For the individual who wanted to know why Clinton is not a true Rhodes
Scholar the following shoud provide some enlightenment.
This Congressman had Clinton's number long ago, and this was read into
the record.
How to take over a country? First you set aside certain individuals as
the "chosen ones" to assist in the take over for the goal first, is get
the money from the Treasury and to date, see how same was managed and it
started in 1913.....today congress protects their pensions, but these
pigs behind the scenario leave nothing for Social Security do
they.....no they want this money for "investment" purposes.
Keep in mind Clinton's offer of a job which would pay him $8,000,000,000
a year as "investment counselor" but of course, in what the natural
reserves in this country - will he be on Soros and Rich who is just a
front man for the mob, on his payroll for this is Rich's specialty from
attempting to destroy labor unions to well, the charge against him was
engaging in organized crime an racketeering, and aiding and abetting the
enemy was it? And what about that "burlap" bag business his father got
his start and made big bucks in Korea.
Strange this pilot I knew fighting in the Viet Nam War - this man in
Columbus, oh so rich with connections - wanted him to do a big of
smuggling and the source why it was KOREA. Well this bastard, Macy
Bloch, who still thrives never touched by the law like his little front
man who had such respectable background - this creep found that one
honest man for whih Diogenese looked at high noon in bright son....but
the police never touched, old Macy.
So lots of body bags lying around and this story where Clinton seems to
have had the immunity to get away with murder - and sodomy and rape
which evidently is of little consequence that such a man should be in
our Oval Office with a prostitute - someday they might give Monica a
medal for letting this man expose himself for what he was from the
beginning....a liar, rapist, sodomist, with long body bag count.
Saba
A TRULY TRAGIC DAY IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Congressman Robert K. Dornan (R-CA)
U.S. House of Representatives July 10, 1995
Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow may be a truly tragic day in
American history, because a person who avoided serving his
country three times during the bloodiest subaction of the whole cold
war, the conflict that raged on for a decade in Indochina, a person who
avoided the draft when he graduated from Georgetown, speaking about
Mr. Clinton, who avoided service in his first year as a graduate student
at Oxford, when all graduate deferments were taken away and then
who, after he actually had a call-up notice, a report date to join the
U.S. Army as a buck private soldier and an induction date of 29,
excuse me, 28 July 1969, used political pressure, the liberal Republican
Governor's office in Arkansas, Winthrop Rockefeller, with the draft
board, the head of the draft board, and two or three members of the
draft board, personal meetings, 2 hours each, to beg them to allow him
to join after the fact the ROTC at the University of Arkansas; then
he had a U.S. Senator, Senator Fulbright of Arkansas, phone in to the
head of the ROTC.
And then I learned at a dinner with the distinguished American,
Distinguished Service Cross holder of the second medal down from the
Medal of Honor, who had commanded ROTC units, whole sections of the
country, commanded ROTC for many colleges, Col. Eugene Holmes, a
Bataan death march survivor, he told me when I had dinner with
him and his wife, Irene, down in Fayetteville, AR, last February, that
Clinton was the only student in more than a decade, as a commander
and professor of military science, the only student who ever showed up
at his house.
He said he did not let him in, but for 2 hours in the front yard,
backyard, back and fourth 23-year-old Bill Clinton begged Colonel Holmes
to let him into the ROTC as a 2-year postgraduate student if he
entered law school to go back on a special 2-year crash course with
the undergraduates at the University of Arkansas and get in the ROTC so
he could avoid the draft, and Colonel Holmes told me, against his
better judgment, with more political pressure than he had ever
thought possible, Senators, Governors, draft board members, Buick
dealerships, all putting the pressure on him, he signed up a man who
graduated from college over 1 year and 2 months before into the
special program and, of course, Clinton never spent a day in the ROTC
at Arkansas.
But now here he is, the Commander in Chief, and if all the
stories are true, tomorrow at noon he is going to normalize
relations, give diplomatic recognition honors and recognition to the
war criminals, the Communist leaders, in Hanoi who killed better men
than he, probably three high school students from the Hot Springs area
of Arkansas went into the service to meet those three draft calls in
June 1968, the spring of 1969, and then that summer of 1969 when
someone had to fill the Clinton slot, late July 1969, and then Clinton
went off to Moscow a few weeks later.
