Beheadings in Iraq - Losing Your Head For A Living.

Well, if you have weak stomachs to go with your steely resolve and determined chin then don't download the videos. I finally went to the net with the purpose of finding them about a month ago and didn't really put a lot of heart into it. A good friend of mine emailed me a link to a page that is either sincere about trying to expose information not touched upon by the filtered Western media or it's a right-wing radical page, but frankly I didn't care. I wanted to see the videos myself. I wanted to remember why I was supposed to hate these people again. Well, I'm not all that glad I did. They're graphic and disgusting, and they made me literally tremble for a moment with anger. I didn't feel nauseous, I really don't get disgusted in that way. I love horror movies, and "knowing it was real" didn't really have that much of an impact. For almost the whole video they have their captive - American construction contractor Eugene Armstrong - blindfolded and kneeling before them. They're dressed in black, with their faces covered, carrying automatic weapons and in front of some Islamic symbol and slogan on the wall. I turned the sound off, it was all Babel, high-pitched and rediculous. I'd never take him seriously without the AK-47. After what must have felt like an eterninty for that poor bastard they stopped and produced a machete-type knife. I turned up the volume as the coward sonovabitch kicks the man over and starts in on his neck with the knife. Sloppy. Messy and unprofessional, un-soldierly. These aren't men of war under our definitions for either of the words. The sounds were terrible. The man whimpered and cried, despite the hand of the scumbag coward terrorist over his mouth. Pulling his head back, exposing his neck to cut - you could hear his muffled scream from beneath his murderer's hand. The sound of the air escaping his windpipe changed in both pitch and volume as it exited through unfamiliar exits as his head was crudely sawed off and it made me shudder. It wasn't human, more like a hearing a horse or another large animal in extreme pain. I remember sheep and hogs being slaughtered when I was a kid, and most of the time they were completely quiet for the knife, but sometimes the pigs screamed. It sounded like a hog being slaughtered, animal and wet with grunts and escaping, spraying blood. They picked Armstrong's head up and set it on his body and left the camera there on it for a good long while. I turned it off before it ended.
So now I've seen what CNN protected me from, and I'm not all that upset at CNN. American Television is no forum for this kind of violence, it's not the reality we can deal with as a nation sanitized by the media and by our leaders.
But the internet is a forum for it, and more wide-reaching. Harder to filter either way, but maybe that's the point. Maybe it was difficult to find because I didn't really want to try hard enough, but maybe finding it was the right thing to do to. You need a shock sometimes to get the heart started. Mine got angry, and wants to know how these men were kidnapped. Where were their handlers? Where are the men accountable for their safety? Why aren't our soldiers protecting these people, when the terrorists can get Police and guard uniforms to get close to people it implies holes in security you could drive a HumVee through, and WHO is accountable for that? We are less than 2 months away from an election the strings of which are long and many and are being pulled from all directions, and one of them demands that we justify the deaths of our nation's soldiers, enlisted personnel and contractors with an ultimately inarguably logical reason for being there. Justification. I don't think we have that. I don't think the family and loved ones of American construction contractor Eugene Armstrong have it. Or will.
I have so much more to say I don't even know what it all is.

Gunmen snatched the two Americans the Briton from a house in an affluent neighborhood of central Baghdad last Thursday, the latest in a nearly six-month campaign of abductions of foreigners in Iraq. All three are employees of GSCS (Gulf Supplies and Commercial Services), a building contracting firm based in the United Arab Emirates. The three men were staying in a two-story building in Mansur district of the city when gunmen stormed the house at dawn, loaded the victims into a van and sped away. There was no indication of any resistance as the building had only one unarmed guard stationed at the location.
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19 September 2004--Iraqi Islamic terrorists threatened to kill three Western hostages unless all female Iraqi prisoners are set free by the end of today. The hostages – British citizen Kenneth Bigley and his co-workers from the United States Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong were shown blindfolded in a video broadcast by al-Jazeera TV and on at least one Islamic jihad website.
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