There are conspiracy theories in the air, and a lot of data are floating around. Larry Elder has been talking a lot about all the Berg Mysteries, and based on the documents he has available to him--and has discussed on the air--I have a few conclusions:

1. Nick Berg was raised in the suburbs and had a very sunny, optimistic view of life. He saw bad events as, by definition, things that happened to other people--never him.

2. Nick Berg was a free spirit, and didn't want to be ruled by fear--or pragmatism.

3. Berg had an Israeli stamp on his passport, and this looked suspicious to Iraqi authorities.

4. He was held by the Iraqis for a time, and was in American custody long enough for them to beg him to leave the country, which was a dangerous place for a young man to be without friends, an employer, or even a translator.

5. He refused to do this, preferring to travel over land. This appears to have been a fatal mistake.

6. His father is a wingnut to begin with, and now near crazy with grief. Rather than accept the notion that evil is real and needs to be dealt with, and that he was mistaken about its nature all along, the senior Berg prefers to pin the entire chain of events on George W. Bush, against all reason.

7. Possibly because of the father's wingnuttery, the family has had previous brushes with the FBI.

8. At no point was Nick Berg mindful of the fact that he was in a war zone; just before he disappeared for good he sent one note home to friends in the States to the effect that he'd been out drinking heavily the night before. A Jewish-American guy who goes out on the town, unaccompanied, in Baghdad, is not being careful of his own safety. Not at all.

9. I do not happen to believe that his captors tumbled to the fact that he was Jewish. I suspect if they had that he might have got worse treatment--like what happened to Daniel Pearl.

I've heard about the e-mail passord business, but I haven't so far seen any evidence to link Nick Berg with AQ or other extremists. I suspect this was just coincidence--or possibly another manifestation of the same carelessness that got Berg killed.

To be clear, I don't think this kid was at fault in his own murder. I also (so far) don't see any evidence that he was guilty of anything other than thinking he'd live forever--or at least long enough to tell his kids and grandkids about his swashbuckling adventures in a war zone someday.

He was 26, and appears to have been almost criminally naive. The luck that got him through one previous trip to Iraq and a few forays to other hot spots finally ran out.

And it's a damned shame.

Posted by: Attila at 03:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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