Colonel Holmes had not even known this. He went through Oslo,
Stockholm, Helsinki, Leningrad, took the train overnight to Moscow
and was put up, when he claimed he had no money, at the best hotel
in town on January 1, 1970, because there was so- called peace
banquet for Hanoi in the National Hotel on the night of January 2, 1970.
A former Member of the other body who had a rather distinguished career
for 12 years, he was in his last year, had chosen not to run again, who
did, I think, a very dishonorable thing. Senator Eugene McCarthy was a
guest of honor at the peace banquet. He was one of the 23-year-old
student organizers from England who had conducted teach-ins at the
London School of Economics, where he called Ho Chi Minh the George
Washington of his country and the United States the interventionist
imperialist power, the evil force in Vietnam, suppressing a revolution,
and had, of course, led demonstrations at Grosvenor Square on
November 15 and a warm-up on October 15, 1969.
By the way, Mr. Speaker, that November 15 demonstrates that
Clinton was the leader of, in London, was termed the fall
offensive by the Communists in Hanoi. There were sympathetic
demonstrations in Paris, in Stockholm, London, New York, of
course, here in Washington, DC, people trashing the streets, Miami,
I believe, I know for sure San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, all
coordinated by people working to give comfort to the communists in Hanoi
who prevailed after 10 long years of struggle against a superpower, the
United States, and the superpower on the other side, the Soviet
Union, had more staying power, and the oppressive forces of communism
won.
Two years after we had pulled out of our military effort, we left so
precipitously in such a disgraceful way that our embassy had open file
drawers with the files of all the people who had worked with us up
and down that beautiful little country of South Vietnam, and the
Vietnamese years later wrote, General Giap, wrote in his book,
that they just came in picked up papers off the floor, from the file
cabinets, put them on clipboards, went out and executed 68,000
people. General Giap, who was hugging Senator Harkin on July 4, General
Giap is a war criminal. General Giap was on the politburo.
General Giap signed off on the execution of 68,000 people. In some
cases, their only crime was to be a secretary, a man or a woman typing
on an American typewriter at one of our multiple military bases up
and down from the DMZ to the Mekong Delta.
Unbelievable. Sixty-eight thousand people killed, but even that
horrendous figure, 10,000 more than our men and 8 women whose names
are on the Vietnam Memorial, that figure is dwarfed by the 700,000 to
800,000 people who drowned on the South China Sea trying to escape
from communism.
My oldest daughter worked in the camps at Snap Nikam, Nam Aret, Aryana
Pretit, and the people that survived the high seas, the South China
Sea, the sharks, dehydration, drownings, they would carve little
plaques. I have two of them in my den at home.
It says, `liberty or death on the high seas.´ Sounds like Patrick
Henry, somebody they never heard of. Another one said, `Some of us are
here in the camps. The rest are with God.'
Then what about the 1 million, 2 million, or as one of my
interns, Vuth, told me the other night, tears running down his face,
`Maybe 3 million of my people died, Congressman. And is Mr. Clinton
going to normalize relations with the war criminals who did this?' He
was speaking of the killing fields of Cambodia.
What a horror that took place. Very few speeches, if any, in this well
or on the Senate floor by those who are taking the lead now with
normalization with the war criminals in Hanoi; I did NBC's `Meet the
Press´ yesterday, and a friend of mine who is on the other side of
this issue, and to try and put this balance, I read the stories of
his horrendous torture in this book, `POW,´ the definitive book that
came out in 1976, the month that I won my first election to Congress,
November of 1976. This book came out, and the torture stories in here,
the war crimes in here just stagger your imagination.
It is medieval. It is Nazi Germany at Auschwitz. It is poor Bosnia a few
years ago with the ethnic cleansing. It is just horrible.
And I read the story of how this now U.S. Senator was tortured, how
he would not accept parole, how when his father was moved from being
the commander of the Navy in NATO in Europe to being commander in
chief of all of our Pacific forces, and the head, the combat commander,
of the bombing operation, how they kept offering this young Navy
attack pilot early release to go home to get his terrible wounds taken
care of, and it gave me renewed respect for him.
