Nick Berg conspiracy theories

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This is a page about conspiracy theories surrounding the death of United States citizen Nick Berg in Iraq in May 2004. The United States government and Berg's family allege that Berg was seeking telecommunications work in Iraq during the U.S.-led occupation. It is also alleged that he was captured and later beheaded, with the killing recorded and later shown as a video on the Internet. There is controversy over the identity of the alleged killers and the circumstances surrounding the alleged killing. However, the several subsequent videos of similar beheadings dispelled most of the conspiracy theories, at least amongst the general public.

The website where the video was reported to have been posted allegedly reported the claim that a murder was committed by Muslim militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Bush administration as well as the mainstream media support this claim. The men in the video said that a killing was carried out to avenge abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.

Shortly after the release of the Berg video, Benjamin Vanderford distributed a self-made video titled "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slaughters an American" which mimics an al-Qaeda beheading of an American. The video was so convincing that on August 7, 2004 it was broadcast on Arab television. He had in fact made the video, in part, to bring up the question why the Nick Berg and other videos were accepted as fact before the physical evidence was found, in light of the information presented here.

Contents [hide]
1 Suspicious aspects of the decapitation video
2 Other suspicious aspects of the official story
3 Audio analysis of the video
4 Issues that cast doubt on the significance of apparently suspicious aspects of the video
5 Alleged motivation and timing
6 Images
7 Later events reducing the likelihood of conspiracy theories
8 External links

8.1 Expert analysis
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Suspicious aspects of the decapitation video

Al Jazeera, in an article entitled Bloggers doubt Berg execution video[1] (http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4FFA61A3-9C33-4597-A8D9-8079E91F2784.htm), and other websites, point out apparent inconsistencies in the video, including:

  • There are jumps in the video, including a discontinuity of over 11 hours in the video's time-stamp from 2:44:12 to 13:45:47 just after the knife is drawn.
  • Cutting a person's artery in the neck while the heart is pumping results in the release of large amounts of blood. (Consider, for example, how much blood there was at the Nicole Simpson scene.) Lack of bleeding, and lack of movement following a video jump, suggest that the decapitation of a living person did not occur. Medical experts interviewed by the Asia Times concurred [2] (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE22Ak03.html), also adding that a person decapitated would have their body strongly shaking and jerking in response to the act.
  • The man said to be Nick Berg wears an orange prison jumpsuit that seems identical to the jumpsuits worn by the hostages held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by the United States. None of the recently kidnapped hostages in Iraq wore any uniform outfits whatsoever
  • The unidentified masked men in the video appear to be standing at parade rest, or more loosely in a Western-style posture.
  • The unidentified masked men in the video have light-coloured skin and a high body mass by Arab standards.
  • One of the unidentified masked men in the video is pudgy and wears very clean tennis shoes. This will not be the case with an Al-Qaida fighter.
  • At least three of unidentified masked men in the video have Israeli Uzi ammunition clips.
  • An unidentified masked man in the video claiming to be Al-Zarqawi (whose appearance is known) wears a mask throughout, which makes no sense if he really is Al-Zarqawi. He also appears to lack Al-Zarqawi's tattoos and prosthetic leg. There have also been reports that al-Zarqawi died long before Nick Berg's disappearance.[3] (http://www.asianews.it/view.php?l=en&art=459)[4] (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4446084/).
  • The voice heard reading a statement, which the CIA identified as Al-Zarqawi, allegedly uses the wrong dialect to be Al-Zarqawi, and is possibly not even a native speaker of Arabic. Some familiar with al-Zarqawi's voice said the voice on the tape did not sound like him. [5] (http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/12/iraq.berg/index.html) Also, because of the low quality of the video, lips cannot be seen moving.
  • The reader seen in the video oddly keeps flipping pages back to the same page he had just been on instead of turning to the next page. Also, the sound is not synchronised with the image, even allowing for a constant delay. It appears that the audio of the statement was dubbed into the video, rather than read live.
  • The wall and the chair in the video match the wall and chair seen in some of the abuse photos from Abu Ghraib prison.
  • When the orator hands the papers to the person on his left, the man who identified himself as Nick Berg seemed to straighten his posture slightly, which may indicate he was preparing to stand.
  • The man in the orange jumpsuit in the video does not look like Nick Berg.
  • The man in the video who identifies himself as Nick Berg sits and talks calmly, and does not attempt to escape.
  • The website at http://www.al-ansar.biz/ was shut down after news outlets like CNN and Fox News (seen as being conservative) were notified, but before Arab outlets could retrieve the video.
  • A person with a (U.S.?) military jacket and cap pokes into the video (frames 9306 through 9368). His neck, left ear and part of his cap and visor can be seen.
  • The poor video quality could be a result of deliberate downsampling (degradation) to obscure details and make the possible hoax more convincing by allowing the soundtrack and the audience's imagination to fill in details that may not exist.
  • The reader appears to touch his face with his left hand, to cough or make his finger wet for flipping pages. Arabs use their left hand as their sanitation hand, and use their right hand to serve and eat food.
  • The executioner is wearing a large gold ring on his right hand [6] (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/Investigation/nick_berg_clues_040513-1.html). Islam prohibits men from wearing gold adornments - they are 'haram' for men [7] (http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Books/Q_LP/ch2s2pre.htm#Gold%20and%20Pure%20Silk%20are%20Haram%20for%20Men).
  • According to the New York Times, "The killer on the video cuts with his right hand. . . Mr. Rababa and Mr. Abu Doma, who shared the same room with [Zarqawi] for several years, insisted that he used his right hand only for eating and shaking hands." [8] (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/international/middleeast/13zarq.html?ex=1247371200&en=fef1b3dec1a80375&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland)
  • Since many people believed that Nick is dead before the staged beheading, it's quite possible that the producers who made this video have someone else dress up like Nick. When the beheading scene started to appear, they took the person out of the scene and replaced him with a dummy instead.
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Other suspicious aspects of the official story

