Beheading reveals different media cultures : Melbourne Indymedia

Beheading Dominates Media in Many Nations
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 13, 2004
Filed at 1:32 a.m. ET

LONDON (AP) -- Amnesty International condemned the videotaped beheading in Iraq of American civilian Nick Berg, an act which Prime Minister Tony Blair's office described as ``barbaric.'' But Iranian radio accused Western media of using the slaying to distract attention from the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

Images from the film showing Berg and his captors just before the killing dominated TV broadcasts and newspaper front pages in many countries.

A Kuwaiti newspaper ran a picture of one of the killers holding the severed head and some Greek TV stations showed the actual execution, although they obscured the head. The full video was posted on an al-Qaida-linked Web site.

``Such acts are unjustifiable under any circumstances and constitute a serious crime under international law,'' London-based human rights group Amnesty International said of the slaying. ``Those responsible should be brought to justice in line with international standards.''

The masked men who killed Berg claimed they were angered by coalition abuses of Iraqi prisoners. The video, posted Tuesday, showed them pushing Berg to the floor, severing his head and holding it up. His body was found near a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday, a U.S. official said.

The video bore the title ``Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American,'' referring to an associate of Osama bin Laden believed responsible for a wave of suicide bombings in Iraq.

Blair's official spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the killing as ``a truly barbaric act,'' adding: ``There is no justification for this kind of act in a civilized world.''

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said, ``It is a terrible crime, and the fact that it was carried out for the media shows how cold-bloodedly it was done.''

``This is atrocious, and the intention is to provoke the American public and ensure further confrontation,'' he told ZDF television after meeting in Washington with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. ``It makes clear how necessary it is that we stand by our own basic values.''

In Greece, government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said the execution provoked a ``sense of abhorrence. ... The Greek government condemns violence wherever it comes from.''

Most Greek TV stations aired segments of the video, some stopping just before the beheading while others obscured the head during the execution.

Other broadcasters in Britain, Spain, China, Germany, Italy and Belgium showed images of Berg kneeling on the floor with his black-clad captors standing behind him.

``What follows is too cruel to show,'' said Belgium's VRT public broadcaster, which aired the video up to the point where Berg was thrown to the ground after one attacker took out a knife.

Germany's mass-circulation Bild newspaper ran a picture of Berg's captors holding up his severed head, eliciting condemnation from the German Journalists' Union.

Iranian radio accused the western media of showing pictures from the video for propaganda purposes.

``As a result, the issue of Iraqi prisoners' torture has been totally ignored by these media,'' the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran said.

``The American authorities too, have entered this news-making propaganda. These authorities have described the killing method of the American national as loathsome, and implicitly indicated that the American troops were justified to torture Iraqi prisoners.''

Arab media reacted cautiously to the execution, with some newspapers conspicuously playing it down or even ignoring it.

Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the big two satellite networks, aired edited snippets of the video. ``The news story itself is strong enough,'' said Jihad Ballout, spokesman for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television. ``To show the actual beheading is out of the realm of decency.''

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-American-Beheaded-World.html

Have a look at the video.

Not a bad job for a one legged man.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Abu+Musab+al-Zarqawi+lost+leg&meta=

The hypocrisy of the west is rivalled only by the hypocrisy of Parsons.

What scares you more, a guy in the Middle East with a nice sharp knife, or a guy in a plush office in the US who orders the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands? Will Bush ever know how it feels to have the blood of a loved one sprayed on his face?

It's about time the left got serious about knocking these fuckers over.

Or is it comforting to know they have you safely corralled in IM wankfests? Snug and warm are we?

They won't stop unless we make them pay. If Howard wins again there will be no option but blood in the streets.

OUR initial reaction to the killing of a human being as a public spectacle is one of shock and revulsion.

The words uttered by President Bush are dripping with hypocrisy, however, coming as they do from a president who has signed more execution warrants as Governor of Texas than any other governor in recent history; and not a few of them have been filmed for the benefit of television documentaries.

Moreover, how many World War Two executions did the Americans photograph and film, often in excruciating detail?

LET us however stand back and review the few facts that have so far been entrusted to us by the authorities, and on which the scared media have so far breathed no comment.

