PROPAGANDA CENTRAL

Berg beheading staged, say forensic experts

A leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation of Nicholas Berg appears to have been staged.
'I certainly would need to be convinced it [the decapitation video] was authentic,' Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, said from New Zealand. Echoing Dr Simpson's criticism, when this journalist asked forensic death expert Jon Nordby, PhD and fellow of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators, whether he believed the Berg decapitation video had been 'staged', Nordby replied: 'Yes, I think that's the best explanation of it.'
Questions of when the video's footage was taken, and the time elapsed between the shooting of the video's segments, were raised by both experts, reflecting a portion of the broader and ongoing video controversy. Nordby, speaking to Asia Times Online from Washington state, noted: 'We don't know how much time wasn't filmed,' adding that 'there's no way of knowing whether ... footage is contemporaneous with the footage that follows'.
While the circumstances surrounding both the video and Nick Berg's last days have been the source of substantive speculation, both Simpson and Nordby perceived it as highly probable that Berg had died some time prior to his decapitation. A factor in this was an apparent lack of the 'massive' arterial bleeding such an act initiates.