I am shocked and hor­ri­fied by the decap­i­ta­tion of Nicholas Berg in Iraq, but not for the chest-puffing rea­sons the folks at Fox News are. U.S. mil­i­tary prox­ies held Berg with­out charges for an extend­ed peri­od of time and there are too many ques­tions about when he was released and who he might have been released to. I’m not one for con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries but there are real ques­tions as to how Berg end­ed up in front of those anony­mous, hood­ed butch­ers. What­ev­er the answers, the U.S. mil­i­tary is involved in his deten­tion, as is the FBI (who made him miss a plane that was sup­posed to take him out of Iraq last month), as is the U.S. gov­ern­ment back home who did­n’t coop­er­ate with his fam­i­ly to get him out of there.
My major piece on this is over on the main Non​vi​o​lence​.org site: “US mil­i­tary prox­ies held Berg before decap­ti­a­tion; who were his executioners?”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000340.php
I’m sure to get even more hate mail than usu­al for this but I’ll also be watch­ing the main­stream media cov­er­age. I only know of many of these details because Berg was local and Chan­nel 10 News gave back­ground to Berg’s deten­tion. Here’s my pre­dic­tion from past expe­ri­ence: this sto­ry will be too hot for the main­stream media to ques­tion for a few days and then it will only be to report that there are some nut­cas­es ask­ing ques­tions. Only after a few days of this kind of second-hand ques­tion will the nation­al media drop the fas­cade and start ask­ing the ques­tions them­selves. It should be a fun week ahead.