OK, enough of this nonsense (Berg video)

I just made Ahknaten, my partner, watch the Berg video.

Ahknaten lived in the Middle East for nine years. He speaks fluent Arabic and is utterly familiar with Arabic culture and the various accents and dialects.

He says that the people in the video were speaking Persian Arabic (a dialect of Arabic) with the correct accent. It is impossible for these to have been American CIA agents or anybody else.

He attempted to give a running translation of what was said but I couldn't follow it all. Mostly it had to do with Israel and American interference in Middle Eastern affairs. At the very end, during the beheading, they were chanting various names for God in Arabic.

Ahknaten says there is no cultural differences about the way people stand. Fidgeting is practically a national pastime.

Many Arabs are as white as Scandinavians. Just as in the rest of the world's population, Arabs come in many sizes and shapes.

Any attempt to read anything else into this video is nonsense.

Get over it.

I appreciate you and Akhnaten weighing in.

Still, there are some questions about how Berg fell into those people's hands.

He was in custody for 13 days, then he was released, then he never was in custody.

He was in custody of the Iraqi police - but don't they report to the US right now?

Many questions remain, Bush & Co lie a lot, so questions and doubts are normal.

I don't speak Arabic so I'm going to have to depend on other experts for their opinions of the video.

But the circumstances leading UP to the video are plenty suspicious.

I do NOT agree with anybody saying that he was working for the FBI (which I saw in one thread).

Neither was he an Israeli agent.

I do agree that the US military is NOT telling the truth about details about when he was detained and by whom.

that because the people in the film are Arab that they are not working for the CIA, the FBI, an Israeli agency, or Pizza Hut for that matter. They could be working for anyone in or beyond Iraq. They could be anyone's assets. They could be part of anyone's network. I don't know what did happen, but I'm not going to base an argument on nothing more than what I find agreeable.

Then that's the final word. :eyes:

n/t

On what do you base this statement? The word of your friend? I think that's a logical fallacy. If I rememeber correctly it's called something like "appeal to a false authority".

The rest of us still want answers. Who did it? Who is the murderer? Who is each one of these people? Who filmed it? Who put it out on the net? Who handled the film before it was broadcast? Who edited it? Where did the killing take place? Is there any forensic evidence? Is there an organization behind it?

I could go on and on, but I'll spare you that. Clearly there are still a lot of questions to be answered - surely you will agree.

http://brainbuttons.com/home.asp?stashid=13

"appeal to authority" means something like "teacher said it so it's got to be true".

Ank speaks Arabic.

If you disagree with him, come up with somebody else who speaks Arabic and have them provide a translation and their opinion on the dialect spoken.

Find somebody who has been to the Middle East and seen only skinny people. (note, there's already a thread going about obesity amongst Arabs).

Find somebody who has immersed themselves in Middle Eastern culture and get their opinion on difference in body language.

Find somebody who can prove that all Arabs are dark.

(on edit)

However, I agree with you. We need to find out more. Let's just not jump to ridiculous :tinfoilhat: conclusions until all the facts are in.

appeal to authority" means something like "teacher said it so it's got to be true".

Substitute Ank for teacher, and that's your argument in a nutshell.

I've got a Bachelor in Education, so I know everything there is to know about teaching.

I've got a Bachelor of Music, so my opinions on C&W Music are sancrosanct.

I'm the Head of Accounting, so if I say the books balance, they balance.

Those are appeals to authority.

"Been there, done that" isn't.

Actually, its better to describe it like this:

"I believe x claim about Eurasian economics because Joe, a brain surgeon says so."

"The Bears will win the Super bowl because John Kerry said they would."

These things would be illicit or illegitimate appeals to authority. In the first example, though the brain surgeon certainly has expert knowledge, that knowledge is in surgery, not economics - he has no claim to any authoritative opinion on that matter that we know of.

The same is true in the second example - Kerry's opinion on who will win the Super bowl is no more expert, and possibly less expert that others - just because he is a public figure and our nominee means nothing. To base a claim on a super bowl win on his statement would certainly be an illicit appeal.

However, if the subject is Arabic culture and Arabic language, then if someone says "I have lived in the middle east for x years and I speak the Arabic language, and based on those qualifications I believe y" it is hard to tack the illicit appeal to authority fallacy to that. It doesn't fit the definition of fallacious reasoning at all. Now, that doesn't mean the opinion is right, but it is not an illicit appeal.

And TrogL, an illicit appeal to authority is not really so much about someone with some background on a subject proceeding to make all or nothing statements about his/her own infallibility. It's more about a person with no relevant qualification or authority trying to defend statements based on an implied authority where none actually exists. "My barber says that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And my barber is respectable person. Therefore, there are WMD's in Iraq." Well, your barber may be a great guy, but unless he has some kind of qualifications I don't know about, his opinion is not an authoritative basis from which to support a conclusion. Alright, enough examples...

