Just to say it

I will just say this now. I may have more to say later, but I want to say this now.

I have seen the video.

The video of the beheading of Nick Berg. And it's every bit as gruesome as you might have imagined. Every bit as - words just don't do justice. Our normal language is not designed to describe such as this. And frankly, those who commit such acts don't deserve the "big" words we often apply, words like heinous, monstrous, inhuman. They are, rather, petty, cheap, sordid little cowards skulking behind their ski masks while talking tough and needing five of them to deal one man bound hand and foot.

Of course, the conspiracy theories are already spreading, suggesting it was actually the work of the CIA or some other US agency to distract attention from the torture of US-held prisoners as Abu Ghraib and, it is apparent, other places as well. The big talking point seems to be that Berg was wearing a "Guantanamo-style" orange prison jumpsuit. Exactly why US spooks would be that incompetent at making a fake is unexplained.

I don't have any trouble believing that the beheading was both real and carried out by small t terrorists (that, as opposed to capital T terrorists like nation states). But I do have my own questions about it. One is that, as news reports have noted, based on the time stamp on the video, there is an 11 hour gap between the time they force Berg down and the time they start to actually cut. (There are a few other jumps of a few to several seconds earlier; perhaps there were a few second takes of parts of the speech.) What happened during those 11 hours?

Another thing is that when the actual beheading starts, there is a momentary closeup of Berg's face in which he appears to be grimacing but the quality of the video is so poor it's hard to tell. What struck me is the blood. It flowed and flowed freely - but you would have thought Berg would be terrified, his heart pounding, his blood pressure skyrocketing. You would have thought the blood would spurt, gush, when his throat was cut. And it didn't. It flowed on to the floor, but none, it seemed, got on his murderers anywhere except their shoes. Which just makes me wonder: Was Nick Berg killed during that 11-hour gap? And did they behead a dead body?

That doesn't make it any less an evil thing and may in fact make it worse since I'm told that beheading is a quick way to die - so if he was killed earlier in a different way it might have been more painful. It's more a matter of what struck me watching it and if the beheading was meant less as a means of execution than of desecration.

One other thing struck me and I wonder if it surprised the killers: The head did not come off easily. They had to struggle, cut repeatedly, twist the head. I remember Alfred Hitchcock in one of his movies showing a couple trying to kill a man. It was a long slow struggle and Hitchcock said later that he wanted to do that because it's actually not easy to kill someone. We tend to think of it as quick, one thrust with a knife, a quick shot from a gun and poof it's done. But life is tenacious, our bodies sturdier than we sometimes realize, and the soldier - or civilian - shot may lie in agony for hours before death comes.

I don't know how to wrap this up cleanly, so I'll leave it at that for now. I may come back to this later, I may not. We'll see.