Moore interviewed Berg for "Fahrenheit" [index to thread at reply #1859]

May 27, 2004 | Filmmaker Michael Moore filmed an interview with American Nicholas Berg in the course of producing his documentary film "Fahrenheit 9/11" before Berg left for Iraq, where he was taken hostage and killed, Moore confirmed to Salon in a statement Thursday. The 20 minutes of footage does not appear in the final version of "Fahrenheit 911," according to the statement.

Word of the footage reached Salon through a source unaffiliated with Moore or his film "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is reported to feature stark images of U.S. civilians and soldiers grappling with conditions in war-torn Iraq, as well as examining the relationship between President George W. Bush and the bin Laden family. It received the Palme d'Or, the Cannes Film Festival's highest honor, on Saturday.

In a statement widely circulated by Moore's people after an initial request for comment by Salon, Moore said, "We have an interview with Nick Berg. It was approximately 20 minutes long. We are not releasing it to the media. It is not in the film. We are dealing privately with the family." Moore's camp declined to comment further on any aspect of the interview. Because the footage is not in the film, a spokeswoman for Miramax Films, the production company behind "Fahrenheit 9/11," said the company had no comment.

It was not clear from Moore's statement whether footage from the interview with Berg had ever been included in early cuts of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Reports about a film industry controversy surrounding distribution of the film first hit the news on May 5, a week before Berg's death. The film officially screened for the public and the press for the first time during the Cannes festival on May 17.

The news that Moore spoke to Berg while he was still in the United States only adds to the mystery surrounding the young man's presence in Iraq and tragic death. The interview was shot before the 26-year-old Berg left for Iraq late last year as a private contractor in the hopes of helping to rebuild the ravaged country. Though it was unclear what Berg spoke about in his interview with Moore, or how the two men met, unrelated reports following his death indicate that he headed for the Middle East with plans to work to improve the country's technological infrastructure and communication abilities. He ran his own company, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, in a suburb of Philadelphia.

Berg did not find employment in Iraq, and when he attempted to return to the United States he was detained by Iraqi police and questioned by American forces. He was released after his family complained. But shortly after, he is believed to have been kidnapped by Islamic terrorists. Video of his beheading was released on an Islamist Web site on May 11. Salon was unable to reach the Berg family for comment before publication.

Moore's film chronicles the United States' military, political and business involvement in the Middle East in the years before and after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His previous politically charged films, including "Roger & Me" and "Bowling for Columbine," have created controversy and won him praise (including an Oscar, for "Columbine"). "Fahrenheit 9/11" has already sparked a media storm; in early May, Miramax's parent company, Disney, announced that it would not allow Miramax to distribute the film, which is highly critical of Bush and his administration.

Miramax has yet to make a deal with a distributor, though the film's warm reception at Cannes and the publicity surrounding the film have made it a hot property that is generating a lot of interest in Hollywood. "Bowling for Columbine" grossed $21 million, making it the highest-grossing non-IMAX documentary of all time.

A source close to "Fahrenheit 9/11" said that a new distributor will be announced shortly, and that the film is expected to be released in theaters during the first week of July, as originally planned.

Check this out! Found it on ALLAFRICA.com:

NICHOLAS Evans Berg, 26, the American civilian beheaded in Iraq last week, once lived in Uganda.

The then 19-year-old undergraduate at Cornell University of Engineering, USA, spent his spring 1998 semester (March-June) in Uganda as part of the School for International Training's (SIT) Study Abroad programme.

He lived with a local family, shared their meals, and even learnt Luganda. During his four months stay in the country, Nick worked with a local community, teaching people how to make building bricks out of mud and cement, using a machine he designed. He also taught them how to sink wells, and build bridges with local materials.

At the end of his stay, Nick donated the machine (press) to the local people he had been working with, along with most of his personal belongings.

Nick's body was discovered last week near a highway overpass in Baghdad. A video posted last Tuesday on a website linked to al-Qaeda showed Nick being beheaded. His killers claimed the execution was in retaliation for the abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison by US soldiers.