  • Nick Berg visited Israel in December of the previous year, and remained there until his subsequent visit to Iraq, which lends credence to the notion that Nick Berg was a spy working for Israel.
  • He worked on the radio tower near the very prison in the center of the abuse scandal; however, his company name cannot be found on the list of approved U.S. contractors.
  • There is absolutely no record of his company, either through state records, online, or anywhere else except for one small, local radio station claiming they intended to hire him to build a tower on swampland after his return from Iraq and Free Republic listing his father and the company as an enemy of the United States.
  • The US officially denies holding Berg. E-mails provided by the family of Berg in early April show that he was being detained by the U.S. military. [9] (http://www.oudaily.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/05/19/40aaa679bf692)
  • His family was not permitted to view the body after it was returned to the United States.
  • The FBI questioned Berg in 2002 after discovering Zacarias Moussaoui had used Berg's e-mail account. Moussaoui is accused of being the "20th hijacker" in connection with the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack. [10] (http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/20901.htm)
  • The absence of the head combined with the presence of a corpse suggests a hoax.
  • The poor video quality which obscures evidence and allows the audience's imagination to fill in the details that don't exist in the video is consistent with a hoax, and inconsistent with known beheading videos where both head and body were recovered.
  • If terrorists had conducted the killing, and dressed him in a US prisoner uniform, interrogated him in the style of a US interrogation in a facility that looked like an Iraqi prison, etc, with the goal of framing the US, why would they perform a scripted decapitation scene in Arabic blaming the US, dressed as terrorists? One could claim several levels of deception and a goal of trying to stir doubt with intentional inconsistencies in the video, but this would require that one accept that the group which decapitated Berg had a high level of PR sophistication.

Some theories also state that President Bush vowed to raze Abu Ghraib prison in order to destroy possible evidence of the hoax and prevent future investigations on location.

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Audio analysis of the video

Two possible asides in foreign languages have been identified in the soundtrack of the video. These are:

  • A Russian voice allegedly saying 'do it quickly' [11] (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/28/1085641717320.html).
  • At 13:46:28 by the video camera's on-screen clock, a soft voice can be heard making a comment in the background. This has variously been interpeted [12] (http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_international&Number=1480935&t=-1) as an English speaker saying:
    • 'It will be done' or 'Thy will be done'.
    • 'I wouldn't do that'
    • 'I don't believe that'
    • 'How will it be done?'

There follows the results of an attempt to enhance the section of the soundtrack that contains the latter aside. The version of the video used was the one available at http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/decapitation_video.htm (5.4 MB WMV format). Cool Extractor (http://www.coolextractor.com/) was used to save the sound track as a 320 kbit/s 48 kHz MP3, the highest quality available. A clip was generated starting approximately 3 seconds before the aside. Here it is: media:Berg_video_iwdt_320kbps_48khz_mono.mp3 (295KB)

GoldWave (http://www.goldwave.com) was then used to perform noise reduction and other filtering on the clip. There are many possible permutations of filtering operations, however, these seemed to give the clearest results:

  • media:berg_video_iwdth_enhanced_c7.mp3 (265KB):
    • Noise reduction using noise spectrum copied from 0<t<2.5 s, 95% overlap, 50% scale
    • Delete noise between 0<2.5 sec
    • FFT timewarp of 75% using 95% overlap and oscillator synthesis (produces 3/4 speed)

The latter two clips have been slowed down by factors of 3/4 and 1/2 respectively. The files are all encoded using 320 kbit/s and 48 kHz.

