From: Nhan Tran <tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com>
Subject: NEWS: US senators to hold talks on missing Americans
Originator: daemon@media.mit.edu
Reply-To: tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com
Organization: N/A
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1992 18:32:58 GMT


U.S. SENATORS TO HOLD TALKS ON MISSING AMERICANS

    By Jim Wolf
    BANGKOK, April 16, Reuter - Five U.S. Senators fly to southeast Asia this
weekend seeking the fullest possible accounting for the 2,266 Americans still
listed as missing 17 years after the end of the Vietnam War.
    The trip could help to close the books -- or open them more fully -- on one
of the most bitter legacies of the war, the remote possibility that some
Americans might still be held captive in Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia.
    All three countries have long denied they still hold any U.S. prisoners of
war and say they are cooperating, despite limited resources, to pin down the
fate of the missing.
    The lawmakers' findings may largely dictate the speed at which the Bush
administration edges towards normalising diplomatic ties with Vietnam.
    Unresolved questions about those listed as missing in action or otherwise
unaccounted for is the sole remaining big obstacle to normalisation and to
lifting a decades-old U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam.
    Leading the Senate team is John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads
the Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, shorthand for prisoner of war/missing
in action.
    He is accompanied by his vice-chairman, Bob Smith, a Republican from New
Hampshire, and three other panel members: Colorado Republican Hank Brown, Iowa
Republican Charles Grassley and Virginia Democrat Charles Robb.
    The senators'(fhrst stop is Honolulu, Hawaii, where they will be briefed on
Friday by the U.S. army's Central Identification Laboratory. The facility tries
to identify recovered remains thought to be those of missing Americans.
    On Sunday, the delegation arrives in Bangkok for meetings with U.S. POW/MIA
field experts. They travel to Phnom Penh on Monday to meet Cambodian officials,
regional ambassadors and the United Nations peace-keeping mission in Cambodia.
    The senators are due to fly to Hanoi on Tuesday to meet Vietnamese officials
and Hanoi-based U.S. experts focusing on the 135 highest-priority "discrepancy
cases."
    This term is applied to men believed to have been captured alive but never
released nor listed by Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia or China as having died in
captivity.
    The senators will spend three days in Ho Chi Minh City, partly to meet
southerners claiming to have information about POWs or MIAs. They fly to
Vientiane on Friday for meetings with Laos officials and Americans investigating
cases there.
    Smith, the committee's vice chairman, has made clear that his focus will be
on possible live prisoners.
    "I assure you that the focus of this committee is live American prisoners of
war," he said in one of the panel's first hearings last year. "That is what we
are working on and everything else is secondary."
    The Senate set up the committee last August after the publication of
snapshots purporting to show captive Americans in Indochina stirred renewed
interest.
    The pictures, believed by family members at the time to be authentic, were
later found to have been hoaxes. The Senate committee is to complete its work by
the end of this year.
    Kerry, a Vietnam veteran and a critic of the war who hoped as chairman of
the panel to put the issue to rest, said in February that a few months of
preliminary research had convinced him there was far more information to be
uncovered than he had expected.
    He said it was hard to understand how repeated earlier investigations,
dubbed the highest national priority by the administrations of Ronald Reagan and
George Bush, "could leave so many stones unturned."
    Committee staff members say they hope the senators will be able to present a
bipartisan consensus report on the issue. Anything short of this would likely
fuel continuing conspiracy theories, feed the uncertainties of the MIA families
and postpone the prickly question of normalisation in this U.S. election year.

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