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Navy Pilot's '91 Fate Still Unknown |
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Despite nearly a year of searching, the Navy has no
new information on the fate of a pilot who was shot down on the first night
of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and is still missing, the Navy's top admiral
said yesterday. Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott
Speicher's FA-18 Hornet was shot down in western Iraq
on Jan. 17, 1991. Speicher, 33, originally was
listed as killed in action, but the Defense Department changed his status to
"missing-captured" in January 2001, after Iraqi defectors said Speicher had survived the crash. The Bush administration
used alleged sightings of the Navy pilot, some of which were provided by
Ahmed Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National
Congress, to help bolster the case for invading "We do not have
new intelligence that adds clarity and definition to what happened to
him," Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, said during a
breakfast meeting with reporters. Hussein's government
said Speicher was killed at the time of the crash.
It turned over some remains in 1991, but DNA testing later proved they
weren't his. One of the defectors
said the Navy pilot was at a A senior Navy official,
who asked not to be identified, acknowledged that some alleged eyewitness
accounts later had been discredited. A senior administration
official, who also asked not to be named, said all the defectors who provided
information about Speicher came from Chalabi's exile group. According to the
official, one defector told Pentagon officials: "I know where he is. I
know he is alive. I know which prison he is being held in. Give me a special
forces team, and I will go in with them and get him." Doubts about the
defector's reports were the subject of heated discussions between the
Pentagon and the State Department, the official said. Eventually, the
defector was put to a lie-detector test and failed, the official said. |