You Can Make A Difference. E-Mail Your Senator To Keep Pow/Mia Bill From Losing Its' Bite!!
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Please Copy Letter You Send To Your Senator & Send To:
Dear Senator,
During the last Congress, the Senate passed the Missing Service
Personnel Act.
Specifically, this bill created a framework of accountability within
the Department of Defense to establish the status and location of
missing Armed Forces personnel.
Until this legislation was introduced in 1995, the procedures for handling missing service personnel had remained unchanged for more than 50 years. This legislation improved procedures for reviewing POW/MIA cases and protected the missing service member from being declared dead solely based on the passage of time.
Gathering 47 co-sponsors in the Senate and achieving unanimous passage in the House, the bill became law in February 1996. However, an amendment to the 1997 Defense Authorization Conference Report repealed its strongest provisions. The efforts to repeal the most important provisions of this bill was led by none other than Senator John McCain, himself a former POW.
Needless to say, Senator McCain and I are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to accountability of, what I consider, the abandoned POWs and MIAs of the Vietnam War.
Why the senator maintains his present position, when recently declassified information as well as articles by many well known authors and investigative reporters, leave no doubt that men were abandoned, is a complete mystery to me and the families of MIA/POWs.
Senate 755 asks the Department of Defense only to make the best possible effort to recover and return our missing personnel. It is the least we, as a nation, owe our soldiers, past and present, who endanger their lives in defense of our country. It is the very least we owe the families who have and will endure the pain and uncertainty of a loved one left unaccounted for in a time of war.
The mood in Washington and the country, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, seems to be peace and prosperity at any cost. Although this may be a noble attitude to take, I sincerely hope and pray that no one in Congress is stupid enough to think that wars are passe. We will have more conflicts and very possibly wars. It is not fair to ask the men and women who will fight these wars to lay their lives on the line knowing that the same thing could happen to them that happened to the last known alive of the Vietnam war--ABANDONED.
It would be utterly disgraceful to ask the mothers, fathers, wives,
husbands, sons and daughters of the next generation of Missing in
Action and Prisoners of War to endure the same treatment that the
families of the MIA/POWs endure to this day: not knowing what happened
because of classification and various CYA actions.
