Wag the, Umm, Head

I will admit that I had no intention of ever watching the online video of Nick Berg's decapitation in Iraq that was all the rage among depraved Internet cognoscenti of late, but after the conspiracy theory buzz hit a fever pitch last week, I decided that I would have to look at a few frames to see for myself if these amateur Oliver Stones were on the right track.

The verdict? Realizing in advance that I am risking a severe ass-thrashing from my good friend Cardlnal Fang for encouraging this behavior, I can say with some certainty that if you do choose to watch said video, you are by no means watching the decapitation of a live individual—and I have some serious doubts that you are watching a real decapitation at all. In either case, you are certainly not watching Muslim extremists: these "executioners" are most clearly American.

I will spare you the frame-by-frame analysis in this forum, since many other bloggers and writers have already advanced their own exhaustive theories, but if you are the least bit curious (and you should be), I suggest starting here, here and here. I will, however, highlight what I felt were some of the more compelling arguments:

• In the opening frames, Nick Berg is seated in a white plastic chair that is identical to one in which Army PFC Lynddie England is shown seated in a photo from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison—where Berg himself is known to have done some work on a communications antenna in recent months. The wall against which Berg is filmed is also the same color and texture as the walls in Abu Ghraib.



• Berg is wearing the same U.S.-issue orange prison jumpsuit that can be seen crumpled on the floor in the background of many of the photos showing naked Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It would surprise me greatly if Al Qaeda extremists routinely clothed their hostages in U.S.-made orange prison garb.



• The "executioners" are highly problematic. The one on the far left appears, from movement and body language, to be a woman—and from looking at their hands, they are certainly the "whitest" Arabs I've ever seen. One is wearing white athletic shoes that look suspiciously like those seen in an image of a U.S. soldier at Abu Ghraib. All of the men sport U.S.-style bulletproof vests of the type worn almost obsessively by U.S. troops, but rarely (if ever) worn by Al Qaeda. And, let's face it—these guys are, if not fat, certainly far more healthy and rotund than we would expect Muslim insurgents to be after months in hiding.



• Two of the men touch their nose and face with their left hands—something that an Arab and devout Muslim would never do, as the left hand is of course the "sanitary hand" one uses for cleaning one's backside.



• The terrorist identified "conclusively" by the CIA as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the one who allegedly beheads Berg in the video, clearly does not sport the three green dots that al-Zarqawi is known to have tattooed on the back of his left hand. He also appears quite nimble for a man who is known to have an "ill-fitting" prosthetic leg that renders him "almost incapable of walking, except with a very pronounced limp."



• Near the end of the video, for about 10 frames (or one-third of a second), the back of the head of an individual pops into the lower right corner of the frame: a white-skinned, Western head, sporting a very short military haircut, and a brown U.S. Army style t-shirt.



• It is the opinion of a number of medical doctors who have viewed the video that there is simply no way that the decapitation of a live person is being depicted. When the carotid arteries of a living person are cut with a knife, blood spurts out with such force that it routinely sprays six to eight feet or more. A careful review of the video shows no spurting blood, no blood on the hands of the "executioner," no blood on the floor, and no blood dripping from the severed head when it is held up on display. To assert that it is possible to sever the head of a living person with a rather short-bladed knife and not get a drop of blood on one's hands is, to say the least, fanciful.



• There are many assertions that the Berg video is "heavily edited" because the visible timecode "jumps around" a lot. This appears to be because there are simply two video cameras in use at the same time with differing timecodes, and these two tapes were later edited together. Still, if one were to want to show the "live" beheading of someone and leave the viewer with absolutely no doubt as to what they had seen, it would seem to me that the singularly most important moment to show with complete clarity would be the actual moment in which the head is severed from the torso. I believe it is no accident that this moment is the only one in the entire video in which there is a one-minute-plus gap in the timecode from a single camera. The so-called executioner spends about 30 seconds miming violent cutting motions (throughout which there is no visible evidence that any tissue is actually being cut), and then there is a quick edit to the head already about four inches away from the torso and being lifted up away from the body. It seems silly to me that in a video that's already more than eight minutes long, it would seem necessary to edit out the crucial, single minute in which the head was actually severed from the body.

I could go on and on, but you're free to read the other inconsistencies for yourself. I don't pretend to know why this video was faked, or by whom, but I do know that I certainly have more questions than answers. We can only hope that some tenacious journalist will work hard to ferret out the truth behind all this, but in the meantime if you want to watch the video, I say, "Watch away." It's no more real than a Friday the 13th movie, and almost as well acted.