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| Iraq-Jordan |
| WHAT LED HIM TO IRAQ? |
| 2004-05-13 |
| BERG’S JOURNEY SPARKED FBI PROBE AND OTHER STRANGE DETAILS HE was not like anyone else his friends from West Chester had ever known - an adventurous dreamer, a driven idealist, part philosopher and part inventor who was bored with college but could rig together a sophisticated alarm system for his summer camp cabin from aluminum foil and a Walkman. But when 26-year-old Nick Berg walked into the kettle of paranoia and violence that is Iraq, people suddenly didn’t see the same guy his buddies from Henderson High knew. Suddenly, Berg’s stubborn wanderlust made him a target of suspicion - a religious Jew riding around Mosul in a taxi with a copy of the Koran. Some U.S. soldiers even wondered if the patriotic Berg was "a wannabe freedom fighter." Who was the real Nick Berg? The entire world has now seen the shocking way that the idealistic young man from the Philadelphia suburbs died - beheaded on videotape by ruthless terrorists who claimed his slaying was revenge for American prison abuses. But there are still as many questions as answers regarding the way that Berg lived - what exactly he was doing in Iraq, why our allies in Iraqi threw him in jail while the FBI investigated him, and what happened in his final days. With the help of his best friends, Berg’s own e-mails and a Pennsylvania soldier familiar with the details of his detainment in Mosul, the Daily News has pieced together a clearer picture of Berg’s life in Iraq. Some of those details have not been reported before, including: • The FBI apparently conducted a lengthy investigation of Berg in captivity because they were checking out a possible friendship or other tie with an Arab at the University of Oklahoma who was under scrutiny in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.The New York Times is reporting this morning that Berg also sent a lengthy e-mail to his family after he was detained. Among the questions asked, he wrote, were: "Why was I in Iraq? Did I ever make a pipe bomb? Why was I in Iran?" The Times said he conjectured that their questions arose from some Farsi literature and a book about Iran that he had. Berg wrote that after four days he was transferred to a cellblock that included prisoners charged with petty offenses and suspected "war criminals." "Word had spread due to the presence of certain items amongst my stuff that I was Israeli," Berg wrote. "So I felt a bit like Arlo Guthrie walking into a jail full of mother rapers and father stabbers as an accused litterbug." On April 7, the day after he walked out of the Mosul jail on his own terms, he wrote a friend: "I’m currently trying to pick things up with the business and the local contacts, all of whom think I’m the biggest flake in the world now, as well as plan my return trip, which has been complicated by... military closures." Three days later, Berg disappeared. In Iraq, an eccentric young man with his own ideas about life became a kind of Rashoman-like figure - the same person perceived by the various players in radically different ways. His friends insist that Berg’s real story is simpler than it looked - that in the most cynical place on earth, he was merely trying to help. "He was extremely upbeat and optimistic about his work there. He was excited about being able to help," said Tom Clardy, a network analyst in Hershey, Pa., who’d known Berg since seventh grade. "He wanted to go because he felt he had an obligation to help rebuild the infrastructure." "He was looking for the real thing," added Jake Vaccaro, another close friend and grad student at the University of North Carolina. "He wanted real experiences, not filtered, secondhand experiences." Berg’s eccentricities were well-known to those who knew him from Chester County’s Henderson High, where he built award-winning science projects and was known for his keen sense of humor. Luke Lorenz, 28, a close friend and now a grad student at Penn State, has saved a message from Berg on his answering machine. "What he said was, ’Luke, I just had this vision. I had this idea. I wanted to run it by you but I don’t have a lot of time. I’ve gotta go check out some Roman mythology.’ " In college, Berg’s restlessness almost got the better of him. He attended Cornell, Drexel, even the University of Oklahoma, but never earned his bachelor’s degree. Lorenz was at Lock Haven University in upstate Pennsylvania. "When he was in Cornell he started having wanderlust and he would ride his bike from Cornell toward Lock Haven, which is about 130 miles and I’d usually pick him up at Williamsport so he’d make it 100 miles," he recalled. "I remember it was actually weighing on him, what he wanted to do. He had this idea to go to Africa and help people there. He just wasn’t getting things accomplished in college." So Berg went to Uganda. "He was working with designing bricks -which are called stabilized soil," Lorenz said. Berg returned much thinner and told friends he’d given a lot of his food away. His next venture was Prometheus Methods Tower Service Inc., which builds, maintains and inspects communications towers. He ran the business out of a farm in Lancaster County owned by his foreman, Scott Hollinger. Berg - listening to news or hard rock like Led Zeppelin while shunning TV - typically worked some 60 to 70 hours a week. "Nick was a worker. That was his life. He didn’t have a girlfriend. He loved to work," Hollinger said. "He loved to climb towers. He was passionate about climbing anything. He and his dad would go rock climbing. There’s freedom up there. No one is breathing down your neck." The difficult job also played into Berg’s sense of risk. "He was all about adventure," Hollinger said. "We would drive six hours to a job and on the way, he’d see cable towers or telephone poles and he’d say, ’We’ve got to pull over.’ " Then the two would hop out of the car and climb the towers. Berg would often impersonate Arnold Schwarzenegger. "He’d say, ’Just do it. Climb it.’ " Often, when he climbed a tower, he’d hang an American flag on top. Very religious, he also often wore a yarmulke, even under his hard hat. Berg also believed strongly in the American mission in Iraq, and last fall he started studying business opportunities there. With a limited knowledge of Arabic and with a distant relative - possibly an uncle by marriage - living in Mosul, Berg spent January and February in Iraq and then returned for a second time in March. He inspected radio towers that had been struck by helicopters during the war, and worked near the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in an ominous case of foreshadowing. He traveled through the dangerous Iraqi countryside but rarely conveyed his concerns to his friends in his frequent e-mails. "My presence near Moffak [his relative] has made him more concerned (about his own safety and probably mine too) than I’ve been the entire time I’ve been here," he wrote his friend Dave Skalish, an engineer at WPHT (1210-AM) here in Philadelphia, in January. "Mosul is very calm - except for the checkpoints, you can’t really tell there is an occupation." But Berg might have been slow to realize by his second visit that things had deteriorated in Iraq. On March 24, Berg was arrested while riding in a taxi in downtown Mosul. The military source in Iraq, who spoke with the Daily News by telephone, said he was jailed because unescorted Americans aren’t usually seen downtown and "they didn’t know what to do with him." He said police were suspicious because of "his demeanor," and authorities also wanted to know why he had the Koran and a book that the source said may have been called "The Jewish Problem" or "The Jewish Solution." Hollinger said it wouldn’t be surprising that Berg was found with the Koran and various books in Iraq. "It would have surprised me if he wasn’t studying up on the culture of that land," he said. "He was an avid reader. He always did his homework and wanted to learn about the culture of the country he was in." The source said it’s unclear exactly why Berg spent close to two weeks in jail. Although he insisted that Berg was under Iraqi control, the FBI also questioned Berg three times and visited his parents back in West Chester. "He’d made some contact with Arab kids at the University of Oklahoma - that’s what the FBI was checking into...a guy from Oklahoma," the source said. He said the FBI wanted to know if the Oklahoma connection was "why he came over here." He said the Oklahoma contact was "related to somebody who was involved in 9/11." But he didn’t know if that person was jailed al Qaeda supporter Zacarias Moussaoui, who attended the University of Oklahoma close to when Berg was there in 2000. Hollinger said he knew Berg had attended the University of Oklahoma and made friends with some Arabs or Muslims. He made friends with people from every culture and religion. "He told me there was some type of identity mixup - either with ID or e-mails, something along those lines," Hollinger said. "He said he was contacted by some prominent officials." On April 6, after Berg’s parents filed suit seeking his release, he was visited in jail by an American delegation that took him aside in a small room. "He refused to accept any money to go home," the source said. "He refused to accept an airplane ticket. He refused any escort. "He didn’t want us. He said, ’You don’t understand these people like I do. You’re here for a reason - and so am I.’ " His friends say that while he was in jail, Berg had no way of knowing that four American contractors had been burned and hanged from a bridge in Fallujah, or that the situation in Iraq was sliding downhill. "I don’t think he understood the gravity of the situation because he was in prison and didn’t know what was going on outside," Hollinger said. After his release, Berg went to a Baghdad hotel and decided he would try to come home after all. But he still wanted to do things his own way - spurning an offer from U.S. consular officials for help in leaving from Jordan. He said he would leave from Kuwait - but never got there. "So he believed in people," Lorenz said, "and that’s one of the sad things about this whole situation because people are using this video to incite more anger." |
