Cmdr. Speicher POW Bracelets are Available

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Gulf War MIA Michael S. Speicher Still Alive In Iraq!!!
"Only two high-ranking Iraqi officials are permitted to see him"
By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch
March 21, 2002

Less than 48-hours after Lt. Cmdr. Michael S. Speicher failed to return to the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga on the night of Jan. 16, 1991, United States Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney held a press conference in Washington and declared to the American people that the Navy pilot was dead.

Cmdr. Speicher's single-seat FA-18 Hornet fighter-bomber had "exploded to bits" in the sky after being hit by an Iraqi surface to air missile, a Pentagon official asserted. The official noted, as evidence of death, one account of a flash in the night sky and 12 hours of radio silence.

"Evidently, pieces of the plane were strewn all over the Iraqi landscape, and Cmdr. Speicher's wing mates saw it happen," the official added.

Cmdr. Speicher, 33, of Jacksonville, Fla., was last heard from over Iraq flying northeast toward Baghdad. He was the first U.S. pilot shot down in the Gulf War leaving a wife, a 3-year old daughter and a 1-year old son.

In May, 1991, the Navy and Speicher's family held a memorial service for him at Cecil Field in Jacksonville. His name was put on a tombstone at Arlington National Cemetery and Florida State University named a new tennis center after him.

So, if Cmdr. Speicher and his aircraft "exploded to bits" all over the Iraqi sky in 1991, why, in March of 2002, is President George W. Bush expressing disgust at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for continuing to hold the Navy flyer "all this period of time without notification to his family?"

A six-page unclassified summary of the report titled "Intelligence Community Assessment of Lieutenant Commander Speicher Case" -- based on CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency data -- states that Cmdr. Speicher "probably survived" the loss of his aircraft and he almost certainly was captured by the Iraqis.

The intelligence report dated March 27, 2001, was not disclosed until March 2002 after a copy was obtained by The Washington Times. It provides an in-depth explanation by the U.S. government on why the pilot probably was captured alive by Iraqis after ejecting from his F-18.

"We assess Lt. Cmdr. Speicher was either captured alive or his remains were recovered and brought to Baghdad," U.S. intelligence analyst wrote in the report.

Captain of the USS Saratoga, Admiral Stan Arthur, who had sent Cmdr. Speicher into battle said that because the Navy wasn't sure where Cmdr. Speicher had gone down, no search and rescue mission was launched.

Nonetheless, right after the shoot down, Adm. Arthur had personally assured Cmdr. Speicher's wife Joanne that "every effort continues to be made to locate Scott." A week later, he sent this message to Joanne, "All, repeat, all, theater combat search and rescue efforts were mobilized."

After the war, on March 7, 1991, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams reassured the American people that the military would continue to look for every missing soldier and flier.

Weeks later, the Iraqis sent a pound and a half of flesh to the Americans, claiming it was the remains of a pilot named Michael. Cmdr. Speicher's first name was Michael, and there was no other Michael among the missing.

Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist, did DNA test on the flesh concluding that it did not come from Cmdr. Speicher. Yet, on the next day, the Navy began the process of officially declaring Cmdr. Speicher killed in action (KIA). "I was a little surprised at that because our test report didn't show that he was dead," Weedn said.

Cmdr. Speicher's case was closed.

Then in December 1993 an Army general from Qatar was with a party hunting for rare falcons when they stumbled across an American F-18. He took pictures, and pieces of the plane back to the American Embassy in Doha, the Qatari capital. The photos and a piece of radar equipment were sent to Washington, where a check was run on the serial numbers.

The pictures showed that the canopy had come down away from the plane indicating that the pilot had tried to eject.

Nearly three years after the Gulf War, it became obvious that Cmdr. Speicher's fighter-bomber had been located and had not "exploded to bits."

The Pentagon went back and checked satellite imagery it had used to track Scud launches during the war. The crash spot was right where his fellow pilot had said it was complete with the outlines of a jet in the sand - Speicher's F-18.

Despite three years of assurances, no one in the U.S. government or the military had ever bothered to look for Cmdr. Speicher's plane. Two years later a U-2 spy aircraft photographed the site. The imagery "detected a man-made symbol in the area of the ejection seat," Pentagon documents say.

In April 1994, Adm. Arthur, wanted to launch a covert mission into Iraq to check out the crash site. Classified documents showed that the chance of success for a secret mission was considered high and the area was very sparsely populated.

Pentagon policy officials balked, fearing that the risks outweighed the rewards.

At a meeting in December 1994 in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense William Perry and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, nixed the covert mission.

They chose instead to ask Saddam Hussein for permission to go to the site under the Red Cross flag.

Gen. Shalikashvili explained later in a statement, "I do not want to have to write the parents and tell them that their son or daughter died looking for old bones."

"To send America's sons and daughters into harm's way is the most serious recommendation a military leader can make," he wrote. "This is a sacred trust."

"I concluded that there was no overwhelming need to put our soldiers at risk to covertly search a three-year-old crash site when the Red Cross option was available," he wrote. "I stand by that decision."

On March 1, 1995, Saddam Hussein agreed to allow American experts to visit the crash site. But Baghdad citing what it called "unforeseen bureaucratic delays." did not allow the Americans to visit for nine months.

Two years after the discovery of the Cmdr. Speicher's jet, and a year after General Shalikashvili's decision, a Pentagon team entered Iraq openly, with Saddam Hussein's permission, under the banner of the Red Cross.

