fishy Posts

In the bookstore today a customer called in and asked about "Let your lives speak," a phrase frequently attributed to George Fox (it's the source of a book title, "Lives that Speak"). While a quick Google search finds lots of pages where people say things like "as George Fox said, you should 'let your lives speak,'" no one actually gives details of when and where he said it. The phrase seems to sit only by itself, with no passages before or after it. A few sites claim it was part of his message on Firbank Fell but no one cites a source. Sitting on the same Palm Pilot as the Yardbirds MP3s is Fox's Journal (Jones edition) and a keyword search doesn't pick up "lives that speak" or "let your lives speak" anywhere. Smells fishy, like another one of those too-good-to-be-true Fox quotes. Can anyone document that it's real?

PS: I fly bright and early tomorrow morning for this year's Quakers Uniting in Publications meeting, in Oregon. I don't know what internet access I'll have so my apologies if new comments have to sit for a few days.

The U.S. media is giving all-out coverage to video stills of an American named Nicholas Berg, who was decapitated by iraqi insurgents (the original video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American"). Barely mentioned is that Berg was arrested by U.S.-backed iraq police forces and detained without charge by iraqi police from around 24 March to 6 April, after being stopped at a checkpoint in Mosul. UPDATE: According to The Guardian and other sources, Berg was originally arrested by the iraqi police but actually held for the thirteen days by U.S. military personnel.

Yes, folks, stop looking for the video and start asking how Berg got into the hands of his executioners. His own family said the U.S. military was at least partially responsible for his imprisonment. On April 5, they filed a federal suit claiming that Mr. Berg was being held illegally by the United States military in iraq:

The Bergs last heard from their son April 9, when he told his parents he would come home by way of Jordan. Suzanne Berg said that the family had been trying for weeks to learn where their son was, but that federal officials had not been helpful. Philadelphia Inquirer

In what is becoming the motif of the iraq Occupation, agents with the F.B.I. claim that the iraqi police acted independently by arresting Berg in the first place. The police are yet another tier of the blame-and-denial game being played by the Pentagon and Bush Administration. The U.S. controls (or should control) the contractors and iraqi police and needs to take responsibility for what their minions are doing in iraq.

My heart goes out to the family of Nicholas Berg. He's from a Philadelphia suburb near the one I grew up in. He took classes at two colleges in my old neighborhood and I could easily have passed him cutting through the campuses. I can totally empathize with his desire to see the world and maybe make it a better place by helping to rebuild iraq.

There are questions that must be answered and the U.S. media had better start asking them:

When did the U.S.-backed iraqi police release Berg?

Who did they release him to?

Where has Berg been for the last month?

Who are the men who decapitated Berg and who were they working for?

Who released the execution video (even hawkish blogger Andrew Sullivan can't find the site, even Aljazeera doesn't say where it is) and who added the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi caption?

Some of the websites questioning the Berg story are clearly those of wingnut conspiracy types. With that warning, here are some interesting links and threads:

• Is Berg Story a Fraud? on the Nonviolence.org board.
• Doctor declares Berg video a fake. I myself wondered why the stills of the captors holding his head looked so clean-looking. The democraticunderground forum has other interesting discussions, including ones looking at the captor's body language and researching the video codecs the web video was recorded with (apparently very up-to-date, it was made by pros, perhaps purposefully kept fuzzy).
• iraq militants claim al-Zarqawi is dead
• Fishy Circumstances and Flawed Timelines Surround American's Beheading. Lots of links here.

For what it's worth, I was contacted my a major American news organization Thursday morning. The researcher said they were asking many of the same questions and she asked if I had uncovered anything interesting. If any of my readers know of other resources, send me an email and I'll post it here and pass it along to this news source.

In the Washington Post, an article on shifting U.S. rhetoric. The basic story: Bush silent on missing weapons, going back to "War on Terror" story. While U.S. inspectors in Iraq might be optimistic about someday finding weapons of mass destruction, the Bush Administration has stopped talking about them (probably hoping everyone will forget their threat was the stated reason for war). I'm sure they conducted enough polls to realize that mainstream Americans are finding the WMD stories increasingly fishy. In response, the official U.S. rationale has now shifted back to the "War on Terror" angle. No matter than U.S occupation forces have also come up empty-handed on any links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And never mind that it's come out that paid Saudi government officials put up U.S. rent money for two of the 9/11 hijackers. Waffling stories are a sign that critical questioning of the Bush Administration policies is having an effect. Let's keep debunking the lies!