As Trump brings home war dead, families blast US agency

Bloomberg

North Korea’s return of about 55 American war dead marks a hopeful milestone in their almost seven-decade journey home. But it could be years before they’re reunited with their families, and some families blame the US government agency charged with identifying them.
The remains, which US Vice President Mike Pence was expected to formally accept on Wednesday in a ceremony in Honolulu, will join hundreds of fallen service members awaiting identification by investigators at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Then begins the painstaking process of trying to match the contents of each casket with a name from the list of 5,300 Americans who never returned from North Korea after the 1950-53 conflict.
The investigations can take years, in part because of the chaos of war, the passage of time and possible improper handling while in North Korean custody. The families of missing soldiers also argue that the wait could be extended because of the methods used by the body responsible for numbering the missing, US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).

‘Lousy Job’
“Their mission statement is the fully-as-possible accounting of our missing service men, but quite frankly I think they do a very lousy job,” said John Zimmerlee, who’s father, Air Force Captain John Henry Zimmerlee, went missing during the Korean War. He said families of some missing troops would hand Pence a letter seeking the agency’s overhaul and the use of independent laboratories to “test remains at a much faster rate.”
The DPAA didn’t respond to emailed and telephoned requests for comment.
The debate underscores the challenges of resolving so many issues stemming from the US’s generations-long dispute with North Korea. While Kim Jong-un’s decision to release 55 sets of remains on Friday marked the first tangible outcome from his historic summit in Singapore last month, achieving closure for families may prove elusive.
The remains represent about one-quarter of those the Defense Department believes are being held by North Korea and about 1 percent of those lost while fighting in the country. Moreover, they’ll likely join more than 850 others still unidentified by the DPAA.

Compare Bones
To confirm their identities, the DPAA mostly uses an identification process in which they compare bones with dental records and circumstantial evidence, such as dog tags, uniform remnants and grave locations to narrow the list of possible matching names. The agency then attempts to verify the results using a database of mitochondrial, or maternal, DNA samples acquired from the families of missing service members. Nuclear DNA is also used in some identifications.
By this process, the DPAA, which has an annual budget of $131 million, identified 201 formerly missing people last year, including 42 from the Korean War.
Naming the bodies recovered from North Korea could be particularly challenging if they’re mixed with other remains or unrelated items picked up while excavating grave sites.
The shipment of remains released last week included one dog tag and no other information that could aid identification, the Associated Press reported, citing a US defense official.

Advanced Processes
Families, however, contend that the DPAA has been too slow to adopt more advanced nuclear DNA-led processes developed in places like the mass graves of Bosnia and the wreckage of the World Trade Center. In those techniques, samples are taken from recovered bones at the start of the process and cross-referenced against DNA databases to find a match.
Edwin Huffine, a former researcher at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory who spent five years identifying genocide victims in Bosnia, said that the process greatly accelerated efforts to name some 4,000 remains. Investigators increased their identification rate to as many 400 a month after naming only seven in the first three years.