First, the man was executed wearing an orange jump suit: I have long been wondering, and expressed to colleagues the opinion, that Iraqi resistance would gain maximum global propaganda effect by putting their captives through the same humiliating and painful hoops that the Americans use in Camp Delta at Guantánamo.

Second, it was Donald Rumsfeld who announced or implied when he and his cronies embarked on their "war on terror" in the Middle East that the United States did not intend to abide by the Geneva Conventions.

Third, was this latest victim of Washington's folly the same kind of "American" as Wall Street Journal writer Daniel Pearl -- i.e. a 100 percent Israeli citizen, merely working in or from America, and probably a Mossad agent? We still remember the fury of the Pearl family, living in Israel, when an Israeli newspaper blew his cover.
The clue to this, apart from the obvious ones, is that "Philadelphia businessmann" Nick Berg is said to have been a "civilian contractor".
Most of the Israeli assistance to the Coalition Forces in Iraq is in the form of civilian contractors -- i.e. hired mercenaries, supplied to operate in the fields of prisoner of war interrogation (Abu Ghraib!), Intelligence, or contract killings.
It is remarkable, is it not, that Berg was captured on April 9, over a month ago and yet not a word of his capture was breathed in the US media about it until now, when he has met his savage end. Nor do I recall any reports on the discovery of his body on Saturday.
So: remember -- you read it first here. If he was a naive and luckless Philadelphia businessman, trapped and mangled by the Moloch that his bellicose regime have created in Iraq, then truly our hearts go out to his family; if he was however a hired mercenary engaged on some covert plain clothes operation, and captured by his enemies and dealt with as a spy, this must mitigate our feelings of compassion.
That said, in a civilized society it is justice that must be seen to be done, not execution

"...OUR initial reaction to the killing of a human being as a public spectacle is one of shock and revulsion. ..."

But, despite this, you can count on 'di' to do his/her best to justify the killing, which has been denounced even by Iraqi clerics opposed to the US presence in Iraq.

Ironically, elsewhere at IndyMedia Melbourne, they are trying to blame George Bush for the killing.

http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2004/05/69962.php

Berg was 'targetted' by the CIA for some weird, utterly illogical "reason"

The main thrust here at IMM, as always, is: 'Don't under ANY circumstances blame the grotesque thugs who actually DID THE MURDER. Because, they are the Iraqi "resistance" whom we love.'

The reasons for Berg's murder are clear;

a) he was a " in favor of the war to the extent that he had already visited Iraq seeking to help with rebuilding efforts. "

http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2004/05/69962.php

In other words, unlike his pacifist dad, he realised that Saddam Hussein was a tyranical monster, who deserved to be overthrown.

b) he was a Jew.

His killers make it perfectly clear that he was being killed for supporting the war effort, not as a soldier but as someone who wanted to rebuild Iraq - an Iraq without the Ba'athist fascists.

di, and people like di, preferred Iraq as it was.

Didn't you?

Despite his/her protestations "of of shock and revulsion", di's hypocrisy is made perfectly clear when she gratuitously links Berg's murder to that of Daniel Pearl who seems, according to her argument, to have somehow "deserved" to have been beheaded because he was "Iraeli" (read "Jewish").

You are a racist scumbag, di.

You main concern with the Berg murder is clear - it draws attention BACK to what Iraq was like under the Ba'athists.

And reminds people that you, and shit-bags like you, supported the fascists in the war to liberate Iraq.

You can pontificate ALL you want about the prisoner abuse - at botton line, though.

You support the people who killed Berg.

He wanted to rebuild Iraq.

Well, curiously, Nick Berg's father doesn't blame the "arab terrorists".

No,

He blames Bush and Rumsfeld

Regardless of who what and why...

He *chose* freely to go into a war zone, one of the hotest on the planet where hundreds are dying daily.
He could have chosen not to go, to liase by other means.
He could have, but he didnt.

He chose to go into the war zone, a 'westerner' in the most inhospitable place on earth for westerners.
He had to know this going in..had to the media coverage alone had that covered.

I am not blaming him for his own death...just questioning the desperatness of 'civillian contractors' who would willingly and knowingly place their lives at risk for such contracts.

While I think the murder was horrendous, ALL murder is horrendous and his was no worse or better than any other murder committed anywhere in the world. People die by worse means every single day.

