Dornan Ties Aid to POW-MIA Data

Returning from a four-day trip to Moscow, Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) said Monday that unless records concerning American servicemen missing from the Vietnam War are opened for inspection by U.S investigators, he believes Congress should halt humanitarian aid to the Commonwealth of Independent States.

“Why should we take some American parents’ money and send it to some country that refuses to say what happened to their son?” Dornan said. “I don’t know why Congress can’t take a hard line stand and say, ‘no records, no money.’ And I mean no medicine, no food.”

Dornan, who has expressed opposition to Commonwealth aid before, and five other congressmen took the fact-finding trip to Moscow. He said he is planning a return trip in about two months.

Dornan said KGB officials told the congressmen that they could question retired military personnel or others who were willing to discuss what they knew about American MIAs or POWs. But he said that effort was too little.

“We have to wait for Soviet citizens who are willing to come clean, and I told them it was insufficient that we should rely on piecemeal remembrances like that,” Dornan said.

Some recent evidence, including congessional testimony by a former KGB member, has indicated that Soviet officials might have known of American servicemen being held by the North Vietnamese long after the war was over.

“I told them the way to get Americans in a recession to send money over there is to open up the records, show they’re serious about it, and our country will respond in a very supportive manner.”

Dornan said key aides to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin assured him that Yeltsin wants to cooperate with the United States to curb weapons proliferation, terrorism and the flow of narcotics.

But Dornan said the “dismantling and disposing of nuclear missiles and nuclear waste is a massive problem.”

He called efforts by some Democrats to reduce the U.S. defense budget beyond the level President Bush has proposed “reckless and irresponsible,” contending that the “restructuring of their military is in chaos.”

He predicts that threats to further reforms inside the new federation will not come from an ideological coup but a military coup.

“That’s why we don’t want to match their chaos with chaos of our own,” he said.

After meeting with Moscow’s mayor, Gavrill Popov, Dornan said he and his group watched as pro-Communist demonstrators attempted to march into the former Red Square on Sunday.

On the Armed Forces Day national holiday that has been renamed Defenders of the Motherland Day, police formed a circle of trucks around the square to restrain several thousand demonstrators.

“It was a cultural shock to see the old red flag flying out in front of these people--who weren’t being allowed to enter Red Square,” Dornan said. “This was really a tiny percentage of people yearning for the bad old days of the Soviet empire.”