A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Monday he believed a Navy pilot shot down over Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War was still alive and being held captive in Iraq, as the State Department said Baghdad has ignored U.S. requests for information about the pilot's fate.
Senator Pat Roberts said that he has asked US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to classify Navy Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Speicher as a prisoner of war (POW), instead of the earlier classification of missing in action (MIA). The Pentagon changed Commander Speicher's status last year from killed to MIA, according to a Washington Times report on Tuesday.
"The bottom line is there is no evidence he was killed when his aircraft was shot down in 1991," Roberts said. "On the contrary, there are numerous reports that indicate he could be alive." His aircraft was shot down on the first day of the air war on January 17, 1991.
Meanwhile, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the Iraqi government has not replied to U.S. diplomatic appeals asking for information about the fate of Speicher.
According to the Washington Times report, a formal diplomatic message was sent to Baghdad in January 2001 asking for information about the pilot. The issue was also raised during diplomatic meetings with Iraqi officials in Geneva, Boucher said.
On Friday during a meeting of diplomats in Geneva, U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait Richard Jones told Iraqi officials, "Iraq continues to shirk its responsibility to answer the many unresolved questions about Cmdr. Speicher's fate."
Pentagon officials are expected to brief Congress on the case Tuesday.
The U.S. administration and congressional officials were responding to a report in Monday’s edition of The Washington Times that said new intelligence information was discovered in recent months indicating Speicher was being held prisoner in Iraq.
Speicher was declared killed in action in 1991, but was reclassified last year to missing in action. It was an unprecedented action and put the Pentagon in the position of perhaps having left behind an American at the end of the Gulf War.
Roberts, in a letter last month to Rumsfeld, stated that a recent U.S. intelligence community assessment of the case reached the conclusion that Speicher "probably survived the loss of his aircraft and if he survived, he almost certainly was captured by the Iraqis."
"This strongly suggests the more appropriate designator or status of POW," Roberts stated. "I believe the status of POW sends a symbolic message not only to the Iraqis, but to other adversaries, current and future - and most importantly to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces and the American people."
Roberts said he discussed the Speicher case with U.S. President George W. Bush some three weeks ago, and that the President assured him the case was "very high on his agenda."
The possibility of an American POW in Baghdad also is complicating U.S. efforts to expand the global war on terrorism to Iraq, U.S. officials said.
Roberts added that the Pentagon has put together a special team of officials to investigate the case. He also noted that various intelligence reports about an American pilot held in Iraq "tend to add up."
Asked if he believes Speicher was alive, Roberts said, "I can't say conclusively that he's there, but that's not the point. They can't say conclusively he's not alive, and the presumption is they must aggressively pursue every avenue of this case."
Intelligence officials said reports that Speicher was alive in Iraq have been surfacing since 1991, when two Iraqi nationals told the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that Iraq was holding an American pilot. The CIA dismissed the information as coming from unreliable sources.
Meanwhile, a U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the Washington Times report claiming new information on Speicher’s fate was provided several months ago "has the facts pretty much right."
"There are reports out there and we investigate every single one," said Lieutenant Commander Jim Brooks, a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to AFP.
In 1995, Commander Speicher's F-18 aircraft was found intact and an investigation team went to the site and determined that the pilot ejected before it crashed. The U.S. team that inspected the site had found the canopy was some distance away, suggesting he could have indeed ejected safely. Iraq also provided Speicher's flight suit at that time.
Four years later, an Iraqi defector reported driving an American pilot to the capital city of Baghdad six weeks after the war began. That report eventually led to the reclassification of Cmdr. Speicher as missing in action.
Several months ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA obtained new information from a foreign intelligence service stating that a person who had been in Iraq had learned that an American pilot was held by the Iraqis. The source said the pilot's only visitors were Saddam's son Uday and the chief of Iraqi intelligence.
Some intelligence officials Monday down played the new intelligence information by claiming that Saddam Hussein would not have kept secret the fact that an American pilot was captured and would have used the pilot for propaganda purposes.
Other intelligence officials said Saddam is just as likely to have kept secret its possession of a U.S. prisoner of war.
These officials point out that Saddam's government held one Iranian pilot as a prisoner of war for 17 years, all the while denying it held any Iranian prisoners of war.
Nevertheless, another US official cautioned that the latest Washington Times report "doesn't mean it was reliable or true."
"And nothing really has changed from the earlier assessment. The bottom line is we don't know," the official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The defense official said that Speicher's fate remains an open question.
"You've got to ask yourself if he was alive, would we have seen him appear?" the official told the News Agency.
"Obviously, Saddam Hussein has been faced with some crises since the Gulf War. Would we have seen him being used as a pawn or not?"
"We are convinced that Saddam Hussein knows what happened to Commander Speicher and for whatever reason he is choosing not to share that information," the official said. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
