Quote: (08-21-2014 01:37 PM)scorpion Wrote:
Here's the link to the video: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f78_1408486626
I agree with kosko that this appears staged. In fact, it looks exactly like you'd expect it to if it was made by the U.S. to whip up popular support for increased military action against ISIS. Contrast this video with the earlier ISIS beheading videos. The difference is stark.
1) Most glaring of all, this video doesn't even show the actual beheading, something ISIS has never shied away from before. The body and the head are neatly posed at the end, shot from a single perspective with much less blood than seen in previous beheadings. This isn't even a video shot either, it's a still photo being panned to give the illusion of it being a video recording. Obviously it's much easier to photoshop a still photo than a video, so this extremely suspicious.
2) The professional nature of the video production
3) Multiple cameras
4) Multiple camera cuts
5) A tiny knife
6) The nonchalant vocal tone and body language of Foley
7) The position of the killer when he begins to make the cut. A grossly inefficient mechanical position for sawing off a head with a tiny knife, and a disgustingly messy position (guaranteeing his clothes will be needlessly soaked in the victim's blood, note that in other beheading videos the killers deliberately try to avoid this, the same way you would if butchering an animal). It's an excellent position if you want to hide the fact that you aren't actually cutting, though. Also, if he was really cutting we would have seen blood, even in the brief time before the camera cut out. But no blood.
8) The movie villain-like callout of President Obama and the American people at the end. Utterly ridiculous.
Foley was most likely tapped as a CIA asset years ago, it's possible he was recruited after becoming a conflict journalist or that might have been his cover from the beginning. Who knows if he was really captured or what his story was. Maybe his cover was blown or about to be and he was no longer useful. Maybe he just wanted to get out and disappear and CIA told him this was his ticket to do so.
That being said, it's possible that it's real. Definitely smells like bullshit, though. Tons of weird things about the video, combined with the obvious fact that the U.S. has all the incentive in the world to make something like that, the egregious history of falsified atrocity propaganda of this kind and that ISIS's origins stem from the CIA/Mossad to begin with. Just seems way too convenient at this point.
I'm just gonna leave this here:
"Beheaded" James Foley - His Secret Life and the CIA
I'm not going to draw any conclusions; instead I will ask - is it so hard to believe that the US government could act with malicious intent? Or create a problem it has to "solve" to divert attention?
Wald