Three national organizations that advocate for the return of U.S. service members missing from past wars say they have been banned from biweekly Pentagon briefings as punishment for being critical of the government’s effort to reorganize MIA investigations, recoveries and identifications.
That reorganization swept up the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which was merged with two other government organizations in January to create the new Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
"By consolidating functions, we will resolve issues of duplication and inefficiency and build a stronger, more transparent and more responsive organization," former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said a year ago.
But that effort, which started with optimism, has since skidded into a ditch, according to some of the organizations most intimately involved with the MIA issue.
Four family advocacy groups, including two removed from the Pentagon teleconference updates, recently put out a statement to voice "our extreme displeasure and frustration at the current turn of events in the process to reorganize the POW/MIA accounting effort."
Group leaders — who themselves often have a relative missing in war — use words such as "hostile" and "antagonistic" to describe current Pentagon engagement on the issue.
Much of that contact involves Rear Adm. Michael Franken, named in January as interim director of the new DPAA, and Rene Bardorf, deputy assistant secretary of defense for community and public outreach, according to the advocacy groups.
The Defense Department’s efforts have resulted in the "exclusion of POW/MIA family groups from the process," with promises of transparency and a more "family-centric approach" falling by the wayside, the groups said in their statement.
"Instead, the current leadership of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has adopted a dictatorial attitude excluding our groups from a process in which we were once integrally involved," the family groups said. "The new attitude is ‘our way or the highway.’ DPAA leadership has made it clear they will tolerate no questioning or criticism of its efforts."
World War II Families for the Return of the Missing, Search and Recover Greatest Generation, Korea Cold War Families of the Missing, and the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen said they want Congress to investigate the "ongoing failures" of reorganization efforts.
The World War II group, National Alliance of Families and another organization, the Korean & Cold War POW/MIA Network, say they have been banned by reorganization officials from participating in the Pentagon’s twice-monthly updates.
The former Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, headquartered at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, was responsible for investigating, recovering and identifying missing American war dead. An "operational office" remains in Hawaii.
JPAC made 87 identifications in fiscal 2014, according to an internal report. Congress in 2009 required the Defense Department to have the capacity to identify 200 individuals per year beginning in 2015 — a goal officials previously said wouldn’t be met.
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser asked Franken and Bardorf by email about the "exclusion" accusations. In response, Army Lt. Col. Joe Sowers, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Defense Department has "implemented guidance that encourages productive, positive, and collaborative dialogue."
All viewpo.ints are welcome, "including opinions that are contrary to DOD positions and policy objectives, as well as expressions of perceived DOD deficiencies," Sowers said. But personal attacks "are grounds for removal from future engagements."
Bardorf told John Zimmerlee, executive director of the Korean & Cold War POW/MIA Network, in a Feb. 13 email that he was being removed from Defense Department meetings, noting he had used "combative, accusatory and expletive-filled language" in a conversation with another reorganization official.
Kenneth Breaux, a Texas resident with Search and Recover Greatest Generation, said it’s the reorganization officials who have an attitude problem.
During a Jan. 27 conference call, "the condescension and adversarial tone displayed by DPAA was over the top," Breaux said in an email to Franken.
Breaux said a complaint among DOD staffers is that MIA family members are "unprofessional" and "angry."
"Is it unprofessional to expect accountability? Is it unprofessional to expect the truth?" Breaux asked. "Decades-long periods of frustration engendered that sentiment, and if by unprofessional they mean ‘passionate,’ then they are confusing themselves."
The four family advocacy groups described in their recent statement a repeating pattern of starts and stops by the Pentagon to reform the MIA accounting mission, with little to show for it.
"Unfortunately, it appears the leadership of the new agency is unwilling to learn from past mistakes," the groups said. "This is not the first attempt by DOD to reorganize the POW/MIA accounting effort. It is not even the second, third or fourth over the past 30 years. We now see a familiar pattern of past arrogance repeated within the new DPAA."
Of 32 groups engaged regularly on the MIA issue, three "have been removed from the calls for violation of mutually agreed upon ground rules," Sowers said.
But a list of those groups showed 26 invitees are veteran or military service organizations, including the Armed Services YMCA and Military Child Education Coalition.
The remaining six are MIA family advocacy organizations, and that number is dwindling. Through August, September and October, about six MIA family advocacy groups were the only participants on the calls, members said. In January the Pentagon started adding far more, they said.
Breaux said that from listening to the roll call of participants from the Feb. 10 conference, it became clear that family groups, especially those actually represented by an MIA family, "are a vanishing species."
Breaux said "the message is clear," adding, "They (reorganization officials) will slowly weed out the family groups in favor of the large (veterans service organizations) and other entities."
"I am probably the last (World War II) representative left" on the calls, Breaux said.
Zimmerlee said reorganization officials want "somebody to praise their effort while they do absolutely nothing, and the family groups really want answers. We really just want answers."
Sowers, the Pentagon spokesman, said all of the participating organizations "are interested in this issue and bring added focus to it."
Lisa Phillips, president of World War II Families for the Return of the Missing, received an email Feb. 9 from DOD official Bardorf telling her the group was no longer being invited to the department’s engagements due to its lapsed 501(c)(3) nonprofit status.
Bardorf noted Phillips’ group was still promoting itself as a nonprofit.
"As a threshold matter, and to protect (DOD) leaders, we do not engage with organizations that are in non-compliance with the regulations that govern their status," Bardorf wrote.
Phillips said a past treasurer made a filing error and that she had refiled for nonprofit status. In the meantime, she said, she removed a 501(c)(3) reference from her website.
Phillips, whose uncle 2nd Lt. Joseph C. Rich died at the hands of the Japanese as a prisoner of war in World War II, said there are other individuals on the DOD conference calls without 501(c)(3) status.
"This is yet another smoke screen to shut out family voice. It was never mandated to provide such items," Phillips said, adding that "none of the men killed in action and their families need to be ‘qualified.’ They were qualified by their service and sacrifice."
Asked whether 501(c)(3) status is a requirement to be on the conference calls, Sowers, the Pentagon spokesman, said "the department is still evaluating if 501(c) 3 status will be a requirement for participation."
Zimmerlee said he was 2 when his father, a B-26 navigator also named John, went missing in North Korea in 1952.
He said he has experienced his share of government bungling in seeking information about his father, but he takes extra issue with what he sees as the new agency’s antagonism.
In a Feb. 12 email to Breaux discussing a flare-up between Zimmerlee and another reorganization official, Franken, interim director of the new DPAA, chafed about Zimmerlee’s "rants" and said he is "undeserving of my agency’s efforts. I am done with him."
He also stated, "I am happy with the progress and direction of this agency."
Zimmerlee offered a reminder that he is a family member whose father remains missing from the Korean War.
"If this new organization is attacking (MIA) family members — these are their clients," Zimmerlee said. "If you’ve been in business, you know that you may hate your clients, but you don’t bad-mouth them and you don’t attack them."
