Berg beheading:
Some
Questions Raised
By Ritt Goldstein
23 May, 2004
Asia
Times
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.
"I would have
thought that all the people in the vicinity would have been covered
in blood, in a matter of seconds ... if it was genuine," said Simpson.
Notably, the act's perpetrators appeared far from so. And separately
Nordby observed: "I think that by the time they're ... on his head,
he's already dead."
Providing another
basis for their findings, in the course of such an assault, an individual's
autonomic nervous system would react, typically doing so strongly, with
the body shaking and jerking accordingly. And while Nordby noted that
"they rotated and moved the head", shifting vertebrae that
should have initiated such actions, Simpson said he "certainly
didn't perceive any movements at all" in response to such efforts.
During the period
when Berg's captors filmed the decapitation sequence, circumstances
indicate that he had already been dead "a quite uncertain length
of time, but more than ... however long the beheading took", Simpson
stated. Both Simpson and Nordby also noted the difficulty in providing
analysis based on the video, the inherent limitations presented by this.
But both also felt that Berg had seemed drugged.
A particularly significant
point in the video sequence occurred as Berg's captors attacked him,
bringing the supposedly fatal knife to bear. "The way that they
pulled him over, they could have used a dummy at that point," reflected
Simpson regarding what the video portrayed. Separately, Nordby said
Berg does not "appear to register any sort of surprise or any change
in his facial expression when he's grabbed and twisted over, and they
start to bring this weapon into use".
Subsequently, Nordby
said it was likely that the filming sequence was manipulated at the
point immediately preceding this, allowing Berg's corpse to be used
for the decapitation sequence. Nordby also emphasized that the video
"raises more questions than it answers", with the most fundamental
questions of "who are you, and how did you die", being impossible
to answer from it. But broad speculation exists regarding a number of
factors surrounding both Berg's death and the video, and its timing
in regard to revelations of US prison atrocities.
In a May 13 article,
the Arabic newsgroup Aljazeera reported that a Dubai-based Reuters journalist
first broke the story, "but while Fox News, CNN and the BBC"
were able to secure the video from the "Arabic-only website"
that hosted it, Aljazeera was unable to locate it. And also on May 13,
the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US Central Intelligence
Agency had determined that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the individual who
beheaded Berg.
Since Secretary
of State Colin Powell's United Nations presentation of February 5, 2003,
al-Zarqawi has been portrayed as the single most dangerous element facing
the Bush administration's "war on terror". Powell's UN presentation
has since been widely accepted as empty; nevertheless, al-Zarqawi appears
to have surpassed even Osama bin Laden as the administration's No 1
terror target. And on May 15, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the Coalition
Provisional Authority's chief Iraq military spokesman, declared that
al-Zarqawi will be eventually caught, though that may prove particularly
difficult.
On March 4, Brigadier-General
David Rodriguez of the Joint Chiefs of staff revealed that the Pentagon
didn't have "direct evidence of whether he's [al-Zarqawi] alive
or dead", providing commentary on the nature of prior "evidence"
linking al-Zarqawi to attacks and bombings. But that same day, AP reported
that an Iraqi resistance group claimed al-Zarqawi had been killed the
April prior in the US bombing of northern Iraq.
Speaking off the
record, intelligence community sources have previously said they believe
it "very likely" that al-Zarqawi is indeed long dead. Such
a fact makes al-Zarqawi's alleged killing of Berg difficult to reconcile,
and there has been broad speculation that blaming al-Zarqawi is an administration
ploy. Further anomalies surrounding Berg's death have fueled added speculation.
According to e-mails
sent from a US consular officer in Baghdad, Beth Payne, to the Berg
family, Nick Berg was being held in Iraq "by the US military in
Mosul". A May 13 AP report notes that a US State Department spokesperson
subsequently said this was untrue, an error, and that Berg was being
held by Iraqi authorities. But another May 13 AP report quoted "police
chief Major-General Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi" as claiming that
reports of Iraqi police having held Berg were "baseless".
And Berg is seen
on the beheading videotape in what appears to be US military prison-issue
clothing, sitting in what appears to be a US military-type white chair,
virtually identical to those photographed as used at Abu Ghraib prison.
However, the taking of hostages has occurred in the region, and beheadings
are not unheard of.
According to a February
2003 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), on September 23, 2001, radical
Islamists captured a group of 25 Kurdish fighters in the Iraqi village
of Kheli Hama. "Some prisoners' throats had been slit, while others
had been beheaded," HRW reported, noting that the television station
KurdSat had broadcast pictures of the dead that September 26. The report
also noted that a videotape "apparently filmed" by those committing
the atrocities had been found.
The strict Islamist
community in Iraq denied that the acts were committed by their people,
stating that the incident was fabricated.
Additional reports
of beheadings also exist, with the victims usually noted as killed with
a bullet before the beheading occurs. But HRW's report also raised an
issue that the Berg video's makers, and Berg's father, both raised:
prisoner exchange.
HRW noted that Iraq's
radical Islamists did pursue exchanges of captives, and the Berg video
specifically noted that his captors claimed they were killing him as
their attempts to exchange Berg had been rebuffed by US authorities.
Berg's father, Michael, has pressed the administration of US President
George W Bush as regards what the facts of this allegation are, with
the administration denying any knowledge that such a trade was offered.
And added questions still exist.
Because Iraq's radical
Islamists speak in a particular manner, and live by a closely proscribed
code, apparent contradictions between these ways and the way Berg's
captors appeared has generated speculation. Some observers have speculated
on the possibility that the individuals weren't native Arabic speakers.
Conversely, it is reported that in Saudi Arabia, where Sharia law allows
for beheadings in cases of severe crimes, the condemned is heavily drugged
with tranquilizers prior to the execution, reportedly leaving them in
a state similar to that which Berg appeared in during parts of the video.
Again, Nordby emphasized
that the video "raises more questions than it answers".
Ritt Goldstein is
an American investigative political journalist based in Stockholm. His
work has appeared in broadsheets such as Australia's Sydney Morning
Herald, Spain's El Mundo and Denmark's Politiken, as well as with the
Inter Press Service (IPS), a global news agency.
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