God... it feels good to head to bed on logic note. :)

I don't have the link handy right now but a linguistic expert stated (it may have been on television now that I think about it) that the dialect of Arabic spoken was that of an Egyptian....which, as far as my limited knowledge affords me, is NOT persian.

RC

in this case, its questionable whether this is an "illicit" appeal. A person who has spent significant time in the middle east and speaks Arabic is probably a legitimate authority.

That doesn't mean that person can't be wrong, but it does mean its not exactly a logical fallacy - especially when his/her expertise is being used to cast down on specific claims for which he/she would have experience: middle eastern culture and Arabic language.

On the Arabic language? sure.

On whether or not these guys are Al-Q, CIA operatives, or something else? not so sure about that one.

i will say it. thank you and your partner for sharing this. i appreciate it.

just as they wanted us to believe.

Thank god we didn't just take their opinions as fact. We kept asking questions and look at all we learned happened that day.

Your guy can have his opinion on the matter but don't try and tell the rest of us that we shouldn't be asking the questions.

Nonsense? Yes it is nonsense to never question that which you are told.

I've provided answers from the source I trust.

Hell, I was suspicious about the white hands until he steered me right. I was wondering about the fidgeting myself. The accent sounded a bit wierd to me too, but I'm used to hearing a different dialect.

I thought the "white hands" and "pudgy arabs" threads were insane, too.

This line:

"According to the State Department, Berg told an American diplomat in Baghdad that he preferred to travel on his own to Kuwait."

Think about it. You're an American, your in friggin' Iraq, for God's sake. The last place you'd probably want to be. You're in fear for your life, and you refuse military assistance out of the country? Does that make sense?
Why would he decide to leave someplace like Iraq, especially with what's going on, alone? It's too fishy. It's like saying you're going to walk home alone, in the middle of the night, through the worst neighborhood of bad neighborhoods...

I don't buy it.

fixing looted transmission towers.

They have denied it. As they have every other claim his family has made.

RC

about what happened BEFORE he was killed. But the "arguments" over the actual video were stupid: arabs can't be white, arabs can't be pudgy, arabs can't wear sneakers, arabs don't "fidget" the same way Westerners do. It's all nonsense.

Things still don't add up (for example who detained whom and when) and the voiceover did seem dubbed.

And my guess is we will never know the full story.

As was mentioned in a previous post, Bush Co lies a lot, so we don't trust much of what they say...

Why was it so obvious that the pulling down of the Saddam statute was staged? I dispute that conclusory remark that body language isn't different in the Arab culture. I think that is absurd.

In any case, we still know nothing about the killers because they are masked. Identity is essential to any evaluation. I think we do know that the dialect is inconsistent with the attribution. To say the killers were CIA is a straw man.

One fundamental concept of terrorism that many people cannot grasp is that such groups can easily be manipulated by intermediaries (usually state agencies) to do just the act that apparently benefits the political interest it ostensibly harms. All that is necessary is sufficient funds and the connections. For example, others have made out a colorable case that the ISI was implicated in the Perl execution. I don't think it takes much speculation as to which two states may have benefitted and what their motives might be.

This tape is obviously part of a psy war effort, but the principal(s) behind it are not established.

What did he have to say about the lame way the terra'ists sawed through Berg's head?

What did he have to say about the lack of blood spurting and blood in general?

What did he have to say about the four obvious edits, the dueling timecodes and the completely unsychronized soundtrack?

What did he have to say about the leader's head covering suddenly changing from very dark to white when he showed off his "handiwork"?

What did he have to say about the terra'ists putting on both ski masks and burkas and covering every part of their bodies other than their eyes and hands while annnouncing their leader's name to the world and proclaiming he did this with his own hands?

What did he have to say about the format the terra'ists used to film the horror and the format the terra'ists used to post it on the internet?

What did he have to say about the website the terra'ists released their video on?

Is it also common for Arab terra'ists to post videos of this sort on their websites? Because I don't remember it ever happening before, do you?

And what about this:

http://www.counterpunch.org/weiher02262004.html ?

And this:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/29/sprj.irq.terrorist.capture/ ?

if these guys were masked, how confident are we that the audio track belongs to the perps? I really don't know because I haven't watch the video. But wouldn't it be rather difficult to confirm the identities of the perps based soley on the soundtrack?

Too much tinfoil going around.

I still have questions about the video, but I'm glad to have an expert opinion.

If the murder video was a black-op, the perpertrators have had to be pretty dumb not to hire some Iraqi goons as actors.

