Bin Laden’s thugs have definitely over reached. And what surprises me is, in light of the uprising against them now spreading through Iraq (and soon elsewhere) one would think they would tone it down and stop digging their graves. But apparently the bloodlust is too much for them. Today al-Qaeda released a video of the brutal execution of 5 Iraqis who were doing nothing more than protecting their homeland:

The self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq, a front for Al Qaeda, took credit for the brutal video that was posted on several Islamic Web sites.

“I advise the police and army to quit this job,” one of the officers said while seated in front of a camera before the killings.

The video shows a black-clad gunman blasting each uniformed officer in the back of the head at close range with a pistol as he crouches blindfolded with his hands bound behind him in a desolate area.

Bloody Bin Laden’s atrocities continue. These men were killed to fill a propaganda need for al-Qaeda; they need more and more violent footage so the Western Media will pick it up. It seems reminiscent, to steal a phrase from John Kerry, of an infamous Vietnam Photo of a brutal Vietcong killer being executed, which helped turn America against that war. Sadly for al-Qaeda, they missed the essence of the message. Right now al-Qaeda’s reputation for brutal massacres of Muslims is being etched into the heart and mind of Islam. And I am not sure Islam is ready to embrace full up Islamo Fascism.

The only good news is al-Qaeda is now limited to brutalizing people away from city centers because so many now are lining up to fight and kill them.

Apparently this is the latest chapter in al-Qaeda’s war manual in their war against the Iraqi people and the coalition; raiding remote peaceful villages, burning down homes and slaughtering both man and beast.

This campaign I will call a campaign of self-destruction. For probably a year al-Qaeda was trying to build their so called Islamic State in Iraq and several times they declared parts of Baghdad or other provinces as the capital of that state.

But now that they have been losing one base after another their objective changed from adding more towns and villages to the “state” to destroying the very same towns and villages! Obviously it’s all about making headlines regardless of the means to do that!

I don’t buy the view presented at Iraq The Model that al-Qaeda is feeling much guilt at being forced to prey on these small villages. A smart strategic move from day one was to let Iraq settle down, get America to start pulling back and take over more slowly. But thinking things out seems to be the big handicap for Bloody Bin Laden’s thugs. They only know how to do rampaging atrocities. Interestingly, even the criminal element of Iraq is starting to shun al-Qaeda’s butchers:

IN A different prison it might have been a sign of trouble. In Camp Cropper, with its 7,000 Iraqi detainees, Major General Douglas Stone knew that when the prisoners turned over four forcibly shaven Islamic extremists to the guards it meant that the moderates had at last regained control of the camp.

“They said, ‘Get them out of here’,” Stone recalled last week. For the first time a compound of Iraqi prisoners had turned against the hard-liners in their midst.

…

“It’s a breakthrough,” Stone said. “The Takfiris [extremists] terrorised the prison. This is the first time the moderates have felt empowered enough to identify them and take back control.”

You know it is bad when even the criminals shun you. al-Qaeda must be up there with purveyors of child porn in terms of prison popularity. Given the atrocities some of these animals have done to innocent children I can understand the sentiment.

There are some amazing people doing amazing things in Iraq – this general running the prison camp is one of them. He starts by treating the people as human beings first:

One of his first moves was to look at what the prisoners were charged with. He found most of them had no idea; nor did the American military court system.

Stone changed that. For the first time, prisoners who had been incarcerated for years were standing in front of panels, being questioned about their alleged crimes.

…

Stone hired Ed O’Connell, a Vietnam war veteran and an adviser at the Rand Corporation think tank, to study the prisoners’ motives. O’Connell found that money was the prime moti-vator for attacks on coalition forces; the second most important turned out to be fear, usually threats against the prisoner or his family. It seems simple but it had been ignored.

The key tactic that Stone has used to turn around Camp Cropper is one that he believes can be projected across Iraq: to empower the moderates. They are the silent majority of the Muslim world and he is convinced that by separating and educating the moderates and ruthlessly containing the radicals, he can send out a force that can work against the extremists.

al-Qaeda sees the people of Iraq as tools, or barriers, or pawns (pawns which blow themselves up). They do not see them as people of Iraq. We do. And that difference is what is turning the tide in Iraq. If we can get the prisoners to start turning on the bloody extremists, then we can and will win this thing.

For more on the wave of good news coming in from Iraq here is a story on how “a deluge of tips” allowed Iraqi and US forces to tamp out much of the violence in the north of Iraq. And here is a story on how the people of Baghdad are pulling together to also fight the extremists, creating a palatable change there. And here is the story of one heroic kid in Samarra who faced down al-Qaeda and helped US forces round them up. Here in this story, from the Salman Pak area, citizen groups are sprouting up to fight off al-Qaeda. The stories of change are coming fast and furious now. And all the denial from the leftward fringe cannot stop the momentum anymore than al-Qaeda’s brutality can.