Posted on 05/27/2004 9:26:51 PM PDT by Rennes Templar
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.
You make some very good points. Aziz I've never heard of until now. It wouldn't surprise me if Al Qaeda operatives pose as newspeople and cameramen (okay no pointing fingers at CNN, et al). The Russian Mafia is perhaps even more ruthless than the Sicilian variety. They are on par with the Asian gangs. Wouldn't surprise me if they were involved in arms deals.
Michael Moore is the rotting corpse in the basement. He hasn't interviewed any members of the Russian Mafia by chance? It would be right up his alley. Michael Moore lies like a rug. Who knows if in fact a video does exist? Did Moore orchestrate the "fake" snuff video? I don't think that man was Berg.
Amazing that Nick Berg and many members of the Russian Mafia are Jews. Esau selling his birthright for a mess of potage...
I could be wrong, but I still don't believe we've been able to pinpoint the exact date that NB was killed. We have it boxed to within about a 3 week time frame, IIRC.
After spending a couple of months in Iraq, (Dec-Feb) he supposedly returned to Iraq a couple of months later, but could not find work, according to his email. I've never found this part of the story, plausible.
Of course it's gone! Nunya did right after all by posting all those entries.
The dark side reads this site as much as the average hardcore FReeper does. If anyone finds something, save it, because it will disappear.
I have leftover tinfoil, if anyone needs some ;-)
Al Qaeda sometimes disguises themselves as newspeople and photographers. They killed a famous Afghan leader the day before 9-11 disguised as newsmen who wanted an interview.
I hope you don't mind me reposting again here, as I this appears to be the main 'research thread' and I know many may not have seen it.
To: calcowgirl
Aziz's organization is called the American Iraqi Council.
I drove over to their building yesterday because it is near my house. It is a dumpy brick midrise office building near a check cashing place and palm reading. A sort of cheesy street with dubious businesses. I didn't see the organization listed out front with other listings, but maybe they don't list. Trust me; this is not the office of Bush operatives. I know one person in the building, a lawyer. I think he does criminal law, but I don't know.
The address is 7263 Maple Place Suite 210 Annandale VA.
For you folks in N. Virginia, Maple Place is Backlick Road on the other side of Columbia Pike.
Here is the link for the organization that Aziz Al-Taee,
( one of his many names) the criminal who partnered with Berg, belonged to. He is listed second, so I wonder if this organization was really a criminal front posing as an emigre organization.
http://www.al-iraq.org/aic.htm
I think that this Aziz may have been involved in running drugs or weapons or both. He had ties in Philadelphia to the Russian organized crime.
The CIA does not exploit unwitting goofy kids and put them in dangerous situations. There are plenty of smart military types that can be spies.
This looks like some drug or weapons thing to me. Berg would be able to go anywhere because of his American passport. He could have been a useful go-between for Russian mafia and Iraq. I would take what Aziz says about Berg's activities with skepticism because he may be trying to blow smoke in our eyes. Who knows if Berg was writing his own e-mails.
The Russian tycoons are very into communications infrastructure. They need somewhere to put the money, and the media companies provide them with political influence.
Did anyone notice that the Russians said that none of their oil people were around during the terrorist attack at Khobar yesterday? Russians in the ME may have regular jobs and also belong to mafia structures. This would be weapons and drugs.
I have no inside information about this, but I have a background in Soviet Studies and have done research on drugs and weapons trafficking from time to time.
I think the young Berg was involved with a Russian mafia network. I don't think it was the CIA. I suppose the CIA might try to infiltrate the Russian criminal structures to get to Al Qaeda operatives, bu whould they use a Berg? He was a drifty kid who got in trouble for being a vagrant and who went from school to school never finishing anything.
The Russian mafia have armed people in the ME and in Chechnya. Where do you think terrorists get all the Russian weapons?
They basically infiltrated and took over the official weapons-selling businesses in the former USSR such as Rosvoruzheniye.
For more information, check out Turbiville Mafia in Uniform" on the internet. http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/fmsopubs/issues/mafia.htm
60 posted on 05/31/2004 6:54:03 AM PDT by Snapple
Well, here's an email that ISN'T posted on the NickBeg.org website. It is of interest relative to Dolphy's post #1584. It also has some pretty detailed info about the towers at Abu Ghraib.
