There's going to be a lot more strangeness before things settle down. Don't try to get on top of it. Trust your own heart. You can't know the truth of complicated events on the other side of the world, not with certainty. Anyone who demands you have an opinion about those things wants something from you and they're trying to trick it out of you.
As far as the Berg thing goes, I haven't seen anything but a few stills from the beginning of it. No head, no video. It's like East European porn - the moment I realized the women all looked beaten and drugged, it lost all its charm. It's too fake to turn me on. And the suffering it took to make it gets in the way.
The one thing I can say forensically about the Berg thing is the stunningly simple and obvious fact that nobody in an organization capable of eluding Mossad and US intelligence is dumb enough to say they're killing someone in retaliation for abuses in a prison that have been happening for over a year but that the world television audience has only just found out about.
It's as though they're taking revenge for people seeing those images from Abu Ghraib, not for the acts of abuse themselves. And there's your answer. It's a response to the repercussion of the images. Just as the train bombing in Madrid was an anticipation of the Spanish people's repudiation of the duplicitous and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq.
It's a response to the images, or more accurately to the inevitable growth of disapproval the images create. Because the original hit from the images was important. To boast at all those Arabs how their brothers were degraded, in as foul and demonic a way as possible. And then after the crowing success of the images, a capping of the outrage, a redirection of the outrage, a dissipation of the horror by adding to it. Changing its focus.
This is a war of propaganda in which real events, and the media images of those events, are being used in complex and deceptive ways, as symbols, as parables and metaphors. And real lives as well.
