Terror videos edited to make bigger impact

Straits Times | September 30 2004

WASHINGTON - Recent beheading videos by Iraq's most-wanted terror leader have been growing in sophistication, using animated graphics and editing techniques apparently aimed at embellishing the audio to make a victim's final moments more disturbing.

It is a sign of the importance that terrorists in Iraq now place on such propaganda efforts.

United States officials said Jordanian-born Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, whose group is blamed for the beheading of two Americans last week, seems aware of the impact he and his followers can have through the media, and are now more adept at using them.

'They have, obviously, a media element, because they make these terrible videos of the hostages, including the executions, and they get that media out to the different outlets,' said Mr John Brennan, director of the US government's leading terror threat analysis unit, the Terrorist Threat Integration Centre.

Early videos from Al-Qaeda and like-minded terror groups were grainy and sometimes just thumb-sized video boxes that popped up on a computer monitor.

But the quality of a video posted on a website last week, showing the beheading of American contractor Eugene Armstrong, demonstrates that militant groups now apparently have access to improved technology.

In the nine-minute Internet video, the images of Mr Armstrong were captured in greater and more gruesome detail than earlier videos. Animated graphics were used, including a Quran with an assault rifle standing on top of it.

The opening sequence was more elaborate, including words that faded in and out. A title page said in Arabic - The Media Division of the Tawhid and Jihad Group presents: The slaying of the first hostage.

Audio and forensic science experts suspect the group embellished the audio to make Mr Armstrong's final moments more disturbing.

The producer, for example, apparently used a noise-reduction technique to highlight sounds of anguish, said Mr Al Yonovitz, who has studied audio for 25 years and is a partner at Yonovitz and Joe Forensic Tape Analysis in Dallas.

'There is an enhancement,' he said. 'It is an amateur version of the Hollywood effects.'

Another expert, Mr Ben Venzke, a US government terrorism consultant, has seen instances in recent videos of roadside bombings where the producer will copy, paste and repeat a normally quick explosion segment, or play it in slow motion to stretch it.

As for the graphic detail in the taped beheading: 'The reason for the visual brutality of it is because it has an impact,' he said.

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