From CNN
Here’s a possibility that entered my mind: What if Nick Berg was a member of Al Qaeda and willingly sacrificed himself to be in ? I realize this theory is kind of far out there, but if this is what happened it would completely change my view of what I saw in the video.*
*Note: I don’t mean to be offensive and I’m not accusing the late Mr. Berg of anything. This is purely a hypothetical possibility.
It’s a wildly, wildly unlikely hypothesis. If you have someone like Berg as a member, why “throw him away” like this? It would make much more sense to pick up an innocent, uninvolved American and kill him, and use your American member for some operation that required more than an innocent, uninvolved American.
WOW… this is very wierd stuff. The guy talks to terrorist and then wanders around occupied Iraq. Does allow for a lot of consipiracy talk.
Also even if he was AQ… they don’t give out membership cards so that you can prove your “one of them”. So they might have killed an “AQ” operative without knowing. (Hard to beleive… he would be much more valuable IN THE US !)
Still something seems amiss in this story. My first reaction is that Berg was “seduced” by whatever that “terrorist” told him on the bus ride. He clearly thought that the arabs weren’t that nasty… or he wouldn’t be risking his life so foolishly.
Ok, maybe the willing sacrifice scenerio is unlikely. But what if they were worried that he would turn on them after he was picked up by Iraqi and U.S authorities? Maybe they killed one of their own to keep him silent.
Then why videotape it? Filmed execution seems to be something reserved especially for infidel captives (Pearl, Berg, and apparently an Italian hostage I hadn’t heard/forgotten about).
One thing I remember hearing following September 11th was that Western intelligence had had a great deal of difficulty infiltrating Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist organizations. They demand a fanatical amount of loyalty and are not accepting. So I don’t think they have a real issue with turncoats. It’s not like the mob where people join to get rich, the members want to serve a cause. Anyway, even if there are some oddities about this story, there’s nothing that makes me think it’s possible the guy was a terrorist. I think if we knew more of what the speakers in the video said, it might establish that he wasn’t.
OK, while we are making up stuff (because the Tinfoil Hat Birgade is just taking too darn long)…
DB was a CIA operative. He was on that bus in an attempt to infiltrate an AQ cell. He went to Iraq to further that effort. He was detected and killed.
Still, the details of this story is darn odd.
Let’s throw in an other theory:
He was a Mossad agent.
Not that he then would have been the first ot the last Mossad in Iraq. Or in the USA. Or no matter where.
But usually they are Arabs and speak perfectly Arabic when operating in the ME.
Salaam. A
Forgot to add:
When operating in the ME. Or operating posing to be Arab outside the ME 
Or what if he was just a naive guy who was a bit reckless about the risks and tragically ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and met a savage and unjustifiable end at the hands of a group of brutal terrorists?
What is the point of this idle speculation?
Speculation is rampant…
I wonder if he was there to spite his father, who seems to be an anti-war activist. Just this war or war in general, I dunno. D or R – I don’t know.
An article on cnn.com states Nick Berg did some communications set-up at the Republican’s 2000 convention. fwiw…
No, Berg got smoked because the US was desperate to push the prison abuse story off the front pages of the world and really needed “the enemy” to do something far more graphic than any of the prison photos.
Berg was a lone wolf and his entreprenurial spirit did pose a threat to promised monopolies for US crony corporations and their subsidiaries, true. But more immediately, they knew that he was tied to al Qaeda through the laptop computer.
Maybe he was innocent of that connection (small world!), but they needed a gruesome beheading of an American more than they needed a truthful resolution to some trivial laptop mystery. And as we have seen from Abu Ghraib, anyone under even the tiniest suspicion of having connections to terrorism is “fair game” for any brutality imaginable.
Just thinking out loud here.
Wrong RTA - Did anyone notice Berg’s shoes? Clearly, Berg may have been a shoe saleman. The rest explains itself.
I remember similar emm… imaginative umm… theories were floated in here when the Japanese hostages were released. For some reason those theories were met with much less interest and more derision. I wonder why – and the Japanese even got away. “Sacrifice himself” “Mossad” Sheesh! I’d like to float my own theory: It was the coming princess of Denmark, Mary Donaldson, who had her secret lover killed so he could not spill the beans on Mary’s secret obsession with sheep shagging. I think it’s both a more interesting and more realistic theory than most I’ve read here.
If this was done by people connected to the US, it most likely was because they mistakenly thought he was an anti-war liberal pussy.
Freerepublic.com published his father’s name (Michael Berg) and his company’s name (Prometheus Methods Tower Service) on an “Enemies List”.
Story here:
As opposed to the four burned, dismembered, corpses hanging over the highway?
A Jewish member of al Qaeda? Man, that’s some theory!
There is something awfully fishy about this situation, though. Why the conflicting stories from the government about whether or not Berg had been in their custody?
My tinfoil hat must be out of order, as I cannot concoct a theory to explain this.
Hmmm, so in the eyes of some, he might as well have been a terrorist!
As you know, the incident you mention occurred quite some time before the photographs of prisoner abuse entered circulation. How, please, can a news story get pushed aside by a story that’s old news?
I think the inference is that somebody, the CIA or whatever, staged the execution to distract the US electorate from the torture stuff.
Now - I’m old enough and cynical enough to not put it past someone to do such a thing, I just don’t believe there is any evidence to suggest this is the case and plenty to suggest the opposite. The orange jumpsuit I’d say, was a deliberate piece of theatre signifying the whole ‘unlawful combatants’ crock.
The whole “he went over there looking for work” scenario is a Grand Canyon wide statement of vagueness. Too bad journalism has been relegated to 5 minutes of research on the Internet.
What’s vague about it? We know what his business was, we know the name of it, we know that he visited Iraq earlier in the year for the same reason… what piece of information is missing that makes it fishy to you?