IF YOU asked them now whether it had done any good, or pleased God or served their cause or helped them win, the masked ones, who picked the severed head of the stranger from the ground, would have to think about the answer for a very long time.
For it would not be easy to tell other people that you cut the head from the neck of a man you didn't know and it achieved nothing at all, absolutely nothing.
Of course, much of our human endeavour fails to achieve its purpose. But executions shouldn't be futile, should they?
It will be a year tomorrow since Kenneth Bigley was killed and his death was made into a video, so that the creeps of the night could watch him die on the internet.
But many thousands of people have died in the months in between.
We watch in the cushioned safety of our lounges and, if there has been a particularly bad atrocity, they read out the figures, which cover a certain period, so that we all know the scale of the ghastly mess called "the war in Iraq".
In that sense, Bigley's death is lost in the mash of statistics, listing the categories of those killed - the children,, the civilians, the British soldiers, the American soldiers, the Iraqi soldiers, and so on and on.
But feelings were keen here in his native Liverpool that lunchtime when news broke that he had been murdered on October 7, by the men who had held him captive for what seemed like an eternity, but was three weeks and two days.
One of ours had been killed in a distant land. That makes it different. It brings into the screaming light of day the terror felt by others in a country that, in truth, for most people had been little more than a splurge on a spinning globe.
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