McCain and the POW Cover-Up
http://www.nationinstitute.org/p/schanberg09182008pt1
http://www.truthout.org/article/mccain-and-pow-cover-up
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a
Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from
the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam
who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career,
McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of
prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men
buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would
logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs
and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the
evidence and closing the books.
Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has
shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as
the Republican Party has made McCain's military service the focus of
his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War
turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk
about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.
The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small.
There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts,
witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots
were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing
the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a
special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington - and even
sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that "men were left
behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number -
the documents indicate probably hundreds - of the US prisoners held by
Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January
1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S.
McCain.
Mass of Evidence
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW
families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had
been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for
holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW
intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.
The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced
the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA
Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its
most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the
debunking machine.
One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon's performance was an
insider, Air Force Lieut. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the
Pentagon's position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the
evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who
was eventually pushed into retirement.
Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies
suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North
Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in
Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took
place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general,
Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding
1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as
leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.
Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the
prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant
in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a February 2,
1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged
$3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid "without any political
conditions." But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said
the aid would be implemented by each party "in accordance with its own
constitutional provisions." That meant Congress would have to approve
the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was
in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they
immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained
skeptical about the reparations promise being honored - and it never
was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners - just as it had
done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and
withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms
for prisoners and brought them home.
In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me
that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and
more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the
start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only
become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi's
desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA
officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the
remaining men - those who had not died from illness or hard labor or
torture - were eventually executed.
My own research, detailed below, has convinced me that it is not
likely that more than a few - if any - are alive in captivity today.
(That CIA briefing at the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters was
conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my own
reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt
there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)
For many reasons, including the absence of a political
constituency for the missing men other than their families and some
veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of the POW story and of
McCain's role in keeping it out of public view and denying the
existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been
alone in his campaign to hide the scandal.
McCain's Role
An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990
legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and
simple document, it was called "the Truth Bill" and would have
compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its
core sentence reads: "[The] head of each department or agency which
holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting
reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United
States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from
World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make
available to the public all such records held or received by that
department or agency."
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went
nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a
few months later, a new measure, known as "the McCain Bill," suddenly
appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction
of the documents could emerge - only records that revealed no POW
secrets - it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, at
left, when the Pentagon cited McCain's bill in rejecting a FOIA
request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So
crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells
out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios
and justifications for not releasing any information at all - even
about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the
Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately
worked together to bury evidence.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service
Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to
include criminal penalties, saying: "Any government official who
knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person
any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and
status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or
imprisoned not more than one year or both." A year later, in a closed
House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the
behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act,
stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and
reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search
for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.
About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the
field, a public McCain memo said: "This transfers the bureaucracy
involved out of the [battle] field to Washington." He wrote that the
original legislation, if left intact, "would accomplish nothing but
create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into
clerks."
McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made
it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/
MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only
"willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By
eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the
government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.
McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence -
documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs' sworn
testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned -
has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an
insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the "bizarre rantings of
the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to
pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," charlatans," "conspiracy
theorists" and "dime-store Rambos."
Some of McCain's fellow captives at Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi didn't
share his views about prisoners left behind. Before he died of
leukemia in 1999, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one
of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter
to the senator in an MIA newsletter - a response to McCain's stream of
insults hurled at MIA activists. Guy wrote: "John, does this [the
insults] include Senator Bob Smith [a New Hampshire Republican and
activist on POW issues] and other concerned elected officials? Does
this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming
evidence that their loved ones were 'last known alive'? Does this
include some of your fellow POWs?"
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