[Blender]

I was on the Hostage Working Group in Baghdad. I watched a lot of these videos. Indeed there is a part of your soul that is sacrificed when doing this work. That video is among one of the more disturbing ones because of the age of the executioner, but I still think the worst are the ones of children being beheaded.

The most disturbing thing about most of them is the way the hostages would just sit still and allow the beheading to happen. I talked to our psych doc (the one that handled the detainees), he said it was because people's brains could not process what was going on. He said what was going through their heads when it happened was simply "this isn't really happening". That was their last thought.

I think that inability to mentally process that level of brutality is a telescoping issue. When I watched the videos at first I remember thinking "This doesn't look real." It looked like a badly made horror movie, because that is the only scenario in which we could accept the idea that men will cut other men's heads off. But the more I watched them and the more I knew the people of that culture, the more realistic the videos were.

The next level of the telescoping issue is organizational. I found it very hard to get support and resources for hostage rescue unless it was a US citizen. The hostage taking was having a profound effect of the area because of the fear it inspired, especially once it became a growth industry for criminals to get money as well as for ideological and political gain. The beheading of children became increasingly common. We had hundreds of videos of men, women and children kneeling on concrete floors and dirt roads. Still nobody wanted to acknowledge hostage taking and beheadings as a serious problem.

These videos are made on a daily basis and yet you NEVER see them in the news. The West is sitting still on it's knees as Islam holds a machete to our throats.

This IS happening.