We've seen only the tip of the Berg affair

The closer we look at the Nicholas Berg affair, the more curious it looks.

Berg, you will recall, was the electronics specialist visiting Iraq for business reasons, who was detained "by the Iraqi police" on March 24 at a checkpoint in Mosul. Just who held him and why remain points of controversy. On April 5, his parents initiated court action to secure his release; the next day, Nicholas was freed. Somehow, he immediately fell into the hands of Al Zarqawi's terrorist band. They beheaded him. The gruesome images of his death, broadcast via an Isalmic website, deflected attention from the tortures in Abu Ghraib.

Although Nicholas Berg was pro-war, his father Michael was an anti-war protestor whose name appeared on an enemies list compiled by FreeRepublic, a website run by reactionary hate-mongers. Imagine Ernst Roehm's battalions armed with computers, and you'll have a good picture of the Freepers at play. They have an established history of targeting perceived enemies for harassment and vengeance.

Many mysteries surround these events.

First question, and it's an important one: Was Nicholas Berg solely in the custody of the Iraqi police, as our government alleges? Or was his detention engineered by the American military, as his family claims? (Had he not been detained, Berg would have left Iraq on March 30.)

From the AP:

To back its claims that Berg was in U.S. custody, the family showed The Associated Press an April 1 e-mail from Beth A. Payne, the U.S. consular officer in Iraq.

"I have confirmed that your son, Nick, is being detained by the U.S. military in Mosul. He is safe. He was picked up approximately one week ago. We will try to obtain additional information regarding his detention and a contact person you can communicate with directly," the e-mail said.

In two e-mails later that day, Payne wrote that she was still trying to find a local contact for the family.

In an e-mail message to The New York Times, the younger Berg described the presence of American military police officers, as well as visits by the FBI.

Nicholas Berg told a friend that he was detained only briefly by the police, then transferred to the custody of United States troops.

The Iraqi police, for their part, deny that they ever held Berg. From a new AP story:

In Mosul, police chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi insisted his department had never arrested Berg and maintained he had no knowledge of the case.

"The Iraqi police never arrested the slain American," al-Barhawi told reporters. "Take it from me ... that such reports are baseless."

Despite the military's denials, the evidence demonstrates beyond the point of rational debate that agencies of the United States government knew of and participated in Nick Berg's detention. Iraq is an occupied country. The police would never hold an American citizen for so long without approval from occupation authorities.

Second question: How did Berg segue from the Iraqi police and/or the United States military to Al Qaeda-linked terrorists? A few observers have wondered if his police/military captors deliberately handed him over to Al Zarqawi's tender mercies.

In this light, we should note that we now have confirmation of an important point: The Freepers did distribute their disgusting "hit list" to the FBI and the military. As noted earlier, the FBI visited Nick Berg during his "police" detention. The FreeRepublic site attracts a large number of American military personnel. Freepers have contacted military officers to initiate retaliatory action against any soldier alleged to hold anti-Bush opinions.

After the beheading, one Freeper noted: "The guy who was beheaded was on this list. He was also arrested by Iraqi police and held in an Iraqi prison for a few weeks before he was kidnapped." This statement indicates that the Freeper network misidentified the son as the father.

One factor may have aided this misidentification: The Freeper hit list erroneously implied that Michael Berg owned Prometheus Methods Tower Service Inc. In fact, that company belonged to the son (although Michael appears to have played some role in the business). The American authorities thus may have received bad intelligence from the Freeper network.

Of course, if any American in authority relied on tips from the Nazi-fied thugs at FreeRepublic, then we are already knee-deep in scandal. Can we, in fact, draw that conclusion?

One need only turn rephrase the question thus: Why else would the FBI believe that Nicholas Berg -- who was authorized to do telecommunications maintenance work in Iraq -- was up to no good? From another AP story:

When FBI agents arrived at the Berg's West Chester home on March 31, they were relieved to know their son was alive, but in jail. The agents questioned them about various details that only they and their son would know about.

Jerri Williams, spokeswoman for the Philadelphia FBI office, said the agency was "asked to interview the parents regarding Mr. Berg's purpose in Iraq."

