Of all the things we hope to soon see - for example, Saddam and his sons either in U.S. hands or dead - none is more important than the rescue from
an underground cell of Michael Scott Speicher, the Gulf War's first casualty.

Back in January of 1991, when Navy pilot Speicher was shot down in Iraq on the first day of the Gulf War, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and
then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Colin Powell immediately declared him "dead." No investigation; no search teams; no attempt to discover what
had happened to our pilot.

It was not until several years into the Clinton administration that more evidence came to light. Indeed, it looked as if Speicher had survived the
shootdown - and had been driven in a truck to Baghdad. A steady stream of Iraqi defectors subsequently reported the same thing: A U.S. pilot -
presumably Speicher - was being kept in an underground prison complex at Salman Pak under the personal control of Saddam's elder son, Uday. (This is
the same suburban Baghdad location where hijackers have been trained in a jet easily visible to satellites passing overhead.)

Only this past summer did the Bush administration finally acknowledge the likelihood that Michael Scott Speicher may very well still be alive. Now
comes the key question: Will he still be alive after we take down the Saddam Hussein government? What will the butcher and his two butcher sons
do to poor Speicher? Will they try to use him as leverage to gain their own freedom? Or will they kill him to avoid yet another certain 'war crimes'
trial? Will we prosecute those who have been holding him all this time?

Let us pray that we soon see the following TV scene: a group of Delta Force troops emerging from some underground facility with a living Michael Scott
Speicher. When - and if - that wonderful day comes, then another series of questions will loom: How could we ever have left him there in the first
place?

Why was no effort made the day he was shot down to rescue him? Why were Cheney and Powell so quickly willing to write Speicher off? If indeed
Speicher has been held alive against his will for 12 years, what exactly has our intelligence community known about it?

If they say that they did not know, then we need to find out exactly why they didn't know. What do we spend over $60 billion a year on intelligence
gathering for? And then comes an even bigger question: If Speicher has been alive all this time, what of the U.S. POWs from the Vietnam War? What has
happened to them? Has the same shoddy disregard for their fates also corrupted the truth about their survival?

A lot rests on the next few days.