From: Nick Berg [mailto:climbing_hand@hotmail.com]Source
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2004 11:36 AM
To:
Subject: The long-awaited, wordy, impersonal e-mail log from Prometheus Towers/Berg Subject: The long-awaited, wordy, impersonal e-mail log from Prometheus Towers/Berg
Hello folks. I hope everyone is staying warm over there. From what I've been able to pick up on shortwave, it's ridiculous cold in the Northeast. I guess I shouldn't say that it's been averaging around 17 (Celsius) over here, and this last week I was in Diwaniya (in the South-Central) where it probably broke 25 (Celsius). We did have a wicked sand storm last Tuesday, probably about three hours of really intense dust blowing around everywhere.
I was in Baghdad at the time so I wasn't able to get the best view of it. The night before, while on a 328 meter tower near Abu Gharib (see below), it went from the usual dead calm to a pretty stout 20 knot blow from the West.
That night it rained pretty heavy, and the whole next day was pretty windy. Other than that there's been essentially no weather.
TOWER STUFF FOLLOWS:
I guess it's been a busy time since my trip to Mosul and the great quest to locate Uncle-In-Law Moffak. The week of 4 Jan 2004 was very busy as there were several RFQ's (requests for quotations) due by the end of the week, most only announced Monday. This gave us little time to respond to some very appropriate bid requests. The other big news was the announcement Friday morning (9 Jan 2004) that the Harris/Al-Fawares/Lebanon Broadcast Company consortium had finally been awarded the new IMN contract. With out getting too technical, this is a one year (at least) contract to operate and rehabilitate the former Ministry of Information, Minister Naji's turf.
The reason this is good news is that we were announced as Harris's approved tower sub-contractor about two days before the award, and we have been working with Al-Fawares since I met one of their guys in early December.
Practically, this means we should be involved with quite a bit of tower work as part of the reconstruction, repair and new construction of the statewide Iraqi Media Network (something like PBS/NPR in the US). There are other private broadcasters being licensed, and there are folks like the VOice of America and the CPA operating small stations, but when it comes to existing broadcast, IMN is it. So we're fairly happy about this development.
Following this news, I set out to expand my knowledge of as many of the existing tower sites as possible. So between the 11th January and the time of writing, I have been on six major sites, inspecting towers and cataloging the extent of looting/sabotage damage. Most of the destruction was intentional looting or even sabotage on the numerous (at one time twenty-six) tall towers in Iraq. There are twenty-two left, and at least ten have some major problems. The worst site I have been on was the Abu Gharib I tower, a 320 meter (1040') guyed tower in the main broadcast complex for Baghdad, near the Abu Gharib political prisons. This complex had 26 towers in it for everything from Microwave to Shortwave to FM and VHF. There are two tall towers (I & II) and the shorter of the two (I), is ready to come down. These are massive structures with 10' faces, 1-1/2" guy wires, and 12"X12"X1" angle legs. Abu Gharib I is missing a guy wire, has three frayed guys, and has had most of the diagonal bracing at the base removed, by torch and by shear force (i.e. Land Rover and cable). The missing guy wire was probably due to nearby shelling, the rest is due to looting. While the two main broadcast antennas are intact (probably the looters got tired of climbing) the main transmission lines (mostly 6-1/8" flexible coax) have been stolen.
This is a common MO, these guys would cut out a long section of hanging transmission line and let it fall to the ground. One out of three would get caught up in the tower (where they remain today) looking like a hundred foot coax-pretzel. We're going to have our hands full just getting these sections free of the tower.
LESS TOWER STUFF:
At any rate, I've also been in the South a little, two sites near the small farm towns of Ash Shomali and Al-Diwaniya. For those interested, these are about 180 kilometers, (115 miles) south of Baghdad, along the main road to Basra and Kuwait. My three days in the SouthCentral was by far the most pleasant time I've spent in Iraq. The Shomali site is one of tallest towers in-country, and sit's out in the middle of a fairly peaceful, flat, irrigated farming area. From the top of that tower (which is in excellent shape and currently broadcasts on UHF) I sat and watched a few farmers with donkeys, the little town area of Shomali (about four blocks long and mostly dedicated to Petrol/Benzine stations) and mostly a lot of open space.
