And I confess that though it troubles me, I would be far more enraged at the beheading of a woman than of a man. I've always been deeply ambivalent about women in combat positions (though as a pacifist, I suppose I don't want anyone in combat) -- but honesty, if this were to happen, it could make a guy like me more, not less, supportive of our efforts in Iraq. That's saying something for this lefty.

Annika you should go see the Michael Moore movie. I know it's far away from your tastes but it is far away from mine too even though I'm what you would call a "lefty", which means I can hang around in the majors well past my prime, I guess -- anyway, the first hour of the movie is stupid like peanut butter icees and meant to do nothing good at all but the entire second half is about the marines and the guy (Moore) actually does a good job with it. If you could bear the boring beginning you'd find some stuff during the second part that Americans haven't seen. Or maybe you've already seen it, I don't know.

Wow, I can't believe anyone has Ty Wig on their fantasy baseball team. What a nitemare.

i agree Hugo. i don't know if it's right to feel this way, perhaps it isn't, but there would be a difference in my mind if that kind of atrocity were committed against a woman. Not to minimize the horror of beheading a man, i think i've made it clear how i feel about that. But i hope they never do it to a woman. That would be a new level of awful.

fairest, i do plan on seeing the Farenheit movie eventually. But i plan on waiting for the video to come out. By that time, it will be too irrelevant to blog about, though.

the 'enemy' didnt make the berg video.

it was an inside job!!

http://aztlan.net/berg_abu_ghraib_video.htm

copy and paste that...

Mets kicked Yankee *ss last night Annika, and though Ty made an error I think he had an RBI double as well. Here in NY uptown I was rooting for the Flushing Bombers all alone. A lot of Yankee fans up here.

I would have waited for it to come out on video, too. I'm no fan of Moore. This is the first "sold out" type of movie I've seen since, um, I think E.T., and that's just cause my mom made me go. But in the Moore movie the looks on the faces of the Marines, all saying: "What the hell are we doing in this country???" -- pretty powerful. Then there are the bleeding dismemebered Iraqi females, cursing us. It's not the country I had hoped for, ours.

Frank:

If Al Qaeda didn't behead Nick Berg, then why have they not denied it was their work? They have ample opportunity to do so, both on the internet and with Al Jazera (sp.?). So, it occurs to me that the link may be seizing on a little similarity stuff to create a hypothesis that may not be correct. The mainstream media has not picked up on this either; what's the reason?

"They perform a variety of jobs, serving as drivers, medics, aviators, police and clerks. By law, they are banned from land combat, but they can still come into close contact with the enemy."

Annika - technically, the regulation concerns direct combat, not land combat.
Direct combat was defined as physical proximity to hostile forces, reconnoitering the enemy with an inherent risk of capture, and engaging the enemy with fire, maneuver or shock effect in contested territory, waters or airspace. However, Les Aspin when he was SecDef removed the "inherent risk" part I think in 94. In the Army, the term is direct combat probability code and that can apply to certain occupations (such as Infantryman) or units (Infantry battalion). If the DCPC is 1 (meaning yes), than the unit or job is closed to woman. The trend has been to open up more jobs in order to make woman more competitive for promotions. Of course, the term direct combat has become less useful in asymmetric, non-linear battlegrounds where supply convoys are just as (or more) likely to get attacked as the infantry squad on patrol and the term "frontlines" has less meaning.

"But in the Moore movie the looks on the faces of the Marines, all saying: "What the hell are we doing in this country???" -- pretty powerful."\

Fairest - if you consider there were over 75K thousand ground soldiers conducting major combat operations for a month (which is app 54M soldier/marine hours) and you take a snapshoot which is less than 1 to the tenth to the minus eight percent of that (oh, and you control all the editing) - I suspect you could find expressions of just about anything you wanted to portray. I probably had that look in Desert Storm after only 5 days and much less actual combat operations...being tired, hungry, dirty, scared, enraged, confused, and dozens of other emotions will tend to produce those kinds of looks.

The bottom line is the hard-core insurgents know the more the current Iraqi government stays in power (or an elected government) and the better economic conditions get for average Iraqis, the less support (especially the fence sitters who don't support actively the terrorists but don't give up any information on them either) they'll have. I suspect some of the insurgent leadership is surprised given the amount of casualities the US has suffered that we have not pulled out.

 recently I wanna buy some jewelry,I found a lot site sellingg  Omega Watches,and Tag Heuer watches.They are so cheap and they are so nice they are replica watches! Some one know about that? what about the quality?