Berg's Decapitation A Fake?

[fornax]

I was following a link from Drudge Report about the Hannity show and the sound from the video and clicking through a few web sites came to this. I haven't watched the video but read about that email from the US consul in Iraq and also though it was strange that the US forces will hand an American citizen to Iraqi police.

Warning: contains rather sickening references.

Anomalies about the video

 

[Insane3D]

There is already at least two thread discussing this...please search.

 

[halik]

Yeah its fake... the guy was dead when they decapitated him. I saw the video and the time stamps are off ... theres is cut between when they throw him down and when they actually do the deed

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Originally posted by: halik
Yeah its fake... the guy was dead when they decapitated him. I saw the video and the time stamps are off ... theres is cut between when they throw him down and when they actually do the deed

Yeah, I posted something about this the other day. Again, I am not vouching for the accuracy of the info contained herein - I cut and pasted it from another site:

Check out the video timestamp timeline:

13:26 - Berg states his and his father's name. Seated in plastic patio chair in orange jumpsuit. Shot taken from a side angle.

2:18 - Seated in same chair, same jumpsuit, shot taken from the front. Berg identifies his family and where he lives.

2:40 - Berg is seated quietly on the floor in front of five masked men. All the men seem very well fed and the exposed skin rather pale for a bunch of islamic terrorists on the run. The middle guy appears to be reading from two pages of prepared text, although he is continually turning the pages over and over and over, his actions making it completely impossible for anyone to read anything from those papers. The video is too grainy to tell if the guy's mouth is moving.

2:44 - The shot angle has not changed - the middle guy is still 'reading' from his papers. Wild screaming starts on the soundtrack, but none of the masked men seem to notice it, and Berg is still sitting very quietly in front of them. He has not moved at all during these four minutes.

2:45 - the middle guy draws a knife from his jacket, pushes Berg over, and the camera suddenly zooms into such a tight closeup that the screen goes black. The timestamp abruptly changes here.

13:45 - the camera pulls back to reveal Berg utterly motionless, being manhandled by the attackers. An assailant with a black mask draws the knife across the throat, while an assailant with a white mask sits on the motionless body. The soundtrack has several people shouting "allahu akbar", but the opinion of native Iraqi speakers who have heard it is that the accents are NOT Iraqui, more likely arabic or arabic as second language.

13:46 - screaming escalates on the soundtrack yet the windpipe has quite clearly already been completely severed by the knife-weilding assailant with the Black Mask, the head being connected only by the spine. No screaming is physically possible at that point, yet it mysteriously continues, much the way it started. White Mask assailant still stitting on the motionless body, doing nothing.

13:47 - There is another in/out camera zoom and suddenly it is the White Mask assailant, not the Black Mask one, that steps away from the body, knife in hand, holding the head aloft. No blood anywhere. At this point, the timestamp and the camera angle abruptly change again.

2:41 - Berg's head held aloft by White Mask, different angle, no blood. Curious - what day is this? As previously noted, during the 2:40 through 2:44 period, Berg could be seen alive, seated quietly in front of his captors as they 'read' their statement.

13:48 - timestamp and shot abruptly change again. Now we get shot of head resting on top of the prone body, with a zoom on the body's severed neck. Everything is very clean, completely inconsistent with the forensic reality of decapitation.

I still tend to think Berg was murdered by terrorists, but the tape, and surrounding circumstances, are so dizzyingly weird that it's hard to know what did or didn't happen.

 

[0roo0roo]

we never invaded iraq. cg these days is f*cking incredible.

 

[MegaWorks]

Originally posted by: Don_Vito

Originally posted by: halik
Yeah its fake... the guy was dead when they decapitated him. I saw the video and the time stamps are off ... theres is cut between when they throw him down and when they actually do the deed

Yeah, I posted something about this the other day. Again, I am not vouching for the accuracy of the info contained herein - I cut and pasted it from another site:

Check out the video timestamp timeline:

13:26 - Berg states his and his father's name. Seated in plastic patio chair in orange jumpsuit. Shot taken from a side angle.

2:18 - Seated in same chair, same jumpsuit, shot taken from the front. Berg identifies his family and where he lives.

2:40 - Berg is seated quietly on the floor in front of five masked men. All the men seem very well fed and the exposed skin rather pale for a bunch of islamic terrorists on the run. The middle guy appears to be reading from two pages of prepared text, although he is continually turning the pages over and over and over, his actions making it completely impossible for anyone to read anything from those papers. The video is too grainy to tell if the guy's mouth is moving.

2:44 - The shot angle has not changed - the middle guy is still 'reading' from his papers. Wild screaming starts on the soundtrack, but none of the masked men seem to notice it, and Berg is still sitting very quietly in front of them. He has not moved at all during these four minutes.

2:45 - the middle guy draws a knife from his jacket, pushes Berg over, and the camera suddenly zooms into such a tight closeup that the screen goes black. The timestamp abruptly changes here.

13:45 - the camera pulls back to reveal Berg utterly motionless, being manhandled by the attackers. An assailant with a black mask draws the knife across the throat, while an assailant with a white mask sits on the motionless body. The soundtrack has several people shouting "allahu akbar", but the opinion of native Iraqi speakers who have heard it is that the accents are NOT Iraqui, more likely arabic or arabic as second language.

