Senate to Create Panel to Investigate Issue of Vietnam MIAs

The Senate, responding to a flurry of recent claims that Americans are being held prisoner in Southeast Asia, voted Friday to create a select committee to delve into the long-simmering issue of U.S. servicemen missing in action.

The committee will have 12 members equally divided between the two parties and will go out of existence late next year unless renewed.

“We hope to be able to have the answers by then (next year) although we can’t predict that,” said Sen. Robert Smith (R-N.H.), the chief sponsor.

Meanwhile, President Bush told reporters that there still is “no hard evidence of prisoners being alive and, for those who are unscrupulously raising the hopes of families by fraud, that should be really condemned.”

The President pledged that the government will continue to operate on the assumption that, “until we can account for every person missing . . ., we have to run down these leads to prove that nobody is held.”

However, some senators argued that the government has failed to vigorously pursue evidence that Americans are still being held, justifying formation of a new congressional committee with subpoena power. “I don’t think there’s been enough cohesion, enough focus,” said Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), who authored the legislation to create the select panel.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) added that he is “relatively certain” a living prisoner of war will be returned to the United States within the next 90 days. He declined to elaborate.

Separately, in testimony before a House Foreign Relations subcommittee, a top Pentagon official cast further doubt on the authenticity of a blurry photograph of three men purported to be American MIAs.

Family members have said that they believe the men in the photo are Air Force Maj. Albro Lundy Jr., Air Force Col. John Leighton Robertson and Navy Lt. Larry James Stevens. The three are among more than 2,200 U.S. servicemen still listed as missing in action from the Vietnam War.

Carl W. Ford Jr., deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told the panel that the photograph of the three men was one of five obtained from a single source who is known to have fabricated such information in the past.

Government investigators have learned that two of those five photos--although not the one that claimed to show the three missing fliers--had been published in a Soviet magazine. Ford said the magazine was discovered in a public library in Phnom Penh, the city to which the photos have been traced. He had no further details, he added.

While the military has not yet ruled out the families’ claims that the photographs show their missing relatives, “It is our judgment that the information as it has accumulated doesn’t leave us all that encouraged that we’re going to be able to confirm the eyewitness identifications of the families,” Ford said.

Lundy’s son, Los Angeles attorney Albro Lundy III, said in an interview that the new information has done nothing to shake the families’ conviction that the men are alive. Lundy noted that the photograph was obtained from at least three sources.

In testimony before the same subcommittee Wednesday, Lundy and other family members accused the Pentagon of failing to vigorously pursue the evidence when it surfaced last fall, and more recently, of putting out misleading reports to undermine its credibility.

Ford also told the subcommittee that the Pentagon is anxious to receive a recently released photograph purporting to show long-missing Army Special Forces member Donald Gene Carr being held in prison last year. Thus far, he said, controversial Orange County activist Jack Bailey has refused to turn over the photograph, although the Pentagon hopes to get it in a meeting with Bailey Monday.

“It’s a case where we see a striking similarity” between the new photograph and earlier ones of Carr, Ford said.

Noting that there was never any conclusive evidence that Carr had died in a 1971 plane crash in Laos, Ford said, “It’s one of those cases we believe could very well be a case where a live American is being held captive in Southeast Asia.”

Meanwhile, Reuters reported that Vietnam allowed U.S. officials to tour a former re-education camp near Danang, to check unconfirmed reports that Lundy, Stevens and Robertson were there.

“They led us into the camp. They said there had never been any foreigners there,” said Garnett Bell, who heads the new U.S. office in Hanoi that is in charge of searching for missing servicemen.

The prison commander did not allow the team to speak to any of the inmates, Bell said.