But I am still boggled at his appearance on `Meet the Press´
where, if I had had the time, I could have refuted every single
solitary thing he said.
The Vietnamese have not given a full accounting of our missing-
in-action. Last year the byword with those who are sympathetic to the
Communist war criminals in Hanoi, the byword was that they were
giving us unprecedented cooperation. That simply was not so.
Last year and early this year the word was superb cooperation. My friend
from the other body said it was substantial. It is not. He said that on
`Meet the Press´ yesterday.
And the Washington Post a week ago today ran an editorial so that a
congressional delegation of all liberals without a single
Republican Member or staffer on this minority trip, at taxpayer
expense with one of the luxurious airplanes out of the 89th
Squadron at Andrews; it has become a disgrace, Air Force officers
carrying the bags of people who avoided service and the cost when there
are commercial flights available to go to even Hanoi, and we will
have legislation on that this year, I can promise the taxpayers that,
this delegation in Hanoi, one of the Senators holds up last
Monday's Washington Post with a kind of a coordinated editorial,
and it said, how is this for reaching for words, `prodigious
diligence, prodigious diligence, in moving toward an accounting of our
missing-in-action.'
What an absolute distortion of the truth.
Now, I have before me a letter that our Speaker,
Mr. Gingrich, is presenting to the Commander in Chief as we speak,
Mr. Speaker. They are having dinner tonight, Newt Gingrich and William
Jefferson Blythe Clinton, and Newt is going to tell him it is going
to be a rough road in this Congress, in this House, and in the U.S.
Senate, to try and find the money under our foreign affairs bills to
fund any normalization or set up an embassy in Hanoi.
I think this House is going to overwhelmingly vote to kill any money
under the appropriations bills process. We all know the language, Mr.
Speaker, `No money under this bill shall be expended to do
such and such.' A negative amendment is always ruled in order, and I
think the President is in for a big surprise.
Mr. Clinton is in for a surprise, because the statistics that I
gave on `Meet the Press´ that my friend from the Senate said he did
not buy are absolutely correct.
I said, first of all, the families who have suffered long over these
years, they have suffered under an anti-Geneva Convention
war crime where the communist victors in Hanoi have
psychologically tortured the family members, the children who have
grown from little toddlers and babies up into their late 20's,
30's, and some in their 40's, the teenagers, the parents who are now
aging into their 70's and some into their 80's, many of them passing
on to go to
Heaven, the widows, some who have married and have never forgotten that
first young hero of their early life, others who have never ever
found a replacement for their heroic young knight of the sky or that
handsome young special operations sergeant special forces, young
enlisted man, young grunt, young marine up and down Vietnam
fighting for freedom, fighting to contain communism, they have never
found a match for that young hero of their early life. All of
these people have been manipulated, because the communists in Hanoi
have slowly, like an ugly time capsule, released boxes of our
heroes' remains.
Now, I can remember in 1979 having before our International
Relations Committee a mortician from Vietnam who passed multiple
polygraph lie detector tests; I recommended he even take truth serum.
He was willing to do that. I do not know if he did. He was of Chinese
heritage because Vietnam, after the war, in a vicious human rights
crusade of violence, threw out all of the Vietnamese of Chinese
heritage, and that is why he, as a top doctor, a mortician, was
thrown out of the country, but he had prepared for storage in a big
warehouse near Hanoi over 400 sets of American remains.
This has been admitted to me by the highest people in the Reagan
administration and by President Reagan himself, who believed this,
that they had 400 boxes of our heroes' remains. President Bush
believed this. I discussed it at length with him. I have discussed it
with three directors of the CIA. They all believed it.
Defense Intelligence, back to the late Eugene Tye, my good friend from
Loyola University, he also believed it. I have never met anybody in
the entire intelligence community, and I am on my seventh year in the
Intelligence Select Committee, I have never met anybody who did not
believe this mortician's story.
And at the central investigative laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base
in Hawaii, which I have visited about eight times over the years, they
said, Yes, we have gotten back selectively over the
last 10 years, about 160 remains that we can tell were
warehoused, even if they were dug up out of the ground a year or two
after a crash, they were still processed.
