Re: Senator Seeks Reward for Speicher

Date: March 19, 2004

"During a Pentagon testimony, senator seeks reward for Speicher info

LIBBY QUAID Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., on Tuesday urged Pentagon officials to offer money and other incentives for information on a Navy pilot who was shot down on the opening night of the 1991 Gulf War.

Michael Scott Speicher was declared killed in action hours after his plane went down. Years later, at the urging of Congress, the Pentagon changed his status to missing in action and then, in October 2002, "missing-captured."

Offering a reward "is the least we can do," Roberts wrote Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a letter released Tuesday.

"Given the past handling of Capt. Speicher's case to date, the refusal to offer this reward would add insult to injury," Roberts wrote.

Lawmakers asked the Pentagon to offer a $1 million reward as part of last year's defense spending authorization. They urged the reward be offered in a non-binding "sense of Congress" provision in the bill.

During a hearing earlier Tuesday, Roberts pressed Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, on the matter.

In response, Jacoby did not mention a reward. He said the effort to learn of Speicher's fate "is both aggressive and ongoing."

The Navy's top admiral said last week that no evidence has emerged since the fall of Baghdad that Speicher was held in captivity. U.S. officials have questioned Iraqis and searched throughout Iraq since the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003.

Saddam's government had always insisted that Speicher died in the Jan. 17, 1991, crash.

"We do not have new intelligence that adds clarity and definition to what happened to him" after he was shot down, Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, told reporters during a breakfast interview. "If you think about what I just told you, that tells you something about the discovery or lack of discovery."

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., wrote Rumsfeld last week to press for the reward.

"Surely, someone in Iraq knows what happened to him, and we shouldn't give up an incentive aimed at uncovering that information," Nelson wrote.

Speicher, 33 when he was shot down, held the rank of lieutenant commander at the time but has since been promoted to captain. Speicher's family lived in the Kansas City area and moved to Florida when he was a teenager.

© 2004 AP Wire and wire service sources"