AP IMPACT: MIA work 'acutely dysfunctional'

AP IMPACT: MIA work 'acutely dysfunctional'
Associated Press
ROBERT BURNS
51 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon's effort to account for tens of thousands of Americans missing in action from foreign wars is so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from "dysfunction to total failure," according to an internal study suppressed by military officials.

Largely beyond the public spotlight, the decades-old pursuit of bones and other MIA evidence is sluggish, often duplicative and subjected to too little scientific rigor, the report says.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the internal study after Freedom of Information Act requests for it by others were denied.

The report paints a picture of a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military-run group known as JPAC and headed by a two-star general, as woefully inept and even corrupt. The command is digging up too few clues on former battlefields, relying on inaccurate databases and engaging in expensive "boondoggles" in Europe, the study concludes.

In North Korea, the JPAC was snookered into digging up remains between 1996 and 2000 that the North Koreans apparently had taken out of storage and planted in former American fighting positions, the report said.

Washington paid the North Koreans hundreds of thousands of dollars to "support" these excavations.

The failings cited by the report reflect one aspect of a broader challenge to achieving a uniquely American mission — accounting for the estimated 73,661 service members still listed as missing from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
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