May 26, 2004
A Portrait of Nick Berg
by Jeremy
This is an interesting New York Times piece on Nick Berg. The story gives a convincing picture of Berg as a somewhat idealistic entrepreneur -- a capitalist with a genuine interest in making a difference in the world.
When Nick Berg's friends cleaned out his apartment, they found prototype bricks made, if I understand it, from paper pulp. He'd been working on a system whereby people in underdevoped countries could manufacture their own cheap construction materials.
In my former identity as a insufficiently self-critical lefty, eager to be a team player, I'd outwardly pretend that this kind of person did not exist: either you were a capitalist or you had a genuine desire to help people, but you couldn't be both. Privately, though, I knew even then that this kind of person exists, even in abundance, though they probably never make it to the top of the ladder. They're not the ones who walk away from Wall Street with a hundred and eighty million dollar golden handshake.
The thing that still seems strange is the Moussaoui password connection. One could imagine a person like Berg, interested as he was in traveling the world to build his business, seeking out foreign students with whom to network. It's equally easy to see someone like Moussaoui, or more likely someone helping Moussaoui, exploiting someone like Berg, if only to steal an email account. It remains a bizarre coincidence, however.
The other mystery centers around the circumstances under which he was detained in Iraq and then released by Iraqi and/or American authorities, since there are contradictory versions of the details.
For me the most credible guess is that Berg simply had an admirable excess of optimism and an ambition to do something big, something positive -- he supported the war and wanted to help with the reconstruction -- but that his trusting nature and his desire to do things his own way led him to take some huge risks. What's frustrating is that it seems he'd realized he was in over his head and he was due to return home just days after his release from custody in Iraq.
What also disturbs me is that Berg, while in jail in Iraq, had evidently been taunted by other prisoners because he had an Israeli stamp in his passport:
Mr. Berg also told friends that while he was in jail, other prisoners chanted "Isralein," apparently believing he was an Israeli. (He had an Israeli stamp in his passport.) American soldiers ordered the Iraqi guards to put him in a separate cell near political and war criminals from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, Mr. Berg wrote.
It doesn't take much of a leap to imagine a scenario in which word of this mysterious "Israeli" could have reached beyond the walls of that jail to fall on the ears of the scum who -- extremely soon after that -- abducted and decapitated him.
We'll just have to wait for more of the story to come out.
In the mean time, berg's story makes me appreciate all the more what this guy is doing in Baghdad, and makes me glad that this guy is putting his trip to Iraq on hold for a while.
-Jeremy
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