First, Berg was Jewish, and the news tried to draw comparisons to his decapitation and Daniel Pearl to elicit some outrage. Didn't happen. Secondly, the whole incident appears to have been staged, the heavily edited tape complete with title alleging Al Zarkawri claimed he beheaded Berg is too pat. Your's is the only allegation I've seen that he was "Johnny Taliban". Far more likely he was a naive innocent who was simply dispensable and convenient.
Here's some info:
There is [a] strange matter to this situation that troubles me. Why was Mr. Berg picked up by coalition forces and imprisoned, so much so that his family sued Donald Rumsfeld for his release and information on him. The military says it released him, but suddenly then, he disappeared because when people went to see him at the hotel he was allegedly registered at, he wasn't there and no one there knew of him. Very strange point number two is, why was Mr. Berg in an American issued orange jump suit -- the kind Americans put prisoners in, when he was photographed and killed? The Iraqis or other Arabs would have had him in Arab clothing so as not to draw suspicion to him of his being a prisoner -- not an orange jump suit. Also, the way the men were standing, and their size, as a person experienced in the middle east, most Arabs don't stand that way and most Iraqis are not that tall -- the men stand more like Westerners of some sort, or even Israelis, but not like Arabs or Iraqis."
Alex Jones of InfoWars.com published several emails that raised additional questions about the alleged Muslims -- supposedly connected to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (said to be affiliated to al-Qaeda, although this allegation is tenuous at best):
"The picture the media is now showing of the guy the terrorist beheaded as revenge for what went on in the Iraqi prisons looks odd to me. If you look at the men dressed in black, they all seem well fed. Actually most look fat. That bothers me, because these guys are fighting a war and eating on the run. They are constantly on the move and should be either very fit and trim or scrawny and malnourished because of the same reasons. One thing they should not be is fat like couch potatoes. If you look at all of the photos of the prisoners who were naked who supposedly were just plucked of the street, most of them are thin."
Another email sent to Jones makes a few trenchant points concerning the video:
"Tape obviously spliced together and heavily edited. Goes from a) Berg sitting in chair talking about family, to b) Berg sitting on floor with hooded "militants" behind, to c) blurry camera movement, to d) almost motionless Berg on floor as head cut off ... Audio clearly dubbed in ... "Arab" reader flips through pages of "statement" and keeps ending up on the same page. Perhaps doesn't even known enough Arabic to recognize what page he's on? ... "Arabs" have lily-white hands and (other exposed) skin ... "Arabs" have Western-style body posture and mannerisms ... When Berg decapitated, there was almost no blood. If Berg were still alive at this point, with the cut starting at front of throat, blood would have been spraying everywhere. Berg's severed head, the floor, Berg's clothes, and even the hand of the "Arab" who decapitated Berg had no visible blood on it ... Berg's body didn't move while on the ground. Although held down, Berg would have tried to instinctively wiggle and writhe away from captor's grip ... Camera angle made it impossible to see if Berg's eyes were even open ... Alleged "scream" from Berg sounded to be that of a woman and was clearly dubbed in."
When I first looked at captures from the video -- I have yet to see the actual video and quite frankly I don't want to see it -- I noticed immediately a lack of blood coming from Berg's severed head. This seemed very strange to me, even though I admit I am hardly an expert on such things -- even so, it makes sense that a freshly severed head would bleed profusely, as the above comment points out. I can only assume from the comments of people who have the stomach to view the video that Berg did not struggle as al-Zarqawi cut off his head with a knife. If true, none of this makes any sense. Is it possible Berg was already dead or this may not even be Nick Berg in the video?
Finally, the blogger xymphora posted an interesting -- and entirely plausible -- summary of what may have happened to the hapless Nick Berg:
"Reading between the lines of the many conflicting reports of the beheading of Nicholas Berg, it appears that he had been in the control of the U. S. military before his death, possibly using the Iraqi police as a front. He then mysteriously ended up in the hands of fundamentalist Iraqi freedom fighters. It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Pentagon arranged for him to be turned over to the freedom fighters in order that Berg's inevitable death could be used to divert attention from the George W. Bush Rape Rooms and give the knuckle-dragging Americans another reason to think of Iraqis as sub-human and thus deserving of torture, rape, and murder at the hands of the Penta-torturers."
I don't necessarily buy into the theory that the US military, military intelligence, or the Israelis, either on their own or in cahoots with the above, killed Nick Berg. But I cannot discount it either, especially considering the repeated and continuous lies of the Bush administration and the blood-spattered history of US intelligence, especially the CIA.
I'll end with another quote from Sam Hamod:
"We must also ask the question intelligence agencies use, 'Who would most benefit from this act?' In this case, if not Israel, then Bush and America to take the heat off of America for the brutality of the torture in Iraq and Guantanamo. This terrible act also took a lot of pressure off the U.S. Thus, it is also possible, since the killers were hooded, and thus we can't know who they were, that it could have been American counter-insurgency agents, CIA or mercenaries who did this heinous at a time when the glare of anger toward the U.S. was growing in the world. I don't know that this is true, but having worked in intelligence situations, I know it has been done in the past."
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