I still think Al-Q are the mostly likely culprits, but any state/para-state with agents in Iraq and a desire for more war b/n USA and Islamic world could do it. Casts a pretty wide net. I'm sure intel analysts across the world are racking their brains over it as we write.

The whole idea of westernized body language and white Arabs wearing sneakers, to me, is barking up the wrong tree. However, there are still things about the Berg video that I find a little odd.

I prefer talking to someone I know and trust in the attempt to find the truth about things that I find suspicious. (That's the reason that I always ask my aerospace engineer friend about matters relating to things such as making cell phone call in airliners at cruising altitudes and the like.)

However, since I do not know anyone who has lived in the ME, perhaps you can ask your friend a question. Has he ever witnessed a beheading? and if so, is his experience consistent with the Berg beheading?

The reason I ask is because I read somewhere that blood flows through the jugular vein at something like 1 gallon per second (I admit I haven't confirmed that stat) and somebody on another messageboard said that he had been to a public beheading somewhere in the Middle East and said that there was a LOT of blood all over the place. This person was highly suspicious of the Berg video since there was very little blood. He was convinced that it was faked.

Any chance of your friend shedding some light on this issue?

If you decide to simply tell me to "get over it", I understand. I'm perfectly happy to find someone else to answer my question.

One other question. Exactly how is it impossible for American CIA agents to be unable to speak Persion Arabic?

For them to have been "CIA agents or anybody else".

I don't buy all of the conspiracy stuff being thrown around; but mostly I see a lot of well informed people here with some sound questions. And there's a lot of good questions.

I agree with you though on the "white" thing, though. That's being very ignorant of the vast culture and ethnicities of a very huge area. We have no idea of who these people really are.

I don't think people are likely to just get over this anytime soon though-- left or right or whatever.

I do think the execution? murder? was probably carried out by a
group of Iraqis, and from their point of view it's not hard to
understand why they would feel as they do.

But I have a huge worry about Berg's detention by the U.S., and
for such a long time, especially in light of their yes, we had
him, no we didn't, claims. It seems from other posts that the
Berg family may have not been as sympathetic to the Bush idealogy
as was orignally put forward by Michael Berg, and the whole story
of him travelling to Iraq for work, then being told there was none
by the firm he'd already had contact with, just seems a little
strange. If that was all true, the U.S. authorities should have
been able to verify it fairly quickly, and let him go, not hold him
for 13 days or so. Neither does the story of him saying he would
prefer to travel on his own to Jordan at a time when hostilities
in Falluja were getting very nasty make much sense - not from what
I've read about conditions in Iraq on other websites. Even people
with very strong convictions and ties to Iraq feel it best to leave
at this time.

There are some inconsistencies on the video - I think perhaps that
while Berg was still alive when he was first grabbed by the hooded
men, he was perhaps later strangled or something, and then a second
video made of him having his head cut off when he was actually
already dead. But for me the real puzzle is connected with the
U.S. military, and whether they did have him in custody, and why,
and for how long, and why he was released into a hostile environment
with no assistance.

I wish the Berg family would publish a detailed account of who they
tried to contact, and what responses they had, and when. It could
be very enlightening.

1. It is impossible for these to have been American CIA agents or anybody else.

2. Any attempt to read anything else into this video is nonsense.

3. He was not working for the FBI. (reply 3)

4. He was not an Israeli agent. (reply 3)


You seem certain about this. Can you provide any justification for these conclusions?

I think "many Arabs are as white as Scandinavians" is a bit of a stretch. As far as I know, the vast majority of Arabs do not have light hair and eyes and I find it odd that ALL of the "masked men" appear to have fair skin.

I don't have a problem with the sizes and shapes issue either except again, ALL of the "terrorists" are, shall we say, WELL FED. It's a lot easier to get that way on a steady diet of MRI's.

"Any attempt to read anything else into this video is nonsense.

Get over it."

Why so defensive? I'm not reading anything into it by noticing that there is an 11 hour gap in the time sequence of the video. Not that is especially matters, but yes, I do think whoever they decapitated was already dead. There's way too little blood. The severed carotid arteries would spurt blood at least a few feet for at least a couple of minutes.

Then there are those walls that are the same snot yellow as the prison where the Iraqis were being abused.

And of course all this coming out in the last few days deflects attention from the prisoner abuse accounts that came to the publics attention a little over 2 weeks ago. How CONVENIENT.

And I started a new thread here...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1590732

which discounts the Jordanian number 2 Al-queda theories.

Also, this would seem to point to either Iraqi or Iranians who were involved in the murder, ergo, at this point we cannot discount some of the Iraqi's who left Iraq during Saddam's regime to work with U.S. intelligence.

Thanks for the update.