More Conspiracy Around David Berg

Berg had close ties to shady neo-con member of Iraqi American Council

It is beginning to look like David Berg was somehow killed and then a group of non-Iraqis decided to fake a video of a beheading. Berg does not appear to be alive during the beheading. His business partner, already convicted of distributing crack and with ties to the Russian Mafia and it looks like to the intelligence community neo-cons, would be a good place to start looking for the real story.

Now, add the name of Aziz K. Aziz to Berg's strange Iraqi odyssey.

Aziz told the Associated Press that Berg had contacted him by e-mail sometime after attending a two-day conference in Virginia on business opportunities in Iraq last December. Aziz agreed to give him some space in an office he had in Baghdad to form a partnership seeking communications work.

Berg refers to Aziz in an e-mail to friends on Jan. 18. "I've found a fairly competent and reliable office manager," he wrote. "He's actually been living in Philadelphia the last 20 years and just came back - so he's similarly out of his element."

Aziz said that Berg left his equipment with him during a short trip back to the U.S. When he came back, the two spent an hour climbing tall buildings at Abu Ghraib, site of the infamous prison. Aziz said they re-recorded measurements that were in his stolen notebook.

In 1993, about a decade after fleeing Saddam's Iraq for America, Aziz was in the electronics business when he was one of 25 people charged with distributing some 100 million crack vials on the East Coat. Prosecutors said that Aziz, who lived in Northeast Philadelphia, was tied to a network run by a Soviet immigrant named Valery Sigal. Most in the ring were immigrants from Russia or the former Eastern Bloc.

Aziz claimed he didn't know the vials were going to drug dealers but he pled guilty. He was sentenced to three years of probation, fined $3,000, and forced to forfeit $17,673 in profits.

Aziz went by several names in Philadelphia. Sometimes called "Joe Aziz," he started calling himself Aziz al-Taee in the late 1990s, around the time he formed the Iraqi American Council. He said al-Taee was his tribal name and - in speaking out against Saddam - he was worried about relatives in Baghdad.

In December 2002, another key member of the Iraqi American Council - a California engineer named Bassam Ridha Al-Hulsaini - was reportedly one of 15 Iraqis flown to Washington by the State Department for two days of "media training" under a project known as Future of Iraq. A couple of months later, al-Hulsaini addressed a "pro-troops" rally in San Francisco, declaring that "The Iraq people are waiting for this liberation."

It's not clear whether Aziz received "media training," but the handsome, nattily dressed ex-pat, now 40, probably didn't need it. He addressed similar rallies in Valley Forge, St. Louis and Washington, where he claimed Hussein's henchmen killed both his cousin and brother-in-law. The rallies were launched by Clear Channel syndicated talk-radio host Glenn Beck, and the media giant sponsored many of them.

Aziz is now getting publicity for monitoring the final cell-phone calls of his slain partner. He said this weekend he understands Berg's phone was used as recently as April 19, and that three calls were made that day to Jordan, to the United Arab Emirates and to a local number.

"He could still have been alive."