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Issues that cast doubt on the significance of apparently suspicious aspects of the video

  • Berg is wearing an orange jumpsuit very similar to those worn by Guantanamo detainees: the terrorists were making an obvious political point by comparing Berg's captivity with that of the Guantanamo inmates.
  • The killer is wearing a gold ring; the reader is putting his "sanitary" hand to his mouth; forbidden by Islam; : by beheading a non-combatant, the killers are also engaging in un-Islamic behaviour. It is possible they are not very observant Muslims, which could be consistent with their being members of Saddam's relatively secular regime. Some would argue that this would cast doubt on Zarqawi's role in the murder, as his organization claimed opposition to Saddam Hussein's government and is a religious-based terrorist organization. However, similar to the Taliban's supposed "orthodox" brand of Islam goes unrecognized by most Muslims, Zarqawi's brand of Islam is by no means "orthodox" or "traditional"; thus, the basic premise of stating that "the video is faked because it appears to be unislamic" maybe tautological.
  • Various things pointing to alleged CIA/US conspiracy, such as Israeli Uzi clips, prison jumpsuit, chair like at Abu Ghraib, wall like Abu Ghraib, "American" visor poking into picture. These indicate that if this was a US "put-up job" it would have been done by rank amateurs. The apparent perpetrators speak Arabic, cut off the person's head (a form of execution used by other Muslims, but not a US-style method execution), remember to shout "Allahu Akbar", and apparently edited the tape, but don't think of obvious things that might hint at US presence? The color of the walls, chairs, maybe even the jumpsuit, could be typical of any of Saddam's prisons. A further indication that the kidnappers may not be Al-Qaeda, but may be Saddam loyalists.
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Alleged motivation and timing

The theories give several possible motivations for the alleged hoax. The Iraqi police suspected Berg was an Israeli spy; if he were, the video may have been hoaxed to allow him to assume a new identity. Another possibility is the hoax was perpetrated by the CIA to cushion the blow from the Abu Ghraib scandal, or to distract attention from other, worse abuses which were alleged before, during and after the release of the video.

On the other hand, any explanation is suspicious that points to Berg being some kind of American or Israeli agent. His father is involved in International ANSWER, an antiwar group associated with the Workers World Party, and which was also heavily involved in organizing the massive Global protests against war on Iraq on February 15, 2003. Yet the elder Berg claims his son was a big supporter of George W. Bush. The father, Michael Berg, also said that he thought that, if the presumed Muslim perpetrators knew Nick, they would know he was their "best friend".

If he were involved with Israel, why did he enter (and want to leave) Iraq by land through Muslim countries like Kuwait and Jordan, while most people arrive and depart by air? If he were an agent of either the US or Israel, why did the FBI interview him several times in custody? If the Iraqi police suspected him of being an Israeli agent, why would the FBI leave him in Iraqi custody, only to have him freed after his father sued?

Some have also suggested that he was accidentally killed during interrogations, and the interrogators arranged the video to attempt to cover their tracks. With the Taguba report reporting severe beatings and the army investigating unusual deaths in custody in US prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo; as well as even a US soldier playing a prisoner in a training exercise getting beaten to the point of siezures [13] (http://www.lex18.com/Global/story.asp?S=1891343&nav=EQlpNN9R), it would not seem unusual for such an event to occur. As with murders everywhere else in the world, those who caused his death would have ample motive to attempt to hide the fact. Since the only video the killers would have of Berg alive was the routine interrogation video, it would consequently be used (hence, the seemingly out of place remarks about his family, Berg's calm attitude in answering questions, etc).

[edit]

Images

Chair comparison:

Chair in Berg video Chair in Abu Ghraib Chair in Abu Ghraib

Although the chairs all appear to be of the same type, it should be noted that this kind of chair is very common. Many North Americans likely own the same model. The men alleged to be the assassins are not North Americans; however, chairs brought into the country by Americans would not be hard to obtain.

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Later events reducing the likelihood of conspiracy theories

On June 18, 2004, the television station Al-Arabiya reported that kidnapped hostage Paul Johnson was beheaded by Al-Qaida militants. The photos provided of the beheading show similar conditions to that of the beheading of Nick Berg. Based on the photographs, Paul Johnson appeared to be in orange prison overalls and was beheaded on the floor in a manner that appeared very similar to Nick Berg's beheading. This puts some, if not all, conspiracy theories of Nick Berg's beheading by agents of any government in doubt.

Several days later, Al-Jazeera broadcast footage of Kim Sun-il, a South Korean, being beheaded in similar circumstances.

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External links

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Expert analysis

  • Northeast Intelligence Network - An analysis of the video (http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/bloodstainanalysis.asp) by a member of the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts (IABPA). (http://www.iabpa.org/) It concludes "...the blood pattern shown in the video is NOT consistent with the cutting or breaching of the carotid artery or arteries of a person where the victim's blood pressure would be considered to be within the normal range. Based on this observation alone, this investigator questions the authenticity of the video as it was been presented for bloodstain pattern analysis."
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