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Message Subject BREAKING>> Captain Michael Scott Speicher who was shot down in '91 during the Gulf War, body remains found!!!!
Poster Handle Anonymous Coward
Post Content
she thought he was dead and tried to move on, which is what most young widows find sensible to do...it's not like they re-married after 18 days, it was a year and a half for goodness' sake. why would you judge her, her grieving process, and how she chooses to go on with her life?


I don't care what you say. Read the link. They're dirtbags.

The "best friend" (glad I don't have one like that) had Speicher's two children take HIS last name. Talk about 'moving in'.....so they're all Speicher-Harris's.

As far as waiting 18 mos to marry, don't kid yourself. They were prolly gf/bf long before 'tying the knot'.




When Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Speicher’s FA/18 Hornet vanished from the radar screens over Iraq in the 1991 Gulf war, everyone — including his family — accepted that he had been killed by a ground-to-air missile.

His widow, Joanne, was left to comfort their two young children. She in turn was consoled by his best friend and fellow navy pilot, Buddy Harris. They married 18 months later and had two children of their own.

Then evidence began to emerge that Speicher may have survived and become a prisoner of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Throughout the build-up to last year’s war and in the months after, Harris flew to the Pentagon for secret briefings on the search for Speicher, never knowing whether the friend whose place he had taken as husband and father would return to reclaim it.

The Sunday Times has obtained details of the search and has interviewed witnesses who claim Speicher did indeed survive. They say the pilot was taken to a house near the spot where his jet crashed in the desert west of Baghdad and then handed over to Saddam’s security police.

A team of American experts has scoured prisons in and around the Iraqi capital. It discovered Speicher’s initials on a cell wall and documents indicating that at one stage he was injured. But it has heard conflicting accounts about his ultimate fate.

The Americans were told by one source that he had been executed years ago; by another that he was still being held prisoner by one of Saddam’s most feared lieutenants after the Washington-led invasion.

In recent days the Pentagon has indicated that a lack of any conclusive evidence has convinced officials that Speicher is dead. His family nevertheless refuses to give up hope.

They claim he was abandoned in 1991 when Dick Cheney, then defence secretary and now vice-president, announced his death, and is being abandoned again because to admit mistakes would be difficult in the run-up to the presidential election. Harris, who married Speicher’s widow only to be told that he might not be dead after all, says he has hoped all along that his friend would return home safely, whatever the impact on his family.

“We will throw a huge welcome home party,” he said. “Then we will deal with whatever comes next in an adult and private manner.”

Harris, 44, added: “I want to be able to look him in the eye and say, ‘This is what I did, this is why I did it’. And I can’t imagine him being displeased.”

When Speicher’s aircraft vanished he left behind Joanne, his college sweetheart, Megan, three, and one-year-old Michael.

“I knew Joanne before she and Scott got married,” Harris said. “She was like a sister. We had a lot of fun together. We were all pretty close. Scott was the leader of his class, a fun-loving, nice guy, always with a smile on his face. We had that connection between us.”

Speicher became a national hero when, in May 1991, a memorial stone was erected in Arlington national cemetery in Washington.

It was less than a year after marrying Joanne that Harris, who was working at the Pentagon, heard that wreckage from the jet had been found intact. He decided to keep the news from his wife, uncertain how it would affect their marriage.

The Pentagon considered mounting a special forces operation to rescue Speicher if he could be located.
“I felt it was a mission we had to perform because we never leave one of our own out there without hope,” said Tim Connolly, assistant deputy secretary of special operations at the time.

American officials approached the International Committee of the Red Cross, which obtained permission to search the crash site. It found the cockpit canopy and a flight suit with the legs cut open. There were no signs of blood.

Harris knew he had to tell Joanne. “Up to that point, there was just no sense in making her more miserable over possibilities,” he said.

She took it well, he explained, but added: “It wasn’t a happy environment for a while. I mean, you can just imagine trying to give that kind of information to your wife.”

Stories began to trickle in from Iraqi defectors about an American pilot being held in Iraq. Then in 1998 an Iranian pilot, Hossein Lashgari, was released after being held for 17 years by the Iraqis. Iran had long given him up for dead.