13:46 - screaming escalates on the soundtrack yet the windpipe has quite clearly already been completely severed by the knife-weilding assailant with the Black Mask, the head being connected only by the spine. No screaming is physically possible at that point, yet it mysteriously continues, much the way it started. White Mask assailant still stitting on the motionless body, doing nothing.

13:47 - There is another in/out camera zoom and suddenly it is the White Mask assailant, not the Black Mask one, that steps away from the body, knife in hand, holding the head aloft. No blood anywhere. At this point, the timestamp and the camera angle abruptly change again.

2:41 - Berg's head held aloft by White Mask, different angle, no blood. Curious - what day is this? As previously noted, during the 2:40 through 2:44 period, Berg could be seen alive, seated quietly in front of his captors as they 'read' their statement.

13:48 - timestamp and shot abruptly change again. Now we get shot of head resting on top of the prone body, with a zoom on the body's severed neck. Everything is very clean, completely inconsistent with the forensic reality of decapitation.

I still tend to think Berg was murdered by terrorists, but the tape, and surrounding circumstances, are so dizzyingly weird that it's hard to know what did or didn't happen.

very interesting! and don't forget the timing of this tape, oh lets see couple of days after Abu Ghraib Prison photos

 

[BDawg]

As long as they killed him, does it matter how?

Did his headless body get returned to his parents last week?

 

[ThePresence]

Matbe their camcorder was broken, maybe their timestamp was messed up. Who know.
I wonder how many people have seen people beheaded to be familiar with the forensic reality of it.
Maybe they didn't react to his screaming because they didn't give a shite?
He turned the papers too fast? PLEASE.

MAYBE HE WAS ABDUCTED BY ALIENS?

 

[Insane3D]

You're right...it's not one bit odd that the screaming is happening while he sits there quietly... It's not odd that the guy who does the beheading says he is a particular AQ higher up we are currently looking for, and titles the tape with his name, but wears a hood...to what...hide who he is after he just told us his name?

There's a difference between looking at something objectively, and finding some things that are strange, and don't add up, and wondering what really happened, and trying to develop wild conspiracy theories involving Elvis, Bush, JFK, and James Dean working in a plot with the aliens from Zantar...

 

[Bulk Beef]

I still tend to think Berg was murdered by terrorists, but the tape, and surrounding circumstances, are so dizzyingly weird that it's hard to know what did or didn't happen.

I asked in one of 1/2 dozen or so other threads on this, but nobody answered, so I'll ask again - has it occurred to anyone that more than one camera may have been used?

very interesting! and don't forget the timing of this tape, oh lets see couple of days after Abu Ghraib Prison photos

Hmmm, that's a tough one. Let's see... if you were a terrorist, and you wanted to make a "statement" about Abu Graib, would you do it now, or six months from now?

Do you people that are clinging to these bizarre conspiracy theories really have that hard of a time believing that a fundamentalist like Zarqawi (or whoever it is on the tape) would do something like this? This is not a new tactic. A primal act that plays to primal fears. Islamic radicals have a real fondness for taking off heads, and videos like this have been coming out of Chechnya for quite some time.

 

[Klixxer]

Originally posted by: ThePresence
Matbe their camcorder was broken, maybe their timestamp was messed up. Who know.
I wonder how many people have seen people beheaded to be familiar with the forensic reality of it.
Maybe they didn't react to his screaming because they didn't give a shite?
He turned the papers too fast? PLEASE.

MAYBE HE WAS ABDUCTED BY ALIENS?

Do you have any idea how much blood there would be if he WAS alive?

Take your regular garden hose and put your pinky inside it, now turn the water on, that is the kind of pressure you have in your jugular, there is NO way to cut off a mans head and not be covered in blood, there are two nerves that regulates the blood flow to and from the head, if they register no flow, the heart would increase that pressure so a beheading IS going to be VERY messy, if it is real.

That isn't what i think, that is what i know, this video can be real or perhaps not, if it isn't we will know about it.

 

[Kadarin]

Interesting...

 

[CaptnKirk]

It should have been every bit as messy as 'OJ' proved - remember OJ ?

In order for it to have been that bloodless, the victum would have had to
have been dead for enough time for pooling and coagulation to occur.
that would have been for somewhat over 6 hours.

 

[fornax]

ThePresence, I don't have the stomach to search for and watch them, but apparently there are many videos of Chechen terrorist beheading Russian soldiers on Chechen web sites, and people claim they're nothing like the Berg video.

Bdawg, I agree and the really sad part is that apparently this guy was genuinly trying to help the Iraqis unlike many of the so called "civilian contractors".

 

[conjur]

The two timestamps could be from different cameras. At first, Berg is shown in a chair and saying who he is, where he's from, etc. then it cuts to the scene of Berg on his knees and the guys behind them and the timestamp changes.

But, then at 2:44:33 or so the screaming starts. Berg is heard screaming twice and then there's a very brief cut in the audio and then the screaming continues and then they throw him down and then it cuts to the different timestamp (perhaps someone else with a different camera?)

