This from The Federalist digest:

       There is some mystery around the nature of Nick Berg’s business in Iraq. He was not there in any official capacity as a contractor.

       His father Michael Berg, in his anguish, has been quick to toe the party line: “My son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. This administration did this. I am sure that he only saw the good in his captors until the last second of his life. They did not know what they were doing. They killed their best friend.”

       In fact, Nicholas Berg was repeatedly warned by his parents that he could be targeted by Islamists because he was Jewish, as was the case with Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by Islamists in Pakistan a year before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Nick Berg spoke with his parents on 24 March. Soon thereafter, he was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul. On 31 March, U.S. officials then took him into custody while the FBI contacted his parents to confirm his identity.

       However, this was not the first time the FBI investigated Nick Berg. It turns out that he was interviewed by the Bureau after 9/11 in an effort to determine the nature of his relationship with Zacarias Moussaoui, the al-Qaida adherent now in federal custody and awaiting trial on conspiracy charges for his role in planning the hijackings on 9/11. While Moussaoui was in flight school training for 9/11, one of his roommates (a student at the University of Oklahoma where Nick Berg was in attendance) used an e-mail address traced to Berg’s computer. Berg acknowledged knowing the suspect and did let him use his computer, but Berg was cleared as a suspect.

       On 05 April, Michael Berg initiated a lawsuit to have his son released from U.S. custody in Iraq, and on 06 April, Nick Berg was released. He was offered safe passage to Jordan but refused. The last his parents heard from him was 09 April, when he called to let them know he was coming home.

While I think it is very sad that this man was brutally killed, I also think some responsibility rests on his own shoulders, as it does with every American that chooses OF THEIR OWN FREE WILL to travel in that part of the world.  The Middle East is a dangerous place, and someone visiting Israel on holiday could be blown up by a terrorist while innocently having coffee in a cafe.

If Mr. Berg didn’t think about the dangers of traveling in that part of world, especially considering his ethnic heritage, then he just didn’t think, did he?