JPAC leadership changes criticized

The Defense Department is running into further controversy as it seeks to reform the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, an organization that investigates, recovers and identifies missing American war dead.

Tom Holland, the longtime scientific director of JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory, in August told  families of missing Korean War service members and other individuals that he was out as of Jan. 1.

The Pentagon has announced it would be putting an armed forces medical examiner in charge of identifications.

But now more than 20 forensic anthropologists and other scientists are vigorously objecting to both moves.

Meanwhile, Johnie Webb, deputy to the commander for external relations and legislative affairs and another longtime JPAC staffer, is leading a new effort to address "ways in which the new agency will communicate with families and interest groups in the future," according to an email from Alisa Stack, who’s heading a Pentagon team tasked with the reorganization.

"He (Webb) will remain in Hawaii with a staff there," Stack said.

Both Holland and Webb have healthy shares of fans and critics.

One of Webb’s critics is the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen, which has called for a "major house-cleaning" of all senior and midlevel management at JPAC to correct a host of deficiencies detailed by the Pentagon and Congress.

The group says it’s already apparent that isn’t happening with Webb’s retention.

"It’s official — the reorganization of the POW/MIA accounting community is rapidly spiraling toward failure," the National Alliance said on its website. "The end product will be nothing more than a rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic."

Another critic is John Eakin, a Texas resident who filed suit against JPAC to get the organization to recover the remains of his cousin, Pvt. Arthur "Bud" Kelder, a World War II veteran who was buried as an "unknown" in the Philippines.

On his website, bataanmissing.com, Eakin also took issue with Webb’s new position, saying the "reorganization is a farce."

Eakin posted an email from Stack in which she said, "Johnie (Webb) is helping build the future." She also said she was thankful and glad to have him as a partner.

Asked for comment, JPAC directed questions to the Pentagon, which said previously it wouldn’t comment on reorganization personnel decisions that hadn’t been finalized.

The Pentagon also is spending $6.7 million for the services of The Clearing Inc. of Washington, D.C., to provide consultation on the reorganization of POW/MIA efforts.

The Defense Department’s efforts at reform follow more than a year’s worth of embarrassing and damning revelations in reports and testimony before Congress concerning failures in the effort to identify missing war dead.

The POW/MIA effort, conducted by a handful of agencies around the country, was fragmented, overlapped and hampered by inter agency disputes, a July 2013 Government Accountability Office report said.

"As of next year, Congress has mandated the department have the capacity to identify up to 200 sets of remains a year, but last year the (Defense Department) agencies only identified 70 sets," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in March in announcing an overhaul of the effort.

JPAC’s budget alone was about $95 million for fiscal 2014, the command previously said.

The Pentagon decided to establish a new agency that combines JPAC, the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office near Washington, D.C., and some functions of the Air Force’s Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory in Ohio.

Navy Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said that as part of the consolidation, the budget, communications and operations functions from each organization will combine into single functions before January.

The Pentagon, through the Personnel Accounting Consolidation Task Force (PACT), is in the process of designing the new agency, she said.

Over the next several months, the Defense Department will begin consolidating some activities to achieve initial operational capability in January, Derrick-Frost said. The new agency is projected to reach full operational capability by January 2016.

How the reorganization will affect a new $82 million JPAC headquarters and lab built at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam remains unclear. JPAC employs more than 500 military and civilian personnel.

A member of the Pentagon’s PACT group is expected to visit Hawaii this week. A "fact sheet" recently made available on the group’s efforts said a decision would be made by December on a headquarters location and an interim director would be designated.

In October or November, a medical examiner is expected to be in place to be the identification authority and oversee scientific operations for the new agency.

That leaves out Holland, the current scientific director.

News organization Pro-Publica criticized Holland for establishing restrictive policies seen as overly cautious that set an exceedingly slow pace at the lab.

The influential National League of POW/MIA Families, meanwhile, said there was an effort by lab leadership to take over the entire accounting process.

But 13 former JPAC lab anthropologists and other scientists lent their names to a letter to Hagel, the defense secretary, expressing "grave concerns" with the apparent decision to remove Holland.

"It appears to us as if the viewpoints of a small group of individuals have had undue influence on your decision," the letter stated.

The JPAC lab "is the gold standard of scientific rigor and excellence that all other laboratories that undertake the identification of skeletonized human remains strive to achieve," the group said.

Changes in leadership, especially the plan to place a medical examiner in charge of what is largely a forensic anthropology lab, "will certainly have serious consequences for the quality of the science."

The group said it had "no doubt" such moves would affect the confidence of future identifications.

Another group of eight JPAC forensic science external consultants, including noted forensic odontologist Dr. Lowell Levine, wrote their own letter to Hagel on July 30.

"Nothing is wrong with the science as currently practiced" at the lab, the group said.

"In fact, Dr. Holland is the reason that the laboratory has achieved international prominence," the letter continued.

Holland is one of only 72 board-certified forensic anthropologists in the United States, the letter said.

"To replace him with a medical examiner — a (medical doctor) whose science and experience evolves around fleshed bodies — is inconceivable," the group said.

The letter writers said a medical examiner’s role is to determine cause and manner of death, while management of an identification lab requires expertise in field recovery techniques based on archaeology and identification based upon fragmentary bones and dentition.

The group said the problem with the number of individuals identified annually does not rest with the lab.

"The scientific laboratory has nothing to do with the selection of recovery sites, yet inexplicably the laboratory is being blamed for the low number of cases identified," the consultants said.