Regardless of the issues that surround it..the moral has to be - if you dont want to be a target - stay out of Iraq!

If your not there - you cant be at risk of being taken hostage, shot at hung or beheaded by "insurgnets' can you?

LH

di:

Not only "initially" but permanently are all of us appalled at
the brutal picture of the execution of Berg.

That goes without saying and is as true of di's sentiments, I
am sure, as it is of all of our own.

That said, the high likelihood - virtually certainty to my mind -
of Berg being some kind of Israeli agent had already occured to me
and probably most of you.

The whole story is one which is most improbable.

First, it was obvious that at the beginning the media was very
careful not to tell us much about Berg's background which would
normally be among the first things one would be hearing.

I didn't hear one word until this morning about what "house of
worship" Berg had attended, if any. Usually, one would hear
interviews with people who had known him at church or in this case
synagogue.

This morning I read the following statement in "The Atlanta
Journal Constitution": "Berg's father said his son was a practicing
Jew and that 'there's a better chance than not' that his captors new
it."

Well. Why didn't we hear he was a Jew from the beginning?

2. Second, Berg has been described from the get-go as a young
business entrepreneur dealing in cell phones and electronics.
(Certainly something a spy might find useful.)

Many of us have been self-employed businessmen. A self-employed
lawyer, I am just back from 2 weeks in Sicily and I am paying one
helluva price for this vacation. Two weeks away is about all my
practice can sustain.

And yet this particular businessman - if you believe the media
story - was able to disappear for months into a place like Ghana with
apparently no ill effects on his "business."

We have seen no pictures of his shop or office.

Normally, the media would be showing us scenes of his house and
of where the business was.

No employees to my knowledge have ever been interviewed. Nor
have any of this young entrepreneur's presumably happy customers for
whatever product or service he was selling.

Nor do we get many details at all of just what kind of "business"
Berg was operating.

This is just nonsense.

Young 26 year old businessmen - even if working out of their
homes - do not operate in a vacuum of employees, suppliers,
customers. Nor can they leave the country for months at a time and
live abroad. (There is no suggestion by the media that Berg was
selling anything or pursuing any profit-motivated agenda in Ghana.
No. He was just there as a humanitarian (Berg's father is quoted in
the same AJC article I mentioned above as aying that he taught
villagers how to make bricks - ??? - and returned emaciated because
he gave away most of his food.) Nor was his trip to Ghana a once in
a lifetime young man's lark adventure. We are told that the several
month "visit" to Ghana was only one of a number of such sojourns
abroad.

3. How many Jews are likely to have been so selfless as to go to
Iraq to "help" the Arabs? But that's not the only story. We are
told that he also went there "looking for work rebuilding the
country's telecommunications infrastructure." (Earlier we were told
he went there to see about selling cell phones). Really? A
businessman who without any clearance from the US government simply
zips into Iraq - alone - to see about setting up a business and
rebuilding telecommunications infrastructure? With no contacts? How
could he expect - as a Jew - to be well received in Iraq? How many
Jews are this stupid? I have met very few stupid Jews in my life and
stupidity is not one of the charges made against Jews by those who
dislike them. We are not told how he travelled alone in Iraq and
communicated with Iraqis, very few of whom speak English and only a
small number of whom speak French, the preferred western language in
Arabia. Did he speak Arabic? The improbability of all this sure puts
a strain on the official story's credibility.

4. Another interesting tidbit: The AJC also informs us that young
Berg - at age 22 presumably - "...helped set up the electronics
equipment at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in
2000." Yeah. I have a strong suspicion of just how some of
that "wiring" was used and for whose benefit.

5. Berg was not some effete bookish Jewish scholar. The AJC has
a picture of him in the gym showing him to be a tough, strapping,
solidly built guy. "Gina Taliani, the YMCA's aquatics and gymnastics
directors, said Berg loved to swim but his muscular body made it
difficult for him. 'I always joked with him that he sunk (sic) like a
rock because he was pure muscle,' she said."

Elsewhere, the article tells us Berg "...was interested in power
lifting."

