Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Did Freepers help kill Nick Berg?

FreeRepublic is a reactionary hate site where fanatics plan "hit" campaigns against any perceived enemy. You may recall the episode in which the Freepers published personal information identifying the waitress who dared to card the holy and untouchable (albeit underaged) Bush daughters. The intention, obviously, was to ease the way for any "holy warrior" who wanted to harass, attack or frighten the woman.

Freeper thugs resort to such scurrilous tactics all the time. They even turned against Jessica Lynch when she refused to go along with the administration's propaganda campaign.

One of their targets was Michael Berg, the father of Nick Berg, the latest victim of Al Qaeda.

In this instance, the Freeper hate campaign may have led to a death.

Michael Berg had participated in an anti-war rally sponsored by A.N.S.W.E.R. The Freepers thus put his name and the name of his company on a public enemies list.

Perhaps unknown to the Freepers (and to the Bush administration), Nick Berg, the son, supported the war. The younger Berg was in Iraq for business reasons when he was detained by Iraqi police. The New York Times tells the story:

The Iraqi police took Nicholas Berg, 26, into custody on March 24 and held him in a jail that he described in the message as managed by Iraqis with oversight from United States Military Police forces. He wrote that federal agents had questioned his reasons for being there, whether he had ever built a pipe bomb or had been in Iran.

"They can detain him and deny him his basic civil rights of a lawyer, a phone call or even a charge for 13 days, but they can't get him" on a plane, David Berg said.

Apparently in a response to the accusations that the actions of the military in Iraq exposed their son to worsening danger, the F.B.I. released a statement saying that Nicholas Berg had not heeded its warnings and that he had declined their assistance in leaving Iraq.

The conflicting accounts continued to swirl around Mr. Berg's detention and release. In Baghdad, a senior adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority, Dan Senor, reiterated that Mr. Berg had never been in military custody.

"My understanding," Mr. Senor said of the Iraqi police, "is that they suspected that he was involved/engaged in suspicious activities. U.S. authorities were notified. The F.B.I. visited with Mr. Berg on three occasions when he was in Iraqi police detention and determined that he was not involved with any criminal or terrorist activities. Mr. Berg was released on April 6, and it is my understanding he was advised to leave the country."

That position prompted the family's decision to read Mr. Berg's e-mail message to The New York Times. In it, he described the presence of American military police officers, as well as the federal agents' visits, to the Mosul jail.

"The Iraqi police is mentioned frequently, which is, of course, absurd, because there is no Iraqi government right now," David Berg said. "And if you think about it, to be detained by the Iraqi police without the U.S. government's knowing would be tantamount to kidnapping."

It is clear that the Iraqi police would never have acted against Nick Berg -- or any other American citizen -- without approval from the occupation forces. The questions are these:

Was Nick Berg detained because he was the son of a man placed on the Freeper retaliation list?

Are there people in our military and in the Republican establishment who privately endorse and collude with the Freepers' vile tactics? (I suspect so.)

If Nick Berg were not detained, would he -- as his family claims -- have been able to leave Iraq before the insurgency became so heated?

The Freepers will never consider the possibility that their Nazi-fied tactics may have led to tragedy. Like their hero Bush, Freeper fanatics are incapable of admitting they may ever have been wrong on any subject. Such individuals know but one mode: Attack, attack, attack. They just don't do introspection.

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