Berg beheading: No way, say medical experts

From the Asia Times courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

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.

Well, I'm withholding judgment on this one. I think that everybody agrees that Nick Berg is dead, but there are some weird questions about this whole thing--I've already read a couple of reports that his beheading was faked, but they were from some Mexican newspaper that I'd never heard of; this source seems more reputable, but I could be wrong. Who knows? One thing's for sure, I don't think the Bush administration is above such a stunt. Of course, that doesn't mean it was a fake, just that it's possible, given the known ethics of the Oval Office. I'm waiting to hear more.

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