lynn@nationalalliance.org
May 31, 2003 Bits N Pieces
Congratulations Once Again To The Folks At Rolling Thunder and Run For The Wall - the 16th Ride for Freedom was a huge success. Despite the poor weather, the turnout was unbelievable. It's hard to believe but each year the ride gets bigger and bigger. We thank all who worked so hard to make this years Ride for Freedom a success. We know how much work an effort like this entails. To Artie Muller and his staff, we tip our hats. You all did a great job.
WANTED: ALIVE
Speicher Reward the following is excerpted from an article published May 30th, in The Kansas City Star, by David Goldstein. "In their thus-far fruitless search in Iraq for Navy pilot Capt. Scott Speicher, U.S. investigators plan to use two old-fashioned tools: reward money and wanted posters."
"Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida backed a "sense of the Senate" resolution urging Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to use his authority to offer rewards for information about missing military personnel."
"We've pretty well hit a dead-end street," Roberts said of the need to try new methods to recover the pilot shot down over Iraq in 1991. "It's a little hard not to be discouraged. We had hoped by this time that we would have had more specific word. That doesn't mean we aren't persevering, that we aren't making every effort." The Senate provision, included in the defense authorization bill passed last week, calls for publicizing a $1 million reward for information "resolving the fate" of Speicher."
Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin said members of the former Iraqi regime, terrorists or others who might have been involved in Speicher's captivity would not be eligible for the money. The reward also applies to the search for members of the armed forces from the Korean and Vietnam wars still considered to be missing, held prisoner or killed in action, but who remain unaccounted for."
"It might flush somebody out who knew about Scott," said Roberts, a leader in the efforts to recover Speicher. "There were probably three, four or five people who even knew about him. He was more or less a pet prisoner of Saddam...."
Roberts, who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that in a recent closed-door briefing with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz he had pushed the idea of circulating posters with Speicher's photograph because he wanted "every Iraqi citizen to know exactly what Captain Speicher looks like." The posters and the prospect of a reward should produce a flood of information, Roberts said, although much of it is likely to be useless."
"But he said the searchers were starting to run out of options." Roberts said a new team of investigators would be on the ground soon in Iraq to aid the search, although he said its primary task would be to look for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. The new team is called the Iraq Survey Group and is made up mainly of scientists. The existing team searching for Speicher is a joint operation of about a dozen persons from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence operations...."
"Once the latest war ended and military and intelligence teams began roaming Iraq, optimism was high that Speicher -- or at least evidence of his fate -- would be found. "Obviously as years go by, the possibility of bringing him home alive realistically seems to diminish," said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Pentagon's POW/MIA office. "But we've got to be vigilant and exercise all the resources we've got."
"Expectations rose several weeks ago when investigators found Speicher's initials carved into a wall at the Hakmiyah Prison, a site where an informant reportedly said an American pilot had been held in the mid-1990s."
Amy Waters Yarsinske, a former naval intelligence officer who wrote a book last year about the Speicher case, said she understood that investigators had also found other symbols inside the prison that might have been left by Speicher. "The symbols he was using are something he was taught in survival training," she said. "The Iraqis would have no idea what they were, even if they noticed. They are the same symbols Scott has left everywhere."
But Lt. Cmdr. Jim Brooks, a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, cast doubt on whether such symbols had been found, or if they were, that Speicher was responsible. He said the Army was conducting forensic tests. "In all the prisons they've been through, everyone carves on the wall," he said. "I haven't seen anything definitive. The search continues...."
Until now, we've refrained from commenting on the efforts to locate Capt. Speicher. However, there are serious questions that must be asked and answered. The U.S. had intelligence assets on the ground prior to the war, their goal - locating Saddam. Were intelligence assets charged with locating Speicher before the war? If not, why not?
Senator Roberts and Nelson are on the right track with a reward and wanted posters. Our question is why didn't DOD flood Iraq with flyers bearing Speicher photo and publicizing the Persian Gulf Accountability Act granting asylum to any Iraqi who returns American POW? Every soldier, sailor, marine and airman should have been made aware of Speicher and carried flyers with his photo. Were the men and women on the ground briefed about Speicher? If not, why not?
If Speicher is Saddam's "pet prisoner" it is possible that wherever Saddam is, Speicher will be nearby.