| Posted by:TS(vice girl) |
| #10 Berg's Business Partner in Iraq Was a Convicted Gangster |
| Posted by: stickdog 2004-05-19 4:48:02 AM |
| #9 What the hell? Not another Zionist(TM) conspiracy. My, my, you Arabs are very good at finding them; maybe they're just making it too easy for you. Or maybe they're just trying to distract you from their real goal . . . Seriously, 4869, what do Clinton's appointments have to do with anything? Check the archives for some of the commentaries I've made on Arab conspiracy theories. The thing is, in the United States, we don't discriminate on the basis of religion. So you just may see Jews and Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and even Muslims in our government. As for Berg, no decent human being deserves what happened to him (a lot of Muslims have shown themselves not to fall into that category, I fear, but never fear 4869, I am refering to the ones whose actions we see every day on the TV, not to the handful of decent Muslims - well, one family - that I actually know). Maybe a lot of the people on the Left certainly do, but we won't go into that. Fact is, wanderlust and being both optimistic and dense do not go hand-in-hand. He may have traveled, but he didn't learn. We do need to learn about other cultures. That's the only way we can integrate a diversity that works for all. But they need to learn from us. If it isn't a two-way street, someone's going to vanish. |
| Posted by: The Doctor 2004-05-16 5:42:48 PM |
| #8 This is America and we can appoint all the Jews we want to government! (Our government is secular and doesn't look at a person's religion as a discriminating factor.) That you Muslims have a problem with that is part of why we're fighting this war, Anon 4869. |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-05-16 5:38:14 PM |
| #7 I'm a Muslim and I feel very sorry over Berg's murder. 59% of all Clinton appointment were Jews Very interesting. How long have you felt this way? . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-16 5:32:33 PM |
| #6 I'm a Muslim and I feel very sorry over Berg's murder. 59% of all Clinton appointment were Jews (who comprise between 2.2% to 2.9% of the US population) to the highest posts of the federal bureaucracy, which has since 1999 blurred as to who is behind what. Berg incident took place at the height of Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. Could it be that his killing was engineered to over-shadow the scandal? Now, I leave you with Clinton's 104 Jew appointments: Adler, Karen - Director State Department Policy Adler, Karen - Liaison to Jewish Community Albright, Madeleine - Secretary of State Alexander, Jane - Director National Endowment of Arts Apfel, Richard - Chief of Social Security Barshefsky, Charlene - U.S. Trade Representative Berger, Samuel - Head of National Security Council Blinder, Allan - Vice Chairman of Federal Reserve Blumenthal, Sidney - Special Advisor to First Lady Boorstine, Robert - Communications Aide Boskin, Stanley - Economic Policy Advisor Boykin, Keith - Communication Aide Brandenburg, Bert - Justice Department Spokesman Breuer, Lanny P. - Special Counsel to the President Breyer, Stephen - Supreme Court Justice Bromwich, Mike - Inspector General FBI Browner, Carol M. - Heads the Environmental Protection Agency Cohen, David - CIA Director of Operations Cohen, William - Secretary of Defense Davidow, Jeffrey - Secretary of State for South America Affairs Davis, Lenny - White House Special Counsel Dellinger, Walter - Deputy Attorney General Dimond, Paul - Head Economic Policy Eisenstat, Stuart - Under Secretary of Treasury Eisner, Hal - Director of Bureau of Intelligence Eller, Jeffrey - Director of Media Affairs Epstein, Thomas - National Health Care Advisor Feder, Judith - Assistant Secretary of Health Feinberg, Richard - Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs Footlik, Jay - Special Liaison to Jewish Community Ginsburg, Ruth Bader - Supreme Court Justice Glickman, Dan - Secretary of Agriculture Gober, Hershel - Assistant Secretary for Veterans Affairs Gober, Hershel - Deputy Head of Food & Drug Administration Greenberg, Stanley - Presidential Pollster Greenspan, Alan - Chairman, Federal Reserve Secretary of State Greenwald, Mandy - Press Conference Advisor Haas, Ellen - Assistant Secretary of Education Hamburg, Margaret - Director of Press Conferences Hoibrooke, Fred - Department of Small Business Administration Holbrooke, Richard - U.N. Ambassador Nominee Holbrooke, Richard - Special Representative