Dan Senor, an advisor for the Coalition Authority, has told reporters that "they [the police] suspected that he [Nick Berg] was involved/engaged in suspicious activities." If they did not get that notion from the Freeper hit list, then where did the idea come from?

Berg's emails from Iraq indicate that he was suspected of building pipe bombs. Berg was a respectable professional. Why would anyone accuse him of building bombs, unless someone in authority had taken the Freeper hit list seriously?

I must also note this remarkable item from The Scotsman, which interviewed an American official:

He added that Berg, who was Jewish, had written materials which were "anti-Semitic" in tone, the official said without elaborating.

Anti-Semitic? Where would the United States military get such an idea?

I think it fair to presume that Nicholas Berg did not, in fact, write broadsides advocating hatred of Jews. However, some arch-reactionaries equate an anti-Bush stance with an anti-Israel stance.

It is disturbing enough to contemplate the possibility that American authorities targeted an American citizen based on information derived from Freeper fanatics. A few commentators, however, have seen fit to take the matter into even darker realms.

Islamic terrorists have an odd habit of helping the Bush administration. For example, just as Sunnis and Shiites united against the American occupation of Iraq, a missive allegedly from "Al Qaeda" tried to drive a wedge between the two Islamic factions. Now we have the exquisitely-timed Berg atrocity, which provides a perfect pretext for disallowing release of further Abu Ghraib torture photographs: National security. Exposure of further evidence could spur further terrorist actions. Or so the argument goes.

Some aver that Al Zarqawi himself -- the "new Bin Laden" -- is little more than a creation of American propaganda. (See this analysis; scroll down.) "The Zarqawi Gambit," by Greg Weiher, published in February, argues persuasively that an alleged letter from Zarqawi to his network bears many indications of fabrication. (One cannot read this text without hearing the faraway voice of Saturday Night Live's Church Lady: "Isn't that conveeeeeeeenient...?")

On March 4, AP reported on a fairly detailed, albeit unverified statement by an insurgent group claiming that Al Zarqawi died during a bombing raid in Northern Iraq. The story will remind many reminds of the controversy over Khalid Shaik Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader widely reported to have been killed well before his alleged "capture."

For what little it may be worth, this site (which I trust about as much as I trust FreeRepublic) claims that an NBC reporter said of the Berg killing: "...the CIA did it to take the heat off the Pentagon." I have yet to see this quote confirmed.

The video of the Berg murder presents us with the absurd spectacle of killers who wear hoods to prevent identification -- even though a caption informs us that Zarqawi is doing the deed. This oddity has led some conspiracy theorists to argue that the video itself is an elaborate fake, a la Wag the Dog. Initially, I found this scenario outlandish. Although I still would file it under "Highly Unlikely," we can't toss such theories into the "Impossible" file, in light of the digital wonders parading across the screen in such films as Return of the King.

The arguments in favor of this theory can be found on Al Jazeera and on the Alex Jones website (not widely considered a credible source). Alleged anomalies in the video include blurry camera work, visible edits, terrorists with Caucasian skin color, and a lack of arterial spray during the cut. The head does not drip blood when lifted up. Berg remains utterly motionless, and a scream was dubbed in.

Al Zarqawi allegedly has expertise in poisons; perhaps the captors beheaded a dead man?

The circumstances of the video's release were also noteworthy. Al Jazeera offer these comments (which I find believable, insofar as they go):

A Reuters journalist in Dubai first named the Muntada al-Ansar al-Islami website as the source for the video -- at www.al-ansar.biz.

Although the site has now been shut down, Aljazeera.net had looked at the site within ninety minutes of the story breaking -- and could find no such video footage.

But Fox News, CNN and the BBC were all able to download the footage from the Arabic-only website and report the story within the hour.

Again, I would caution readers against conclusion-hopping. The wilder conspiracy theories often do not pan out, and the sources supporting the "fake video" scenario are, for the most part, internet conspiracy-mongers who do not merit great trust. More reasonable observers have steered clear of these claims.

Even so, keep one (skeptical) eye trained on these allegations. False video tapes were a tactic widely discussed by Army War College theorists in their writings on the Revolution in Military Affairs. This war has forced us to confront so many deceptions, we should not be too quick to dismiss any explanatory scenarios.