

  Monday, June 29, 1992     THE PLAIN DEALER.....     page 2-C

                          FIND THE TRUTH, FINALLY

 
   A shameful chapter of America's past has been reopened with evidence that
 U.S. officials may have abandoned as many as 133 Americans in Vietnam after
 1973. Are any still living? This painful question must speedily be addressed
 at the very highest levels of government.

   The accusations of abandonment and government lies come from, among others,
 the well-respected Sen.John Kerry of Massachusetts, a decorated Vietnam War
 veteran who chairs the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs. Kerry is
 a Democrat. But Republican war veterans, too, have formed a Republican
 Congressional Leadership POW/MIA Task Force to press for an "honorable" end
 to years of disgraceful inaction.

   In a post-Cold War world, there can be no ideological or partisan reasons
 to prevent a thorough investigation of Kerry's claims. There must be a final
 accounting of the fate of the 133 soldiers he said may have been left behind.
 Recently declassified documents show  these men were known to have been in
 Vietnamese custody before the war ended but were  never confirmed to have died,
 and were not returned with other prisoners when North Vietnam said it re-
 patriated all American POWs in 1973.

    Many of the 133 may then have been dead, with no evidence either way. But
 Kerry, in a chilling assertion, said last week, "There was evidence that some
 absolutely were left behind at that time." His comments were quoted by the
 Associated Press.

    Kerry's charges carry weight. He is one of the few politicians who have
 refused to use the POW-MIA issue to pander to grieving relatives. He resisted
 jumping aboard the series of hoaxes perpetrated in the name of finding the 
 truth about the more than 2,200 still missing in action from the Vietnam War.
 Virtually all those 2,200 probably died long ago. Many doubtless failed to
 survive the ambush or plane crash that cut them off from their fellow soldiers.
 But Kerry and others point to a disturbing load of official lies that have 
 complicated full accounting of their fates. The Vietnam war included a dark,
 secret side where men were ordered illegally into Laos and Cambodia or sent
 on long-range spy patrols. For casualties of these excursions, records were
 routinely falsified.

    Retired Air Force Gen. Eugene Tighe, former head of the Defense Intelligence
 Agency, who investigated the POWs' fate for the Pentagon in 1986, also 
 recently told the AP there was "irrefutable" evidence, using satellite photos,
 other intelligence data and refugee interviews, that Americams were left
 behind. 

    How successive U.S. administrations could have failed to act with vigor
 and outrage on such information defies understanding. The nation's present
 leadership must quickly remedy that omission.

                            __________________________

 Same paper, same issue..Page 4-A...

                  U.S., RUSSIANS SEEK POW DATA ON MOSCOW TV.....

             Top aides issue appeal for details on prisoners.......

 By Thomas Ginsberg
 ___________________
 Associated Press

                    MOSCOW
   Top U.S. and Russian officials made an unprecendented televised appeal
 yesterday for details about U.S. war prisoners in the former Soviet Union,
 and they accused the KGB of withholding information.

   The secret police "know the most, but have given us the least," said retired
 Col.Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, co-chairman of a joint U.S. Russian commission on
 POWs.

    Volkogonov appeared with former U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon, the other
 co-chairman, in a taped message on the current affairs show "Panorama." 
 Afterwards they gave the commission's Moscow phone number and address.

    The appeal was part of an effort ordered by President Bush and Russian
 President Boris Yeltsin to clarify the fate of tens of thousands of U.S.
 and Soviet servicemen who vanished during four decades of superpower confronta-
 tion.

    Yeltsin this month turned the quiet investigation into a high-profile 
 issue when he announced that U.S. soldiers had been kept in Soviet prisons.

    "I appeal (for information) from anybody who knows anything of interest to
 the commission," Toon said, sitting in front of map of the former Soviet Union.
 "Don't be afraid. You won't be persecuted for cooperating with us. On the
 contrary, we will be grateful to you."

    Contacting the panel might not be easy. Viewers got only one quick look
 at the phone numbers and address, and no one answered at the numbers last
 night. "Panorama" personnel could not be contacted for an explanation.

    Toon said the United States hoped Russia could help trace some of the
 78,000 Americans still listed as missing or captured from World War II, the
 Korean War and the  Vietnam War.

    Both men expressed confidence that the three-month-old commission would
 find new evidence, and Toon said progress has "not been bad."

    But Volkogonov said officials in the former Soviet KGB were frustrating the
 panel's work by refusing to open archives.