A physically tough Jew, who was a self-employed businessman in
his 20's. A businessman able to leave his business and tour the world
on several months long expeditions to multiple countries. A Jew who
wanted to help Arabs. One who would go to Iraq alone without any
clearance by the US government. Someone who at age 22 was wiring the
Republican Party.

Give me a break!

excerpt:

CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports U.S. officials said the FBI questioned Berg in 2002 after a computer password he used in college turned up in the possession of Zacarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative arrested shortly before Sept. 11 for his suspicious activity at a flight school in Minnesota.

Moussaoui is now in federal custody and awaiting trial on conspiracy charges stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks.

I do agree with ladyhawk on this, Berg wouldve know what Iraq was like and did go of his own volition, i mean iraq aint safe for Iraqis at the moment nevermind westerners...

Berg Video: "Someone with U.S. military cap seen in frame"
"At frames 9306 through 9368, a person with a US military cap temporarily pokes about a quarter of his left head into the video."....

Could Bush administration officials be prosecuted for 'war crimes' as a result of new measures used in the war on terror? The White House's top lawyer thought so

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
Newsweek
Updated: 6:28 p.m. ET May 17, 2004

May 17 - The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/

Race-hate pervert "rory stormer " is among a number of neo-Nazi stooges trying to shift responsibility for the Berg murder away from the self-acknowledged perpetrators.

Here he links us to a site quoting "controversial" web site La Voz de Aztlan.

La Voz de Aztlan is in fact a notorious anti-Semitic web site based in Mexico.

It was this site which recently circulated fake "rape" pictures, actually downloaded from a common pornography site, claiming they were "evidence" of US soldiers "raping" an Iraqi woman.

They were blatant, featuring uniforms not even remotely resembling American uniforms.

When exposed, La Voz de Aztlan then blamed Jews for creating the pornography in the first place.

If you watch this video, you will see the "US military cap" is merely a green cap. It bears no US military insignia whatsoever.

Contrary to defences offered by 'pr' and others, IndyMedia Melbourne is a profoundly racist web site, circulating blatant anti-Semitic material every day.

It besmirches Nick Berg because he was Jewish.

Could be right. Perhaps its all baloney.

Not that anyone's going take much notice of your most heart felt concerns when you don't even have the guts to use your real name. What you afraid of?

Are you for real or just trying to stir the shit. Probably the latter.

rory - you can destroy the credibility of a lot of good evidence --eg: plastic chairs and orange jumpsuits--with just one silly claim produced by Rorasach's pixel test.

The "cap" is not a cap - it's a segment of wall framed by a finger and a shadow.

Apparently The Age has been bombarded with calls from people questioning the legitimacy of the video. Not that you would know that from reading the actual paper - yYou have to ring them to find that out.

"....rory - you can destroy the credibility of a lot of good evidence --eg: plastic chairs and orange jumpsuits...."

Good evidence? LOL

Alternatively, Rory, your ludicrous attempt at providing alibis for the fascist al-Kaida thugs who murdered Nick Berg (by their own admission) also risks drawing attention to the equally stupid "evidence" of the "plastic chairs and orange jumpsuits...."

A plastic stack-chair and an orange jump suit would hardly be considered exotic items in a country like Iraq.

The chairs are cheap, mass produced items found in just about every country in the world - and in a nation with 5 per cent of the world's oil processing facilities, I somewhat doubt that an orange jumpsuit would be hard to find!!

Indeed, with a hostage under your control in the desert, an orange jumpsuit would be the ideal garment to make him wear - because he'd stand out very nicely against the terrain if he tried to escape.

It is just laughable the desparation of the IMM hate criminals to excuse their beloved jihadist heros of Nick's murder.

It's like Occam's razor in reverse - Occam's dementia!!

Beheading video seen as war tactic
Experts say terrorists employing grisly form of propaganda

The nightmare video of an American civilian captured in Iraq being decapitated by his captors was anything but a random act of terrorism, experts say -- it was a press release, carefully designed for a global audience.

The video, released on a radical Islamist Web site and since replayed on television, captured in newspapers and reposted elsewhere on the Internet, bears the media-savvy hallmarks of al Qaeda or an affiliated entity, according to a number of media and Middle East experts.

