← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 13758 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-05-17
2004-05-17 15:19 | User Profile
Something about this writer's story just doesn't ring true...
[url]http://www.sptimes.com/2004/05/15/Worldandnation/A_jolting_awareness_t.shtml[/url]
Iraq A jolting awareness that I crossed paths with Nick Berg Jamie Francis has made two trips to Iraq, most recently in April when he and senior correspondent Susan Taylor Martin spent four weeks there looking at the war's effect on the country. By JAMIE FRANCIS, Times Staff Writer Published May 15, 2004
On a warm evening in Baghdad's old Jewish quarter last month, I was taking photos in a crumbling building when I was literally pushed toward a Westerner with ivory skin and a red beard. He was lifting weights inside the Arnold Classic Gym. He wore black steel-toed boots as he grunted out exercises beneath dozens of portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Iraqis called him Mr. Nick.
I was amazed to meet another English speaker inside the local gym, but I was there to photograph Iraqis and had little interest in being sidetracked with small talk. But soon, I found myself in a casual conversation with an engaging young man, whose intelligence and friendly nature allowed him to move easily in and out of a strange culture.
Now, more than five weeks after the chance meeting, I have learned that Mr. Nick was actually Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old Pennsylvania man who was beheaded by a group of hooded men in Iraq. The grisly murder was videotaped, and it's now thought that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate of Osama bin Laden, carried out the execution.
Times colleague Susan Taylor Martin and I were first lured to the gym by a small sign along one of Baghdad's most traveled streets. The sign, which showed a bare-chested man with rippling muscles, seemed out of place in Arabic culture. The owner of the gym, Sabah Taleb Mehdi, hung the advertisement for his business, which is an homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger, his childhood idol.
I suppose Mehdi felt compelled to push the two Anglos together. He said Mr. Nick was a regular who had been coming for weeks, and he seemed to enjoy shouting the American's name: "Mr. Nick, Mr. Nick, Mr. Nick," he would say as if singing an Arabic melody. "Mr. Nick good, Mr. Nick very good."
And the young man would cast his brilliant smile and try to answer back with a few words of Arabic. At the end of his workout the two embraced and patted each other on the back. As always, Mehdi refused payment from Mr. Nick for the use of his gym.
We were together for maybe 45 minutes or an hour and exchanged a few personal details. He made his way around the circuit of dinged weights, doing arm curls, squats, military presses, pull ups. He was curious about my digital cameras and the places I have traveled for the Times.
Mr. Nick told me he was a contractor. I didn't push; I waited for him to say more. In today's Iraq a pleasant conversation can spoil quickly with aggressive questioning, since everyone is defensive about security.
We both expressed a level of comfort about Iraq, even as conditions spiraled out of control all around us. Just a few days earlier four American contractors had been killed, dismembered and burned in Fallujah. Each hour seemed to bring new tension. Gunfire and explosions had become background noise.
Berg didn't mention being held in custody from March 24 until April 6. According to news reports, he was jailed in Mosul because his activities aroused suspicion. And if the reports are correct, our meeting came only one day after his release and two days before his kidnapping.
He said he was not working because conditions were too violent, but yet he had taken to traveling the country by local taxi - highly unusual for most foreigners. (Susan and I were doing the same thing as we filed stories and pictures to the Times.)
Mr. Nick described trips to Mosul and Kirkuk, riding in the ubiquitous orange and white taxis with car loads full of Iraqis. But he said nothing of where he might go next.
I was unsure about his nationality. He talked of family in America but also of being in Israel. He looked the part of a construction worker, but there was never a mention of who he worked for or more specifics about what he did. It's impossible to know much of a person in 45 minutes, but this much is sure: He had a wonderful smile, and he was likable, engaging and adventurous.
His skin, hair and thin beard made him stand out in a gym filled with Iraqis. But his muscular build placed him in the brotherhood of those who pump iron, and although language was a problem they managed to hold a warm, if halting, conversation with his fellow bodybuilders. When a street vendor arrived selling apple juice, the Iraqis and the American drank from the same cup.
I only learned late Thursday evening of Mr. Nick's identity. CNN was pursuing the story and had learned he was a regular at the gym. Mehdi gave them our names and a producer called.
