Moreover, on frames 9306 through 9368 of the video, someone who appears to be wearing a US military cap pokes his head part way into the video.
The purpose of this hastily-organized beheading was to counter the stories of torture emerging from Abu Ghraib a mere week or two earlier. It was to imply that "if we're bad, they're badder," morality being a strictly relative virtue.
Asia Times, 2004
Jones Productions, 2004