The Use and Abuse of Scott Speicher

Posted on June 15, 2004 in Occupation of Iraq Reading

It’s politics Tuesday!

There’s a story going around that one Scott Speicher, a Navy pilot last seen when a missile hit his F/A-18 Hornet fighter, is still alive and being held in Iraq. The primary piece of evidence is that Speicher’s plane, which crashed in the Iraqi desert on th first night of Operation Desert Storm, contained no body when investigators from the Defense Department and the International Red Cross reached the site. The plane, deemed to have disintegrated when a missile hit it, was found partially intact. An empty flight suit was found nearby.

The campaign to free Scott Speicher strikes me as magical thinking in the spirit of the WMDs that repeated American searches have failed to find. The lack of a body inspires his supporters to believe that Speicher is out there somewhere, roving the Iraqi desert like a sandblasted dervish or living in a foul, as yet undiscovered Iraqi prison — perhaps a basement of Abu Ghraib that the U.S. Army has yet to discover.

What the people who bang the pot for the theory don’t tell you is that other pilots saw Speicher’s plane explode. No one saw him eject. No one saw a parachute. No one heard an emergency beacon. We are asked to believe that Speicher survived 700 degrees of liquid fire. A Pentagon source said “Nothing the team found indicates that the pilot survived the crash.”

Yet there are those who proclaim that he lives. Never mind that Saddam Hussein, when captured last December, continued to affirm that there were no American pilots still loitering after the First Gulf War. We know how he lied about WMDs after all. Who can trust him to tell the truth? Never mind that an internal review commissioned by Saddam Hussein himself regarding the fate of American pilots in Iraq described Speicher’s fate as “Unknown, no information available on the fate of the pilot.” What matters is that we don’t have a body. For Scott Speicher, hero of the First Gulf War, the laws of physics must have been suspended. He must be alive and in the hands of Al Qaeda or the Iraqi resistance.

In the year 2002, the Bush Administration — either in an act of capitulation to popular pressure or of calculated prevarication in support of the pending Second Gulf War — reclassified Speicher as a POW. They based their evidence on the testimony of a mysterious informer who turned out to be a waiter and a compulsive liar. When investigators set the informer face to face with the captured head of the Iraqi Special Security Organization, his story crumbled. Word is that the Pentagon will issue a final report declaring once and for all that Speicher is dead.

Provided, of course, that election year politics does not lead to a squashing of the facts.

In the June 2004 issue of Harper’s, Scott Ritter recounted the exploitation of the Speicher story by sensation-seeking journalists and media jingoists:

Alongside arguments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Scott Speicher offered Americans a human and less abstract rationale for war. In the six months leading to war, there were at least 135 news stories about Speicher, speculating about his fate and the character of those who would keep him prisoner. In March 2002 the Washington Times ran a front-page article on Speicher for five consecutive days. One was titled “Bush denounces ‘heartless’ Saddam: He suspects Navy pilot is live captive,” and another cited an informant inside Iraq who “stated that the pilot was being kept in isolation.” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer called Speicher’s situation “shocking,” and on MSNBC a former Pentagon official discussed the likelihood that the pilot was being tortured. When asked about the hypothetical treatment of the Navy pilot, President Bush said “It reminds me once again about the nature of Saddam Hussein.” In this manner, Speicher’s case became an argument for the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Only a monster and a war criminal would hold a prisoner incommunicado for eleven years; and, so the syllogism went, surely such a monster and war criminal would acquire and deploy unconventional weapons. (p. 75).

The friends and relatives of Scott Speicher remain unable to accept that what the other pilots saw was unsurvivable. Scott Speicher, burnt to a crisp and perhaps buried by a passing Beduoin, stands as yet another cruel use of human emotions to justify an evil war, another body hung from the gibbet of popular opinion for the express purpose of expending the U.S. arsenal for the profit of the arms dealers and obtaining booty from a savaged nation. I can understand how friends and loved ones need a body to explain the open hole in their network of relationships. I can understand the difficulty of coming to terms with any death. What I cannot fathom is how anyone would spin a lie just to wage war. But then, only a monster and a war criminal would stoop so low and we know for a fact that that monster does have unconventional weapons at his disposal.

Military families stricken by wage cuts, housing shortages, and poor medical care should heed the lesson of Scott Speicher: your emotions can be used against you. And because of this, more soldiers and pilots have died in Iraq for a war waged for the wholly partisan purpose of keeping a usurper in power.