According to Prof. Robin Swett, who accompanied Nick and five other students to Uganda, Nick was "a loner in a lot of ways."

"I wasn't really surprised to learn that he had taken the initiative to Iraq on his own." The don was quoted in the Brattleboro Reformer, an American newspaper.

While in Uganda, Nick wrote a thesis paper which discussed an innovative press for brick construction. "Berg got a high grade on the paper," Swett said. While in Uganda, Berg raised funds to purchase a press for the local community where he worked and lived, said Rebecca Hovey, the dean of SIT's Study Abroad programme. Berg did "very well" and got a high grade on the paper, said Swett.

Once back home in the US, an excited Nick told his father Michael Berg, 59, a retired teacher, his Ugandan invention.

"And then you put it in a press, and it made a block. And the advantage of it was it could be made on site," Micheal, recalls his youngest son trying to describe to him, how the brick machine worked.

Besides Uganda, Nick also visited Kenya and Ghana, where he was again involved in development work. He helped put mobile phone masts in Kenya last year.

Here's my point. He gets back from Africa, where he's visited all these places. He has his degree in Engineering now. HE GOES TO OKLAHOMA UNIVERSITY where he does what? From what I gather, not a hell of alot. Maybe some stagehand work. He doesn't even have a place to live. Isn't that weird? Maybe I'm missing something, has anyone established or given a reason as to why he chose to go to Oklahoma? He seems to have a specific reason to do everything else. I don't know. Maybe I'm too caught up in this, but the whole thing doesn't connect.

Good find. I think it's clear now that Lila's son was killed in Iraq. Here's another one that also includes information about how MM acquired his Iraq film footage.

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

The New York Times
May 23, 2004 Sunday

Michael Moore's Candid Camera
By FRANK RICH

(snip)

Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources -- foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video -- he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read ''My Pet Goat'' to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.

(snip)

Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on ''Nightline''? In ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can simulate World War II carnage in ''Saving Private Ryan,'' it's hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy away from the reality in a present-day war.) We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. ''I was a Republican for quite a few years,'' one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, ''and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way.''

Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of ''news,'' has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before ''60 Minutes II''?

Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times reported in March 2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at C.I.A. interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on Jan. 20, after the Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that ''U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners.'' And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story.

Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. ''We've had this footage in our possession for two months,'' he says. ''I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic.''

(snip)

In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-described ''conservative Democrat'' from Mr. Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., whose son, Sgt. Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Mrs. Lipscomb, who by her own account ''always hated'' antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage. As her extended family gathers around her in the living room, she clutches her son's last letter home and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined notebook paper. A good son, Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending ''the bible and books and candy,'' but not before writing of the president: ''He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama.''

(snip)

I'm still catching up on the thread in the Southern Hemisphere.(Time difference.)Incredible amount of work being done here. I also kept asking myself WHY was Berg climbing towers? Not just in Iraq, but in the US? He and a fellow named Hollinger (?) Who was paying them and for what...it sounded more like a pair of idiots into a new form of 'extreme sport' until I read #991 from livius, then it began to make a little more sense. Prometheus!
I read previously (can't find the original story) that as a young boy, Berg was an electronics freak. He made a radio I seem to recall, from the remains of a toaster! This may not be significant at the outset, but combined with the fact that he never completed his education Berg is beginning to look like a loose canon to me. Possibly brilliant but not affiliated to any profession/trade with discipline or oversight. He sounds more like a potential saboteur to me. ( All in 'good cause'?)
And what was the story about 'silver wires' found on the towers in Iraq?
Who do the towers in the US belong to? Are they government property or privately owned? If they were mine, I would be sending someone out to check them all to make sure they have not been tampered with...the schematics for 60 towers on a laptop, be they in the US or in Iraq sounds like a fairly big-time operation to me.
I'm new here...enlighten me please, what is a ping list? How does it work? I think I would love to be on it if there is room for one more. I found the Berg story smelly from day one. Keep up the good work.

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