Feds reschedule meeting after Berg’s father complains

by LARA JAKES JORDAN

The father of an American man beheaded in Iraq accused the Bush administration and his local congressman of trying to cancel a long-awaited meeting that was supposed to answer questions surrounding his son’s death.

Within hours of the complaint Thursday, federal officials said the meeting was back on.

Michael Berg, an anti-war activist, said the government is dragging its feet on the investigation into the death of Nicholas Berg, 26, whose grisly slaying was videotaped and posted on the Internet in May.

"I don’t think they want to meet with me," Michael Berg said from his home in West Chester, Pa. "I have some pretty hard questions about his detention, and they don’t want to answer those questions because they don’t want to commit themselves."

Nicholas Berg’s body was found May 8 in Baghdad. The owner of a small communications company, he was in Iraq seeking work, and was last seen on April 10 when he left his Baghdad hotel.

His family has said the U.S. government contributed to his death because Berg was detained for about two weeks in Iraq, by either Iraqi police or the U.S. military, and missed his flight home. The family believes if Nicholas Berg hadn’t been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave the country before the violence in Iraq worsened.

The Pentagon maintains Iraqi police - not U.S. forces - detained Berg for 11 days. But the Iraqi police chief has denied that his forces in Mosul took Berg into custody. Berg also was questioned three times by the FBI, urged him to leave Iraq, U.S. officials have said.

Michael Berg said he wants to know who ordered his son’s detention, and how he fell into his killers’ hands.

Rep. Jim Gerlach, R-Pa., initially postponed a Friday meeting in Washington between Michael Berg and authorities from the Pentagon, the FBI and the State Department after being told that a Defense Department official with key knowledge of the case would not be able to attend.

By Thursday afternoon, however, the Defense official agreed to meet with Berg at an earlier time - without the State Department and FBI. Scheduling conflicts will prevent authorities from those two agencies from meeting Berg until later, Gerlach said.

"We’ve been trying to set up one big briefing, so we had all the agencies represented rather than piecemeal," Gerlach said. "It’s better to have everybody in the same room at the same time.

"But now with the mix-up here, it looks like we’re just going to have to do it in a two-part thing," Gerlach said. (AP)

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