The mission found that the crash site had "been expertly searched within a month prior to the team's arrival" by the Iraqis.

"The Iraqis excavated the cockpit area of the wreckage and removed all significant cockpit debris," the report said.

But a key finding of crash investigators was that Cmdr. Speicher "initiated the ejection sequence, jettisoned the canopy and likely ejected from the stricken aircraft prior to the crash."

At the crash site, the canopy was found nearby but the ejection seat "could not be found," the report said.

Navy investigators later concluded that the pilot of the downed aircraft was "not incapacitated" by the missile that it and that Cmdr. Speicher had an "85 to 90 percent chance of surviving."

At the crash site, the search team was given a flight suit by the Iraqis that purported to be Cmdr. Speicher's. Its condition revealed that "the pilot was not in the aircraft at ground impact" and contained what was possibly a trace of blood, the report said.

The report said the lack of evidence at the crash site that Cmdr. Speicher died combined with the condition of the flight suit "suggest that he probably survived the crash of his F/A-18."

In 1999, an Iraqi defector reported driving an American pilot to Baghdad six weeks after the war started. Officials said the evidence of ejection, combined with agent reports saying Iraq held an American pilot, eventually led to Cmdr. Speicher's reclassification from killed in action to missing in action (MIA).

On March 11, 2002, The Washington Times reported that British intelligence told its American counterparts of an American pilot being held captive in Baghdad, 11 years after the Gulf War. The British alerted U.S. investigators that an Iraqi source had told them that only two high-ranking Iraqi officials were permitted to see the American pilot, the newspaper reported. The source said the pilot's only visitors were Saddam's son Uday and the chief of Iraqi intelligence.

Is Cmdr. Speicher alive? There certainly is evidence that he was alive after being shot down and in the absence of credible evidence proving him dead, all Americans must demand his immediate release.

Some intelligence officials said Saddam is just as likely to have kept secret its possession of a U.S. prisoner of war. These officials note 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.

The U.S. government's haste to declare Cmdr. Speicher dead is a glaring example of the Pentagon's unwritten post Vietnam policy of "killing on paper" military personnel who become missing during a conflict.

As servicemen and women start falling into the hands of an enemy, the Pentagon simply declares them missing in action and denies all knowledge of Americans being captured.

If some of the missing are returned alive at the end of hostilities, it is a plus for the Pentagon. For those like Cmdr. Speicher, who are not returned, it is more politically convenient for the Pentagon to close the book by declaring them killed in action, body not returned, than to disturb the peace by demanding their safe return.

In March 2002, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of Allied forces during the Gulf War, told The Virginian-Pilot that since Cmdr. Speicher was believed to have been killed in action, his name was not brought up by the U.S. during negotiations with Iraq at the end of the war.

"I was assured 100 percent that everyone was fully accounted for and that there was no MIA situation," Schwarzkopf said. "That was a major consideration in my mind just based on the MIA situation in Vietnam."

Sen. Robert C. Smith, New Hampshire Republican and member of the Armed Services Committee, said he has been tracking reports on the Speicher case for more than five years.
"Unfortunately, we have not yet accounted for Commander Speicher, but I will continue to work with the administration to determine his fate," Mr. Smith said through a spokesman. "We must vigorously pursue every lead for the sake of Commander Speicher and his family. We owe him nothing less."

During the Gulf war, even after Cable News Network (CNN) reported Iraq's minister of information saying that American pilots had been captured and that reporters would be allowed to meet with them, the Pentagon denied knowledge of any Americans being captured.

"We know of no American prisoners of war," Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said when asked by reporters if Iraq were holding any U.S. prisoners of war.

Only after video interviews of allied POWs were broadcast on Iraqi television and later in the United States did the Pentagon officially declare that the Iraqis were holding U.S. prisoners.

It was nearly two weeks after 20-year old Army Spec. Melissa Rathbun-Nealy and 23-year old Army Spec. David Lockett disappeared before the Pentagon officially declared them missing in action.

The Pentagon had actually held the two Gulf War soldiers absent without leave (AWOL), despite eyewitness accounts from American servicemen who saw them being captured and reports that a captured Iraqi soldier had said he helped transport two Americans, a white female and a black male (Nealy is white and Lockett is black.) to Basra, a key Iraqi command center north of Kuwait.

Nealy's father, Leo Rathbun, took matters into his own hands and appealed directly to Saddam Hussein asking him to acknowledge his daughter as a prisoner of war. He told The Grand Rapids Press that he did not want his daughter forgotten if a peace plan calling for the release of all prisoners were to be signed.

"The Army has not recognized Melissa as a POW, and if the war ends, I believe the Bush Administration would ignore the problem of MIAs and POWs just as previous administrations ignored the MIAs and POWs still thought to be held in Vietnam," Rathbun said in the interview.

Neither the U.S. nor Iraqi governments officially acknowledged that Nealy and Lockett were prisoners of war until they were released in February of 1991.

The Pentagon has always lied to the American people about U.S. servicemen known to be captives of an enemy. The lying is as deadly for the captured and missing as an enemy bullet, and it is time for it to stop. We must demand that our government be absolutely honest and accurate in accounting for our missing servicemen. Otherwise, those brave men and women now serving our country in battle will also be treated as expendable, abandoned to the enemy and allowed to disappear.

That is exactly what happened to Lt. Cmd. Speicher and many unfortunate U.S. servicemen captured in Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam and in the Gulf.