Resolution
Nov. 10th, 2004 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynI was thinking, earlier today, about Nick Berg's death. As the news of his murder was first circulating, some of my LJ friends were pointing at things in the video, or in the events leading up to his death, that appeared inconsistent with the story presented in the video: that he'd been kidnapped and executed by Muslim terrorists while the videotape was rolling.
And I was wondering: did anything more ever come of that? Was a hypothesis advanced that explained the apparent inconsistencies? Were the concerns of armchair bloggers refuted by mainstream sources or official channels? Does anyone here know?
[Edit: Here's an example of the inconsistencies that were being discussed at the time.]
And I was wondering: did anything more ever come of that? Was a hypothesis advanced that explained the apparent inconsistencies? Were the concerns of armchair bloggers refuted by mainstream sources or official channels? Does anyone here know?
[Edit: Here's an example of the inconsistencies that were being discussed at the time.]
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Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-10 07:29 pm (UTC)There were inconsitencies, but then in anything there will be inconsitencies, when everything fits together neatly is when I tend to be most suspicious.
And a lot of the comments seemed to be paranoid delusions to me, the big "proof" seemed to be People from Middle Eastern cultures believe that Middle Eastern people were not involved in this video, based on the mannerisms, accents, behavior and appearance of the killers. A close inspection of the video suggests that Westerners may have been involved.
The problem is, people ALWAYS say this.
When looters were roaming one of the cities and stealing from the hospitals, the residents of the city were insisting that the looters must be from outside the city.
When the prison scandal was first reported, everyone said how it must have only been a few people - and residents from the towns the guilty people came from still refuse to beleive they did anything wrong.
It's always an 'outsider' who does something horrible, not an insider.
So as long as the major piece of evidence is based on avoiding taking responsibility, however remotely, this story goes no where for me.
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-10 07:31 pm (UTC)So there seems to be lots of elements of a coverup because there WAS a coverup, it just wasn't a diabolical plot to kill Berg - except on the part of a few Muslim extremists. It's the simplist explanation to me.
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 12:51 pm (UTC)I'd looked around at the time on various Free Republic threads that were linked to at the time of the release of the Nick Berg video, such as this one:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1133804/posts?q=1&&page=1
I note the references to his father's very active involvement in International A.N.S.W.E.R, but I am not seeing a cover up, nor evidence that the jihadists were even aware of this. However, knowing that Berg's father was on their side would not likely have overcome their revulsion for Nick Berg himself being a Bush supporter (in the unlikely event that they knew that much about him and his famous father).
The jihadists probably simply saw the Jewish name, Israeli stamp in the password, American citizenry, and had all the information they needed to pronounce death. Probably any one of those would have been enough.
But if you've got something else, I'd certainly like to see it.
===|==============/ Level Head
Technocolor!
Date: 2004-11-11 01:17 pm (UTC)No, I don't subscribe to a black/white, right/wrong, good/evil view of the world.
There are lots of groups with their different motivations.
And in the Nick Berg case I see what looks to be six different groups that could potentially be interacting.
First off, you have Berg himself. Who, if we take everything said at face value, was an opportunist looking to profit off the Iraq war. No shame in that. So he's poking around, without official dispensation, and annoying folks.
Secondly, we have the Freepers who were engaged in an active campaign of smearing people who oppose the war - and who listed his lastname and business on their website.
Thirdly, we have the American military who may have had him detained. The most likely scenario here is one of them reads the Freepers website, puts 2 and 2 together and get's 5. Not some big plot at high levels of goverment, just some low level guy who decides to play with fire with other peoples lives.
Fourthly, we have the Iraqi police who are let loose on this guy. They know he is an American, they know he is jewish, and here they are handed an opportunity to extract some payback.
Fifthly, along comes the state department, getting reports of an abducted American and a family who are rapidly approaching big conspiracy theories. They work through the issues, first they have no idea where he is, than they find him, than he was arrested by american soldiers, than it turns into Iraqi police. Lots of confusion. But they apply some leverage and get him sprung.
So, back to the first group, Nick Berg himself. Sprung from prison, suspecting American soldiers - probably justifiably - and the state department has the bright idea of asking the military to escort him out. He refuses the escort and determines to make his own way out.
