We now know that it was not that swift for Bahjat. First she was stripped to the waist, a humiliation for any woman but particularly so for a pious Muslim who concealed her hair, arms and legs from men other than her father and brother.

…By the time filming begins, the condemned woman has been blindfolded with a white bandage.

It is stained with blood that trickles from a wound on the left side of her head. She is moaning, although whether from the pain of what has already been done to her or from the fear of what is about to be inflicted is unclear.

…A large man dressed in military fatigues, boots and cap approaches from behind and covers her mouth with his left hand. In his right hand, he clutches a large knife with a black handle and an 8in blade. He proceeds to cut her throat from the middle, slicing from side to side.

Her cries — “Ah, ah, ah” — can be heard above the “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) intoned by the holder of the mobile phone.

Even then, there is no quick release for Bahjat. Her executioner suddenly stands up, his job only half done. A second man in a dark T-shirt and camouflage trousers places his right khaki boot on her abdomen and pushes down hard eight times, forcing a rush of blood from her wounds as she moves her head from right to left.

Only now does the executioner return to finish the task. He hacks off her head and drops it to the ground, then picks it up again and perches it on her bare chest so that it faces the film-maker in a grotesque parody of one of her pieces to camera.

…She had nine drill holes in her right arm and 10 in her left, he said. The drill had also been applied to her legs, her navel and her right eye. One can only hope that these mutilations were made after her death.

It is obvious that these two Islamofascists were quite brave while they were torturing a bound and half-naked woman but we suspect that they would squeal to high heaven at the mere sight of even one man with any kind of weapon in his hands. We hope the Iraqis catch up with these individuals so we can hear them squeal and beg for their lives when the ropes are put around their necks, as Iraq has already done with several terrorists. There is nothing wrong with these two individuals that a long drop and a sudden stop will not fix.

Furthermore, we will be very politically-incorrect and say we have but two problems with what happened at Abu Ghraib:

(1) Some of the subjects of the mistreatment might have been innocent. We do not give a damn what happened to the guilty ones and we are in fact glad it happened to them.
(2) If I were a soldier, I would not want to have the kind of person who enjoyed perpetrating these abuses watching my back or flank. The conduct involved was contrary to the discipline of any kind of respectable military organization.

I hope the murderers of Atwar Bahjat get to enjoy the Abu Ghraib treatment as well, although, as stated above, members of the U.S. Armed Forces should not be the ones to do it to them.