to NATO Indyk, Martin - Middle-East Peace Negotiator Katzen, Sally - Secretary of Management and Budget Kessler, Steve - Comm. Food & Drug Adm. Kessler, David - Chief of Food & Drug Administration Kessler, Steve - White House Counsel Klain, Ron - Chief of Staff for Vice President, Al Gore Klein, Joel - Assistant Attorney General Klein, Ron - Assistant Secretary of Education Koch, Kathleen - Heads FBI Equal Opportunity Office Koplovitz, Kay - Advisor Small Business Administration Koza, Michael - National Foreign U.S. Interests Head Kristoff, Sandy - Health Care Chief Lehman, Bruce - Head, U.S. Patent Office Levitt, Arthur - Chair Securities & Exchange Lew, Jack - Dep. Dir. Management & Budget Lewis, Samuel - Director State Department Policy Liberman, Evelyn - Head Voice of America Radio Lipton, David - Under Secretary of the Treasury Ludwig, Eugene - Director of the Mint Magaziner, Ira - Head National Health Care Policy Miller, Aaron - Deputy Middle-East Peace Negotiator Nash, Robert - Presidential Personal Chief Neuwirth, Stephan - Association Counsel to President Penn, Mark - Asian Expert on Security Council Penn, Mark - Presidential Pollster Pltofsky, Robert - Chairman Federal Trade Comm. Podesta, John - Chief Assistant to President Pollack, Ron - Director, Families USA Pollack, Ken - Iraq Office National Security Council Rabbi Emanuel Rahm - Director Communications Radd, Victoria - Deputy Assistant to President Rahm, Emanuel - Presidential Policy Advisor Riedel, Bruce - South Asia Office NEC Rivlin, Alice - Director Management of Budget Rominger, Richard - Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Ross, Dennis - Special Middle East Representative Ross, Martin - Middle-East Peace Negotiator Ross, Stanley - Member National Security Council Roth, Stanley - Assistant Secretary of State Rubin, James P. - Under Secretary of State Scher, Peter - U.S. Trade Representative Eli Segal - Deputy Chief of Staff Shapiro, Howard - General Counsel (Lawyer) for the FBI Shapiro, Ira - Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Sherburne, Jane - White House Counsel Sidney Blumenthal - Special Advisor to First Lady Silverman, Stephan - Secretary of the Cabinet Slotkin, Nora - Equal Opportunity Department CIA Soils, Patricia - Director Scheduling to Hillary Sosnik, Doug - Counsel to President Sperling, Gene - Head National Economic Council Steinberg, Jim - Deputy National Security Council Stiglitz, Joseph - Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Summers, Lawrence (TLC, Bilderburger) - Secretary of the Treasury Tarnoff, Peter - Deputy Secretary of State Tenet, George - CIA Chief Thomases, Susan - Chief Aid to First Lady Waxman, Seth - Acting Solicitor General Weidenfeller, Nancy - Office Quality Management Weiner, Robert - Drug Policy Coordinator Yellen, Jannet - Head Council of Economic Advisors Yellen, Janet - On Board of Economic Council |
| Posted by: Anonymous4869 2004-05-16 5:20:28 PM |
| #5 Somebody's out there planting stuff. I can't believe that the reporters could turn up all of this in less than 24 hours "unassisted." It'd be interesting to know who "the source" quoted in the second bullet point is, and how much of this article is based on his information. |
| Posted by: Old Grouch 2004-05-14 12:36:37 AM |
| #4 I read elsewhere today that he had an Israeli stamp in his passport. Anyone who has traveled in the Middle East knows that that gets you nothing but trouble -- businessmen typically get a second passport for travel in the Arab world. And he visited Iran too? He was, at best, a foolish traveler. I'm not big into conspiracy theories, but I smell more to this story. |
| Posted by: Tom 2004-05-13 9:21:52 PM |
| #3 What led him to Iraq? Well, from this account and the account of his father's idiotic behavior today, I'd say it was a little dose of youthful adventurousness and a WHOPPING huge dose of liberal cluelessness. What the fuck do these people think, anyway? That the world would be just like it on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood if it weren't for those terrible Republicans? Did he think Iraq would be just like Sesame Street or Teletubbies? |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2004-05-13 7:46:50 PM |
| #2 [sarcasm on, setting high] Clearly, the hooded men in the video were Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft. No other explanation makes any sense. [sarcasm off] How the Dad can place blame on Bush in light of the facts laid out here is beyond moonbattery (what comes after moonbat status?). |
| Posted by: Sludj 2004-05-13 7:39:15 PM |
| #1 so many strange issues - he carries Farsi language books, but wants to learn to speak Arabic? Either this was a strange confused guy with a lot of interests and travels, or there's a lot more to this story. Regardless, his Dad's an unmitigated asshole and a irredeemable idiot /rant |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-05-13 7:28:12 PM |