Friday, May 14, 2004

More Nick Berg suspicions

From Susan's blog Suburban Guerilla:

This is interesting; apparently the statement from the men who killed Nick Berg does not contain the phrase "al Qaeda." It seems we added that:
CNN - LIVE FROM:
O'BRIEN: Interesting. All right, now one final thought here. You did a very careful translation of your own, of the statement. And in it, you see no reference to al Qaeda. And yet the official U.S. government translation does. Explain how that happened.

NASR: Oh, I find it very interesting, because out of the blue, there is a mention of al Qaeda on the U.S. government translation. It says: "Does al Qaeda need any further excuses?" Any speaker of the Arabic language is going to notice a difference between the word al Qaeda, which means "the base," and al qaed, which means "the one sitting, doing nothing."

My translation says: "Is there any excuse for the one who sits down and does nothing?" Basically they're telling people, you have no excuse for not doing anything, for not acting and defending Islam and so forth. Whereas the U.S. government translation has this factual error, I'm sure it's an honest mistake, but basically it sort of adds al Qaeda to the statement, which is not on the statement.

O'BRIEN: All right, Octavia Nasr, we don't know exactly how that got in there. We'll try to get more on that. We appreciate you bringing that all to light and appreciate your insights, of course.

NASR: You bet.


More Susan:

(Put on your tinfoil hats.) But when I watched the infamous video in which Nick Berg was beheaded, I noticed something odd.

The person all the way on the left looks like a woman. The shoulders are rounded and so are the hips. And if you watch the video, you'll see this person moves differently than the rest.

So what does that mean? Beats me, but I'd say it greatly raises the odds against this being a group of Islamic miltants. Isn't a woman dressed as a man supposed to be an abomination?

I was also reading a comment somewhere that the attackers were speaking Russian, and had heavy Russian accents.
  full post

Comments to the post:

That Russian comment was made on Counterspin - another commenter said no, I'm fluent in Russian and I didn't hear any Russian.

Thank goodness we can discount that possibility - that leaves a mere 19 plausible scenarios.

Al Qaeda? Obviously possible.

The Administration? I think that's a stretch.

Our friends? Why not? Would anyone even have had to ask? Ahmed Chalabi has already admitted that the content of the intelligence he fed Congress, the press, and the neoconservatives is less important than fact that it got us into Iraq. Or perhaps another favor from the Kurdish intelligence people who are reported to have been behind the capture of Saddam. Or does Zarqawi follow the administration's fortunes and write us a letter or post a videotape when it looks like we're losing our stomach for the war?

Truly, we are lost in a hall of mirrors.


Amen. And that goes for more than just this particular story.

(But I'm going to have to disagree with the Administration as being involved being a stretch. Whether they are or not, I think this would be right up their sick, lying, war-staging, power-mad alley.)