In the video, five masked men -- carrying Kalashnikov rifles and wearing what appear to be explosive belts used by radical Islamist suicide bombers -- stand behind their bound victim. Their outfits, manner and actions are reminiscent of other tapes, such as the one showing the 2002 decapitation of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and the ones that Palestinian suicide bombers often record before their deadly missions.

It was the kind of production, the experts said, that al Qaeda and other radical groups have repeatedly used in their global war on the West: an evolving form of confrontation that American institutions -- politicians, press, public and military -- are still struggling to understand and deal with effectively.

The video showing the death of Nick Berg, a businessman from Pennsylvania, probably had several intended purposes, the experts said -- not all of them obvious.

The stated purpose, based on the killers' own Arabic statement recorded just before the killing, was revenge for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

"How can free Muslims sleep soundly as they see Islam being slaughtered, honor bleeding, photographs of shame and reports of satanic degradation of the people of Islam, men and women, in Abu Ghraib prison?" one of the masked killers demands in the video as Berg sits before him.

But most experts said they doubted Berg's videotaped death was a result only of those abuses. Several, noting that Berg apparently had been kidnapped nearly a month ago before he was killed, suggested that the prison scandal merely provided the terrorists with an opportunity to make a point.

"In the journalistic world, the prison photos provided the terrorists with a 'hook,' " said Matthew Felling, an analyst at the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C.

The terrorists' real motives, the experts said, probably were more wide- ranging and more subtle than simple revenge.

One motive, said Juan Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, is to frighten Americans, especially the nongovernmental groups and the population of some 25,000 civilian contractors -- mainly security personnel -- working in Iraq who provide a sizable armed "auxiliary" to the U.S. military and the Coalition Provisional Authority.

"The reason this video was made was an attempt to destroy that auxiliary, " Cole said. "It's not going to scare the U.S. troops out of the country, and it's not going to get rid of the CPA. But there are a lot of (nongovernmental organizations) and contractors that are going to decide this is not the time to be doing business in Iraq."

Another goal, the experts said, is recruitment -- drawing new members to the cause by portraying the killers as defenders against anti-Muslim forces.

"They are trying to tap into anti-American sentiment and use it to their own purposes ... get more followers, get more cash, finding more political support," said Jim Walsh, an international security expert at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

A third, even more subtle motive might be a power struggle within the radical Islamist movement itself, Walsh speculated. The tape is entitled "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American," and the Web site that released the tape reportedly identified al-Zarqawi as Berg's killer.

U.S. investigators say al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, has ties to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. By taking such a high profile, Walsh suggested, al-Zarqawi might be trying to establish himself as the active leader of the radical Islamist movement, leaving bin Laden in the shadows.

It's difficult to gauge how successful the tape will be at accomplishing those goals, the experts said.

Powerful images certainly have the ability to change policy. Violent images from Vietnam and, more recently, Somalia are widely credited with altering public perceptions and, ultimately, leading to the end of American military presence in those lands.

"If you turn America's stomach, you turn around public support at the same time," Felling said. "All the news reporting, all the language, all the written word in the world does not have the effect of one brutal video image."

In fact, the power of information is so great that military policy experts describe it as an instrument of national power, like diplomacy, economy and the military, said Douglas V. Johnson II, a research professor at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute.

American institutions -- government, military and civilian -- are still trying to fully understand that power, especially in the rapidly evolving world of 24-hour cable news and the new Arabic media since the first Iraq war, Johnson said.

"It's an emerging field of study," said Johnson, who wrote research papers on the effect of media on foreign policy more than 10 years ago. "The landscape is changing beneath our feet day by day. Keeping abreast of it really takes an awful lot of effort."

The radical Islamist movement, on the other hand -- which developed as a global force in the form of al Qaeda around the same time as the global media emerged with CNN and, later, Al-Jazeera -- appears to think it understands the lesson of what happened in Mogadishu, Somalia, other experts said.

"Bin Laden has referred to Mogadishu as an example of America's timidity, " Cole said. "He's very aware of how the video of those Americans being pulled through the streets affected the American public."

If the goal was to rally world opinion by an act of revenge for the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, however, the extremists may have miscalculated.

"The entire planet was beginning to turn on America" because of Abu Ghraib, Felling said. "Here (the beheading) is an image that stopped that momentum, and the world sees the brutality we're up against, that makes the prison photos, while not less troubling, knocks them down a peg or two."