Enter the last party, the thugs who kidnapped and killed him. Maybe they got the information that an American who seemed important(after all, the State department pressured the police to release him) from the Iraqi police. Maybe Berg happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and they just happened across him. I dunno.
Continue the story from there.
Now, each party is going to be covering something up. His family(who are also his business partners) is covering up just precisely what he was doing in Iraq. The military is going to cover up that some thug working for them is responsible for him being arrested. The freepers don't want to be associated with it and will point out that they never mentioned Nick directly, just his father and his business. The Iraqi police will cover up their treatment of Mr. Berg. And the guy in the police who fingered him to the thugs, if such happened, will cover that up. Oh, and people from the middle east in general are going to adopt the natural position of "it wasn't someone like me" and so add fuel to the conspiracy flame.
So everyone is covering up something, no one in the goverment wants to dig too deeply, so it looks like some massive conspiracy when in fact it is just a bunch of pathetic little conspiracy's.
That is my working hypothesis. No hero's, just lots of small bit villians.
Re: Technocolor!
Date: 2004-11-11 03:40 pm (UTC)Your last point I would certainly concur with -- Berg was in the wrong place at the wrong time. An unescorted American Jew wandering the streets of Iraq on his own -- particularly the city he went into -- is a tragedy waiting to happen.
Here is a timeline, turned up by Google just now and with links that largely still work.
Nick Berg's father still insists that he was held by the US. An aquaintence says he was told that by Nick Berg himself. But the email that the family received from Nick, supposedly saying this, they will not release. Curious.
I'm inclined to think he was detained for being a lone civilian American trying to get into a troubled Iraqi city under peculiar circumstances.
But the "enemies list" -- the list of people on the side of the terrorists -- would hardly condemn Nick Berg. If anything, it would encourage the terrorists to treat him well.
Conspiracies are fun, though. ];-)
===|==============/ Level Head
Re: Technocolor!
Date: 2004-11-11 03:41 pm (UTC)http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread49809/pg1
===|==============/ Level Head
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 01:38 pm (UTC)http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1092851/posts
It is, instead, a list of signers to a petition for International A.N.S.W.E.R. regarding a then-upcoming anti-war protest. In other words, rather than being gathered by "right wing" forces, these were people and companies who voluntarily added their names.
Perhaps not all of them realized that the organziation explicity supports the Iraqi insurgents, and calls for the failure of the US military there. But in any event, the list has been misportrayed. And the list does indeed show the name of the company Nick Berg's father had at his home -- and that the father was an officer of.
I suspect that the son would be annoyed, but I do not know what their arrangements were.
If the appearance of the name on this list got Nick Berg killed, it should be noted that the name was put there by his own father.
===|==============/ Level Head
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 02:37 pm (UTC)Oh, and for future reference, it's just Gary. I'm too boring for cool nicknames, so my LJ handle is simply my name.
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 03:52 pm (UTC)===|==============/ Level Head
Which one? All of them. :-)
Date: 2004-11-12 01:14 pm (UTC)I know, it's a bit rude not to go into details. But the subject has drifted off the main topic(did anything get resolved regarding Nick Berg) and since this is in someone else's 'house' so to speak, I think it would be kind of rude to fill up her semi-private journal with debate over the side issues.
Re: Which one? All of them. :-)
Date: 2004-11-12 03:10 pm (UTC)And without FreeRepublic comments on their fathers, even. ];-)
===|==============/ Level Head
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 10:47 am (UTC)Perhaps it was orders from the very top all the way down that caused this group of perpetrators to pull their stunts between 2 and 4 am when no one else was around, and then get turned in by their fellow soldiers and prosecuted by their own commanders, and then have their defense attorney in that prosecution contacted his old buddy Seymour Hersch to stage a news release to distract attention from them and focus instead on the command chain, which the media was pleased to do.
If it hadn't been for the clever defense attorney, these people might have been jailed for their acts and no one would know that they were really acting under orders from Geroge W. Bush to be ignorant abusive perverts in the middle of the night. Wouldn't THAT have been terrible! The world would not have realized that these several "ignorant abusive perverts in the middle of the night" were really carrying out American policy from the very top, and the other quarter million soldiers in theater didn't count.
