"The reason this video was made was an attempt to destroy that auxiliary," Cole said. "It's not going to scare the U.S. troops out of the country, and it's not going to get rid of the CPA. But there are a lot of (nongovernmental organizations) and contractors that are going to decide this is not the time to be doing business in Iraq."
Another goal, the experts said, is recruitment—drawing new members to the cause by portraying the killers as defenders against anti-Muslim forces.
"They are trying to tap into anti-American sentiment and use it to their own purposes … get more followers, get more cash, finding more political support," said Jim Walsh, an international security expert at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
A third, even more subtle motive might be a power struggle within the radical Islamist movement itself, Walsh speculated. The tape is entitled "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American," and the Website that released the tape reportedly identified al-Zarqawi as Berg's killer.
U.S. investigators say al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, has ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. By taking such a high profile, Walsh suggested, al-Zarqawi might be trying to establish himself as the active leader of the radical Islamist movement, leaving bin Laden in the shadows.[1]
Yet few outlets explored the plausibility of the claim, and as time went on, any qualifier fell away from press reports so that the association became hardened: Nickolas Berg was beheaded because of the abuses at abu Ghraib at the very least, and perhaps for the perception of abuses at Guantanamo. In that context, the orange jumpsuit made sense.
Nicholas Berg, in other words, died for our sins, and the use of the jumpsuit was a visual method for making the point unmistakable and preparing it to
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- ↑ Stannard, "Beheading Video Seen as War Tactic."
