Group justified by report on Soviet POWs

[Rose Siding]

Leaders of a group that long has sought the return of U.S. POWs and MIAs say they feel vindicated by a new Pentagon report that concludes that many Americans, including U.S. servicemen, were imprisoned in the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The National Alliance of Families (NAF) hailed the report -- "The Gulag Study," which was compiled by the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office's Joint Commission Support Directorate (JCSD) -- as the "definitive work confirming that prisoners of war" from World War II and the Korean conflict "were transferred to the former Soviet Union" and held captive in labor camps, primarily in Siberia.

"Volumes of documentation unearthed over the last 50 years by family members and researchers convinced us long ago" that this was the case, the alliance said.

But NAF said that for years, "official Pentagon policy dismissed not only our conclusions, but the conclusions of their own investigators," such as the Pentagon's 1993 report "The Transfer of U.S. Korean War POWs to the Soviet Union.".......

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050221-115000-8701r.htm

Interestingly timed, this release of a rpt that reverses official Pentagon policy.