Michael Berg, left, collapses to the ground, and is comforted by his son, David, after learning of his son’s death

Nick Berg has already disappeared from the front pages of newspapers. Although many haunting questions remain about Berg, 26, and his odyssey in Iraq, the murky circumstances surrounding the events which led to his horrific execution at the hands of Iraqi militants linger.
Besides being a human tragedy, Nick Berg’s death two weeks ago represented, as well, an ominous development for the Bush administration, which continues to struggle not only with the disastrous impact of the prison scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib detention facility, but with the almost daily Iraqi terrorist bombings which kill innocent civilians, and American armed forces personnel. With the White House trying to curb attacks by insurgents before the June 30 handover to a caretaker Iraqi government, the spectre of Iraqi terrorists ratcheting up the violence endures as more than a dim prospect.
In an essay published in The Guardian this past weekend, Michael Berg places the responsibility for his son’s death — and for the war in Iraq — at the feet of George W. Bush. Mr. Berg calls for an immediate end to the war in the Middle East, and censures the U.S. President as a man who “doesn’t have to bear the consequences of his acts.”
Mr. Berg offers further condemnation of the U.S. Secretary of Defense …

Donald Rumsfeld said that he took responsibility for the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners. How could he take that responsibility when there was no consequence? Nick took the consequences.
Even more than those murderers who took my son’s life, I can’t stand those who sit and make policies to end lives and break the lives of the still living.

We mourn tragic loss, all the more so when the death of a loved one was as unnecessary and preventable as the death of Nick Berg.

Laura Talkington’s son after he was attacked on Nov. 1, 2003, by another ward in a California Youth Authority facility in Stockton, California. Photos were taken by CYA infirmary staff.

Every parent’s worst nightmare revolves around what harm their child might come to when away from the care and control of the family unit. There is no greater heartbreak for a parent than when a child unleashes familial bonds and harm befalls a loving — if misguided, and even at times obstreperous — child. Imagine, then, how Laura Talkington feels.
In a piece written for the Pacific News Service, Ms. Talkington describes her fear at visiting her son and the horror of watching him lose himself and become another person, at how he has become hard and afraid due to the abuse heaped upon him, by both guards and other prisoners.

I have not been able to be a mother ever since my son went to the California Youth Authority, the state’s system of youth prisons. I have spent the last four years watching him appear in the CYA visiting room with cuts, choke marks and bruises. He has been attacked by other youth or staff more than 40 times. I have seen him lose confidence in himself, become cold and depressed and fearful for his life. And the whole time, I have not been able to do one thing about it. Except lose sleep … What the CYA calls rehabilitation, the rest of us call tortuous abuse.

Mark Martin, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, provides more chiiling details on the abuse these children suffer. And because, as we’ve found most recently with the published pictures and video of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. troops that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, VanRamblings offers this disturbing video as graphic testament to the abuse suffered by children at California’s quasi-jails for kids.

Far be it from VanRamblings to kick a man when he’s down, but migawd, for the first time in the last four years, a beleaguered George W. is looking not only all of his 57 years, but positively weary and downright … old. Looks like the bike spill that he took while on vacation in Texas — when you pile up every other untoward event that has affected the U.S. President these past weeks and months — has really begun to take its toll.
As Talking Points Memo suggested yesterday …

I can’t help but wonder whether the spill the president took from his bicycle today won’t become iconic in the same way that the state dinner the first President Bush attended in Tokyo on January 8th 1992 in which he collapsed into the arms of, and then vomited on, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa became a symbol of his then-faltering presidency.

Matt Drudge reported an alleged uncharitable off-the-record remark made by John Kerry, quoting the Democratic Presidential hopeful as saying, “Did the training wheels fall off?” Although Kerry’s alleged intemperate remark — even if it is funny — may in the short term afford Bush an added degree of sympathy, the long-term implications of the Bush spill may be dire indeed.