But while the video may not have helped radical Islamists with the international audience, the experts said, it remains to be seen how the video -- and similar photographic horrors they said will inevitably come -- will ultimately play in America.

That's because American media have yet to come to grips with their strange relationship with terrorists, according to the experts. Several commended the careful thought and soul-searching at a number of publications and broadcast outlets that preceded their publicizing the video images and the Abu Ghraib photos.

But Brigitte Nacos, adjunct professor of political science at Columbia University in New York, said the media also needed to recognize that terrorists were using them to get their message across, to spread fear and to recruit members.

"Terrorism, as I see it, is communications," said Nacos. "Without the media communicating what they want to say, terrorism doesn't really make sense. "

She said the media have the responsibility to report on such events in an informative way. But for her, the key question is how much is enough -- from no mention at all to the repetition of identical disturbing images that characterized coverage of Sept. 11, Abu Ghraib and now the death of Nick Berg.

"I'm not saying the traditional media ought not to report on this," she said. "My concern is ... once you have reported it, especially on television, it is played and replayed, and I think that magnifies the impact. I think that there has to be some restraint. I'm not talking about censorship ... but there probably is a limit where you say that's enough."

Opinion on where the media should draw that line varied among the experts.

Nacos commended the New Yorker magazine for illustrating its most recent article on the Abu Ghraib scandal with just one photo -- and not the most ghastly one it had available.

Cole, who writes the influential Web log "Informed Comment," said the benchmark should be the number of people affected by an individual terrorist act -- a formula that he said should have relegated the video story to two paragraphs well inside a daily newspaper.

"(Berg's slaying) was done in order to get on the front page of the New York Times, and the New York Times should resist that temptation," he said. "I think we should be very careful about giving a lot of space and a lot of attention to what is essentially a monstrous, horrendous publicity stunt."

But other experts said the American media had a responsibility to cover the video in a significant yet proportionate way -- even if that meant risking being used by the terrorists to further their agenda.

"It's a reality," Walsh said. "The kidnapping and murdering and bombings are the reality of what is happening on the ground in Iraq. To hide that would be the greater mistake."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/13/MNG6E6KL791.DTL

http://www.prwatch.org/spin/index.html

What are the odds?

Abu Ghraib prison chair

"Al Qaida" chair

Abu Ghraib prison chair

In which the UK's The Sunday Times catches up, some days late, with IMC...

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Beheading of Berg - now it's a conspiracy

by Tony Allen-Mills and Nick Fielding

FOR most people the videotaped execution of Nicholas Berg was a graphic reminder of the risks involved in waging war on a violent terrorist enemy. For others, however, it was evidence of a conspiracy.

Take, for example, the suspiciously white ear that appears shortly after frame 9,306 of the beheading video. It appears to belong to a captor wearing an American cap.

Quite why an Islamic terrorist would be wearing an emblem of the enemy has yet to be explained. This is one of at least 50 anomalies now being pored over by video experts, computer analysts and internet surfers.

The arrest last week of four Iraqis suspected of involvement in the revenge killing of the 26-year-old civilian adventurer has added to the confusion, fuelling doubts about official accounts of Berg's visit to Iraq.

Moreover, it has refocused attention on the bizarre sequence of coincidences and contradictions that led to his death. His past links to an Al-Qaeda terrorist have raised questions in some quarters as to whether he might even have been working for the intelligence services.

Wandering across Iraq in search of business for Prometheus Methods, his fledgling Pennsylvania-based communications company, Berg would introduce himself in halting Arabic as "the tower guy". He specialised in climbing radio and mobile phone installations to inspect, repair and upgrade them.

There was nothing in the young American's e-mails home to indicate any sinister connections. He even laughed off a 13-day spell in jail after Iraqi guards spotted an Israeli stamp in his passport - a serious faux pas in the Arab world.

Six weeks ago he checked out of his Baghdad hotel and told the receptionist: "Inshallah (God willing) I will be back in a few days." His body was found on May 8 [2004] on a Baghdad motorway overpass, but it was not until three days later that his family learnt how he died.