The air was clean (er), and when I'm climbing these towers I even get to go a few hours without some awkward "Americai?" question. (The answer to which is usually "Sawa" - as you like). I have been taken for "Turkiye" a few times, and this can be very handy as it shuts people up real quick, most Iraqis not speaking Turkish.
So Shomali was nice, and I managed to rescue some of the light-bulbs from the top beacon of the tower, which hadn't been replaced since 1997. I guess the no-fly zones in the North led all the broadcast engineers here to forget about tower-lighting for a while. We feel this is a big problem, now, as there are hundreds of tall and medium-height towers in some very flat places, many of which are frequented by the usually-low-flying helicopters of the Coalition. Just last week a Coalition helicopter ran into a short utility tower in the North near Mosul, knocking out one of the main 400 kV lines.
The other site I visited in the South was Diwaniya, a larger town with some big grain silos and two universities. It's also home to Camp Santo Domingo, one of the many non-US military bases. I actually had to meet An American CPA guy who worked there and so I got into the base - it was full of Dominican soldiers. So here, in the heart of Babil Province in the biblical land of Babil, where most CPA guys don't speak Arabic or Spanish, and none of the Dominican's seemed to speak English, and most of the rural Iraqis of the area don't speak English (and none speak Spanish), we were all truly confounded. It was really a very humorous situation in fairly calm area of the country. The other interesting thing about this area is that, for some reason, there are supposedly a good deal of Iranian spies who wander over and sneak about. This actually became quite relevant to my stay in Diwaniya. Isn't this starting to read like a mystery novel...
So this last Thursday afternoon I had the bright idea of running down to Diwaniya to inspect this temporary tower which was built by the former FPS (something like the Secret Service). This is one of many portable sites which were set up in strategic areas to beam the message out. Most have been abandoned, but the tower in this case is still in good shape. SO anyhow, Thursday about 1200 I left Baghdad and enjoyed a beautiful sunny afternoon and a peaceful bus-ride to Diwaniya (about two and a half hours).
I get off the bus in this little town and set out to find this site, on the outskirts of town. As usual, the directions are something like - go to Diwaniya and get on the main highway. On the way out of town, there is a tower. It's across from Al-Qadisiyah (which turned out to be a University and thus a good landmark. Without knowing too much Arabic, though, one can't tell what Al Qadisiyah is - a street, a house, a person, a sheep...).
So I finally find the site at around 1900, it's dark and I can barely make out the tower. But I found it and learned what I needed to know. I make my way back to the Garage Baghdad (which is where the service-taxis leave periodically throughout the day). By this time I had missed the last public service-taxi to Baghdad, so I started to negotiate with a throng of taxi drivers (none of whom had a car - that's kind of an afterthought to actually winning the negotiations). I've got one down to 30,000 ID (about $20 at the time) when the IP (Iraqi National Police) swings by on patrol. It seems they had reports about unknown Iranian people infiltrating their town, and at night they can't see much of my face. Anyhow, the story ends in a rather anti-climatic fashion - the police collect me and take me off to the Lieutenant who is more worried for my safety than about me being an Iranian spy. By the time the story get's told and re-translated a few times, they've got me being picked up at the sheep market amidst a bunch of Turkish truck drivers. So I am invited to spend the night in Diwaniya (which I do) and the next morning after hours of waiting and re-telling the sheep story I get on my way back to Baghdad. The sad part is I didn't really have a great desire to return to Baghdad - it's so much nicer out in the country.
But I didn't come prepared to stay in Diwaniya and I had a meeting I needed to attend.
Other than that, we're trying to wrap up our preparations here so I can get back to the US. I think our interests will be well taken care of while I'm gone. I've found a very competent and fairly reliable commercial Manager here. He's actually been living in Philadelphia the last twenty years and just came back - so he's similarly a bit out of his element. Imagine coming home to a country so different form where you grew up. We're right now at an office near the sporting club where he played European Football as a kid.