Some of these were people who obviously died in captivity. The light
color of the bones and their condition and the chemical substances on
the bones, we know they were prepared for storage. And 160 from over
400 brings us roughly a number of over 260.
I said at a press conference on the grassy triangle in front of this
Capitol that it is an act of treachery to normalize relations
without demanding the 260 remaining boxes of remains. I predicted that
they will be thrown into the Red River and flushed out into the Tonkin
Gulf, or worse, thrown in a pit all of these heroes' bones, knights
of the sky, these young aviators, these special forces officers and
sergeants. Their bones will be thrown in a mass grave, covered with
lime, lye, and they will be forgotten, except to God, in that mass
atrocity grave.
If are there any Americans still alive, particularly in Laos, which
I have visited four times. I have been to Vietnam 10 times and Cambodia
three times. I have worked this issue for 30 years and 1 month
since my best friend, David Herdlicher, was shot down, May 18, 1965.
And I still wear his bracelet and this No. 1 Hmoung bracelet, H-
m-o-u-n-g, the French word was Montagnard, mountain people. Since I put
that on in Kontum in the central highlands in September 1968, it
has never been off my wrist since. I alternate POW bracelets. No,
this is not David Herdlicher's; this is a young sergeant from Hope,
AR. I wear that symbolically sometimes, James Holt, missing in South
Vietnam, September, excuse me, February 7, 1968, the beginning of the
Tet offensive.
The first week of the Tet offensive, that week, we lost 1,111
Americans killed in action.
That was the month that Robert Strange McNamara quit on leap year
day, so he would only have to remember it every 4 years; resigned 29,
February 1968.
It rained all over this big ceremony on the lawn in front of the river
entrance to the Pentagon.
They canceled the fly-by. How fitting that God saved four Air Force
pilots the ignominy of flying by, probably all of them Vietnam vets,
in tribute to a man who had betrayed the fighting men on the field.
Well, here is McNamara's book, Mr. Speaker.
That is how I spent part of my district work period; working my
way through this tragic book of evil revelations on how McNamara
never even believed in the cause in 1962 or 1963, when there were less
than 50 Americans killed in action. Not 58,000; less than 50. He did
not believe in what we were doing there.
And McNamara tells in this book what he did after that fly-by was
canceled and it rained all over this retirement ceremony. Where LBJ
rewarded him with 13 years as head of the World Bank, where he made
$250,000 a year without ever paying a nickel of taxes on it. That is
what a lot of U.N. jobs, and the job at World Bank, pays.
McNamara in his book says the next day, on March 1, he left for a month
of skiing at Aspen.
We had hundreds of people in prison in Hanoi. Twelve of them had been
beaten to death inside their prison cells. One man, Maj. Earl
Cobeal, beaten senseless and incoherent. Never got his sanity back and
died alone in some cell without any other American there to hold him
and nurture him as he died. We have gotten back his remains.
While he was being tortured by three Cubans imported by the good
graces of Castro to teach the Vietnamese how to torture with more
severity the way Castro was cutting up people and letting them rot,
stark naked, in black cells without a shred of light for up to 25 years.
He was showing the South Vietnamese that they had forgotten in the
Orient what the `death of a thousand knives´ was like, I guess.
And McNamara was skiing.
Imagine how many young men and women we had in hospitals from one end of
Vietnam to another, after the horror of that Tet offensive named after a
religious holiday that they decided to attack on, imagine how many
triple amputees, quadruple amputees. I visited one quadruple amputee at
a hospital in September of that year and I talked to some of the nurses
that said these are the cases that would just tear your heart out. How
many people had given their arms and legs during that Tet offensive?
I remember going in the big refrigerated morgue at Bien Hoa in that
year, 1968. And I said to this young corporal, first asking him how he
could work in a
place like this, and he said, `Mr. Reporter, I spent six months in
the bush shooting at Charlie and getting shot at. And when they
offered me a chance at the midpoint to work in this morgue, I took it
because I know I am going home. And I cry a lot in here looking at all
these men, many younger than I, who are on the way back to the United
States in green body bags.'
