Statement of Donna Downes Knox
Korean/Cold War Family Association of the Missing
Legal Counsel: Member of the Board of Directors
September 10, 1996

The men who are missing from the Korean War have been gone for over 40 years. Their families were told when they went missing that the US Government would pursue all available leads, and that we would be kept informed of all information that our government had about the whereabouts or fate of our men. We now know that the government did not even try to find them. It simply wrote them off for dead, changed their status to Killed in Action, and moved on through the post-war years.

I have searched long and hard for information about my father. I know many others who also have searched. We were all told that there was no information. The truth was that there was a great deal of information, including hundreds of intelligence reports, but no one was charged with gathering it and analyzing it to find out what happened to these men. There was no post-war investigation. There was no system in place with which to even begin. There was never an intention of producing an accounting.

After decades in which the government essentially did nothing to try to find or account for our MIAs, the Missing Service Personnel Act was passed. It is the first law that could make a difference. It provides for certain policies and procedures that will protect the missing person and enhance the likelihood that he or she will be repatriated.

We have not yet even had a chance to work within the Law's framework and already it has been gutted of many of its significant provisions. Some of the provisions do not directly affect existing MIAs, but as part of the POW/MIA Community, our organization recognizes their value and supports their reinstatement.

I would like to address the provisions individually. They speak to different needs of our missing men and (someday) women.

KOREAN WAR KIA/BNR CASES:

There has been some confusion as to what provisions of the Act were ultimately amended. Section 1509 (b) provides for further review of individual Korean War MIA cases where new information is discovered that could change the status of the individual. My understanding is that this section was originally targeted for repeal, but that ultimately it was left in tact.

Instead, it appears, 1509 (c) has been eliminated. This section, in the existing law, gives authority to review cases of men classified as KIA/BNR, if compelling new information is discovered that could change the status of the man's case.

As a threshold matter, it is disconcerting, to say the least, that anyone in our government would want to eliminate the opportunity for review of a case in which compelling new information was discovered that the man had not been killed. Is the apathy that blatant?

Additionally, please be reminded that, after the Korean War the U.S. Government changed all of the MIAs' status to KIA/BNR, not because there was any information that the men had died, but because it cost less to pay death benefits than it did to carry them in a missing status. We are VERY concerned that elimination of the provision for review of KIA/BNR cases is a back-door attempt to eliminate the opportunity for review of any Korean War cases.

This is particularly inappropriate now, when relations with North Korea are opening up for the first time, and where numerous Live Sighting Reports are being received that some of our men are still alive in North Korea.

It defies not only common sense, but the common decency, to specifically legislate these men out of the opportunity for review just as a window of opportunity appears to be opening for them. The standard for review is high in the existing law,..... the new information must be compelling. There can be no legitimate rationale for removing this provision. The only motive could be a desire to bury these cases.

If the review for KIA/BNR cases from Korea is eliminated, you run the risk of creating a confusing loophole in the law, through which the other retroactive provisions will be neutralized.

CRIMINAL PENALTIES:

The Missing Persons Act currently provides for criminal penalties for the intentional, willful withholding of information from an MIA's file. The amendment removes this provision from the Act.

Government officials have been withholding crucial information from the families of the MIAs since President Eisenhower, unbeknownst to us, wrote off for dead POWs that, according to intelligence reports, had been taken from North Korea to China and the former Soviet Union during the Korean War. This exclusion from information about our men has continued until this very year. Whatever the agenda, it most certainly has not been rooted in the best interests of the missing men. Politics and bureaucracy far too often dictate the course of action.

We now have a POW/MIA office and, undoubtedly, some in that office are dedicated to its purpose. But the problems that we face in seeing any real progress still are many. The office has had millions of dollars and several years. Individual cases have not been solved. Questions about American POWs in general having been held back have not been answered, and there is an apparent unwillingness to give us information and to include us in the "loop."

The Joint Task Force Russia, which is charged with investigating the question of American POWs being held in the former Soviet Unioin, recently completed a summary of its work and conclusions during the last 4 years. In some instances the report essentially closes the book on individual MIAs, and neither the families, nor their files, were consulted before such a posture was adopted. In some cases, the Report is based on inaccurate information that could have been corrected if the families had been kept informed.

General Wold has stated that the families are the real experts on the cases, and that DMPO can never hope to know as much about the MIAs as the families do. And yet the families are consistently treated as "outsiders" and are often the last to know of information that is learned, or conclusions that are drawn.

Live Sighting Reports come to DPMO and they are immediately classified, so the families are not told about them. Weeks, months, even years go by and still we are not told about them. When the reports leak out, those that have, we ask why they had not been disclosed. Inevitably, the reports are played down by DPMO: either there were inconsistencies with other related reports' or the report was not first-hand; or DPMO is still checking into the matter. Time will pass, and we do not hear anything else about it.