By this time Congress had started asking questions about Speicher. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate select committee on intelligence, was given a private briefing and went public with his outrage.

“We have quite a few people that dropped the ball,” he admitted. “Quite frankly, I think some people ought to be court martialed.”

In 2001 Richard Danzig, the navy secretary, changed Speicher’s status from killed in action to missing in action, the first formal acknowledgment that he might have survived. He was promoted to captain and salary payments to his family resumed.

In 2002 the navy reclassified him as missing in action, captured. In the run-up to last year’s invasion, he was declared a prisoner of war.

“I think it is very likely that he could be alive,” Roberts said. “And that makes you stop and think that for 12 years, here is a young man who has gone to bed every night or awakened every morning wondering, ‘When is my country going to come get me?’ ”

Cindy Laquidara, the Speichers’ lawyer, spoke to an Iraqi defector who reported seeing a captive American pilot. At least two other defectors told US intelligence they were aware of Speicher’s existence. A small team attached to the US Marines who entered Baghdad 18 months ago was assigned to find him.

For two days six experts concentrated the search on Hakimiyah prison, where they discovered the initials “MSS” scratched into a cell wall. They also found documents indicating he had been hurt in captivity and had been moved between 18 locations around the country.

There were unverified reports that Speicher had been executed by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam’s closest aides. A body, said to have 30 bullet holes, was supposedly buried in one of two possible locations, although extensive searches failed to uncover it.

However, it was also claimed that General Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as “Chemical Ali”, kept Speicher with him following the war. Al-Majid was captured but has refused to talk about Speicher.

The Iraq Survey Group looking for weapons of mass destruction also contained a team of seven intelligence experts known as Task Force Speicher whose sole job was to hunt for him.

A report by the group revealed that a defector from Saddam’s Special Security Organisation had provided names of witnesses who had seen or known of Speicher in captivity.

In Washington, another 15 experts from the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency were dedicated to finding him. A search team that tried to reach the crash site two months after the fall of Baghdad was foiled by attacks from insurgents.

However, several witnesses told The Sunday Times they remembered Speicher’s jet. Mashel Shehan al-Asafe, 61, a sheep merchant, said: “Two shepherds who were close to the place where the aircraft crashed helped him. They brought him to my house and I gave him water and some food.

“When we spoke to him it was with our hands, because we could not understand his words. I remember his name and it was Speicher, as you say.”

Speicher was taken by car to the nearest large town of Hit, west of Ramadi, where he was handed to police. Al-Asafe added: “He was injured and he was treated by a medical doctor in Ramadi.”

All the developments in the official hunt have been disclosed to Harris at his Pentagon briefings. Some information is difficult to share with Joanne and the children, he said.

“There are moments when we think we’re on the verge of bringing Scott home,” he explained. “But because it is an emotional rollercoaster and much of it doesn’t pan out, I sit and absorb it all. If I passed it all on to the family we would all be basket cases.”

Harris believes there is no doubt Speicher was in captivity. “I’ve spoken with the president several times about this and I’ve been assured by him he will never give up looking for Scott. He will make sure this is resolved and he has given me his word and I’m going to hold him to that.”

Friends of Joanne say she has dealt with the news of her husband by “putting it all into a compartment that she refuses to open."

“She has moved on and at times says she doesn’t want to look back,” said a close friend. “It makes her sound uncaring and she’s not but she’s had to move on with her life.”

Harris, on the other hand, remains preoccupied with the search. “I gotta find out the truth,” he said. “This is important, the most important thing in my life."
[link to www.arlingtoncemetery.net]

Well seeing as how much of the above turned out to be wrong, your baseless speculations and mis-characterizations make you quite the dirtbag.
 Quoting: Normal Is Subjective


NO, YOU are the dirtbag, plus you can't read.

BTW, his 'widow' received Speicher's back pay retroactively when his status was changed to MIA. On top of that, her second hubby has a 6 figure salary at the Pentagon.

Think that's enough money for her, dirtbag? Do ya?

Nope. She's suing the radio manufacturer stating that her dead husband's radio malfunctioned when his plane crashed.

Too bad your best friend doesn't start a 'relationship' with your spouse the minute you go missing.

But then, a dirtbag like you would need a friend and a spouse.

GFY.
 
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