Since then it's been destroyed, rebuilt, run by Oday, son of Hussein, and finally privatized. The fact alone that he and I are just now sitting in a free and open internet shop is unbeliveable to most Iraqis. Even a year ago he would have been arrested upon his return. Neither of us would be seeing the un-restricted internet. At any rate, Aziz will do us well I think, and I'm happy I finally found someone I can strategize with.
So I'll be back soon and I hope everybody's doing well. Take care to all.
Sincerely
Nick Berg
Prometheus Towers
Mobile: 484.883.4772
Office/Fax: 610.696.8873
climbing_hand@hotmail.com
So, did Berg have something in his possession that he wanted to carry out of the country? Is that why he refused an offer of a legitimate trip home? Where is his laptop computer? To whom were the calls made by the people who used his cell phone? Like you, I have nothing but questions...his family maintains that his activities were not politically motivated...he was in Iraq to do good things. Good for whom? 'One man's meat is another man's poison' may apply.
If the 'terrorist beheaders' were 'soldiers' has anyone given thought to the possibility they might have been ex-Republican Guard? Sunni arabs. It was their 'friends' who were prison, whom the photographs humiliated most of all.
I totally forgot about that until you mentioned it. That's the kind of tactic that the KBG would use.
And the leader of the Northern Alliance (name?) was also killed by someone posing as a journalist. I never understood how they let him get past their security. Vanity can really be a killer, can't it.
The explosives were hidden in the camera, I seem to recall.
Whoops...same man. Mansoor? I saw a documentary on him, made quite sometime before. He was a very brave man and a great loss.
But I didn't come prepared to stay in Diwaniya and I had a meeting I needed to attend.
There is no doubt about it, his missives were strange.
After going on and on and on about this strange trip to Diwaniya and mentioning Iranian spies several times, he never gets to a point--in fact says flat out they did not think he was one--of why he brought that up.
After all the odd details he tells before this point, he then mentions "a meeting I needed to attend", with zero explanation or needless and seemingly pointless detail.
BTW, I thought he had bought a car when he first arrived (another odd thing, I thought. How does one arrive in a foreign land like war-torn Iraq and buy a car!, but anyway) so why did he take a bus? to Diwaniya?
Miss Marple, you took some interest in Nick Berg's email writing style. You might find this interesting.
Yes, it is strange. I hope someone official is following all of this.
How and who? It keeps going around in my mind. Like a merry-go-round, I keep coming back to the same place. Help me out. One of the last people who spoke to Berg was Aziz, wasn't it? So he claims? Aziz apparently tells that Berg had told him he accepted an offer of transportation from 'people who seemed very nice...'
Doesn't that sound rather lame? He also said that the cell phone was used up to three days after Berg left, and that Berg may still have been alive on a certain date.
Sounds like a good alibi to me. An alibi for Aziz.
As an aside, I remember when my stepfather took my dog into the woods and shot it. He came back and told me 'some nice people were having a picnic by the lake and they took the dog away in their car...'
I found the dog a week later, dead under a tree. And I have never forgotten that lie. It sounds so much like Aziz!
Yes, that "nice people" line seems lame to me. Does anyone know if Michael Moore's web site is back up?
Actually, I think it was Andrew Robert Duke.
Don't ask for a source; I don't remember! It's somewhere on my hard drive and I don't have time to look for it.
"Actually, I think it was Andrew Robert Duke"
Thanks. That is probably correct. But the information, that Berg had received/accepted transportation out of Iraq from some 'people who seemed nice' ...were the words of Aziz.
I have saved most of the articles and will now go back and check.
That Andy Duke character deserves a good examination, if you ask me. He shows up as owning property in CO, both in Denver and Boulder. He's been in Iraq since last summer and hangs around the Al Fanar hotel in Baghdad as a "consultant." This is allegedly the hotel where he met NB and was 2 doors down from him, drinking beer with NB the night he was last seen. And I think Duke once had a stockbroker's license, but I'm not sure of that one. His age has been given as anywhere from 43 to 50 -- seems like no one can get it right.
Anyway, my leisure time is gone for now. Be back when I can.
If you look up Duke, try different variations: Andrew Robert Duke; Andrew R. Duke; Andy Duke, etc.
Some links:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4973713/
http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/13/wtort113.xml
http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.php?DocumentID=9398&TagID=7
Fabulous info Dolphy!! Thanks for the ping!
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