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Originally posted by: sward666 I asked in one of 1/2 dozen or so other threads on this, but nobody answered, so I'll ask again - has it occurred to anyone that more than one camera may have been used?

That alone still wouldn't account for the way his severered head is shown at 2:41, in the middle of the timeframe that the killer was still reading. That's not to say there are not other explanations for this, though - it's possible one camera's timer was broken (though I can't say I have ever seen a modern camcorder that functioned, but had a broken timer, so it would still be odd)

Do you people that are clinging to these bizarre conspiracy theories really have that hard of a time believing that a fundamentalist like Zarqawi (or whoever it is on the tape) would do something like this? This is not a new tactic. A primal act that plays to primal fears. Islamic radicals have a real fondness for taking off heads, and videos like this have been coming out of Chechnya for quite some time.

I want to be clear, as I have consistently, that I am NOT clinging to any bizarre conspiracy theories about Berg's killing, and think the likeliest explanation is that he was murdered by terrorists, though he may have been dead when he was beheaded on the tape. That said, there are certainly a list of extremely bizarre and troubling aspects to the case that would take a day to list, including but not limited to:

- Berg's prior brush with al Queda, and the fact that Zacharias Moussaui ended up using his login password (this alone makes it hard for me to take anything about the tape at face value, though if anything it seems to me to militate in favor of the idea that Berg was some kind of AQ agent, rather than that he was killed by the US).

- The fact that the US Consulate apparently told Berg's family he was in US custody, and he apparently told a number of people he had been in US custody, but now the US is denying it, and the Iraqi police are also denying having held him.

- The fact that Berg's body was reportedly found on 8 May, but the killer on the tape indicates the day as 11 May, the day the tape was released.

- The fact that al Zarqawi says his name on the tape, but stays masked.

- The orange jumpsuit seems really weird, in that it's not clear to me where the terrorists would get such a jumpsuit, or why they would use it (though admittedly the jumpsuit does not appear to be a standard jumpsuit).

- The aforementioned time code issues, combined with the obviously out-of-sync screaming, make it clear the tape was heavily edited. No idea whether this means it is fake, though. We'll probably never know for sure.

 

[conjur]

When did he say his name on the tape?

In another thread up here, someone posted a translation of the speech and I don't recall seeing Zarqawi's name mentioned.



http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=52&threadid=1308290&STARTPAGE=3&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

 

[Gaard]

I don't know if 'fake' would be the right word. He was obviously beheaded. But, just as obvious, imo, is that this tape isn't what it was passed off as.

The facial expression is of one in pain. But there is the lack of blood during the decapitation. Draw your own conclusions.

 

[YellowRose]

Now was'nt this Z.... guy declared dead several months ago. And doesn't he move pretty well for a dead man and with a artifical leg which itself is damaged. Where on earth did they find 5 well fed arabs. These guys look like they have yet to miss a supersized meal from Micky D's in years. Why did two of them use their left hand to touch their face. I thought the left hand was taboo/unclean thus they would not touch their face with their left hand.

 

[Genx87]

I just watched it for like the 5th time to see the time stamps and there is indeed a difference between when they lift the head up. But the version I have the sound seems off by a few seconds and he is clearly moving while they are cutting his throat. You cant get around the movements he does and I mean this is even after several seconds of cutting.

 

[mastertech01]

Originally posted by: YellowRose
Now was'nt this Z.... guy declared dead several months ago. And doesn't he move pretty well for a dead man and with a artifical leg which itself is damaged. Where on earth did they find 5 well fed arabs. These guys look like they have yet to miss a supersized meal from Micky D's in years. Why did two of them use their left hand to touch their face. I thought the left hand was taboo/unclean thus they would not touch their face with their left hand.

I dont know, I looked at many pictures from Iraq and the men all seemed well fed. And from my recollection the right hand was taboo, at least it was back when I was there. No common right hand shaking. We continously had to remind ourselves when greeting Arabs.

 

[nickdakick]

Is the video a fake? Hell, yeah if I've ever seen a fake this is one. Sadly enough the fact that the guy was beheaded is not. Did they do it in front of a camera ? No. Did someone do it ? Yes. Who ? Well, we don't know(yet).

 

[Ozoned]

another article

 

[YellowRose]

Well it is hard keeping different customs in mind. So its the right hand and not the left. Ok thats out as a bit to ponder. I still think the 5 behind berg looked awful big and burley and totally different then the arabs one sees on TV. There is also one thing that really bothers me. That is that their just doesn't seem to be enough blood when you consider the area that was cut.

 

[Klixxer]

It does not matter, none of the left hand-right hand stuff matters, it is IMPOSSIBLE to cut off a mans head without being covered in blood, once the jugular has been severed it is like standing by a sprinkler, anyone who has ever seen a nicked jugular knows that and as the carthoid isn't delivering back the blood pressure will increase by 5x that is several liters of blood, squirting all over the place.

It CAN'T be real, there is just no way, it is like saying that someone swimmed in an ocean without getting wet, get it?