August 30, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
JOHN McCAIN:
Documenting a Very Controversial Life - His Real Legacy
Friend,
Just a short introduction today to several news and essay
snippets about the real legacy of the late Senator John McCain. As the mainstream media AND Fox continue
their cloying and over-the-top efforts at a secular canonization of this man,
it seems incumbent that we examine more closely his career.
His parting message supposedly directed to his former Arizona constituents
was actually, in a real sense, a parting and bitter shot at President Trump and
the America First agenda, an affirmation of his belief in full-blown globalism,
and a rejection of the traditional belief in an America of families, regions,
states and historic communities—what McCain disdainfully calls “blood and soil.”
It clearly indicates that his intense and at time frenzied internationalism had
not abated one whit during his painful last illness:
"We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a
nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to
humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We
have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in
history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process (italics
added)."
McCain’s closest allies had become, over the
years, liberal Democrats, “open borders” fanatics, defenders of Obamacare, and
inveterate opponents of Donald Trump…most recently in his memoirs he had
expressed his regrets that he had not chosen former Senator Joe Liebermann, the
leftist solon from Connecticut as his running mate in 2008 (and reportedly he
refused to invite Sarah Palin to his funeral ceremonies—well, Palin was an
early Trump supporter: it figures). Those who have praised him the most—with
the possible exception of the teary-eyed Lindsey Graham who blubbered all over
the US Senate—have been figures like Senator Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
Again, while praying for the repose of his
immortal soul, we must not lose sight of his incredibly disastrous and
deleterious influence on the United States, on our politics, and, yes, on the
world during his thirty-plus years in Washington. That, in fact, must be his
legacy…not one to be proud of at all.
Here follow six published essays—actually
short bits of essays, with links to read the full articles—about McCain’s career.
The last of these six is a long and very detailed essay by investigative
journalist Sydney Schanberg: “John McCain and the POW Cover-up.” I include the
entire essay…and it is a severe indictment of McCain’s conduct during the
Vietnam War. I pass it along as is, without my comment.
WSJ: McCain, Coons to Introduce Bipartisan Measure to Grant Dreamers Path to Citizenship
By Solange
Reyner | Sunday, 04 Feb 2018 09:04 PM
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Chris
Coons, D-Del., will introduce a bipartisan full citizenship plan on Monday for
young immigrants known as Dreamers in order to reach a budget deal before
funding for the federal government runs out this Friday, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The proposal, though, doesn’t include
funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border like President Donald Trump has
asked for....
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McCain Blasts Trump's Policies in Munich Speech: Makes Veiled Comparison to Nazi Germany
http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/mccain-blasts-trump-policies/2017/02/17/id/774297/?ns_mail_uid=61377180&ns_mail_job=1712560_02182017&s=al&dkt_nbr=lfwlr466
By Jason Devaney | Friday, 17 Feb 2017 05:16 PM
Arizona Sen. John McCain delivered a series of attacks on
President Donald Trump Friday during a speech in Germany, and at one point he
compared today's political atmosphere to the Nazi years of the 1930s and
1940s....
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“New World Order under enormous strain” says John McCain March 28, 2017
US Senator John McCain said on Friday
that the world desperately needs the US and Europe to “unite once more to
preserve globalism and the new world order.” The current chairman of the
armed services committee in the US Senate said that Washington should
restore cooperation with the EU [European Union] — long one
of America’s “most important alliances.”
The remarks came at the Brussels
Forum, a conference organized by the transatlantic, globalist think tank,
German Marshall Fund. The globalist ideologue, who once was a presidential
candidate for the Republican Party, has once again put himself
in direct opposition to President Trump by saying that it is
essential for the allies to develop more connectivity,
internationalism, and cooperation.
“I trust the EU,” he said,
elaborating that EU and NATO were “the best two sums in history” and have
maintained global peace for the last 70 years. “We need to rely
on NATO and have a NATO that adjusts to new challenges.”
Earlier in January the new US
President Donald Trump complimented the UK on its “smart” decision
to withdraw from the EU and dubbed NATO an “obsolete” coalition.
McCain said Trump should fill intelligence gaps and address
what the Senator believes was Russia’s attempts to influence the outcome
of the US election in November.
McCain also accused Russia
of supporting right wing political parties in the rest of Europe and
trying to influence approaching elections in France and Germany, and
the president of Russia Vladimir Putin in particular, in trying
to restore the Russian empire, despite providing no evidence
for those allegations.
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Sen. John McCain Refuses Questions On $9 Million Dollars from George Soros
https://stonecoldtruth.com/sen-john-mccain-refuses-questions-on-9-million-dollars/
(NevoNews.co) The question we all want to know, is where did it come
from? John McCain keeps hiding and refuses to answer that question! What we do know, thanks to an investigation
by The Daily Caller, is that the McCain Institute for International Leadership
received a VERY GENEROUS donation from none other than George Soros.
The
institute is intended to serve as a “legacy” for McCain. It “is dedicated to
advancing human rights, dignity, democracy and freedom”. It is also a
tax-exempt non-profit foundation with assets valued at $8.1 million and
associated with Arizona State University.