We have no idea whether an active investigation is being conducted or whether the information is being "buried" because it might interfere with foreign policy. We don't even know what the foreign policy is on this matter, or if one exists. We do know that an overall picture is emerging that American POWs are still in North Korea, and we see nothing more than belated assurances that the North Koreans are being asked about it.

Over the weekend the New York Times reported that a high ranking North Korean defector, a member of the secret police, told U.S. intelligence officials early in the spring that elderly black and white American POWs were still alive in North Korea as late as 1993. The families were told nothing of this report. The defector identified the location of the prison; he described it; he had been there many times; he had seen the men; he had been told details of their lives by prison guards. This information is very specific and it interfaces with past reports.

DPMO is very quick to discredit the reports. Alan Liotta, the man most involved in these matters at DPMO, discounts any live sighting report that is not "first-hand". He has done so to the families; to the media. He has done so in testimony at a previous congressional hearing such as this one. Mr. Liotta defines a first hand report as one in which the source not only saw the Americans, but spoke to them enough to confirm that they are POWs and want to come home.

Therefore, in the case of this latest report, because the prisoners who the North Korean defector saw did not dare to tell him .. a man who was then a member of the secret police... that they are POWs and want to come home, this report is not considered first-hand and has been discounted accordingly.

If the families are not told about these reports, we are not able to apply pressure to make sure that leads are being pursued. This is not just fanatic curiousity for us. The families have been, and always will be, the driving force behind the accounting effort. We need to know what the government knew then, and what it knows now about what happened to our men.

Earlier this year, after U.S. officials had received the report from the North Korean defector, DPMO told famililes that there is not evidence of any Americans still alive in North Korea. At the same time, a DPMO analyst on Korean War MIAs was reporting internatlly that there is too much evidence to deny that some Americans are still there. The report was leaked out and DPMO played down its significance and attempted to discredit the live sightings reports upon which it was based.

We are not kept informed and we have seen no results. It should not be DPMO's prerogative to unilaterally discount or disregard information about our missing men without at least disclosing the information and explaining the analysis and conclusions. Politics and bureaucracy abound in that office as they do everywhere else in the government. There is no accountability, and there needs to be.

More than a few people who are well-informed on this matter believe that our own government does not want news of live American POWs to get out for fear that such developments would complicate foreign policy. This fear of suppressed or withheld information is not based on paranoia. It is based on past policy and on current events.

Still others, who are strategically placed within the system, assure us that there is no intentional withholding of information, rather that a pervasive level of incompetence.

Whether through cover-up or incompetence, we still do not know what happened to our men and we do not know whether some are still alvie waiting to be rescued 43 yeasr after the war.

Our FOIA requests for information pertaining to even the broadest of inquiries are routinely denied, as though the United States was sleeping through the war and collected no intelligence whatsoever. We cannot get an executive order to declassify Korean War documents, even though such orders have been issued as to documents from WWII, the Vietnam War and the Cold War.

DMPO is charged with helping the families identify and locate relevant documents. We ask about the thousands of documents stored in the myriad repositories around the world, and we are told that it will take ten years for them to go through the relatively few pages that they have gathered to date. Meanwhile, we have no way of knowing what they have found, and no way of getting at the information ourselves.

Recently about 700 pages of relevant classified material was recovered from the Eisenhower Library. Two different DPMO analysts working on the project spoke to family members of frustration that they feel because "significant information" that they have found in these documents is being ignored. Nothing is being done with it. At the same time, management at DPMO reported to family members that nothing of significance had been found in the documents. The analysts who actually went through the documents did not seem to agree. Time is passing. We have to deal with the incompetence, and we have to attach a price to the wrongful whithholding of what should be disclosed.

The sanctions in the act are for wrongful withholding. They are not triggered by mere megligence or carelessness. The sanctions are criminal, not civil. That means the Department of Justice, not private litigants, would have to prosecute a case. The prosecutors would bear a burden of proof of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, and they most certainly would require compelling evidence before they would seek an indictment. These are all safeguards against prosecution of claims that have no merit.

The Amendment to the Act protects only people who would wrongfully withhold information that should be disclosed. These people should not be protected. Last year Congress voted to hold government officials accountable on this matter. It is serious, and in the past it has not been handled properly.

DPMO will not be "debilitated by a legal and investigative burder, " as Senator McCain claimed when he offered his amendment. DPMO, and all other government officials will simply have to adopt a policy of disclosure, rather than one of secrecy and insider information. That way, we will all know the level of information at hand. We will all know what's being done about it. We can work together more effectively. Accountability is the only incentive that will get the job done.

Another hearing is scheduled for September 17th at which members of DPMO will be asked to answer questions. We would like you to ask them specifically WHAT they are doing about the various live sighting reports; WHAT they are doing about identifying, locating, and declassifying relevant documents; and WHAT they are doing to get the administration's assistance in dealing with North Korea, China and Russia to bring about a full accounting. Improved economic and diplomatic relations are fine. But there has to be a well-conceived and well-executed plan for compelling disclosure by these other governments of information that they will not enjoy exposing.