And I said, `What is in that huge bag over there?´ He said,
`That, sir, that bag is all the arms and legs cut off our men in the
hospitals around here and we treat it with respect. We are going to
take it out in a helicopter and bury their arms and legs at sea soon.'
I will never forget that story. Tears were running down my face in
this cool, refrigerated little corner of Bien Hoa Air Base in an
extremely hot summer day in 1986. Thinking about this particular
corner of the world's struggle against communism. Again, to quote
Kennedy, a `twilight struggle´ It was not so much twilight in Korea
and Vietnam.
And I would like to read a line, Mr. Speaker, from McNamara's book.
It used an expression that I used on this House floor on the day after
the State of the Union speech.
And I said I would revisit this again and again and that if I ever got
a ruling from the Chair again that aid and comfort to the enemy was
not a legitimate historical expression for debate on this floor, that I
would appeal the ruling of the Chair. And if my party voted
against me and did not sustain me, I would resign from Congress on the
spot.
It is not tonight. That day is coming earlier in the day. And I will
find the right moment. I will know it. I will smell it when it comes.
And I will do it in the well with plenty of Democrats and I will give
Mr. Fazio and Mr. Volkmer, and a lot of my other colleagues, a big
chance to take down my words again.
But those words, `aid and comfort to the enemy,´ have popped up
twice just in the last couple of weeks. Mr. Clinton used the words
against people who want to vote out the assault weapon ban. He said
that is giving aid and comfort to the criminals in the street, the
enemy in the streets, to vote against the assault ban.
So Mr. Clinton has given aid and comfort to the enemy in his head. He
knows what that expression means.
Here is what McNamara writes on page 105 of his book. Fitting number
of the page, since we lost more F-105s than any other airplane in
the Vietnam conflict.
By the way, to set the scene, let me take out my little U.S.
Constitution and read where this line comes from. Article III,
section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, and why treason is not
applicable without a declaration of war to using this term.
Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war
against them.
Remember, until the Civil War, we always referred to ourselves as
individual States. The Civil War brought us together into one unit as a
country.
In levying war against the individual States, or in adhering to their
enemies, and our Founders and Framers of the Constitution capitalized
Enemies. Giving them Aid, capital A, and Comfort, capital C. Giving
them Aid and Comfort.
No person shall be convicted of treason, unless on the testimony of
two witnesses to the same overt act or on confession in open court.
Now, that is where that term, aid and comfort to the enemy, comes from.
That is where Clinton, although he did not realize it, got it when he
referred to people who strictly interpret the second amendment as
giving aid and comfort to the enemies in the streets, the
criminals.
Here is Mr. McNamara in this profoundly evil, self-aggrandizing,
nonatoning book; over 58,700 dead Americans, 8 of them women.
McNamara says, `Upon my return to Washington, DC, on December 21st,'
and he is talking now about 1963, just a month after, one day less than
a month after Kennedy's horrible assassination. He talks about secret
missions up to the North.
And this is courageous South Vietnamese who were captured,
tortured to death, because it was poorly organized and planned. It
was endorsed by what we call the 303 Committee under Ambassador
Lodge, an interagency group charged with reviewing such top secret
plans, following recommendations from Secretary of State; from
McCone, head of the CIA; from George McBundy, National Security
Advisor; and me, Robert McNamara, the President approved a 4-month
trial program beginning on February 3, 1964, so it hadn't started yet.
Its goal was to convince the North Vietnamese that it was in
their self-interest to desist from aggression in South Vietnam.
Looking back, it was an absurdly ambitious objective. For such a
trifling effort, it accomplished virtually nothing.
McNamara probably went skiing or mountain climbing that winter and
here were young Vietnamese that we trained, sent north, bailed out
of our secret, unmarked airplanes into North Vietnam, most of them
compromised and captured and viciously tortured to death, and we wrote
them off like they were just expendable pawns at the beginning of this
conflict.
But here he is, before these men have bailed out to their certain
death, none of them ever came back as prisoners, these
Vietnamese. `Upon my return to Washington, DC on December 21st, 1963,
I was less than candid when I reported to the press. Perhaps a
senior government official,' McNamara goes on, `could hardly have been
more straightforward in the midst of a war.'
