Posted on 03/25/2002 5:33:41 PM PST by kattracks
WASHINGTON, March 25 (Reuters) - The United States on Monday dismissed as propaganda an offer from its arch-enemy Iraq to probe the fate of an American pilot shot down on the first day of the Gulf War in 1991.
The mystery of the missing pilot has resurfaced amid U.S. threats to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and U.N. attempts to broker a return of arms inspectors to Iraq.
"I don't believe very much that the regime of Saddam Hussein puts out. They're masters of propaganda," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a news briefing.
An Iraqi foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday Baghdad was willing to receive a U.S. delegation to look into what happened to Lt. Commander Michael Scott Speicher, the only American pilot lost in the war whose body has never been recovered.
A U.S. military team searched for his remains in 1995 but their mission apparently ended inconclusively.
Rumsfeld said Iraq had made no offer to host a new U.S. delegation through formal channels and appeared to downplay recent reports Speicher might be alive.
The Washington Times newspaper said earlier this month U.S. intelligence agencies had obtained new information indicating Speicher was in captivity in Iraq.
Washington listed Speicher as the war's first casualty but took the unusual step in January last year of reclassifying him as "missing in action" after evidence emerged he might have survived the crash. Iraq said then that he was dead.
But defense officials said U.S. spy satellites detected more than three years after Speicher went missing what they called a "man-made symbol" at the crash site.
They said a flight suit that could have been Speicher's was found more recently on the surface of the desert.
"Needless to say, we have a great deal of interest in anything involving Commander Speicher from any source," Rumsfeld told reporters who raised the issue with him.
"But ... I have no new information about his status."
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher on Monday accused Iraq of refusing for three years to attend meetings of a humanitarian commission set up after the Gulf War to address such issues as Speicher's fate.
The United States has labeled Iraq part of "an axis of evil" along with North Korea and Iran and warned Baghdad it could become a target if it does not let U.N. weapons inspectors back in the country to verify it is not holding weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq, which has barred inspectors since they left in December 1988, says it has destroyed all such weapons.
© Reuters Limited.
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