===|==============/ Level Head
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 11:16 am (UTC)Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn't.
But at the end of the day, whether they were ordered or not is irrelevant. They still did the crimes.
And you can still find people from their hometowns who deny they did anything wrong.
It's always "someone else" who does the bad stuff. Not "someone like me".
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 11:39 am (UTC)Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 12:26 pm (UTC)The second part -- that "residents from the towns the guilty people came from still refuse to believe they did anything wrong" may be true in some cases. From the articles in the local papers, it doesn't seem to be a majority opinion, but I certainly don't know.
Ah -- I see that some of these perps were considered not-quite-goodguys before going:
And indeed, as GaryAmort suggested, there is at least one family who -- while not denying what happened -- still didn't think the attack on their family member was fair:Some of these people simply confessed. Others attempted to blame their conditions, as their attorney suggested. The "orders from their commanders" did not originate until the news media got involved. Of course: how could the defense attorney (himself a civilian) make THAT point when addressing the very people that these "orders" were to have come from? It wouldn't fly.
I think that GaryAmort's point was valid -- but I didn't think that the Abu Ghraib example was a good one to use for it.
===|==============/ Level Head
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 01:34 pm (UTC)Well, first of all, declaring this the day the story aired in the news was still simple denial and jumping to conclusions. Even if it 'turned out to be true' it still wasn't a valid assumption to make on the day the story aired.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day(unless it is digital - in which case it might display nothing, or only be right once a day, or even something odder)
Since I was discussing examples of how people in general immediately dismiss that a crime could be committed by someone 'like them', I think all the comparisons were valid. Actually, I passed on making the comparison that immediately came to mind because I can't find the link to the cartoon that expressed it best. Ahh, found it, http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/archive.asp?nextform=viewcomic&id=661
Gamers who declared the sniper was 'not like them' before he was caught, despite media reports of similiarities.
And of course Angry White Men, http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/archive.asp?nextform=viewcomic&id=662
Just because they were right, does it make their conclusion before the facts where known the correct one to make?
As for it being only a few people involved in the prison scandal, or there being orders from higher up, I'm not sure. I don't think any real conclusion of who all was responsible and to what extent will be able to drawn for years. What we(and by we I mean the United States) can do is take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 09:15 pm (UTC)*chuckle* What kind of a clock are ye handin me? ];-)
Well, first of all, declaring this the day the story aired in the news was still simple denial and jumping to conclusions.
Not quite true, I think. The notion that hat it was a larger, endemic situation would be unlikely on its face, particularly to those familiar with military code -- and that represents quite a few citizens. And I recall that the timestamps -- the "wee hours" times on the photos -- were discussed very early on.
At least as interesting are the other half of the country, who instantly assumed that it was a top-down order to torture those prisoners and is to this day reluctant to admit otherwise.
And then we had the third element -- the person who broke the story, but knew that it was not at all as he portrayed it as he was doing so. Unlike either category we're discussing of people jumping to conclusions, he started from the conclusion, then led his readers astray. Or so the evidence that I've seen indicates.
I do agree that the supervisory problem there needed to be addressed -- and certainly was in the process of being so. It's hard to plan on your own people being such creeps, but necessary.
===|==============/ Level Head
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-12 01:21 pm (UTC)Interesting, but not germane to my point. I was pointing out examples of people who try to either dismiss crimes commited by members of their 'group' as either not being performed by some other group or denial of the crime. Primarily the latter, but I opened the door to the former because it is the other option peolpe tend to take and couldn't find a way to not mention it and remain balanced in my mind.
As such, the response of many Americans to assume a massive conspiracy wasn't relevant to my point, which just to re-iterate since this has gone on so long was:
A major leg of the Nick Berg conspiracy is the men in the video did not portray the mannerisms of middle eastern people as claimed by middle eastern people.
I dismiss this claim as not being a compelling claim, because it is human nature to rationalize away crimes by claiming the people doing them are not part of your group.
Re: Nothing was resolved
Date: 2004-11-11 11:42 am (UTC)You know, I hadn't actually considered this facet of human nature in the context of the Nick Berg story. Thnak you. :)