Here he is calling it, in 1963, a month after Kennedy is dead, a war.
A full-blown war.
And his heart is not in it, but it took him 5 more hears to resign.
Incredible. Four and a half.
I could not fail to recognize the effect discouraging remarks might
have on those we strove to support the South Vietnamese. He does not
give them the time of the day all through this book, our allies. Some
corrupt; most very brave dying for their country. As well as those we
sought to overcome. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.
Now, get this Mr. Speaker. Bob McNamara:
`It is a profound, enduring and universal ethical and moral
dilemma: How, in times of war and crisis, can senior government
officials be completely frank to their own people without giving aid
and comfort to the enemy?'
So, Robert McNamara, in December of 1963, one month and 21 days after
the tragic assassination of President Ziem and his brother, after they
were sprayed with machine guns in the back of an American-supplied
armored personal carrier, an M-13. A tragic, a beheading of a Nation
under Communist assault from the north, he considers it a full war and
talks about giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Well, if he did not want to give aid and comfort to the enemy, what
about the demonstrators that he put up on the floor of his house,
friends of his son, Craig, who never wore the uniform of his country.
And he tries to weasel around that in here. This is McNamara who said,
`We must not draft our college kids, because they are tomorrow.'
Well, what about the college graduates from West Point,
Annapolis, Air Force Academy, Texas A&M, North Georgia, Citadel, VMI?
Or all of the ROTC units like mine at Loyola U. all around the
country? What about those college graduates? What about the young farm
kids who were going back to the family farm, but first were subject to a
draft?
What about the 100,000 young black men who had been denied a good
education in all of the poor schools and ghetto areas around this
country, where we lowered the school standard and the tests you had to
pass to bring them in? What were they? Cannon fodder?
What about all the Hispanic-American families, particularly in
California, which had such a family tradition for generations of
joining the Marine Corps? You know, all of our services used to
reflect our religious background in our country. But the Marine Corps
is about 33 percent Catholic, compared with a 24-percent population,
because West Coast Hispanic families, generally Catholic, like the
Marine Corps. What about all of them? Were they just cannon fodder?
What about the honor graduates from West Point, the Naval Academy, and
the Air Force Academy, who got a Rhodes Scholarship and went to what
the skipper of the Kitty Hawk told me was the worst hate-America
environment he had ever been in his life for 2 years, and he
overlapped Clinton by a year at Oxford,
********
except he went to class and graduated, while Clinton was ditching
class, never went the second year at all, and did not graduate, 1 of
only 6 in his class of 32 who did not graduate. **************
What about all those people?
Like the recent commander, that just made three stars, of the 1st
Cavalry Division down at Fort Hood who graduated before Clinton got
there, he was back in June of 1968 at Leavenworth, and then went to
Vietnam and won two silver stars. Were they the best and the brightest,
all of the aforementioned?
What about all the Americans that went they got drafted said well,
Uncle Sam wants me, it is an undeclared war, but my dad, my uncle, my
older brother fought in Korea, and that was not a war, but a police
action, according to President Truman, that was undeclared. But here
is McNamara calling it a war. Aid and comfort to the enemy in
time of war.
Well, I have before me a letter, Mr. Speaker, from some of the
greatest Americans that this country has ever had serve in
uniform, our POW's in Hanoi. This is a group of leaders, the ones that
were tortured the most, the ones that were tortured far more than others
who have gone a different direction from them.
This comes from the American Defense Institute, which is founded by
Eugene Red McDaniel, acknowledged by all the POW's, I reread some of
his periods of torture in here, and it is absolutely incredible
that he survived, the tearing apart of his body, the infections, hardly
a square inch of his body was not ripped. Red McDaniel founded this
American Defense Institute, and here is a press release they put out
with the names of 60 U.S. POW heroes on it.
`Former U.S. POWs oppose normalization with Vietnam, Alexandria,
Virginia. In a letter sent to President Clinton today, the 10th of
July, 60 former U.S. POWs, including Congressman Sam Johnson,
Republican, Texas,' Sam had hoped to be with me today, but he had a
former engagement tonight.