I immediately told the CNN producer that she had made a mistake. No, I had never known a Nicholas Berg. She would e-mail me pictures, she said. But as she strung together the words - Arnold Gym, Sabah Taleb Mehdi, Nicholas Berg - I didn't need the pictures. I went numb.
Then the pictures arrived on my computer. In an endless five seconds of silence I gazed into his eyes. I imagined the video of his beheading and was disgusted. I recalled an NPR report that described the details so vividly that I turned the volume down so my 3-year-daughter could not hear.
The TV pictures and still images of a captive Nicholas Berg were nothing like the man I met. His skin was pale, his youthful beard thick and sculpted, and he seemed smaller.
I failed to connect the dots, I think, because Mr. Nick was so confident and comfortable surrounded by people unlike him. He displayed a faith in humanity common to all of us who travel in dangerous places and sometimes must entrust our lives to strangers.
So when I heard the news of an American's beheading, I just assumed it was someone I never knew. Someone who made a huge error in judgment. Someone who had made a tragic blunder. Maybe someone who had trusted the wrong person.
I don't know how much we had in common, but I recognized Nicholas Berg as a kindred spirit, someone who sometimes sees adventure where others see danger. I saw a piece of myself in him, and that's what frightens me. That's why on Thursday night, I lay sleepless in my bed listening to the wind, with Mr. Nick's smile etched in my mind.
[Last modified May 15, 2004, 01:00:35]
2004-05-17 18:11 | User Profile
I think I've figured it out, 'Brot. It reads like it's written in code - a lot of generic human-interest pablum intended to spell out 'HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER IN A CHINESE LAUNDRY' when held up to the light at a certain angle.
He seems to introduce darker, more questioning angles in the standard 'he had a smile that could light up a stadium' tragic-dead-guy puff piece, then holds back or veers left or reverses course back to the singsongy stuff.
Here's the most egregious example of this tendency:
[QUOTE]He said he was not working because conditions were too violent, but yet he had taken to traveling the country by local taxi - highly unusual for most foreigners. Mr. Nick described trips to Mosul and Kirkuk; he said nothing of where he might go next. I was unsure about his nationality. He talked of family in America but also of being in Israel. He looked the part of a construction worker, but there was never a mention of who he worked for or more specifics about what he did. [I]It's impossible to know much of a person in 45 minutes, but this much is sure: He had a wonderful smile, and he was likable, engaging and adventurous.[/I][/QUOTE]
Hell-[I]ooo[/I]! This whole piece reads like the DoD guy is right there in the room with him, vetting the piece over his shoulder as he wrote it. Every time a morsel is dropped that hints at Berg as an agent/double agent/triple agent/Mossad operative - why would a cash-strapped Iraqi gym owner let some carpetbagging Jew with no connections or military guardian angel use his gym for free? - we veer off the detour and back onto the main road of that bright, hopeful, groin-mostening smile of Berg's or some such similar nonsense about [I]seeking adventure[/I]. Please. If the guy wanted adventure that bad, he'd've gone to Iraq as a Marine.
2004-05-17 20:47 | User Profile
Exactly.
This is my favorite part:
*I only learned late Thursday evening of Mr. Nick's identity. CNN was pursuing the story and had learned he was a regular at the gym. Mehdi gave them our names and a producer called.
I immediately told the CNN producer that she had made a mistake. No, I had never known a Nicholas Berg.*
Here's a professional journalist who meets a striking American in the middle of a war zone, and completely forgets about the encounter. Francis would have us believe he spent the four-five days after the Berg beheading story broke not making a single connection between "Mr. Nick" and the "innocent American businessman Nicholas Berg"? And what about the correspondent he was traveling with?
Francis must have a set cast from solid bronze to even be over there at this time, but in his story he sounds frightened to the point of panic. It's as if he's telling us (or someone) that Berg told him nothing, NOTHHHINK!! (big eye roll) and there is no way he's getting any more involved.
I just assumed it was someone I never knew. Someone who made a huge error in judgment. Someone who had made a tragic blunder. Maybe someone who had trusted the wrong person.
