Nick Berg Video: The Occam's Razor Analysis I'm not posting a link here, you resourceful kids who must see it can find it. I had to look and found it this morning. At first I had the same reaction of horror that everyone else did, although somewhat tempered by some past experience of my own: I work in a biology lab and have decapitated maybe 800 undrugged rats in my life. (We need them stress-free because we study stress and need good basal values, so drugs are not an option as they may mess with what we are looking at.)
Then the timestamp issues were pointed out, the conspiracy sites are all abuzz with "IT'S A FAKE! WAG THE DOG!" Well kids, the guy is in Philadelphia with no head, so it's not a fake. The question is how alive he may have been. I was curious and took a second look and found a lot of timestamp jumps, which you can read about below.
Let me give you my "professional" opinion first. ("Damnit Jim, I'm a scientist, not a terrorist assassin!") It may seem morbid, but I think my experience gives me a very unique perspective on this act. I've done it myself, in a more controlled way, on a different sort of animal, but believe me, it is never a trivial thing. The first few times I had to do it I thought I was having a panic attack. But that feeling subsides as the experience gets familiar, and one has to remind oneself of what one is doing to recapture even a little of that. That these men could do this, and either control or not have that feeling, says to me they either have experience or are capable of acts of depersonalization that I cannot fathom. Or both, of course.
IMO the act was genuine in every meaningful way. A live man was decapitated. He may have been unconscious or sedated. I don't think he was dead, and if you read my time analysis below you'll see why. But if he was dead, it was not out of mercy but to control him, and it was by some method so fast and scarless that we should be thankful.
If I seem detached, well, I have had a lot of practice. It's my job. I'm not a monster and I hope I'm not sounding like one. But I must protect myself from reality somehow, and my natural defense is intellectualization and analysis. If I let myself feel too bad for this guy as a person, how am I supposed to deal with the three dozen American soldiers dead in Iraq this month...SO FAR?
Is there a voyeurism aspect? Sure. I've come to terms with that in myself. I want to see this to make sense of it to myself. Anyone who condemns people for wanting to see and puts themselves onthe moral highground for not looking is not being fully honest with themself, or understands so little about humanity that they couldn't be contributing much of value to these discussions. I have friends who have asked me to not post the URL because they will look and they don't want to. THAT'S humanity, THAT'S self-knowledge. And here is my version.
ANALYSIS
There are two cameras. One thinks it's 2AM and one thinks it's 1PM. I'll call them Camera2 and Camera13.
Video begins at 13:26. Camera13 is on Berg at a 3/4 angle. He begins talking.
After "my father's name is Michael" 13:26:27->2:18:30 (Camera2, facing Berg) "My mother's name..."
(so we have an 11:07:58 second difference between the cameras.)
at "I live in we-westchester" there is a skip. Not a stutter--to my ears, an audio artifact.
"...Philadelphia." 2:18:43->2:40:32. This is the shot seen on the news: 5 standing hooded men and Berg sitting. (I wonder what they did in that time. Drug Berg? 20 minutes is about right for a sedative isn't it?)
Blah Blah Blah, probably about how Jews like me are the root of all evil and we drink baby blood. Or whatever the fuck he says. I don't fucking want to know, honestly. In the middle of it, we get a jump from 2:43:39->2:44:31, it may be audible but I don't speak Arabic. There are many things that sound like they could be skips, and in Hebrew (which I do speak, and which is similar syntactically to Arabic) they almost certainly would be, but I suppose they could be features of the language itself. Anyway, in those almost 60 seconds there is absolutely NO change in anyone's pose. I really, really looked for one, too. 5 people didn't move a muscle. This and the skip makes me think we are dealing with some real hi-quality AV equipment here. (hence Occam's razor.) The sound later is off from the video, and I think this is where it happens. Perhaps one camera's sound was used for both?
At 2:44:32 you start to hear movement and people yelling "alaaaaa! hu akbar!", but it doesn't show up on video. There is a truly bloodcurdling scream at 2:44:34-7. I hope it's a fake, but I doubt it. There may be some audio skipping in or after it.
In the image, the guy pulls his sword at 2:44:35 and wrestles Berg down to the floor with his knife out but not touching him. As they wrestle him, the timestamp inexplicably becomes unreadable. the 2:44 is clear, but the seconds aren't. The very last clear time you see is 2:44:12, but that's not possible--2:44:42 maybe? camera error?
Another jump to Camera13. By our previous calculation the timestamp on there should be 13:52:10, but it's 13:45:47 so one of teh camera's timestamps had to have been adjusted in that 20 minutes to have at least the minutes close to each other. We have a different angle and Berg is on the floor. If it's a recreation of when they were wrestling him down before, it's a damn good one.
13:45:52 jumps 6 seconds to :58, the camera was too close and it looks like they just cut out the zoom. Then we have the stuff you won't see on TV, and I am sad to say during this the timestamp is perfect. It's interminable. There is one cut at 13:46:33 to 13:47:46. In that minute the task has been underway, and we see the completion. Their barbaric trophy is displayed until 13:47:53, in a 3/4 angle shot. One last cut, to 2:46:17. Same image (dude's head covering is exactly the same, arm looks to be at same angle), different camera angle. And now we know that it's been about two minutes since they wrestled him to the ground. And those two minutes are generally accounted for by Camera13.
I saw a different version this morning that had more at the end, but the one I sat down and analyzed didn't have that last bit. Trust me, it's just as well.
