Stranger and stranger....

...According to Berg, his son was taking a course a few years ago at a remote campus of the University of Oklahoma near an airport. He described how on one particular day, his son met "some terrorist people -- who no one knew were terrorists at the time."

At one point during the bus ride, Berg said, the man sitting next to his son asked if he could use Nick's laptop computer.

"It turned out this guy was a terrorist and that he, you know, used my son's e-mail, amongst many other people's e-mail who he did the same thing to," Berg said.

Government sources said Berg gave the man his password, which was later used by Moussaoui, the sources said.

The sources said the man who used Berg's e-mail knew Moussaoui, now awaiting trial on federal charges that could bring a death sentence. But the sources would not disclose details of how the men were connected.

So, are we to assume that Nick Berg was accessing his email on a moving bus using what, his cell-phone? I know you can do it, but was it really that easy and reliable a "few years ago"?

Complete story here.

Prosthetic leg...?

The mystery of who really killed Nick Berg deepens:

"From Iran Zarqawi traveled to Iraq in May 2002, where his wounded leg was amputated and the limb fitted with a prosthetic device. He spent two months recovering in Baghdad, at which time "nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there." (From here.)

The quote is originally from the National Review Online.

According to people who have seen the video, the person beheading Berg did not seem to have a prosthetic leg.

Michael Berg, Nick's father, blames the Bush administration in no uncertain terms, not for directly wielding the knife, but for delaying his son so long that he could not safely exit Iraq.

"My son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. This administration did this," Berg said in an interview with radio station KYW-AM.

Full story here.

Were U.S. forces responsible for Berg’s gruesome death?


I’m blogging again after a long hiatus.

The reason? Despite a schedule that leaves me no time, I just can’t stay silent any longer.

The precipitating factor is the Nicholas Berg tragedy. As usual, mainstream media coverage is infuriatingly inadequate.

Contrary to the official storyline, family and friends insist that Berg was held in detention in Iraq not by the Iraqis but by U.S. forces.

…The Berg family last month filed a habeas corpus petition against Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, saying Berg was being illegally detained by the U.S. military without probable cause. Berg was released a day later, April 6.

According to the petition, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, the family said it understood, based on information provided by the FBI and the State Department, that while Berg had originally been detained by Iraqi police in Mosul, he was later transferred to U.S. military custody.

The petition said the FBI had been involved in "investigating and confirming Nicholas Berg's identity and to ensure that the individual detained was Nicholas Berg based on a concern of possible identity theft."

The Bergs added that the FBI had recommended that their son be released from custody, and that the State Department had told them it no longer had power to intervene or to bring him home because the son "had been turned over by the Iraqi police to the United States military."

[Full story here.]

One day after the family filed the lawsuit on 4/5, Berg was released from custody in Mosul. He told friends when he got back to Baghdad that, due to his Jewish name and an Israeli stamp in his passport, he'd been suspected of being an Israeli agent. He checked out of his Baghdad hotel on 4/10 and vanished, until U.S. forces found his decapitated body on 5/15.

Allegations are flying that Berg was picked up at the behest of U.S. forces due to the mistaken supposition that he was an antiwar activist. Why would someone think that the Bush supporter was actually against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and do such a thing? Because his father, Michael Berg, signed an anti-war petition that ended up on a Rightwing website that called for reprisals against the petition’s signatories.

Furthermore, speculation that Berg’s actual murderers were not al Qaeda operatives was given substance by Wolf Blitzer’s interview on CNN yesterday of Rend Rahim Francke (or Rend al-Rahim), the Iraqi Governing Council’s representative to Washington. Rahim stated categorically that the U.S. translation of the horrific video showing Berg’s murder was inaccurate. The expression translated as “al Qaeda,” she said, actually referred to a similar sounding Arabic expression meaning roughly “those who sit by and do nothing” (think, “apathetic,”), a mistake native Arabic speakers would never make. Moreover, she said the speaker did not have a Jordanian accent, as would be expected if he were actually Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who U.S. authorities and the C.I.A. are blaming for actually cutting off Berg’s head.

I can’t find a live link to the CNN story (I saw the segment as it aired yesterday) and it hasn't been picked up by any other news outlet I've seen.

Other websites and threads are commenting on the light-skins of the hooded men in the video, the military stances they held, their buff physiques and possession of weapons not usually found in the hands of al Qaeda operatives. Ignorant as I am of military habits and paraphernalia and not having viewed the video, I can’t comment on any of this.

What is blatantly obvious is that Berg’s tragic and grisly murder has shifted the attention of American voters away from the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, the mounting American death toll and escalating financial costs of the war. Once again, “Us against them” war hysteria is running at fever pitch among the suseptible and renewed determination to “stay the course,” is strong in America.

Am I actually suggesting that the Bush administration would cold-bloodedly sacrifice a 26-year-old American citizen’s life purely for political gain?

What do you think?