Why a beard? Well one of his emails mentioned that he had taken to telling Iraqis that he was Turkish to avoid scrutiny; perhaps he was getting a little worried about the situation and decided to lower his profile, and grew a beard to blend in better.
A lot of his story has unanswered questions. Whether or not he was murdered on video is not one of them in my book.
We saw a video that was barely watchable. What struck me when I saw Nick's picture is that the man in the video resembled my cousin Jimmy when he was in college. We're black Irish. The only difference is that Jimmy also had a moustache.
The nose I can agree with, thanks to posted still clips here. The bone structure, I can't. The cheek bones and the shoulders, for example. If Nick Berg had grown a beard, he would have looked like Paul Bunyan. Of course I could be full of it, I'm just saying that even POW's don't change that much. People can still recognize them.
Well, see my recent post to FL_Engineer. I'm starting to smell a rather large rat.