Finally,
A Voice of Reason
Glory Hallelujah !! It's happened !! The truth about the MIA issue has slipped out. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW-MIA Affairs Bob Jones has spoken the truth. Here it is.
QUOTE
Copyright 2000 Agence France Presse
Agence France Presse
August 15, 2000, Tuesday 8:15 AM, Eastern Time
HEADLINE: US fighting losing battle to find live MIAs in Asia: official
DATELINE: PHNOM PENH, Aug 15
The United States admitted Tuesday it had no credible evidence any of
the thousands of young American soldiers who went missing in action (MIA)
during wars in Asia are still alive.
US deputy assistant secretary of defense Robert Jones, responsible for
tracking down MIAs and prisoners of war, said of the 21,000 reports of live
sightings since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 none had borne fruit.
"It is highly improbable that there is an American being held against
their will," he told reporters before wrapping up a tour of Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia.
"Does that rule out the possibility? No it does not, and that is the
reason the president of the United States has as his number one priority the
investigation of live sighting reports," he said.
There are currently 2,014 American soldiers unaccounted for in Southeast
Asia alone. The last report of a live sighting was last year, Jones said,
but declined to give details.
Washington spends about 54 million dollars a year world-wide trying to
track down and identify the the remains of missing soldiers.
Jones said defectors from North Korea had also given investigators no
hard evidence there were any survivors of the war on the Korean peninsula still
being held by Pyongyang.
"We have debriefed over 485 defectors that have come from the North to
the South. None of them have been able to provide us with any information
concerning live Americans in North Korea."
Jones said that the only credible reports received related to four
defectors who went over to the North between 1960 and 1980, and are now
residing in the North and considered by Pyongyang to be naturalised North
Korean citizens.
The two Koreas -- with the South backed by the US -- have remained
technically at war following the bitter 1950-53 conflict. No peace treaty
was signed between the two nations after the war ended in an uneasy armistice.
Jones said that should hostilities end on the peninsula, where the US
still bases some 37,000 troops, it would be up to those four defectors if
they wanted to reestablish contact with their families.
He said after the Vietnam conflict he knew of only two US soldiers who
chose to stay behind, one of whom was now dead. The other, a marine, later
returned to the US and was courtmartialed and discharged.
de/jsm/rob
END QUOTE
Comment
This is an excellent article except for one thing that the reporter did not get straight. The article refers to ". . . the 21,000 reports of live
sightings . . ." Not exactly. In fact, the number 21,000 refers to ALL reports received by the various POW-MIA offices -- reports of grave sites and crash sites; hearsay reports; dog tag reports; reports about SEAsian prisons; etc.
The number of "live sighting reports," as stated by the Defense POW-MIA Office is:
"As of June 16, 2000, 1,907 first-hand live sighting reports in Indochina have been received since 1975; 1,879 (98.53%) have been resolved. 1,309 (68.64%) were equated to Americans now accounted for (i.e. returned POWs, missionaries or civilians detained for violating Vietnamese codes); 45 (2.36%) correlated to wartime sightings of military personnel or pre-1975 sightings of civilians still unaccounted for; 525 (27.53%) were determined to be fabrications. 28 (1.47%) unresolved first-hand reports are the focus of current analytical and collection efforts: 25 (1.31%) are reports of Americans sighted in a prisoner situation; 3 (.16%) are non-POW sightings. "
For a discussion of the "live-sighting reports," check out https://miafacts.org/live_sightings.htm
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