Nick Berg Beheading Video

If you are under 18, you may NOT watch this video! If you are a parent and are concerned about your kids viewing this post, please either supervise and/or restrict your children's Internet use or invest in a blocking program.

I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.

This is an excellent copy of the Nick Berg Beheading Video. There are a still some copies floating around (though it is often hard to find), but often they are not very good. This is a copy of the first video that was released onto the Web in 2004. It was reportedly downloaded 10 million times!

There is something truly terrible and weird about this video. The footage is sort of amateurish and shaky, but it's not that bad. For one thing, Berg is dressed in an orange jumpsuit as the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are. He is seated on a chair in an austere room.

At the beginning, he gives a short monologue, and he seems to be slightly smiling, but in an odd or sort of bizarre and detached way, while he is talking. Since you know what is going to happen to him later on, it's quite creepy.

Then Berg is seated on the floor in his jumpsuit, with five hooded monsters behind him, all dressed in black. The one in the middle, said to be Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the famous head of Iraqi Al Qaeda at the time, reads a long speech in a creepy and angry voice. The other four sort of shift back and forth ominously as the speech goes on.

Berg is on the floor in front of them, seemingly calm or at least oblivious to what is going on. He doesn't seem to know what is going to happen to him. One gets the impression that he is either naive, drugged or possibly gone crazy from the confinement. At any rate, his behavior is incongruously disturbing.

At the end, the Orcs jump down and hold Berg down. Then Zarqawi saws off his head. When this happens, at first Berg screams horribly and tries to wriggle away, but he is beheaded quite quickly. Zarqawi then holds up the head, severed horribly, dripping with blood and with entrails hanging from it, while all of them shout, "Allahu Akbar!" over and over. The severed head has a strange horrified expression that is even more creepy.

At that moment you realize that this man has just had his life severed in the same manner as his head was. He's been killed in the most awful way, and now he's dead. I was literally shaking after watching this thing.

This was the first beheading video I ever saw, and this one stuck with me forever. I watched it once and was traumatized for 2 to 3 weeks afterwards, in one way or another. I watched it again, and that was one Hell of a mistake. I still rank this up there with the most terrifying shock videos on the Internet.

Berg was Jewish and went to post-invasion Iraq to try to drum up business for his business, Prometheus Tower Services, headquartered in Kenya, which made towers out of pressed construction blocks where the cost of a steel tower would be excessive. These were called Bovl Blocks. He seems to have been something of an adventurer.

He arrived in Iraq on December 21, 2003 and ventured up to Mosul, where he visited the family of an Iraqi man married to his aunt. He left and returned on March 14, 2004, intending to leave on March 30, 2004.

He wandered up to Mosul where he was detained by local police "for his own protection", as he was an obvious American wandering around an extremely unstable Iraq on his own, taking taxis, walking, etc. with no bodyguards at all. The Iraqis turned him over to Americans who detained him for 13 days without allowing him to meet a lawyer.

Both Iraqis and the US were worried that he was some sort of a spy or an agent, but apparently he was not. FBI agents visited his parents to confirm his identity on March 31. His parents filed suit to release him, and he was let go on April 5. The US says they never held him, that instead the Iraqis were holding him, but this appears to be a lie as we now have an email showing that US forces were indeed detaining him.

He was released on March 6. US officials advised him to leave Iraq immediately and offered him a flight out. Berg refused and instead headed down to Baghdad. He stayed in a cheap hotel in Baghdad and hung out at the gym where he chatted with and made friends with some of the regulars.

Berg had his last contact with US officials on April 10 and did not come back to his hotel that night. All of Iraq was in flames in the midst of a huge uprising. Berg had his bags and he was wandering about Baghdad apparently trying to find his way out of the city. This is apparently when he was abducted by Iraqi Al Qaeda.

His family became worried when they did not hear from him for a few weeks and contacted US officials, but they had no word on him. His decapitated body was found on a Baghdad overpass on May 5, 2004, just as the first invasion of Fallujah was getting underway. On May 11, a video was released on the Malaysian website of Muntada al Ansar, a militant group. The video was titled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American.

A CIA voice analysis of the tape one week said that the man reading the speech and who conducted the beheading had a high probability of being Zarqawi himself.

In the speech, Zarqawi says, "We tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way." He also threatens President Bush and President Musharaff of Pakistan.

A French reporter, Sara Daniel, later interviewed Abu Rashid, head of the Mujahedin Council in Fallujah, who admitted that his group had killed Berg. He said that they tried to do a prisoner exchange with the US for Berg, but the US rebuffed them.

There are some controversies about the video, but it doesn't appear to be a CIA or Mossad false flag operation, which is one of the popular anti-Semitic theories out there.

One of the conspiracy theories is that Berg's monologue at the beginning comes from his interrogation while being held in US custody. Therefore, the video is a false flag op. I don't believe there is good evidence for this. Another theory is that he was already dead when the video was made, and that a corpse was beheaded. But I've never heard or seen a corpse wriggle and scream like that before.