News-Info-Alerts

Re: National POW-MIA Recognition Day

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: September 22, 2002

No wonder news coverage is so pathetic... media reports POW-MIA "celebrated"!

"U.S. celebrates POW/MIA day as Bush presses on Iraq
September 20, 2002 10:52 AM ET
 
By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The United States on Friday paid somber annual tribute to its former prisoners of war and more than 92,000 troops unaccounted for in conflict as the Bush administration pressed Congress to support a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Ceremonies were held across the nation and at the Pentagon on National Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Recognition Day, and President George W. Bush issued a proclamation. On Thursday he sought authorization from lawmakers to end Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs by any means.

"With this observance we reaffirm our commitment to those who have suffered the horrors of enemy captivity, to those who have yet to return from battle and to their families," Bush said in a statement issued by the White House.

Nearly 60 years after the end of the Second World War, the fate of more than 78,000 American troops who fought in that conflict remains unknown.

More than 8,100 are missing from the Korean War, 1,905 from the Vietnam War, more than 120 from the Cold War with the Soviet Union and three from the 1991 Gulf War.

Although formal figures are not kept from the First World War, at least 3,300 Americans remain unaccounted for from that "War to End All Wars."

MIA/POW FLAG TOPS WHITE HOUSE

The flag of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia -- a group pressing for continued searches for MIAs and POWs -- flew over the White House and other government offices in Washington and across the country.

Among the thousands of MIAs is U.S. Navy pilot Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, shot down over Iraq in January 1991 on the first day of the Gulf War. His fate has become an international bone of contention between Washington and Baghdad.

Speicher, then 33, was flying an F-18 fighter jet and long assumed to be dead. But subsequent reports suggested he could have survived the crash and may be in Iraqi captivity.

In April Iraq invited the United States to send investigators to look into Speicher's fate. But the Bush administration declined, saying Baghdad's invitation stated it had no information to offer.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell decided on July 8 to send a diplomatic note to Iraq through the International Committee of the Red Cross to get more information.

At the United Nations in August, however, the United States accused Iraq of refusing to cooperate on the fate of Speicher.

U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte raised the issue in the U.N. Security Council, saying Washington's attempt to get information through a U.N.-backed commission on missing persons chaired by the Red Cross had brought no results. "