Army bid to locate pilot turns up empty
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A U.S. military search team in Iraq has checked three sites in the country for signs of a Navy pilot missing from the 1991 Persian Gulf war but has found nothing, defense officials said yesterday.

A team of Army specialists given the job of looking for Capt. Michael Scott Speicher conducted the searches in the past several days acting on intelligence information obtained before Operation Iraqi Freedom. The specialists visited facilities and residences where the Iraqis were suspected of holding a U.S. pilot, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They came up empty," said one official. "The search is continuing."

A U.S. intelligence official said there have been two recent reports indicating that Capt. Speicher is being held in Iraq. In addition, numerous intelligence reports in the months leading up to the ongoing Iraq campaign indicated that Saddam Hussein's government had been holding a U.S. pilot.

The U.S. Army has formed a special team to search for terrorists, weapons of mass destruction and Capt. Speicher. Additional intelligence teams are in Kuwait, waiting for Iraq to be stabilized before conducting searches and investigations related to Capt. Speicher, who went missing in January 1991 on the first night of the Gulf war. At the time, he was declared killed in action, but several years later, new evidence surfaced indicating that the pilot had ejected from his F-18 jet and survived the crash. His status was reclassified twice, with the latest category being "missing captured."

Disclosure of the recent searches for Capt. Speicher comes amid growing pressure on the Pentagon to resolve the fate of the missing pilot. Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican and chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said Sunday that Capt. Speicher may be alive in a Baghdad prison cell. Family and friends of the Navy pilot are "pulling on a full-court press to find him," Mr. Roberts said. A spokeswoman for the Speicher family, Cindy Laquidara, said last week that the military should do more to find out about Capt. Speicher's fate.

Mr. Roberts said teams in Iraq are looking at documents and talking to people who can help locate Capt. Speicher. Earlier this month, the U.S. military took over Iraq's Rasheed military prison in eastern Baghdad, where the Iraqis were known to have kept foreign nationals prisoner. The prison provided some intelligence on inmates, a U.S. defense official said. A U.S. intelligence report from March 14 stated that Capt. Speicher had been seen being moved in Baghdad recently, officials said.

Progress reported in search for Speicher
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officials said they are making progress in finding a missing Navy pilot and have dismissed months of faulty intelligence reports.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded this week that they were fed false information on Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, who has been missing since the 1991 Persian Gulf war, as the result of the searches of three sites in Iraq, one intelligence official said yesterday.
The searches by an Army team of three sites in Iraq where Capt. Speicher was reported by Iraqis to be held came up empty.
"As a result, we are now eliminating some sources [of intelligence] whose veracity is questionable," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
"All the rash of reports we had from late last year to early this year on Speicher were found to be intentionally false," the official said. "It appears the Iraqis were really good at putting out misleading information."
A special team of intelligence officers recently arrived in Iraq to begin searching for Capt. Speicher and were led to a prison earlier this week where the initials "MSS" were found on a prison wall.
The initials found at the Kahmiyah prison may have been written by Capt. Speicher, officials said.
Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the MSS initials were found at an Iraqi prison known as the "judgment center," where interrogations of prisoners were carried out.
"Obviously finding the initials is encouraging," said Mr. Roberts, who for years has been pressing the Pentagon to resolve the Speicher case.
"It's another piece of the puzzle. Scott left his own record," he said.
U.S. investigators in Iraq are looking for Iraqi records on the case and are trying to locate Iraqi officials who may know about Capt. Speicher's fate and whereabouts, he said.
"We know the Iraqis kept very detailed records, so we're hopeful more information will be forthcoming soon," Mr. Roberts said in an interview.
Capt. Speicher initially was classified as killed in action during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. But his status was changed in 2001 and again earlier this year to "missing-captured" based on intelligence reports.
An Iraqi informant led the U.S. intelligence team to the prison, where other English-language words were found scrawled on walls, the official said.
U.S. officials have said one problem with investigating the case of Capt. Speicher is legislation signed into law in October by President Bush. The law, known as the Persian Gulf War POW/MIA Accountability Act, gives the U.S. government the power to grant refugee status to any Iraqi or Middle Eastern national who helps the United States rescue a living American Persian Gulf war prisoner.
The increase in bogus intelligence reports on Capt. Speicher followed passage of the law.
The recent searches helped prove that the source of the bad intelligence on Capt. Speicher cannot be trusted, the intelligence official said.
"We don't know whether it was intentional disinformation, or whether it was the result of someone seeking personal gain," the official said.
The discovery of the bad informant has helped searchers focus their efforts on more promising leads, the official said.
CIA and DIA investigators in Iraq now are looking for several key officials who are believed to have knowledge of Capt. Speicher's fate.
The pilot went missing after his F-18 jet was shot down southwest of Baghdad on the first night of the 1991 Gulf war.
A later search of the crash scene revealed that the pilot had ejected and was probably taken prisoner by the Iraqis.
Numerous intelligence reports from Iraq in the past two years have indicated that the now-ousted regime of Saddam Hussein was holding an American pilot believed to be Capt. Speicher.

