Posted on 05/29/2003 2:16:59 PM PDT by Bkauthor
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascitystar/5963405.htm
WASHINGTON - 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 the publicizing of 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 are not 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."
Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, his two sons and dozens of other top Iraqi officials are still considered at large, assuming they survived U.S. air attacks.
Roberts, who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that in a recent closed-door briefing with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz he pushed the idea of circulating posters with Speicher's photograph because he wanted "every Iraqi citizen to know exactly what Capt. Speicher looks like."
The posters and the prospect of a reward should produce a flood of information, Roberts said, although much is likely to be useless. But he said the searchers are 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 is 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 people from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence operations.
Speicher was the first U.S. casualty of the 1991 conflict. Although he was initially declared killed in action, subsequent evidence showed that he probably survived the crash of his fighter jet and was taken prisoner by Iraq.
His status was first changed to missing in action, but reports continued to surface that he was alive. The military now considers him to be a prisoner of war.
Once the latest war concluded 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 during 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 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 the likelihood that such symbols were 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."
But as more time passes without a clear resolution of Speicher's fate, his friends and supporters grow more anxious.
"I was hopeful when the war was coming to a rapid close," said Barry Hull, a fellow pilot in Speicher's squadron who flew with him the night he disappeared. "I hoped they'd find him in a few days. It's been pretty quiet since."
Still, Hull said, "It's not over yet."
To reach David Goldstein, Washington correspondent, call (202) 383-6105, or send email to dgoldstein@krwashington.com
Find Saddam, find Scott. Scott is Saddam's "stay alive" card.
Book: Clinton ignored evidence Navy pilot survived Gulf War shootdown
Just a reminder.
Thank you my friend!
From the World Net Daily article:
Yarsinske claims Speicher escaped from his aircraft with injuries, made his way through Iraq in search of medical help and eventually was found in the desert and nursed back to health by the Bedouins.
Yarsinske claims Speicher was "alive and in Bedouin protection" for several years after the shootdown - a fact she says she verified . . .
The big break in the case may have come in 1999 from an Iraqi defector who told authorities he had driven an American pilot from the crash site to a hospital.
Isn't this contradictory? Did LCDR Speicher walk through the desert until he found the Bedouins, or was he driven from the crash site to a hospital by an Iraqi defector?
Didn't Truman also forget a few thousand WWII U.S. POWs who were held by the Germans that ended up in the Russian Gulags? I once read a non-fiction book that seemed credible...can't remember the title.
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