Michael Berg, whose son Nick was one of the first foreigners abducted and killed by insurgents in Iraq, will be the featured speaker tonight at 7 p.m. in the Reamer Campus Center Auditorium.
Berg will discuss “The Costs of War and How Clean Elections in America Can Help.” He will be joined by Joan Mandle, executive director of Democracy Matters, a grassroots student organization advocating for publicly financed elections.
The event is free and open to the public.
Nick Berg, 26, was a telecommunications contractor when he was detained in Iraq for 13 days in March 2004 by U.S. military and the FBI. After his release, and in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations, Nick was abducted and murdered on May 7, 2004. A video of his decapitation was posted on the Internet and received worldwide attention.
Michael Berg, a retired teacher, has blamed President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his son’s death. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year in Delaware as the Green Party candidate on an anti-war platform.
Joan Mandle was, from 1990 to 2001, associate professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Colgate University, where she also directed the Women's Studies Program and founded and supervised Colgate's Center for Women's Studies. Mandle has also taught sociology at Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College and Penn State. In 2001, she left Colgate to become executive director of Democracy Matters.
Mandle recently received the League of Women Voters of Oakland's “Civic Contribution Award” for her campaign finance reform work in the Bay Area and the Sociologists for Women in Society's “Feminist Activism Award” for a lifetime of service and activism.
The talk is sponsored by Campus Action, a student social action group. For the third year, the group has constructed the Iraq War Memorial display, which includes 3,336 stakes along the walkways at the center of campus. The stakes have the name and age of every American soldier that has died in Iraq.