`Lieutenant General John Peter Flynn, U.S. Air Force, retired.' He
was the highest ranking POW at the time he was shot down, senior U.S.
colonel in the Air Force, and he rose to the highest ranks of
any of the return POW's. Brig. Gen.
Robinson Risner, one of my squadron commanders at George Air Force
Base, shot down eight MiG's in Korea. When they got their hands on
Robbie Risner, believe me, the torture he suffered was the torture
of the damned. In his book, `The Darkness of The Night,' I do not
think that is the exact title, but it is close, his story of torture
is, again, just medieval, and Capt. Red McDaniel. Red was the
communications officer for the escape of Larry Atterbury and
John Dromisi. Dromisi was beaten for 38 days.
He could not move for 3 months, had to be fed by hand. And Larry
Atterbury, 6 foot 3, his size gave them away in their overnight escape,
when the sun came up and they were trapped on the bank of the Red
River. He was stripped naked, four Vietnamese soldiers stood on the arms
and legs, all of this with the approval of the politboru that we
are going to recognize tomorrow at a White House Rose Garden cemetery,
and they beat him until there was no flesh on his body, from his hair
to the soles of his feet. He died after 8 days of constant scourging
with long fan belt whips. They actually were fan belts.
These officers, and 57 others from the Vietnam War, expressed
their opposition to establishing diplomatic relations with
Vietnam. `Until you as commander-in-chief, Mr. Clinton, tell us Honoi
is being fully forthcoming in accounting for our missing comrades.'
The letter was sent by Captain McDaniel, President of the American
Defense Institute on behalf of the former U.S. POW's from Vietnam,
concerned with recent reports that a White House announcement of the
move is imminent. They invited my colleague, Sonny Montgomery, two star
reserve general, combatant from World War II and the 12th Armored
Division. He just told me that he would not go to such a ceremony,
an honorable man, Sonny Montgomery.
`While we appreciate Vietnam´s support for U.S. crash site
recovery,' no big deal, in letting us spend millions of dollars going
out to crash sites that are 30 years old, `And archival research
efforts,' pathetic, pathetic, entry level archival searches, the
former POW stated, `We know firsthand Vietnam´s
ability to withhold critical information while giving the
appearance of cooperation.'
Elsewhere in the letter the former POW's contend that Hanoi could do so
much more to resolve many of the unresolved POW-MIA cases. I refer
anybody watching on C-SPAN, Mr. Speaker, to the
aforementioned 260-plus boxes of heroes' bones warehoused
somewhere in the suburbs of Hanoi.
`Some of our fellow servicemen went missing during the same
incidents which we survived.' Two-seat F-4 Phantoms side-by- side,
A-6 Intruders. `Some were captured and never heard from again.
Some were known to have been held in captivity for several years and
their ultimate fate has still not been satisfactorily resolved. Still
others were known to have died in captivity,' 97 of them, Mr. Speaker,
and we still have yet to get an accounting on, what did Senator Kerrey
say on `Meet the Press´ yesterday? He corrected me from 97 down to 89
I believe. A fine point. `Yet their remains have not been
repatriated to the United States.'
The former POW's expressed their concerns that many of the
`reports from U.S. and Russian intelligence sources maintain
several hundred unidentified American POWs were held separately from
us during the war in both Laos and Vietnam and were not released by
Hanoi during Operation Homecoming in 1973.' Several hundred. I have
never held out hope for more than 40, Mr. Speaker. But what do I
know compared to these POW's?
And called on Clinton to `Send a clear message to Hanoi that America
expects full cooperation and disclosure on American POWs and MIAs
before agreeing to establish diplomatic and special trading privileges
with Vietnam.'
Since February 2, 1994, Mr. Speaker, when we relaxed all the trade
sanctions, we have gotten back exactly eight remains of Americans,
and it cost us thousands of dollars to identify them, because the
remains were mixed in with animal bones and several hundred Asian sets
of remains. Just no care at all, sending us boxes of this, as
though they were cooperating, when they have got this warehouse.
Unbelievable. Eight.
We averaged 21 a month under Reagan's 8 years, 24 remains a month under
George Bush's 4 years, and now we are down to 8 since February 2
a year ago under Clinton?
