THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The elite military search unit now being asked to bring its identification expertise to ground zero has built a reputation over the past decade for daring work in dangerous places and impressive results in a forensic lab where names are matched to human remains, sometimes no more than a single tooth.
On Sunday, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the Hawaii-based organization's expertise should be applied to a new search for remains in buildings near the World Trade Center site, where hundreds of bone fragments left over from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were recently discovered.
In a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Schumer said the "miraculous" finds warranted federal efforts to help local agencies identify the 1,000-plus victims still missing in the destruction of the twin towers, and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command - or JPAC - was best suited for the task.
If approved, it would not be the first nonmilitary mission for the agency, created by the Pentagon in 1992 with the primary mission of finding the more than 2,200 Americans still missing from the war in Indochina, and thousands more on other battlefields.
Schumer's proposal followed the finding of 150 new bone fragments on the roof of the former Deutsche Bank building, severely damaged in the Sept. 11 attacks and soon to be demolished. More than 400 shards were found earlier, prompting calls from victims' families for new efforts to identify those still missing.
JPAC experts were in New York and at the Pentagon after the attacks, and sent a team to Indonesia in early 2005 to aid in the recovery of tsunami victims. Its Central Identification Laboratory, the world's largest forensic facility, also has provided forensic assistance to recovery efforts in domestic and foreign plane crashes and local law enforcement cases.
Indeed, said JPAC spokesman Troy Kitch, the lab's outside work dates as far back as the Jonestown massacre in Guiana in 1978.
"We're a military organization, so we don't take these actions on our own, but if called upon we are prepared to do so," said Kitch.
Before 1992, MIA searches in Indochina were rare and focused mainly on the politically explosive issue of Americans still held captive. While that remains JPAC's stated first priority, no latter-day prisoners of war have turned up since 591 known POWs were repatriated in 1973. Founded as Joint Task Force-Full Accounting and merged with the Central Identification Laboratory into JPAC in 2003, the agency has recovered and identified about 400 missing Americans in Indochina, and hundreds more in old battlefields from Papua New Guinea to Vietnam.
The majority are pilots and other airmen who crashed in remote mountains and rain forests.
As of this month, JPAC lists more than 1,800 Americans still missing in Indochina, 8,100 in Korea, 78,000 from World War II, 120 from the Cold War era and one from the first Gulf War.
A typical JPAC search team has about a dozen military members - specialists in mortuary affairs, bomb disposal, medicine, aircraft, weapons and military equipment and linguistics - led by one of more than 30 civilian anthropologists from the Central Identification Laboratory.
The work is often dangerous due to leftover bombs and shells, poisonous creatures, adverse weather and difficult terrain.
Despite that, JPAC's only casualties were the deaths of seven members, along with nine Vietnamese, when their Russian-built helicopter crashed into a fog-shrouded mountain in Vietnam in 2001.
The CIL laboratory, located at Hickam Air Force Base near Pearl Harbor, grew from the Army's Saigon mortuary that handled U.S. dead in Vietnam, and is now widely regarded as the world's best forensic lab. Its experts in skeletal analysis and forensic dentistry conduct "blind" exams to make sure no case is unduly influenced by prior information - a crucial factor in preventing mistakes.
Because many remains are old and fragmentary, the process often lasts months. More than one person has been identified from a single tooth - Vietnam being the first U.S. war in which dental records existed for all military personnel.
Mitochondrial DNA drawn from remains goes to the Armed Forces DNA Identification lab in Rockville, Md., for comparison with family samples. This method is used in more than half of CIL's cases and would figure in many from ground zero, as it has in the past.
COMMENTARY by Andi Wolos:
CIL at JPAC is already under-budgeted, over-tasked, under-manned and out of space. They cannot lay out the remains they have in storage now for lack of space. Their new facility is years away from realization, there is a 10-year backlog on recovery operations in LAOS ALONE. The North Korea JFAs have been on hold for a year. JPAC has a limited number of teams, already assigned to specific regions for recovery. It takes years to plan searches, excavations and recoveries. During and after the Christmas Asian Tsunami emergency recovery operation, NOT A SINGLE POW-MIA IDENTIFICATION WAS MADE for months because everyone was doing something else. If the USG and its people want JPAC/CIL to become global forensic recovery specialists, then they better make damn sure this unit gets a heck of a lot more funding, more people, a new massive facility and be willing to pay for it.
Retasking JPAC/CIL for any operation other than emergency relief and POW-MIA recovery and identification will only prolong the frustration, pain and uncertainty that has plagued POW-MIA families for 15, 30, 50 and 60 years. WW II families receive regular contacts from European citizens with crash site locations and artifacts, but JPAC is overwhelmed, the families wait. Vietnam and Laos make JPAC's life difficult at best with a decade backlog for recovery in one country alone, the families wait. Nothing is happening in Korea, the families wait. The LSE facility has been BRAC'd... JPAC, DPMO, CIL and AFDIL do not have magic wands or crystal balls... there are finite resources and time constraints. The POW-MIA families have waited too long for answers. To diminish or divert the limited resources that are supposedly dedicated to this nation's 'Highest National Priority' is unacceptable.
If Congressional leaders wish to stand on the remains of fallen Americans and grandstand, then they better be willing to put their money where their mouth is and get JPAC more resources.