    "We've had access to Defense Ministry archives, to the (Communist Party)
 archives, to the Interior Ministry archives. The special services have given
 us the least," said Volkogonov, Yeltsin's military adviser.

    He said Russia's foreign intelligence chief and the head of its domestic
 intelligence service were cooperating, but that lower-level officials were 
 not.

    Intelligence officials could not be reached for comment last night.

    Toon and Volkogonov said prisoners might even be found alive, a shift from
 their earlier position that the panel was unlikely to find survivors.

                          ______________________________

 Again same paper, same issue Page 1-G.....

                          GULF POW DESCRIBES HER ORDEAL 

              EVENT MAY BECOME ISSUE IN DEBATE OVER WOMEN IN COMBAT...

 New York Times
 ______________
                DOTHAN, ALA.

   On a cold night during her weeklong captivity in Iraq in the Persian Gulf
 War in 1991, Maj. Rhonda Cornum was loaded into a pickup truck with another
 U.S. prisoner of war, a young male sergeant, and taken from an underground
 bunker to a small prison.

   During the 30-minute drive, an Iraqi guard kisser her repeatedly, pulled a
 blanker over their heads so that they would not be seen, unzipped her flight
 suit and fondled her breasts, she said later.

   Cornum, 37, a flight surgeon and biochemist from East Aurora, N.Y., had 
 broken both arms, smashed her knee and had a bullet in her right shoulder as
 a result of the downing of her Army helicopter.

   She screamed in pain when the Iraqi tried to pull her flight suit down over
 her untreaated and swollen arms, she said. Before the ordeal was over, she
 told a presidential commission on women in the military on June 8, she was
 "violated manually -- vaginally and rectally."

   Cornum's testimony stunned some of the members of the commission, which also
 learned in the hearing that Specialist Melissa Coleman, the other U.S. female
 prisoner of war in Iraq, was the victim of "indecent assault."

   Their treatment has become an issue in the debate over whether women in the
 military should be allowed into combat.

   Those who favor limiting the role of women have seized upon Cornum's exper-
 ience, saying it proves that women are more vulnerable than men in combat
 situations. None of the male prisoners, for instance, has reported that he was
 abused similarly during captivity.

   But other experts on POWs and on military personnel say the disclosure
 illustrates much larger issues: that rape and sexual abuse are two of the
 many forms of mistreatment suffered by prisoners of war, and that men as well
 as women are at risk.

   There is a need to raise the consciousness of U.S. troops of both sexes about
 sexual abuse in the military in general, they say, not only in the unlikely
 case that they are taken prisoner.

   The issue may receive more attention in the coming months as the panel, the
 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Services, 
 draws up guidelines for women in the military that are due in mid-November.

   In an interview in Dothan, not far from Fort Rucker, where she graduated
 last week from the Air Command and Staff College, Cornum said the sexual 
 assault in Iraq in that winter of 1991 "ranks as unpleasant that's all it 
 ranks."

   Everyone's made such a big deal about this indecent assault," she said, in
 her first interview since the war. "But the only thing that makes it indecent
 is that it was non-consensual.

   "I asked myself, `Is it going to prevent me from getting out of here? Is
 there a risk of death attached to it? Is it permanently disfiguring? Lastly,
 is it excruciating?" If it doesn't fit one of those five categories, then it
 isn't important."

   She noted that "there's a phenomenal amount of focus on this for the women
 but not for the men," and said the abuse suffered by male POWs was much worse
 than what she endured.

   She mentioned that Maj.Jeffrey S. Tice of the Air Force, who had a tooth
 explode from its socket when he was tortured with jolts of electricity. The
 Pentagon has said other POWs were beaten with rubber hoses, boards, sticks,
 leather straps, and hammers, shocked with cattle prods, threatened with dis-
 memberment, deprived of food and coerced into making videotapes.

   When Cornum returned from the gulf last year after her week-long captivity,
 she said, "I was not raped; I was not tortured," and it was assumed that the
 female POWs probably were treated better than their male counterparts.

   But this month, W.Hays Parks, a senior lawyer and expert on POW matters in
 the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the Army, said, without elaborating
 that the two female prisoners were victims "indecent assault" that he defined
 as "intentional touching of private parts without consent."

    Since then, Specialist Coleman has denied publicly that she was mistreated.
 Pentagon officials, however, said she told military interviewers last year
 that she had been fondled. Coleman, whose name was Rathbun-Nealy at the time
 of her capture but who has since married, was unavailable for comment.

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