A terrifying scream

And then Nick Berg, a civilian contractor aged 26 who went to Iraq to help rebuild communications equipment, is pushed onto his side, the knife cuts into his throat, his screams get frantic and he gurgles, the bastards who are doing it shout "Allahu Akbar" over and over again. Finally his head is held aloft. [small video/large video]

A statement read immediately beforehand stated:

For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the US administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused. So 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 coffin after coffin ... slaughtered in this way.

MetaFilter has a characteristically heated thread about this, The Guardian leads with a headline suggesting it was indeed a revenge killing for the recent Abu Ghraib torture (the Taguba Report about this, even though on Fox's website, is still classified, soldiers are told)...

But is it really a revenge attack? DailyKos questions this in common with many other sites. In MetaFilter someone said Islam is a religion of peace. Yep. But this killing departs from the basic rules of Islam, and as someone else replied, every single religion has been held up to be one of peace by its adherents, only to be twisted by humans displaying human nature and being nasty to each other.

I don't reckon this killing is a religious revenge. It may be in the minds of the murderers. But they don't care for the people in Abu Ghraib so deeply that they would kill for them. They held that abuse up as a totem, without caring about it too much. If the guy who did the beheading is Zarqawi, bin Laden's henchman, he's in Iraq to keep Al-Qaida's operations going. Cut off a young American's head in Iraq and who will go there? Create a vacuum, agitate, destabilise. That's what they're about. That's what they want. I've seen it in Northern Ireland enough times.

A situation which was bad already just got a lot worse. It's hard to choose between throwing up your hands and getting out of there or going after this group and stopping them. But I think America should get out of Iraq governance, and into *helping* Iraq and every other nation hunt and eradicate Al-Qaida.