Wonder if the Pentegon will dismiss WMD this quickly.

Pentagon Abandoning Capt. Speicher - Again

Less than four months after major combat operations in Iraq ended, the Pentagon is now engaged in another operation - to rid itself of a thorny and controversial POW/MIA mystery from the 1991 Gulf War, the fate of missing Navy pilot Capt. Michael Scott Speicher.

A wealth of evidence that emerged over the past decade strongly indicates that Speicher survived both the shoot-down of his F/A-18 Hornet on Jan. 17, 1991, and more than a decade of imprisonment in Iraq. As a result, the Navy reclassified his status from Killed in Action to Missing in Action, then last year, from MIA to "missing-captured" (as current Department of Defense statutes and missing person directives do not use the term Prisoner of War).

So why is it that unnamed Pentagon officials are now attempting to con the news media into declaring Speicher dead once more?

Those Pentagon officials who believe that Speicher was never held captive in Baghdad or anywhere else, and died at or near his crash site and is buried in the desert of Iraq, are engaged in a campaign to leak selective pieces of information to bolster that theory.

Other officials inside the government, who are trying to do an honest investigation into the Speicher case - and the POW/MIA issue in general - must be experiencing the same level of frustration as the relatives of the missing serviceman. That sense of frustration has led one well-placed government source to contact our organization, the National Alliance of Families. He has confirmed our worst suspicions that the Pentagon is simply trying to get rid of the Speicher "problem" by walking away from it.

What our source confirms is that, once again, powerful officials in the Pentagon are gripped by the "mindset to debunk" - a general belief that since (as they believe) the POW is dead, any information suggesting otherwise is bogus and must be discredited.

The source, who I will call Buddy, was blunt: "I could go on and on … but you can see through the smoke and mirrors and the spin - those in government who should have led the charge all along to account for Speicher have been swayed by the naysayers, or on their own have come to believe that he died long ago."

A first sign that the Pentagon's abandonment of Michael Scott Speicher was underway came in The Boston Globe last fall, four months before the U.S. military invaded Iraq and toppled the regime there. Key quotes and passages from the article, published on Nov. 11, 2002, included:

* "Many intelligence and military officials assert that Speicher is almost certainly dead."
* "All the signs that the military has say he's dead."
* "There is a conflict between the evidence that says he's alive and the evidence that says he's not alive …. "
* "Speicher appeared to have escaped his stricken Hornet, but what happened to him afterward remained unknown. 'We think he survived the ejection but he died afterward …. ' "

Similar news coverage has suddenly appeared in the past two weeks, signaling that the Pentagon intends to rebury the Speicher case. Dissecting various articles, it appears that the Pentagon is basing the shift in position on three assumptions:

* The initials, "M S S," found scrawled on a cell wall, in Hakimiyah Prison in Baghdad, do not belong to Michael Scott Speicher
* DNA testing done on material taken from the cell does not match that of Speicher's.
* Information provided by an Iraqi source who passed a polygraph test, putting Speicher in that cell, could not be confirmed.

While Pentagon sources say the search for Speicher continues in Baghdad, the new focus of the investigation has returned to the desert crash site.

