As for this specific retaliation, it wasn’t prompted by the announcement that troops had abused prisoners, because that happened in January.

It was definitely prompted by CBS’ decision to act as Al Jazeera though.

Perhaps it’s every administration’s fault since Carter. Not wholly to blame, but not wholly blameless, either.

when I saw this I saw the face of evil personified. and you are right it will be coming back to america.

911 was the curtain opening and no matter what excuse they give for thier evil, no matter what apology the left tries to use along with the canard that we somehow brought this on ourselves thru our policies, this stands alone as testament to the evil that they ascribe to.

and I refuse to allow western culture to be overwelhmed by this eastern scourge.

europe is allready on the way towards being a dark continent again, submersion in islam well under way.

where ever they go they bring death. it is thier gift.

“We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity.” -Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, head of the al Muhajiroun group in London.

Muslim Europe - article by Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1796

chris you are wrong. they would have killed him in this fasion no matter what. the prison story was purely an excuse.

No, Chris is right. This so-called act of revenge — “the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghiraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls,” said the terrorists — was nothing more than a political powerplay. Terrorists may be brutal, but they are not stupid. With Democrats and their comrades in the media calling for apologies and resignations, the terrorists had Bush on the ropes. So they punched hard, knowing that timing is everything. Meaning, the appeasement party, having long forgotten the old saying, “Loose lips sink ships,” abetted the enemy in the murder of Nick Berg, by hyping the prison abuse scandal to the point of absurdity.

No, the terrorists aren’t stupid, but they are making a bet: they think we’re more like Spain than not.

IMO-they don’t still understand Americans…the ones who still have their spines intact. They think that if they push all the right buttons, we’ll fold. Actually, I quite understand their miscalculation; they’ve been pushing around the Euro’s for years.

Now if they get America angry enough (we’re not there yet…the leftmedia has been banking that fire), they’ll live (or not) to regret it.

Ask the Japanese, they were the last ones stupid enough to ignite America’s fury. They also thought that Americans were weak and dissolute.

A M Siriano I am right in that they would have killed him and used some other excuse, this was handy but they would have killed him none the less.

Any liberal that blames Bush or Abu Ghraib or Rumsfeld or anyone in the Bush Administration or any conservative member of Congress or any conservative pundit for this atrocity is a partisan fool, is flatly wrong, and doesn’t deserved to be taken seriously.

The murderous thugs who carried this out are themselves the only ones responsible for this unimaginable atrocity.

I’d also like to add that holding left liberals in the U.S. responsible in any way for Berg’s murder is equally wrong. I am just as outraged and stunned and saddened by the rest of you at this horrible, gruesome barbarity.

Correction: My last sentence should read “I am just as outraged and stunned and saddened AS the rest of you at this horrible, gruesome barbarity.” My apologies for the lack of proofreading before hitting the post button.

If anyone thinks they would have decapitated the guy and blamed it on a January pdf report on prison abuse, you’re dreaming. But I agree they would have done it no matter what at some point in the future. It’s not like they decapitate a guy every week though. They save this gory stuff for special occasions.

This was clearly an attempt to jump on the CBS photo bandwagon and feed the growling anti-Bush beast.

Now, that’s not to say they won’t do things on their own schedule, but now the international political dynamic of this war has been permanently shifted by CBS and the Democrats, and al Qaeda took the cue and did their part to fuel the fire.

Here’s where it really could get bad though. Al Qaeda may now decide that there’s a new window of opportunity that has been created by Democrats that didn’t exist previously. They may now opt to take bigger risks for a bigger payoff before the election. That may include making a push for a WMD attack that they had previously put on the back burner as too risky with Bush as President.

Put yourself in their shoes. This is the time to go for it, precisely because you suddenly have an opportunity to call it a response or self-defense. Prior to this you’re just killing for no reason. So again, this is all a wonderful political gift from CBS and the Democrats. “We nuked NYC because of the atrocities in Abu Ghraib,” will work for most idiots around the world now. “We nuked NYC for the hell of it,” wouldn’t have.

rumcrook, do you see how they made the murder tape due to this fundamantal shift in the war? Not that it will work for them, but they responded to our domestic politics and hoped to make it worse for Bush.

Jimmy, do you see how the responsibility for the crime itself is different from the responsibility for changing the political dynamic of the war and opening a door for an attack?

I’m actually less worried about barbaric thugs committing a single murder than I am about the war dynamic. CBS is more powerful and dangerous at this moment in time than any individual terrorist, because an al Qaeda nuke (or a failure to stop Iranian nukes due to the new dynamic) is just a tad worse than an individual beheading.

That’s why it’s important that we look at why the murder occurred when it did. Calling it even politically and blaming just the barbaric terrorists sounds very reasonable, and in a basic sense it’s true, but it’s also short-sighted and completely misses the strategic aspects of this war.

They didn’t need an excuse to do this, we all know that. But they took an excuse and cue from CBS and the Media.

For years I read of the atrocities like this and more committed by Islamofascists in Algeria. The press called it a civil war or strife, but I figured that if they could such things, slit the throats of muslim babies, mothers, and so on without compunction, they would not hesitate when their attention turned to us.

As for lowering ourselves to their level, it is inevitable. Read about Daniel Boone. To win, he had to become as savage as the Indians, same with the settlers.

The odd thing is that humans can do it and then go back to normal (most of them). The evil men who did that to Berg are now sitting around the table eating cous cous, laughing, joking, planning the rest of their lives.

Someone else has said it. These fascists don’t fear death, they fear humiliation which is why I can’t get worked up about Abu Graib. My quarrel was that we assigned incompetents to the task who made it worthless and idiotic, and damaged our cause.

>> To win, he had to become as savage as the Indians, same with the settlers.

The odd thing is that humans can do it and then go back to normal (most of them). <<

Mark, you’ve got it exactly. Civilization must be uncivilized sometimes, but because we want our people to return to normal, we try to separate the abnormal actions and times as much as possible. Police forces, military forces, and state executions are all imbued with special quasi-religious rituals for just this purpose; to insulate the killing-part of the person and institution from the normal-part.

Maybe this is the deep problem with these young prison guards; by treating the interrogations as cheerful games — just another session of Dungeons and Dragons — they broke out of the “ritual bubble”.

chris I agree with you that the terrorists are exploiting a dynamic your right. what I am saying is it wouldnt have mattered what was going on they would have pinned it on us and the leftist press would lend support to thier cause.

Yeah rum, I think they hold humans in reserve for times like these. It’s like holding onto gold and waiting for the price to skyrocket.

Many abductees were just being released over the last year due to depressed political value and the cost to hold them all. The value only increased when the press and the Dems went nuts, raised the political stakes and essentially put a bounty on American heads.