Fishy Circumstances Surrounding Berg's "Beheading

How I yearn to be a retard with no desire to discuss things, regardless of the possibility that ultimately any conclusions reached may not 'mean' anything.

In Iraq while Saddam was still in power with UN sanctions?

Anyone who goes over there looking for work is an opportunist. I can't feel bad for Berg or anyone else that gets caught up in that shit when its associated with greed.
Berg knew the risks, he was no good samaritan like he has been portrayed.
So whether or not the CIA killed him or Al Queda is circumstancial.

That's missing my point, isn't it? What we're talking about here is a video, and a video made for propaganda purposes. We have post facto knowledge that Berg was beheaded, and a video that purportedly shows that he was beheaded by certain people for certain reasons. Those are two different things. I don't see anything wrong with a skeptical approach to the video, and I certainly don't think anything like Occam's Razor applies here, no matter what conclusion you end up with.

To put it another way, it begs the question to apply Occam's Razor to the video evidence when the issue at hand is whether the video is evidence.

[Edited on May 24, 2004 by saucy_son]

I feel sympathy for almost anyone who gets brutally beheaded. There are a few exceptions but on the whole, that's a terrible way to die.

In other news, I think you're a heartless dick. But that's just me.

I have no problem with skepticism either, in fact I encourage it. However, what we have been talking about isn't the video itself but whether or not the phenomenon in the video (the beheading) was what it claims to be, the murder of an American by Islamic extremists in retaliation for the prison abuse, or whether there is a deeper and more complicated conspiricy behind the phenomenon. So instead of needlessly multiplying entities (ie, the man was held by the US, he dies in prison, the prison scandal erupts, the US concocts a propaganda scheme and beheads his lifeless body) I choose to stand by the empirical evidence (the video artifact) of the phenomenon (the beheading) and accept the explaination (he was murdered by extremists) as the most simple and logical explaination of that phenomenon, using the law of parsimony as my philosophical justification for doing so. Everyone else is welcome to come to whatever conclusion that most suits them.

That was the framwork of the discussion I was having, regardless of what you think is the issue at hand. What is the video if not evidence of a beheading? To say the video isn't evidence requires the needless mulitplication of entities which results in a complicated and convoluted theory that requires more assumptions than facts to prop it up. Ergo, Occam's Razor is applicable, in my opinion.