While the Pentagon has discredited the alleged live sighting of Speicher at the Hakimiyah Prison, we must ask: What about the other reported sightings of Speicher?

The Pentagon has not been able to explain away the claim by an Iraqi defector who escaped to Jordan, who told American investigators that in the first days of the 1991 Gulf War, he had driven an American pilot from the desert to Baghdad where he was taken by the Iraqi authorities. The U.S. pilot, the defector said, was alive, alert and wearing a flight suit. The defector pointed Speicher out in a photo lineup, and passed two lie detector tests.

According to Buddy, "The one source that claimed to have been held with Speicher and fed him on a daily basis stated they had been held for 10 years in the underground prison; that individual was released and left Iraq."

Buddy also told us, "The individual that reported feeding the pilot was talking to an individual outside Iraq when he made the claim, and the U.S. side never interviewed him. Another source said Speicher had a scar on his face from the aircraft loss incident, and that he walked with a slight limp."

"Another source put him in another prison facility in downtown Baghdad, and underground, to which access was limited to a small number of people. These many, many source reports did not come from a single source, and there is no way they can claim the information is bogus."

With regard to the alleged sighting at Hakimiyah Prison, Buddy stated:

"The source in question claimed a long time ago that he had seen Speicher in the early 1990s and may have been the one that passed two polygraph [test]s; however, some folks claim he was not telling the truth. In the meantime, there have been a number of different sources who claimed that Speicher was alive and being moved between facilities, which they identified. Some of those sources were deemed to be entirely credible, while others had no reason or motivation to lie."

"I am afraid that questions within the government about the credibility of one source have tainted reporting by others," he added.

After several Iraqis taken captive in the war denied that Speicher had been held prisoner, it became quickly clear that Pentagon officials arbitrarily opted to believe the naysayers, Buddy explained.

The Iraqi defector who had placed Speicher in Hakimiyah Prison passed his polygraph. The two Iraqis whom the source said could confirm his report, denied it and passed their polygraph tests. Obviously someone lied.

The question is, who was lying and why has the Pentagon assumed that those denying Speicher's captivity are the only ones telling the truth? This is an especially important point, because U.S. investigators have admitted that captured Iraqis have proved very adept at beating the polygraph, telling lies shown by the polygraph as being truthful. Yet, the Pentagon gives weight to the involuntarily captured Iraqis over the voluntary Iraqi defector.

On another crucial point, the Pentagon previously reported that samples of genetic material taken from the cell that contained the initials, "M S S," do not match samples for Scott Speicher. Their immediate conclusion is that Speicher was never in that cell and therefore he did not scratch the initials "M S S," on the wall.

That is certainly possible. But let's look at another possibility, one the Pentagon and news media have chosen to ignore.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-FL, who has pursued the Speicher case, has described the prison cell as a "hell-hole." Various media reports have described its sanitary facility as a hole in the ground with a drain over it. From our understanding, the hair tested for DNA came from that drain.

The source put Speicher in that cell in the mid-1990s. Do we have absolute proof that no one else occupied that cell after Speicher? Is it not possible that Speicher's genetic material may have been washed away by whatever other genetic material followed it through the drain and into that hole?

How does the failure of a DNA match prove Speicher was not in that cell? Is it not possible Speicher was in that cell, and left his initials but that his genetic material did not survive in the cell?

The Pentagon seems disinclined to consider that possibility.

"I think you see what is happening with the government responses," Buddy explained. "There is no evidence of this or that. There is a reason for that. Since Speicher became an issue in the mid-1990s, the position of those [Pentagon officials] in the issue assigned responsibility to determine his fate has been that he was lost in the aircraft crash in 1991."

"So they can say well in advance of any investigation that there is no evidence of his being alive, since they maintain he died previously," Buddy continued. "Does that make sense? If no one believed in the DNA evidence, again, how could there be such evidence if he died, they would be willing to say rather quickly that there was no evidence he was held in the cell."

There is still much that can be done in Iraq to unearth the truth of what happened to Speicher.

"Further interviews in Baghdad of former Iraqi officials have failed to surface any information as to the status of Speicher, but have revealed the names of a number of other officials who would know what happened to him," Buddy told me. "If the team remains vigilant in its pursuit of information on Speicher, they will find out what happened to him, or determine where he is."

