Jeremy Scahill On The Beheadings

As you may know, I believe that some or all of the ISIS beheadings may be fake:

http://sainthoward.blogspot.com/2014/09/further-evidence-isis-beheadings-are.html

Please read what Jeremy Scahill recently said about them:

... first of all, you know, this has haunted me—I mean, obviously, as a journalist who’s worked in those areas, and I have a lot of friends now who are in those countries, you know, I was horrified at it. In watching the videos, though—and, you know, they were so—in both the case of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, they’re so calm in the statements that they are giving, and it’s impossible to imagine that they know that they’re going to be killed in those moments. And, you know, my suspicion—and I’ve done some reporting on this—is that they had been put in that position repeatedly and told, you know, "You have to say this statement." And in other words, they were subjected to mock executions over and over and over again. And if you notice in the videos, you don’t actually see their heads being cut off. I think it’s possible that that was like read number 31 for James Foley of this statement, and they took the best cut of that, and he may have been killed in other context, and then they placed it there.

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/3/jeremy_scahill_on_obamas_orwellian_war

So, the beheadings could very well be a hoax or the videos have been edited in ways we cannot assess.

And this is the basis of our war on ISIS? What was it that The New York Times just wrote about Gary Webb?

Mr. Webb was open to attack in part because of the lurid presentation of the story and his willingness to draw causality based on very thin sourcing and evidence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/movies/kill-the-messenger-recalls-a-reporter-wrongly-disgraced.html

Frankly, everything we think we know about ISIS is "presented luridly" and "based on very thin sourcing and evidence", so maybe we shouldn't be rushing into another war just yet.

Update: Naomi Wolf agrees with me on this, and that's very good company:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2781864/Author-Naomi-Wolf-condemned-suggesting-videos-hostages-beheaded-ISIS-aren-t-real.html

And what is more important: not "disrespecting the victims' families" or discovering what really happened?

Naomi is right - many "journalists" are accepting and printing crap instead of doing their jobs.