Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 21, 1995 TAG: 9506210113
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder Newspapers
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
That decision means that no one will receive more than a reprimand for the disastrous incident that caused 26 deaths.
The Air Force originally had charged six officers in one of its worst friendly fire incidents ever. But Capt. Jim Wang, 29, the senior director aboard an airborne warning and control plane, or AWACS, was the only one court-martialed.
After just five hours of deliberation, a military jury of nine men and one woman found Wang innocent of charges related to the April 14, 1994, downing of two American helicopters by two American fighter jets over northern Iraq.
The victims' families expressed outrage at the outcome.
``My husband and I feel that this concludes for the Air Force their massive whitewash of this tragedy that cost the life of our son, Patrick, and 25 other people,'' said Maureen McKenna. Her son, Army Capt. Patrick M. McKenna, was a pilot of one of the helicopters.
While all the officers but Wang were spared court-martial, the Air Force pointed out Tuesday that most received reprimands and two other officers got ``admonishments'' in recent months.
The first fighter pilot was reprimanded but never charged. The second pilot was charged but later cleared after he altered his original account of the incident. He received a reprimand.
Wang's exoneration, which occurred at the end of a two-week trial, closed a bitter, 14-month odyssey that began in the no-fly zone over northern Iraq and ended in a tiny, makeshift second-floor courtroom at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City.
Wang had consistently said he was being made a scapegoat in the shootdown, which killed 15 Americans, five Kurds, three Turks, one Frenchman and two Britons. Some relatives of the victims also complained that officers much higher up the chain of command bore responsibility.
``I feel that I've still been dragged through the mud,'' Wang, an Air Force Academy graduate and the son of Taiwanese immigrants, said in a telephone interview. ``I've still been dirtied.''
Further, ``the fact that I was cleared raises even more questions about what could have gone wrong,'' he said. ``If the blame doesn't lie with the AWACS senior director, it must lie with'' other shortcomings that surfaced during the accident investigation.
Despite his exoneration, he said, he will continue to push for a congressional hearing into the matter.
``We owe it to the public and to the families of the victims,'' he said.
by CNB