Word: mias
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...main reasons for the MIA industry's persistence was the government's initially sluggish effort to get to the bottom of the mystery. For years, the Pentagon turned over the question of missing Americans to defense-intelligence agencies more accustomed to concealing secret information than to guiding bereaved relatives through a thicket of classified and often conflicting reports. This heavy-handed approach not only angered relatives of missing servicemen but also fueled the suspicion and frustration that the MIA industry exploits...
Sensitive to criticism that they once acted too slowly to resolve the MIA riddle, Pentagon investigators beginning with the Reagan Administration have taken a more aggressive stance, seeking quickly and publicly to investigate all reports of MIAs, even from the most dubious sources...
...Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs has begun its own effort to close the books -- or open them more fully -- on the MIA issue. During a 14- month inquiry that is expected to cost $1.9 million, the committee hopes to establish whether any American servicemen are alive in Southeast Asia, as well as make recommendations for ways in which the government can improve its process for resolving unsettled cases...
Even so, it is likely that the Senate investigation, like 10 prior official inquiries, will leave unanswered questions that the MIA industry can prey on. Illinois Republican Congressman Henry Hyde has suggested that given the cost of disproving counterfeit assertions about MIAs, anyone who makes one should be charged with defrauding the government. Perhaps. But the real victim is not the government. It is the MIA families, whose grief and uncertainty have been exploited...
Inside the MIA Mystery...