But given the Pentagon's deplorable conduct in the hunt for Michael Scott Speicher - a pattern that echoes its mishandling of the Vietnam POW/MIA issue - one is forced to wonder how seriously the Pentagon will treat any new leads.

I've never figured this mentality out, but I can say as a family member of a missing soldier that this behavior is no different than the way the Vietnam MIA issue was handled.

Our cousin survived the shooting down of his F-4 and was alive at the end of the war. His co pilot was released at the end and claimed our cousin's wedding ring as his so he could return it to the wife since the Vietnamese wouldn't release our cousin. They knew for years he was alive and they left him there.

It just blows me away when I hear stories like this. The good of the many outweigh the good of the few, but in these cases what good are we protecting by not going after our people? There are recent stories about Korean War POW's still be sited in Pyongyong.

Gops, you and your family have my sympathy concerning your cousin. It's unimaginable what that's like to deal with. It's embarrassing and shameful that especially when evidence exsists, we leave people behind.

This got me to thinking. Around the early to mid 70's there used to be POW/MIA bracelets that you could get from the Red Cross. They had a man's name, service branch (I think) and the date he was missing. There were also stars you would stick on them to signify if they had returned or not. Does anyone know if there is still such a thing anymore? I wore mine until it finally wore in half and broke and then I got an exact replacement for it. Seems like once a month you'd also receive a newsletter with names of men who had returned. Saddly, my guy was never on one.

Pentagon report: Still no signs on fate of missing Gulf War I pilot...
Washington Times
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough

Government investigators reached Navy Capt. Scott Speicher's F-18 crash site in Iraq earlier this month, but found no evidence that would solve the mystery of whether the pilot is dead or alive.
The Washington Times obtained a secret Pentagon report earlier this summer that said no evidence to date had been found that could determine his fate. The report cast doubt on an Iraqi informant's veracity when he said he had seen Capt. Speicher alive in the mid-1990s. The report said the U.S. search team previously tried to reach the crash site after Baghdad fell, but was turned back by gunfire from Iraqi guerrillas.
The next step, according to a U.S. official, is to interview people in the town of Hit, a Sunni Muslim and Saddam Hussein stronghold southwest of Baghdad. There are unconfirmed reports that a shot-down allied pilot was taken there during Operation Desert Storm before being transferred to Baghdad.
Iraqi gunners shot down Capt. Speicher's jet on the war's first day in January 1991.

Fate Still Unknown

Philadelphia Inquirer
March 4, 2004

Despite nearly a year of searching, the Navy has no new information on the fate of a pilot who was shot down on the first night of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and is still missing, the Navy's top admiral said yesterday.

Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher's FA-18 Hornet was shot down in western Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991. Speicher, 33, originally was listed as killed in action, but the Defense Department changed his status to "missing-captured" in January 2001, after Iraqi defectors said Speicher had survived the crash.

The Bush administration used alleged sightings of the Navy pilot, some of which were provided by Ahmed Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, to help bolster the case for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein.

"We do not have new intelligence that adds clarity and definition to what happened to him," Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, said during a breakfast meeting with reporters.

Clark said that finding out what happened to the pilot remained a top priority and that the investigation into his fate was continuing.

Hussein's government said Speicher was killed at the time of the crash. It turned over some remains in 1991, but DNA testing later proved they weren't his.

One of the defectors said the Navy pilot was at a Baghdad hospital in 1998.

A senior Navy official, who asked not to be identified, acknowledged that some alleged eyewitness accounts later had been discredited.

A senior administration official, who also asked not to be named, said all the defectors who provided information about Speicher came from Chalabi's exile group.

According to the official, one defector told Pentagon officials: "I know where he is. I know he is alive. I know which prison he is being held in. Give me a special forces team, and I will go in with them and get him."

Geeze, this gets me P.O.'d! TI me, this is simply a case of our government breaking the faith with members of the military. It is *WRONG!*, *WRONG!*, *WRONG!*

BP

I post news on this story as much as I can. You get the feeling that this keeps getting swept under the rug.