-

Nick Berg's head as a political football?


The latest news is that they've made arrests in the abduction... last week. (The "they" being Iraqi police.)

"'The arrests are good,' a high ranking American offical in Baghdad told NBC News, but those in custody are not believed to have killed Berg directly."


The story is that those arrested were "former members of Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen paramilitary organization", and were led by Saddam's nephew, Yasser al-Sabawi, though he wasn't arrested. Further, they are supposed to have abducted Berg, but then handed him over to the other group, who executed him.

It's such a tangle.

That some will rush to use this as "proof" of a connection between Saddam Hussein and anyone in al-Qaida, bothers me, but people can be moronic. Just consider how many people think there's some link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. That people would believe that over essentially nothing (nothing more than insinuations from President Bush), one would think that the country where most of the 9/11 terrorists came from (either initially or when entering the US) would have been considered a slam dunk conspirator... but, no, following actual evidence into Saudi Arabia wouldn't be convenient, eh?

Almost as distressing is all the intrigue concerning who held Nick Berg, when, and why. As you'll see near the bottom of the linked article above, John Ashcroft is not only standing by the statement that US forces never held Berg, but that not only did he decline safe passage out of the country but "he refused government offers to advise his family and friends of his status.”

There's something very peculiar in all this. Whether it's an administration cover-up or Berg had an alternate agenda in Iraq... I wonder if we'll ever know the truth? If I had more time to dig into this I'd be tempted to, especially with respect to coming up with as detailed a timeline as possible.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
Insurance Company-Driven Propaganda Storm It's almost heartening to see them go to these lengths - they're getting a little scared - though I worry how many wingnut media outlets will reference the report as if it's substantive..? ( From the Washington Post ) The Insurance Industry's Deceptive Report by Ezra Klein In the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries, the health insurance industry has commissioned a report (pdf) projecting doom and despair for those who seek to reform its business practices. The report was farmed out to the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has something of a history with this sort of thing: In the early-'90s, the tobacco industry commissioned PWC to estimate the economic devastation that would result from a tax on tobacco. The report was later analyzed by the Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting group, which concluded that "the cumulative effect of PW’s methods … is to produce patently unreliable results.&qu
Read more

The Tease of Things I Don't Need

-
Image
     The lure of things we don't need, could easily find greater needs to apply the cash to, and which we may not even have the space for, is a very First(ish) World Problem, to be sure.        HasLabs is a special projects division of Hasbro, that occasionally pitches large and/or elaborate items - oversized figures and/or vehicles - essentially crowdfunding each project. They set the price, and a funding line - the number of people who need to pledge to buy one (or more -- up to five) at the announced price, then collect the names and information of interested parties for a period of 45 days. Once the number of pledged buys hits the target, the project is greenlit.      A couple years ago there was a HasLabs special build project aiming to fund a production run for an oversized (32" tall), elaborately-articulated action figure of Marvel comics' Devourer of Worlds: Galactus. Back on July 18, 2021 I posted a piece on the project, which at the time was just two days
Read more

Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

-
Image
      Even though I've already watched the pair of debut episodes of Frasier (see next paragraph), and this week's Star Trek: Lower Decks (which continues to do a stellar job of mining  previous Trek series for character, episode and extraterrestrial culture lore and deftly applying them at breakneck speeds), I still have multiple things I'm looking forward to catching up on, including new eps of Gen V (Amazon Prime), Loki (Disney+), and both Archer and Welcome to Wrexham (both on Hulu), along with the first two episodes of a final six for Doom Patrol over on Max... and that's just off the top of my head, so getting this week's streaming post out of the way brings those one step closer for me.       I've watched the two episodes of the new Frasier series that arrived on Paramount+ this week, and while it was a mixed bag it was good to see the character back, with him attempting to move into his third act by returning to Boston, where we first met the ch
Read more