The video posted on the Muntada al-Ansar site claimed that Berg had been killed in revenge for the US abuse of prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail. The CIA later announced that it believed the man who read a statement and then wielded the knife was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Islamic militant with ties to Osama Bin Laden.

As America recoiled in horror at descriptions of the blood-curdling murder, Berg's family disclosed a curious connection. Five years earlier, Berg had attended the University of Oklahoma. At a nearby flight school at the same time, an Islamic militant named Zacarias Moussaoui (right) was taking pilot lessons. Moussaoui, a French Moroccan, is awaiting trial on charges that he would have been one of the September 11 hijackers had he not been arrested beforehand.

When the FBI began examining Moussaoui's local links it made an extraordinary discovery. He had been using Berg's university e-mail password.

Michael Berg, Nicholas's father, has said his son innocently gave his password to a man he met on a bus. The man is believed to have been Hussein al-Attas, a student at an Oklahoma community college who had become friendly with Moussaoui and who asked if he could borrow Berg's laptop computer to send an e-mail home. Al-Attas is now in US detention.

When Berg was arrested at a roadblock in Mosul, northern Iraq, last March, his Moussaoui connection provoked further scrutiny of the password incident. He was interrogated three times by FBI agents in Mosul.

Eventually he was released, and a Justice Department official insisted last week that however unsettling it seemed that a civilian randomly executed by Al-Qaeda should himself have been investigated for Al-Qaeda links, officials had no doubt it was "a total coincidence".

The plot seemed to thicken when Michael Berg's grief at his son's murder turned to rage against the US administration. Berg claimed that his son's detention in Mosul had been unlawful, and had "immersed my son in a world of escalated violence . . . were it not for his detention (I) would have had him in my arms again".

This improbable sequence of events provoked intensive scrutiny of both the US government's treatment of Berg and the video that shows his death. While some of the anomalies appear easily explained by the obvious editing of the tape, others have excited intense debate.

The CIA's insistence that al-Zarqawi was responsible appears based on the scantiest of evidence. Al-Zarqawi is known to have lost one leg, yet there is no sign on the video of either a prosthesis or any awkward movement. Sound experts have speculated that the voice might have been dubbed on.

Other questions have been raised about the orange jumpsuit worn by Berg, which appears similar to those worn by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
He is sitting on a white chair, similar to one shown in an image from Abu Ghraib prison.
There are discrepancies in the times on the video frames.
No credible motive has yet been advanced for the suggestion among conspiracy theorists that US forces might have faked a video to cover up Berg's death. More problematic is the government's claim that al-Zarqawi was responsible.

Two of the four Iraqis arrested in connection with Berg's murder have already been released. The others are believed to be former members of Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen militia, and might have been loyal to Yasser al-Sabawi, a nephew of Saddam who continues to fight coalition forces.

Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Ltd

Good article, Di --- do you have the url?

"Attacks held to be a CONSPIRACY"
-LA Times, September 11, 2001

"Five Men Held as Suspected CONSPIRATORS"
- Bergen Record, September 12, 2001

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1119734,00.html

BUT YOU MUST REGISTER

Tattoo allegedly sported by "prisoner" in Abu Ghraib prison

Thanks for the times link, Di - but not for your latest photo link (it doesn't work!)

Times:
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No credible motive has yet been advanced for the suggestion among conspiracy theorists that US forces might have faked a video to cover up Berg's death
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No conspiracy theorists that I've seen have suggested that U.S. forces faked a video to "cover up Nick Berg's death". The suggestions that have been put forward are that the agents were NOT Al Queda, that the chairs and jumpsuit are U.S. miltary issue, that Nick was already dead before the beheading scene, and that the timing of the video appears to be designed to deflect attention from the Torture/Abuse/Murder scandal.

In fact, the very title of this thread (and several others initiated by Chris Parsons of Manly Council) adequately represents a very credible response-based motive for producing the video.
++++++++++++++++++++

Religion of beheading

Beheading reveals different media cultures

Shhh.... Terrorists. Don't tell anyone!
"While atrocities are committed by Islamist animals"

Murdered civilian hoped to help Iraqis rebuild

Seems to me that helicopter killing of thousands of Arabs do not count, as outragious as killing of one Amercan. Maybe if Bush can try pease signals things may change for the better. Less war dumbs Mr. Bush. Give pease a chance.