You almost expect the punch line here: "Yes, my friend Mr. Nick seemed quite the sensible sort; not the kind who would even for a moment lose his head..." Who is Francis kidding here? Probably Berg didn't tell Francis and Martin anything of importance, but it almost sounds like Francis wants to ensure he doesn't end up in that white chair, listening to the same highly-skilled barbershop quartet who gave Berg his final [URL=http://www.ok.org/homemaker/shavuos62/kosher.html]Circle-K[/URL] close shave.
Sleepless, indeed.
2004-05-19 05:57 | User Profile
[B]HE WAS QUEER![/B] This just hit me like a bombshell, will elaborate under "edit" later.
The entire two incidents, Abu Ghraib and Berg's beheading, plus the pics, is [B]male homosexual anal rape fantasies! jewish homosexuality laid out as 1 - 2 punch for Iraqis and America to wince at, politically. "Its who we are."[/B]
There is so much this hypothesis ties together:
The psychosemiotic teaching is that feelings harbor fantasies: what is felt at deep levels is what unconscious fantasies are about. Therefore, the addition of homosexual rape fantasies, or of punishment by beheading for having such fantasies -- the unconscious recognizes both opposites, equally -- added to Israeli hood-torture template for Abu Ghraib atrocities; goes a long way IMHO to explain the most outstanding phenomenon of this entire war process: the gut-wrenching hatred, extending beyond all words into revulsion of being, itself, brought on by mention of anything associated with the "J-" word (also called "radio-active sign-use). It is the feeling that goes with the fantasy of being ss fcked by Jews. I feel a responsibility to point that out, don't know why.
This is not my nature. I am not ashamed to admit, by way of public confession, that I share that weakness of Arabs which Seymor Hersh said Israeli's can count on, in breaking down subjects for interrogation. Not quite sure how much actual physical turture could be endured, anymore, but that isn't what partriotic resistance is all about.
What I find most dismaying, and wrote to tell him as much, is attitudes like that of Walid Phares, Ph.D.
[url]http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Phares20040519.shtml[/url] The missing pictures from the Arab world Walid Phares, Ph.D. (archive)
May 19, 2004 Torture Existed Before Abu Gharib, But Why No Coverage?
When the Abu Ghraib prison abuse crisis exploded, I analyzed the reactions coming from the Arab World. In an election year, the stakes are high for all parties involved. Each side wants a convenient "truth". The Bush Administration talked about "bad apples." While on the offensive, the opposition talks of a "systemic problem."
President Bush went on Arab TV, while his opponents rushed to speak on behalf of the "humiliated Arab world." But as General Abuzeid put it since Day One, it sounds as if "the issue is making more noise in the U.S. than in Iraq." In fact, the Arab-speaking General got it somewhat right. We in America, were more concerned about "our" image than about the actual incidents themselves. The Arab World obviously reacted, but not exactly as many politicians fantasized.
When I asked individuals from different Arab countries what would they think about Bush's outreach, answers varied. Everybody was sickened by the ugliness of the pictures, but beyond the graphics there were two types of reactions.
The anti-Americans were not difficult to guess. With al Jazeera's incitement, natural anger mutated into hysteria. Suddenly, religion was cited heavily. Very few made a distinction between the psychological illness at Abu Ghraib and the future of Iraq. Actually, the Jihadist networks found a lethal political weapon and exploited this all the way. They think they caught America by its mentally weakest soldiers. More than sanctions against the guards, they want to flush the American-led Coalition out of Iraq, and Bush out of the Oval office. In this Jihad "home run," the architects of the Abu Ghraib crusade against "U.S. immorality" enlisted European elites too. The oil chained establishment from Paris to Berlin is wailing. Manhattan's U.N. is mourning.
He's not kidding on the square in putting out this policy of shamelessness, as if it were impossible for any "images" to be objectively shameful to America.
That creates the crisis, right there. Nobody with honor, my religion says, can take what he says the Arab speaking General Abuzeid "got somewhat right."
This Walid Phares, Ph.D., belongs to a cell of male homosexual Jewish anal rapists, or their associates, operating through the Rumsfeld-Cambone-Miller-John Israel link to Lynndie Endland, and elsewhere, like cancer growths breaking out all over the United States. The virus is carried in the blood of communication, itself. Of course, this could all be just my fantasy.