NEWS
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
This excerpt is from a CNN.com story about the death of Nicholas Berg, a civilian murdered by an Iraqi group ostensibly in retaliation for the photos of American abuse of Iraqis in the Abu Ghraib prison:" ... In an interview with Boston radio station WBUR on Tuesday, Berg's father, Michael, said: "I still hold [Rumsfeld] responsible because if they had let him go after a more reasonable amount of time or if they had given him access to lawyers we could have gotten him out of there before the hostilities escalated.
"That's really what cost my son his life was the fact that the U.S. government saw fit to keep him in custody for 13 days without any of his due process or civil rights and released him when they were good and ready."
The interviewer asked, "Do you really blame Donald Rumsfeld for your son's death? And will you do anything in addition to that lawsuit you had filed?"
Michael Berg responded, "It goes further than Donald Rumsfeld. It's the whole Patriot Act, it's the whole feeling of this country that rights don't matter anymore because there are terrorists about.
"Well, in my opinion 'terrorist' is just another word like 'communist' or 'witch,' and it's a witch hunt, and this whole administration is just representing something that is not America, not the America I grew up in."
> CNN.com: "U.S. vows to find American's killers"
Posted by Rob at 11:22 PM
