News-Info-Alerts

Re: US & Iraq Formally Exchange Offers on Speicher

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: April 12, 2002

"U.S. responds to Iraqi offer on Navy pilot's fate

Speicher's plane was shot down on the first day of the Gulf War.  

From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States and Iraq have formally exchanged offers that could pave the way for an American delegation's visit to the Middle Eastern country to investigate the fate of a Navy pilot shot down early in the Persian Gulf War.

Baghdad sent an offer earlier this week to the State Department, via the Red Cross, proposing that a U.S. team visit Iraq to try to determine what happened to Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher.

The pilot has been missing for more than a decade after being shot down in the opening hours of Operation Desert Storm. His body has not been recovered.

The Iraqi offer had several conditions, including that the media cover any search team's activities and that American Scott Ritter -- a former U.N. weapons inspector who has been critical of some U.S. policies toward Iraq -- be part of any U.S. delegation.

A Pentagon official said Wednesday that Washington had issued a tentative response to the Iraqi offer. The reply is thought to reject the conditions made by Baghdad, while demanding full U.S. access to any sites, materials or personnel it requests.

The official said the United States would send a search team only if Iraq can offer new information.

"We are not going for a dog-and-pony show," the official said.

U.S. inspectors saw where Speicher's plane crashed several years ago, later saying the site had been tampered with and that they learned little from their visit to Iraq.

Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Aldouri, said Wednesday the U.S. pilot "is dead, I think, and the Americans know very well he is dead."

But he called Iraq's offer "serious," and said Baghdad would welcome a U.S. team.

"There is no problem for us to receive this team and certainly we will answer all questions they have on the fate of this pilot," Aldouri said.

Speicher, then 33, was piloting a Navy F/A-18 Hornet jet when it was shot down by enemy fire on January 17, 1991 -- the first day of the Persian Gulf War. He was subsequently declared the war's first combat death, but the Navy changed his status to missing in action in 2001 after receiving information that he may have survived. "