Hearing on Accountability For American POW/MIAs
September 17, 1996
During the past 20 months of the 104th Congress, I have conducted a series of Military Personnel Subcommittee hearings in order to provide effective congressional oversight of the process of seeking the fullest possible accounting of American combatants who remain missing in action. It has been my intention to work in partnership with the Defense and State Departments to bring an honest closure for hundreds of families who have not broken faither with their missing loved ones.
My 31 years of direct involvement with our missing heroes began on May 18, 1965 when my best friend in the Air Force David Hrdlicka was shot down over Laos. Although he was photographed as a prisoner and interviewed in captivity by Soviet journalists, he remains unaccounted for and fate unknown. My general study of this issue began 43 years ago when in Air Force flight training my class was briefed by an Army psychiatrist during a seminar on the "brainwashing" experienced by American POWs in Korea which led to the creation of the U.S. Military Code of Conduct. A code we were ordered to memorize as aviation cadets.
I have since come to the conclusion that the term "mind set to debunk", which described the performance of Defense Department analysis, is too cryptic. It was coined in 1980 by my friend Lt. General Eugene Tighe, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was repeated by internal D.I.A. investigations in 1986 and 1987 and used again in 1990 by Col. Mike Peck, an Army Special Forces hero who resigned in protest and disgust as Director of the Defense POW/MIA Office. It is too imprecise to describe the lack of competence by an entrenched bureaucracy. This shameful institutional performance is best described as an unrelenting "predisposition to discredit and dismiss" all information and reports that have merit and might lead to resolving cases of Americans known to have been alive in Communist captivity and, frankly, may still be in some seemingly God-forsaken cases.
The habit of writing-off captured American fighting men after no-win stalemate wars with the "evil empire" of COMMUNIST began in 1919 following the Archangel Expedition by 15 nations against the Bolshevik forces in Russia. My own father, U.S. Army Captain Harry Dornan was nearly sent north, but he had enough World War I combat points and three wound chevrons which enabled him to avoid that ill-fated operation. Then, at the end of World War II after Stalin's forces overran Nazi-controlled POW camps in eastern Europe, several hundred Ameicans and allied prisoners disappeared into Soviet gulags. During the Cold War, U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy pilots on so-called "ferret" missions, spy flights, around the periphery of the Soviet Union, and CIA missions using U-2's and converted bombers flew over or near Russia and China. Many involved shoot downs and the crews, in most cases, disappeared without an official paper trail. Then, in the early 1950s, some of the best Americans of our World War II generation and the older edge of my generation were lost in Korea. Then came Vietnam and the "black hole" of Laos.
What ties together all of these tragix chapters in military history is the evil nature of COMMUNISM, with its total disregard for human life and no military code of ethics that would have dissuaded COMMUNIST governments from withholding American or allied fighting men. In fact, there was a continuous strategic objective in the COMMUNIST Worldwide struggle against the allies of the Free World: It was to squeeze every ounce of intelligence information out of some captured Americans, especially the highly trained pilots and electronic ferret mission technicians. The COMMUNISTS, in fact, were preparing for future heightened conflict while fighting lesser struggles that we came to describe with the misnomer, "The Cold War."
Despite the pleading of the patriotic families of the missing, and numerous attempts by the U.S. Congress during both Democratic and Republican administrations to reestablish accountability in our federal government, we have been stymied by bureaucratic inertia and a lack of properly trained and motivated experts in geo-politics and intelligence. There has never been a systematic methodology led by fearless Sherlock Holmes-type investigators to build upon the successes and mistakes of the historical record. Instead, we continue to see the "corporate board" approach of the Defense Department's Office for POW/MIAs, where the cynics reign supreme. So-called analysts lurch into the future without ever taking into account the strategic goals and intelligence lusts of the Evil Empire and its surrogates. There has always been a calculated and systematic exploitation of American prisoners.
Even today, despotic regimes continue the cruel exploitation of prisoners. The Serbian heirs of Marshall Tito tortured and exploited for propaganda the two French Mirage pilots who were shot down over Bosnia. The Serbs deliberately declared them MIAs, denied ever holding them as prisoners, and then claimed that the pilots had been "kidnapped" from a hospital. Only an international outcry, political pressure and French threats led to their release.
In any international conflict which escalates into fighting, you can always tell the evil side from the righteous side by the way the combatants treat prisoners of war. In order to preserve a viable democracy, we should remember the eloquent words written in part, by one of our witnesses today, Colonel Phillip Corso, Col. Corso wrote for then-U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge who spoke on the floor of the United Nations on December 4, 1954 in an effort to gain the freedom of American servicemen and civilians held in China, North Korea and the Soviet Union. "It is an immemorial principle of human decency that a family looks after its own members. A nation must also look after its own, if it is to continue to be a nation.... The thing that sustains the man in uniform when he is far from home is the thought that he is supported by those for whom he is fighting. We cannot let these men down."
In the nuclear shadow of the Cold War, American leaders such as President Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy were faced with classic dilemma.... the risk to millions of innocent citizens that might have resulted from an ultimatum threatening the use of force to gain the release of American POWs from the gulags behind the iron and bamboo curtains. But today, there is no credible explanation for not utilizing our great superpower's vast resources to finally keep faith with our brave men -- whether they be alive or dead --- and with their families. Honor demands that we demand the fullest possible accounting of our heroes.