Mysteries about Nick Berg

I'll be interested to see if the mainstream media pursues some of the intriguing questions about the presence of Nick Berg, who was shown in the gruesome video this week being murdered,  in Iraq.  And about exactly how he came into the hands of those who murdered him.

And one would have thought one aspect that would be mentioned very prominently in news reports was the fact that Berg worked at the Abu Ghuraib prison.  (See below.)  Instead, I found that buried in the middle of one of several AP stories on Berg.

When I saw the following description, I immediately started wondering, is this the real story? Americans deny holding Berg despite claims by family; body being flown home AP San Francisco Chronicle 05/12/04.

... Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days, the family said.

His father, Michael, said his son was not allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor told reporters that Berg was detained by Iraqi police in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The Iraqis informed the Americans, and the FBI questioned him three times about what he was doing in Iraq.

Senor said that to his knowledge Berg "was at no time under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces."

So that's odd in itself.  Weird things do happen in countries at war.  But I would like to think that American officials in a war zone would show particular concern about protecting Americans from arbitrary justice.  It's not as though the Iraqi police in general have shown themselves to be intensely loyal to the occupation government.  Then there's this (my emphasis):

State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon said that on April 10, Berg told a U.S. consular officer in Baghdad that he wanted instead to travel to Kuwait on his own.

Berg apparently had an Iraqi in-law in the Mosul area, according to emails to his family.

Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt said the only role the U.S. military played in Berg's confinement was to liaise with the Iraqi police to make sure he was being fed and properly treated because "he was still an American citizen."

Say what?  An Iraqi in-law?  Wouldn't he need an Iraqi wife for that?  Now, I suppose it's possible that Berg, who was Jewish, had an Iraqi wife.  Instead, this AP report FBI: Agents Advised Berg to Leave Iraq 05/12/04 indicates the in-law was one of his father's relatives:

Michael Berg told the AP that Nicholas' paternal aunt, now dead, married an Iraqi man named Mudafer, who became close to Nicholas. In one of the e-mails, Nicholas Berg describes going to the northern city of Mosul, where he introduced himself to Mudafer's brother, identified as Moffak Mustaffa.

The first AP article quoted above describes the 26-year-old Berg as a "self-employed telecommunications businessman."  This AP article has more: Beheaded American civilian had been advised to leave Iraq, U.S. officials say. San Francisco Chronicle 05/12/04.

According to his family, Berg, a small telecommunications business owner, spoke to his parents on March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30. But he was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. ...

Berg attended Cornell University, Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oklahoma, where he got involved in rigging electronics equipment while working for the maintenance department, his father said. He helped set up equipment at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000.

While at Cornell, he traveled to Ghana to teach villagers how to make bricks out of minimal material. His father said Berg returned from Ghana with only the clothes on his back and emaciated because he gave away most of his food.

Michael Berg said his son saw his trip to Iraq as an adventure in line with his desire to help others.

Although Berg was working on his own, U.S. officials fear the savage killing might prompt more foreigners working on international reconstruction projects toflee the country. ...

A coalition official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called Berg's death a "real anomaly" because the overwhelming majority of Westerners here are working for international companies.

Friends and family of Berg said he was a "free spirit" who wanted tohelp others -- working in Ghana, in one example -- and that his going to Iraq fit with that ideology. They said he supported the Iraqi war and the Bush administration.

Okay, contractors going to Iraq with their company for presumably good pay and career opportunities, with maybe a touch of adverturism, I understand.  Ditto for soldiers-for-hire, aka "security contractors."  And soldiers and American officials of various kinds.

But, what, was this guy just hitchhiking around Iraq looking for some freelance contracts to put up satellite dishes in people's back yards or something?  On the face of it, that's a strange story.  True, maybe.  But strange.  The family connection makes it a bit more plausible.  But, still, it's an odd story.

Laura Rozen is wondering about some aspects of this story, too.  Commenting on coalition spokesperson Dan Senor's statements on the case, she mentions in passing that Senor "is about the biggest, most self-satisfied shmuck ever. He lies as a duck takes to water."  (Sounds like a guy with a future in a Bush second term.)  She doesn't really believe Senor's version:

More like, we don't to speculate, because showing how elements of the US government were complicit in Berg's detention and failure to get out of Iraq before he was seized by Al Qaeda would hurt the Bush White House's efforts to try to use Berg's decapitation to their political advantage. Sick bastards.

Hesiod has a few links on the question.  One of the links is to the Break for News blog, which reports:

The family firm of beheaded American Nick Berg, was named by a conservative website in a list of 'enemies' of the Iraq occupation. That could explain his arrest by Iraqi police --a detention which fatally delayed his planned return from Iraq and may have led directly to his death.

Yikes!  This sounds creepier and creepier.

Another of Hesiod's links is yet another AP story, this one from the Boston Globe, with yet another wrinkle:  Questions surround young American shown decapitated in video 05/12/04 (my emphasis).

Two e-mails sent by Berg to his family and friends show the 26-year-old telecommunications expert traveled widely and unguarded in areas of Iraq a dangerous practice rarely done by Westerners.

The FBI warned Berg shortly before his disappearance that Iraq was too volatile a place for unprotected American civilians but he turned down a State Department offer to fly him home, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Berg was inspecting communications facilities, some of which were destroyed in the war or by looters.

During his time in Iraq, he struggled with the Arabic language and worked at night on a tower in Abu Ghraib, a site of repeated attacks on U.S. convoys and the location of the notorious prison where U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi inmates.

Okay, here's a 26-year-old Jewish telecommunications entrepreneur who doesn't speak Arabic but had a family connection in Iraq, traveling all over Iraq on his own "inspecting communications facilities" and working at Abu Ghuraib.  He was a prowar Republican who was also a passionate humanitarian who wanted to help out Third World countries.  And he was apparently on some kind of Freeper "enemies list."  He was detained by Iraqi police and questioned by American officials. And then there is this, from the same story, this part at least widely reported:

On April 5, the Bergs sued the government in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally. In a writ filed April 5 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, the Bergs said the State Department told them their son ''is currently detained in Mosul, Iraq, by the United States military'' and that American diplomats ''no longer'' had ''any authority or power to intervene'' on his behalf.

Berg was released the day after the suit was filed. His family said he told them he had not been mistreated. They did not hear from him after April9 when violence flared in Iraq because of the U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah and a Shiite uprising in the south.

Note that now the government denies that he was in American custody.  But the State Department, according to his parents, had told them Nick was in US military custody.

And I haven't scoured the Internet for articles on Berg.  But I'm really surprised in what I've seen so far that the fact that the man worked at Abu Ghuraib prison would be so little noticed.  In fact, I almost missed it when I was reading through the Boston Globe's AP piece I cited.  I'm wondering if that was omitted from some reports - if it was on the AP wire it was certainly widely available to every newspaper running articles on the subject - out of some misguided patriotic consideration.  Did they think that mentioning that Berg actually worked at Abu Ghuraib might lend some kind of credence to the killers' propaganda claim that what they were doing was in retaliation for American torture of pirsoners there?

That would be the generous assumption, that our press barons think their readers are too moronic to know the difference between the enemy treating prisoners of war as international law requires and cold-blooded murder.  The less generous assumption would be that they didn't want to say anything that might diminish the incident's value as prowar incitement.  Commenting on such press behavior in the 1991 Gulf War, Chris Hedges in War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) observes, "Such docility on the part of the press made it easier to do what governments do in wartime, indeed what governments do much of the time, and that is lie."

Maybe the Iraq War fans shouldn't be rushing to make Berg a martyr for their cause.  It looks like al-Qaeda members aren't necessarily the only ones complicit in his death.