Al Qaeda Hackers
Best of the Web Today - May 14, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
Authorities insist it's nothing more than an eerie coincidence, but boy, it is eerie. CNN reports that Zacarias Moussaoui, who is awaiting trial on charges related to his role as the "20th hijacker," once used a purloined e-mail account belonging to Nick Berg, the American civilian murdered in Iraq by al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. On a bus in Oklahoma a few years ago, he "allowed a man with terrorist connections to use his laptop computer," according to his father, Michael Berg:
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," [Michael] 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.
Adding to the high weirdness of the whole Berg saga are the strange and confused political views of the elder Berg, who is apparently some sort of far-left antiwar activist. (Reports such as one in the Philadelphia Daily News suggest he and his son did not see eye to eye on Iraq's liberation.) Agence France-Presse reports on Michael Berg's sickening moral inversion:
"Nicholas Berg died for the sins of George Bush and (Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld," Michael Berg, visibly upset, told ABC television.
"The al-Qaeda people are probably just as bad as they are, but this administration did this," he said.
Distraught people sometimes say crazy things, but this quote, from another CNN report, bespeaks a genuine and astonishing ignorance:
Berg's father said Thursday his son was someone who simply wanted to "help people, not to hurt anyone." "He was not disrespectful of danger, he just didn't recognize danger in people," Michael Berg said. "The al Qaeda that killed my son didn't know what they were doing. They killed their best friend. Nick was there to build Iraq, not to tear it down."
Does Michael Berg really not understand that al Qaeda is in Iraq to tear it down, not to build it? |
