GOP Senators Allege Cover-Up on POWs : Missing: The government has ignored reports of sightings in Southeast Asia, they say.

Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee charged Thursday that the government has rejected or covered up information on American prisoners who were left in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War.

In a 117-page staff report, the panel’s GOP minority contended that in each case, the government failed to conduct a thorough search for remaining POWs because of “grand visions of a foreign policy of peace and reconciliation, desire for a new economic order of trade and investment” and “the natural tendency of the bureaucracy to eliminate its workload by filing cases marked ‘closed’ instead of finding people.”

They also complained that the government has been similarly uninterested in tracking down POWs held captive by Communist regimes in earlier wars.

The report tends to support allegations by Col. Millard A. Peck, former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action, that the government has made no effort to pursue 1,400 reported firsthand sightings of U.S. POWs in Southeast Asia.

In a March letter of resignation, which was made public earlier this week, Peck wrote that the government used his office as a “toxic waste dump” to bury the POW issue and that “any soldier left in Vietnam--even inadvertently--was, in fact, abandoned years ago.”

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams denied the allegations: “In the past 10 years there have been seven formal investigations into the government’s handling of the POW/MIA issue, and they have all concluded that there is no conspiracy, that there is no cover-up, that the government is undertaking a good-faith effort to account for prisoners of war and those Americans listed as missing in action.”

Members of POW/MIA groups have expressed anger over Peck’s charges. “It’s outrageous what has happened,” said Dolores Apodaca Alfond, chairman of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Servicemen.

“We need to investigate these live sighting reports, because we are sure that there are live Americans in Vietnam and in Laos” as well as the Soviet Union, China and North Korea, she added.

According to the report, Bolsheviks captured U.S. soldiers during the Russian Revolution from 1917 to 1919 and did not release many of them, even after President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the Soviet government in 1933.

The report alleged that U.S. authorities during the Vietnam War originally demanded the release of 5,000 U.S. POWs by the North Vietnamese government. Yet after Operation Homecoming brought 591 POWs back to the United States in early 1973, U.S. officials declared that the only remaining POWs in Southeast Asia were dead, the document said.

In each case, according to the report, Communist regimes “denied holding U.S. prisoners, contrary to many credible reports, while in fact they were holding the U.S. POW/MIAs as slave laborers and as reserve bargaining chips to get diplomatic recognition and financial assistance.”

“On the U.S. side, our government downplayed or denied the reports of POW/MIAs and failed to take adequate steps to prove or disprove the reports, while elements in our government pursued policies intended to make diplomatic recognition and financial support of the revolutionary regimes possible.”