And that is called prodigious diligence by the Post? Substantial by
Senators Kerrey and McCain? And what did I say was the word
last year, unprecedented, superb this year? Horrible.
That was the press release. Here is the letter.
It says, in closing, the press release brought out the biggest parts
of the letter, and I will insert the whole letter into the Record, an
open letter to President Clinton.
The last paragraphs say,
`America deserves straightforward
answers if Vietnam really wants normalized diplomatic and
economic relations. If Vietnam truly has nothing to hide on the
POW-MIA issue, then why have they not released their wartime
politburo and prison records on American POWs and MIAs? Why have they
not fully disclosed other military records on the POWs and MIAs?'
We have had senators go over there, I am sorry to say, Mr.
Speaker, and not ask these direct questions. The politburo
records are a key, as are the prison records. Now, they kept
accurate records like the gestapo in World War II. And yet we have
Members, elected to the U.S. Congress, that make excuses for them. `Oh,
with the humidity over there, the records have all, you know, mildewed
and they have been lost and they have been shuffled around.'
We did not believe that when we brought German war criminals to trial
and to execution. They were obsessive about keeping records. I
have just seen declassified top secret records from 1968, the same
year that McNamara is in the Caribbean vacationing and skiing at Aspen
while these men are being tortured to death in Hanoi and beaten.
That very year I saw a reference that we picked up through NSA
listening, where they referred to our prisoners as `golden
rubies.´
I remember having a priest who was captured, a Vietnamese Catholic
priest, tell me after he had escaped from the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
being taken north, one of a handful that were lucky enough to escape,
he said they kept referring to prisoners as `pearls,´ as a string
of pearls. That they watched our men when they would come down in a
parachute, try to shoot it out and kill two or three villagers, and
then take the man captive and not even beat him, just shoo the
villagers off. There would be two or three dead people there.
Ted Guy told me the other day how he killed two farmers coming at him
with machetes and he was captured. He went through several beatings
later and 4 years of solitary. But the soldiers were under orders,
these pilots are worth their weight in gold. The survivors from the
dozens that died in the slimy camps in the south, `march them
north´ they said in 1967 and 1968, because the POW's have taken on an
absolutely supreme monetary value.
That is why they still talk about Nixon's disgraceful offer of $3.25
billion to get them to sign on the dotted line after the Paris peace
accords and the 18 days of December B-52 raids, only to write off
every prisoner in Laos. Remember, Mr. Speaker, 499 Americans missing in
Laos, and not a single one ever came home.
The last two paragraphs of the POW letter is, `We would only be
compounding a national tragedy if we normalized relations with Hanoi
before you as commander-in-chief can tell us Hanoi is being fully
forthcoming in accounting for our missing comrades.'
Compounding a national tragedy. If there are a million Americans, or
more than that, watching tonight, Mr. Speaker, I want them to hear those
words ringing in their heads tomorrow around noon eastern time, if
we reward the war criminals and the war criminal JOP in Hanoi with
the final insult, betraying 1.5 million Vietnamese casualties,
half a million or more, 700,000 United States wounded, and those
58,747, roughly, names on the Vietnam Wall.
`Perhaps more than any other group of Americans, we desire to put the
war behind us, but it must be done in an honorable way.' And that
sentence is underlined. It must be done in an honorable way.
`We, therefore, ask you to send a clear message to Hanoi that
America expects full cooperation and disclosure on American
prisoners and missing in action before agreeing to establish
diplomatic and special trading relations with Vietnam.'
Sincerely, John Peter Flynn, Lieutenant General, Air Force,
retired. Robbie Risner, I repeat, my squadron commander at my last
base of assignment, Brigadier General. Our own courageous Gary
Cooper here from Dallas, Sam Johnson, Member of Congress. Eugene Red
McDaniel, John A. Alpers, Baugh, Speed, Baldock, Beeler, Boyer,
Black, Brown, Carey, Burns, DiBernado, Lieutenant Colonel, Marine Corps,
horribly tortured. Franke, Goodermote, Jensen. James Hickerson,
Navy, married my good friend Carol Hansen, who lost her handsome
young Marine Steve Hansen.
[...]
http://washington-weekly.com/jul17/A
