American civilian beheaded in Iraq - what are the consequences?

Civilian contractor Nick Berg was beheaded on videotape by a group affiliated with al-Qaida.

First, my prayers go out to the Berg family. This is the pricetag that we are paying for Bush's pet war project. George W. Bush should go to this family and make personal amends. This is his doing. This is Bush's responsibility.

But the terrorists who killed this man are not innocent, they are evil and they are cowards. This is not about retaliation for the abuse of prisoners, this is about terror and hatred. Still, this is exactly what Howard Dean was talking about when he said that the capture of Saddam did not make America more safe.

Second, I am concerned about whether this will turn public opinion around regarding the photos showing abuse against the Iraqi prisoners.

Will American bloodlust be rekindled over this act? Will we, as a country, convince ourselves that the Iraqi prisoner's deserved their treatment? How will America respond?

And what can we do to help spread sanity?

This plays right into Bush's hands.

Sorry, but the idea that this is retaliation for the torture scandal is BS. It's not like AQ or whoever did this hasn't killed people on video before this one incident (Daniel Pearle, the Italian guy who was shot in the head after yelling "I'll show you how an Italian dies"). I call it an opportunistic killing that was done in the hopes of causing the American public to further turn against the war. Which may have worked, however...

in the absence of prison pictures showing anything beyond the S&M scenes of the last week this is going to look like overkill to most Americans. If something else "visual" comes out of the prison scandal that's showing extreme physical brutaltiy then perhaps public opinion will stay outraged over that incident. If that doesn't happen then I think you'll see the pendulum swing back towards Bush.

(Daniel Pearle, the Italian guy who was shot in the head after yelling "I'll show you how an Italian dies").

Actually, Daniel Pearl was the Jewish reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was killed in in Karachi, Pakistan in January 2002 after being lured for "an interview." Fabrizio Quattrocchi is the man you are referring to.

identifying Daniel Pearl as the Italian.

Tansy Gold, who is accustomed to deciphering ambiguous English. . . . . . . . . . . .

They can kill each other and not Americans and we can stop torturing them and maybe in so oh 150 years they will stop loathing us.

Sounds like a plan.

...is the hard work of intelligence-gathering and investigation (and for reliable information, that DOESN'T include "abusing" prisoners).

You know, the tools that put the 93 WTC bombers and Embassy bombers in prison and provided our main store of information about al Queda. The same methods that were dismissed by the Bushies as "swatting flies".

If you really want to catch these guys and bring them to justice, get rid of the guy creating the chaos they thrive in: Bush

and that should be a campaign issue. Bush has spent his life bucking responsibility while Kerry has spent his seeking it out.

There can not be a cleaner line by which to differentiate these two men.

That's something Hannity would say.

is acceptable "payback" for the abuse suffered by Iraqi prisoners?

I'm not downplaying the abuse, I just want to clarify our perspectives on this.

you invade a country on a pretext, subjagate, humiliate, torture and kill innocent Iraqis and the plaster the pictures over the internet.

Why are americans so shocked when someone retaliates against their insane butchery?

Why is that?

First of all, how did this fellow go from being a prisoner in US custody, to kidnapped by al Qaeda?

Second, the man's father is anti-war and anti-Bu$h. He's blaming the whole thing on W.

Third, this smells more like a covert op, than it does al Qaeda. It will be interested to see where this one goes.

and there isn't much we can do about it. The pukes and their supporters now have someone to hold up as an "innocent victim" of "depraved brutality." How can we dispute that, without going back to all the long, logical arguments? Hard to argue with a beheading.

Second, while I agree that the RW will spin Berg's murder into martyrdom, I don't think that is necessarily evidence that he was murdered BY the BFEE.

Isn't it at least remotely possible that something like the following happened? . . . . . .

Nick Berg goes to Iraq as a legitimate businessman to help rebuild communications infrastructure. His contract runs out and he comes back to the States, but goes back in search of additional work. Maybe for the money, maybe his stateside business isn't flourishing, who knows? In the process of looking for work, suppose he talks to someone or goes somewhere that draws the attention of some overzealous military. Maybe he's talking to an imam or a businessman known to have ties to the Ba'athists. Could be anything, could be entirely innocent. So he gets picked up by MI and tossed in prison.

He's held for 13 days, but upon his release, he tells his family what went on and states he was treated decently, not abused.

He tells them he's going to head home through Kuwait and Jordan. I haven't seen anything that indicates he HAD to go home this way, or that he couldn't get out another way. Maybe he was going to look there for other work, or do some sightseeing. Again, do we know for sure?

The reports do indicate that he was aware of the heightened level of fighting and that this may have complicated his departure.

But he doesn't appear to have been with any contracted employer, which means he was pretty much on his own and probably a sitting duck for anyone out to grab a hostage.

Am I saying it's his own fault? No, not at all. The people who murdered him are still murderers, and there is no excuse for that. None at all. But the fact is that business executives, reporters, diplomats, etc., get kidnapped around the world by fanatics who have an ax to grind or a colleague they hope to spring from jail. This is not something new.

We know exactly how some people in the U.S. reacted to Sept. 11. As far as they were concerned, there were no innocent Arabs, no innocent Muslims, no innocent Middle Easterners, no innocents who even looked like they might be any of the above. We're hearing people even today clamoring for blood, any blood, in revenge for Berg's death. Most of them are not people on this board, thank goodness, but they are out there nonetheless. (Some of them, apparently, in the U.S. Senate. . . .)

But if "decent" Americans are so willing to kill innocent people out of a sense of blind vengeance, why should we be so incredulous that people of another nation, of another faith, of another ideology would be equally eager to kill, regardless of the victim's innocence?

Why must we insist that, "Oh, it must have been Black Ops!" when there is another, perfectly plausible and much more understandable explanation?

I'm as much of a tinfoil hatter as anyone, I suppose. I sat in my living room on Sept 11 and watched the first tower fall and said out loud, "Hmmm, I wonder how the bushies engineered this one?" Do I really believe they concocted the plot and carried it out? No, not really. A. I don't think they're smart enough and B. They'd have been found out. Do I think they took advantage of the situation? Absofuckinglutely.

And I think they're going to take the same kind of advantage of Berg's death as they did of 9/11, and when we accuse the BFEE of being at the root of it all, we lose sight of the fact that they are not our only enemy.

of iraq.

only positive result i can think of....

based on their emotional rection to seeing the beheading, from people who said our torture and rape of innocent iraqi's were no big deal.