May 12, 2004 - His name is Nicholas Berg. His home was in West Chester Pennsylvania. On March 31 he was in custody in an Iraqi jail in Baghdad. The reason for his incarceration is unclear. The FBI says that he was not in US custody but he was in “local” custody. The FBI also says that “he was in Iraq on business and that’s that.” His family last heard from him on April 9th when he phoned to tell them that he was leaving Iraq through Jordan, Syria or Kuwait.

They found his body near a Baghdad highway overpass on Saturday. The body was headless. Video of his last moments and his beheading were published on an Arabic language web-site on Tuesday. He is shown dressed in an orange prisoner’s jumpsuit similar to that used at our county jail or other US prison facilities. Dressing prisoners in that kind of garb is not typical of Iraqi practice. The title of the video reads "Sheik Abu Musab Zarqawi slaughters an American infidel with his hands and promises Bush more,” Taking credit for the execution Zarqawi claims the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib as justification.

There is no glossing over it. The images of Mr. Berg’s execution by his captors, like that published of Daniel Pearl’s death, were horrendous. The images of abuse in Abu Ghraib pale in comparison. Nor do the Abu Ghraib photographs compare in horror to the pictures of the roasted remains of other Americans swinging from the girders of Fallujah Bridge. Many, like Senator James Inhofe, will point to Fallujah Bridge and Nicholas Berg’s slaughter as justification for the incidents at Abu Ghraib. They will claim that those of us who would hold America to a higher standard than that established by dictators and terrorists only support our adversaries.

When we hold America to the rule of law; when we refuse to be drawn into the law of the jungle where fang and claw are the only rule; then we are putting our feet on the road to defeating the terrorists. When we insist that America adhere to the principles of fair and humane treatment of prisoners we are appealing to our nation’s strength and purpose; the very values that set us apart from a world in which terror begets terror and horror returns with even greater horror.

If it is our purpose to bring justice to an Iraqi people who have known nothing but injustice and the rule of terror we cannot succeed by establishing our own chamber of horrors antithetical to our own traditions and heritage of ordered liberty under the rule of humane law. We must not descend into the rule of the fang and the claw while we demand an eye for an eye in an endless cycle of horror. We cannot sink to the lowest common denominator in a equation whose only solution is the infinity of death.