Anyone with even a limited knowledge of the POW/MIA issue knows that the U.S. government did not change Speicher's status from Killed in Action to Missing in Action and again from MIA to Missing/Captured solely based on the indication he survived his ejection. If surviving ejection were the sole criteria for a status change a whole lot of Vietnam and Korean War POW/MIAs now classified KIA, are due for status changes.
As the article above states: "Expectations rose several weeks ago when investigators found Speicher's initials carved into a wall at the Hakmiyah Prison, a site where an informant reportedly said an American pilot had been held in the mid-1990s."
It's far too early to write Speicher off. We can't let Speicher be killed on paper for a third time!
More on Speicher - May 30, 2003 from a CBS News Report by David Martin: "New evidence has surfaced in the case of Scott Speicher, the U.S. Navy pilot shot down on the first night of the first Gulf War in 1991. Speicher was initially reported killed, but later listed as missing, his fate unknown...."
"... the new information comes from documents turned over to an American intelligence officer, who cannot be identified, by a former general in the Iraqi Air Force. After the two men examined them for three hours, the American told the Iraqi, "This brings to a close one of the great sticking points" in the 12-year saga of what happened to Speicher."
"Specifically, the documents appear to solve the grisly mystery of a pound and a half of human flesh that has been at the heart of the Speicher case. The Iraqis turned those remains over to the U.S. in 1991, identifying them only as "Michael," which is Speicher's proper first name."
"When the DNA did not match Speicher's, the Americans suspected the Iraqis of trying to trick them into thinking the Navy pilot was dead while they continued to hold him captive. The U.S. was never able to identify the remains, but the documents, some of them top-secret Iraqi memos, identify them as belonging to an Air Force pilot shot down a month after Speicher. The Pentagon will now retest those remains against the DNA of the dead Air Force pilot to finally make a positive identification."
"As for Speicher, the Iraqi general insists they don't know what happened to him. Investigators have now searched more than 50 prisons, graveyards and other sites in Iraq. The most tantalizing clue turned up in a now-abandoned prison that held captured American pilots during the first Gulf war. Etched on the wall of cell 46 are the initials "MSS." Could that stand for Michael Scott Speicher? Investigators believe those initials were scratched there in the last two to three years. They are still trying to figure out what the other letters on the wall might mean."
"The search team went over every square inch of the cell looking for some other piece of evidence Speicher was here. They even went into the toilet area and scrapped the drains for his DNA. It will take months of testing to see if any of the samples match Speicher's DNA. In the meantime, the search goes on. Investigators have already dug up six graves where he might have been buried, but none of the bodies had caps on their front teeth like Speicher had. The investigators are coming back to this cemetery on Saturday to dig up another body."
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Who Is The Air Force Pilot, Shot Down After Speicher - we may have missed it, but we found only two Air Force crews lost and recovered/unrecovered after Speicher. One loss was over the Indian Ocean. Would Iraq have any chance recovering remains from that crew?
It is far more likely that the remains may be of a crewman aboard an AC130H lost January 31st 1991. The crew commanded by Major Paul Weaver consisted of Arthur Galvan; John P. Blessinger; Dixon L. Walters, Jr.; Paul G. Buege; Barry M. Clark; Thomas C. Bland Jr.; William D. Grimm; Timothy R. Harrison; Robert K. Hodges; Damon V. Kanuha; James B. May II; John L. Oelschlager; and Mark J. Schmauss.
Only 5 of the crewmen were identifiable. The families of the other 9 crewmen, according to two family members, we've spoken with, were forced to accept "apportioned remains." In other words this was another one of CIL-HI's creative identifications. Prove 1 man or 5 on an aircraft dead and consider all 14 dead and identified, with or without remains.
We haven't been able to find any other Air Force crews that were shot down after Speicher, with no recovery or suspect recovery. If you can find one, please let us know.
The only servicemen considered unaccounted for by the government, from Gulf War I, are Navy officers Speicher, Lt. Robert Dwyer and Barry Cooke.
We're Amazed But We Shouldn't Be - with three servicemen lost on or after Jan. 16, 1991 classified as body not recovered, and nine buried without remains, why weren't the remains returned by Iraq in 1991, tested against all personnel declared dead without remains?
This RingSurf Operation Black Flag Net Ring
owned by Mike Matteri.
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