Who has the plan, and what is it? We have been asking for years, and we still don't know. We need a law that MAKES government officials include us as a partner in this effort. It is not Bill Clinton's father that is missing, or William Perry's; or Al Liotta's. MY father is missing, and I want to know what information exists, and what is being done about it. If it takes criminal penalties to bring about a policy of openness on this issue, then let us have the strength and commitment to put them in place. The missing men deserve that and much more.

FORENSIC EVIDENCE:

The Act currently provides that a set of remains that is not visually identifiable cannot be associated with an individual MIA unless an appropriate forensic scientist certifies the association. The Amendment removes this safeguard against mistake of intentional misidentification.

Already, with relatively few remains having been returned from Vietnam, hasty and incomplete identifications have led to costly mistakes. Mothers who thought they had buried their sons have had to dig them up again for more testing. When someone has waited 25 or 45 years to find out what happened to their loved one, we owe it to them to get it right. More importantly, we should not be declaring someone dead and closing their case unless we know we have the right set of remains.

There are too many competing political, economic, and bureaucratic factors at work in this matter to assume, or hope, that something as important as identification of a set of remains will be done correctly. We have technological capabilities today that we have not had in the past. We should use them and make sure that when we declare a man dead, he is, in fact, dead.

48 HOURS REPORT:

The Act currently provides that a missing persons's direct commander must make a recommendation of missing status within 48 hours of the time the individual goes missing.

McCain's amendment lengthened that time to 10 days, purportedly because the commander's "don't have time" to be distracted by such matters during combat. Are the individual men so expendable that their commanders should not be bothered even to report them missing? The trail stays warm for only a short while. If no report even is filed for 10 days, and no investigation or search and rescue efforts are initiated, we are essentially throwing the individuals to the wolves.

The difference between 48 hours and 10 days is a lifetime to a person in enemy territory waiting to be rescued.

McCain's amendment will have no one looking for a missing person for at least ten days, probably more, and his or her chances of making it back will become nil. If the men and women in today's military knew how little they as individuals mean to their government, many of them probably would never agree to serve.

President Clinton made a big show of saying "We take care of our own" when the military base was bombed in Saudi Arabia. Men lost in combat are "our own", and we are not taking care of them if we let them linger in peril for ten days until their commander gets around to reporting them missing and seeing what can be done about it.

3 YEAR REVIEWS:

We have seen how easily this government will write off its missing men. For Korean War MIAs no case files were developed; no comprehensive list of the men who are missing was compiled; intelligence documents that told the story of what happened to many of them were not collected, reviewed or analyzed. There was no plan and no effort to find the MIAs.

The Missing Persons Act compels periodic review beyond the initial 1 year period. The amendment removes this provision. One year is perhaps enough time for a person to wander back in the door if he is able. However, chances are, if a missing individual is still alive, he's being held by an enemy and our government will have to discover what became of him and work to get him out.

Information comes to light in different ways at different times. Governments change. These situations can, and do, go on for years. If there is no new information every three years, the review process will be easy. At least there will be a process in place whereby information is being gathered, reviewed, and compared to other information. If new leads can be developed based on the review. this should be perceived as a Godsend, not a burden.

This government claims to be committed to finding out what happened to these individuals. True commitmemt does not evaporate after one year. We send millions of dollars in aid to other countries.

Surely we can find it in the budget for a periodic review of the cases of our missing service perosnnel, in hopes that we might uncover new information about what happend to them, and perhaps even bring some of them back alive.

CIVILIANS:

The Amendment will deny protection of the Missing Persons Act to civilians who are lost while attached to a military unit, subject to orders. We see no logical reason for removing such individuals frmo the purview of the Act. They are Americans serving their country. They need and deserve the protection no less than anyone else.

The explanation for this change is that the State Department is conducting a one year study into how best to protect these individuals. We all know how that will go. The one year will stretch into several. Eventually protection might or might not become a reality.

The better wisdom would seem to be to cover civilians with this Act and remove them if and when there is comparable protection available in different legislation.

CONCLUSION:

The amendment offered in the Senate this year resounds in pro-government themes: remove accountability; reduce the size of the project; minimize the obligation. Nowhere in this is there concern for the missing men and women. These themes might sound attractive in a vacuum,, but when you consider the enormous amount of time, effort and money that is spent on countless other items that happen to be more politically rewarding, one must ask: Are not this nation's missing men and women who have gone into battle to protect the lives and liberty of others equally deserving of the resources?

These are not just names on a page. They are individual Americans who put themselves in harm's way when their country called. They are the fathers, brothers, and sons of thousands of Americans who still wait to learn of their fate. There has been no report of their deaths, nor any evidence of their deaths. There IS evidence that many Americans were taken alive and not returned. Until we resolve the question of what happened to these men we will not have repaid our debt to them.

Gutting the Missing Persons's Act is a tremendous step backwards. House Bill 4000 will do a great service to our missing service personnel by reinstating the provisions that have been removed.