Nick Berg

Posted on May 11, 2004 in Atrocity Occupation of Iraq

UPDATED: 21:28 PDT 1 May 2004

This is politics Tuesday.

One must speak to the death of Nick Berg. The murder, the execution, the butchery cannot be abided. Nor can the chaos which made this possible. Al Qaeda was not in a position to perform this kind of act against anyone in Iraq until George W. Bush lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction and demolished the country.

NBC Nightly News mischaracterizes the reaction of the family as “simply devastated”. Newsday writes about how the U.S. occupation was a direct cause of Nick Berg’s death:

Michael Berg lashed out at the U.S. military and Bush administration, saying his son might still be alive had he not been detained by U.S. officials in Iraq without being charged and without access to a lawyer.

Nick Berg, a small telecommunications business owner, spoke to his parents on March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30. But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days.

His father, Michael, said his son wasn’t allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.

FBI agents visited Berg’s parents in West Chester on March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son’s identity. On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day Berg was released. He told his parents he hadn’t been mistreated.

Michael Berg said he blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son’s death. He said if his son hadn’t been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave the country before the violence worsened.

No pacifist that I know condones what was done to Nick Berg. The “right” has already started to beg for the airing of this terrible video in a desperate attempt to bolster support for this failed war. They want more blood. This pacifist declares that the murder of Nick Berg should be treated as a crime and the perpetrators brought to justice — but not by the United States. The operations of Al Qaeda must be pursued, prosecuted, and ended by international cooperation. We cannot afford to repeat the mistake that followed 9-11, we cannot continue the lie that brought Nick to his medieval death.

Nick Berg believed in the reconstruction of Iraq. He went there to help the Iraqi people rebuild their bomb-shattered communications system. He was no pacifist. Yet this pacifist recognizes him, salutes him as yet another victim of the stupid wrestling match between two zealous fools, Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush.

Bush apologist General George McClellan has already used the incident to justify the invasion and the maltreatment of prisoners: “This shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom,” he said in a report cited at Bloomberg.com. “They have no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. We will pursue those who are responsible and bring them to justice.”

What he does not tell you is the full truth about the nature of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib:

Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places… seeing the pictures simply made it all more real and tangible somehow. American and British politicians have the audacity to come on television with words like, “True the people in Abu Ghraib are criminals, but…” Everyone here in Iraq knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained. Some were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, while others were detained ‘under suspicion’. In the New Iraq, it’s “guilty until proven innocent by some miracle of God”.

Nick Berg died in George W. Bush’s Iraq, a land where all semblance of safety has disappeared because the people have lost all respect for any institutions, because the machines of war prowl the streets, and bullies rule the minds and bodies of the people. The role of the United States in keeping Nick Berg in a place of vulnerability must be exposed. This is yet another instance of Bush Administration incompetence when it comes to matters of protecting the lives of American citizens.

This is not a time for a pacifist to change his mind about war. This is a time to speak more adamantly in defense of freedom from violence and fear. There can be no compromise with terrorist ideologies, be they of a popular movement or of a nation-state.

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From comments made at Mike Golby’s blog:

I look at all this high-minded controversy and I return to the fact that U.S. foreign policy amounts to twenty year olds with guns. Young Americans who don’t realize that what they have now was built on the backs of their parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifices and demands. And elitists who don’t know how to communicate this to them, who are too married to their post-modernism to realize that they handed the ticket to the Right to do whatever they wanted.

All ideas are not equal. What the Bush Administration did is despicable and cruel, cruel to the Iraqi people, cruel to the young people like Nick who believed that they were bettering the world.