>I don't exactly want to watch one; so could you guys explain why it
>was a freak out?
The deed was done using a knife held with bare hands. It's very messy - lots of hacking, punctuated initially by screams. Lots of spurting blood. I watched some videos of guys being shot (on the same Ogrish site), but those are relatively quick and clean. The beheading was drawn out, and it seemed that the victim experienced lots of pain and terror before the lights dimmed. It's a very intense dose of pure horror.
There's a political angle to it as well. A few days ago, a veteran peace activist whom I admire quite a lot (I'm not mentioning his name because I didn't ask if it was ok to quote him) told me that one reason he thinks the antiwar movement has nearly died out is because of the brutality of the resistance. As he put it, that means that it "lacks a certain 'edge' of legitimacy which the Vietnam war had. Personally I support the right of people to resist in their own way - but in Iraq this has become very confused. Perhaps only the harder part of the US Left can rejoice over the chaos." I felt something like that watching the video - that anyone who could cut off someone's head with a knife held in his bare hands is so debased that it messes with one's political clarity about the war. Yes, I know the US military is far more murderous, and it's our military, and yes, I agree that people have the right to resist in their own way, but it takes some kind of hardness not to be knocked a bit off political course by the unmediated brutality of a beheading.
Doug