Steve Israel: “we recently celebrated the 51st anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, and among those that we honored were the…”

“we recently celebrated the 51st anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, and among those that we honored were the 6,000 soldiers in that war who were designated as Missing In Action. The cooling of tensions on the Korean Peninsula have allowed an unprecedented opportunity for the repatriation of the remains of those lost servicemen. At the same time, recent advances in DNA technology have made it possible to identify those remains once a DNA sample is obtained from a living descendent. An organization called the Korean War Project has set up an Internet-based initiative called Finding the Families to locate the 6,000 families of servicemen missing in action from the Korean War. I have placed a link on my government Web site to their homepage so that the citizens of my district can search the directory of missing soldiers from their area in an attempt to find a living descendant who can provide a DNA sampling. I urge my colleagues to provide matching support in tracking down those missing families by providing similar links on their own Web sites, in addition to generating more public awareness of this important issue. Mr. Speaker, our missing heroes deserve more than just our passive pledge not to forget, they deserve our active support. Supporting the Finding Families program is a way to do just that.”