John
McCain turned over nearly $9 million in unspent funds from his failed 2008
presidential campaign to a new foundation bearing his name, the McCain
Institute for International Leadership.
His
legacy should be that of a traitor, after derogatory remarks about a sitting
president said while overseas.
But
McCain has very deliberately refused to release a list of donors and the dollar
amounts they provided.
So,
we know that Soros gave a lot of money. And we know that the McCain Institute
got even more from other parties, but that he’s not going to tell us who.
The
Daily Caller gives us more:
Critics
worry that the institute’s donors and McCain’s personal leadership in the
organization’s exclusive “Sedona Forum” bear an uncanny resemblance to the
glitzy Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) that annually co-mingled special
interests and powerful political players in alleged pay-to-play schemes.
The
institute has accepted contributions of as much as $100,000 from billionaire
liberal activist-funder George Soros and from Teneo, a for-profit company
co-founded by Doug Band, former President Bill Clinton’s “bag man.”
Teneo
has long helped enrich Clinton through lucrative speaking and business deals.
And
Bloomberg reported in 2016 on a $1 million Saudi Arabian donation to the
institute, a contribution the McCain group has refused to explain publicly.
In
addition, the institute has taken at least $100,000 from a Moroccan state-run
company tied to repeated charges of worker abuse and exploitation. The McCain
group has also accepted at least $100,000 from the Pivotal Foundation. It was
created by Francis Najafi who owns the Pivotal Group, a private equity and real
estate firm.
What
exactly is John McCain doing behind closed doors? What is he doing for Soros to
get all that financial love?....
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John McCain Claims Barack Obama Provided Better ‘American Leadership’ Than Donald Trump
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/11/report-john-mccain-says-american-leadership-better-obama/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=2017061246
Anti-Trump Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has told a left-wing newspaper that he believes “American leadership” was better under President Barack Obama than President Trump — the latest in a series of shots the failed 2008 presidential candidate has taken at his fellow Republican.
According
to the Guardian, McCain was “visibly irked” when asked about comments Trump made last week in the wake of the terrorist
attack in London, in which he criticized London Mayor Sadiq Khan for his response to the atrocity.
“What
do you think the message is? The message is that America doesn’t want to lead,”
McCain said. “They are not sure of American leadership, whether it be in
Siberia or whether it be in Antarctica.”
Then,
when asked if America’s international standing was better under Obama, McCain
reportedly responded: “As far as American leadership is concerned, yes.”
McCain
— who lost his 2008 presidential bid against then-candidate Obama after a
campaign in which he repeatedly defended Obama from his supporters’ criticisms — has been an outspoken
critic of Trump and has refused to tone it down since his fellow Republican
took the White House....
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John McCain and the POW Cover-Up
The “war hero” candidate buried
information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.
SYDNEY SCHANBERG • MAY 25, 2010
Eighteen months ago, TAC publisher Ron
Unz discovered an astonishing account of the role the 2008 Republican
presidential nominee, John McCain, had played in suppressing information about
what happened to American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. Below, we
present in full Sydney Schanberg’s explosive story.
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 U.S. 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 Lt. 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 Feb. 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.
The Arizona senator, now the
Republican candidate for president, has actually been following the lead of
every White House since Richard Nixon’s, and thus of every CIA director,
Pentagon chief, and national security adviser, not to mention Dick Cheney, who
was George H.W. Bush’s Defense secretary. Their biggest accomplice has been an
indolent press, particularly in Washington.
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. 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?”
It’s not clear whether the
taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played
a role in his postwar behavior in the Senate. That confession was played
endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo—to try to break down
other prisoners—and was broadcast over Hanoi’s state radio. Reportedly, he
confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon
has a copy of the confession but
will not release it. Also, no outsider I know
of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he
returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by
McCain.
All humans have breaking
points. Many men undergoing torture give confessions, often telling huge lies
so their fakery will be understood by their comrades and their country. Few
will fault them. But it was McCain who apparently felt he had disgraced himself
and his military family. His father, John S. McCain II, was a highly regarded
rear admiral then serving as commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. His
grandfather was also a rear admiral.
In his bestselling 1999
autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad
throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently
than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda
value. Other prisoners at Hoa Lo say his captors considered him a prize catch
and called him the “Crown Prince,” something McCain acknowledges in the book.
Also in this memoir, McCain
expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. “I
felt faithless and couldn’t control my despair,” he writes, revealing that he
made two “feeble” attempts at suicide. (In later years, he said he tried to
hang himself with his shirt and guards intervened.) Tellingly, he says he lived
in “dread” that his father would find out about the confession. “I still
wince,” he writes, “when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my
disgrace.”
He says that when he returned
home, he told his father about the confession, but “never discussed it at
length”—and the admiral, who died in 1981, didn’t indicate he had heard
anything about it before. But he had. In the 1999 memoir, the senator writes,
“I only recently learned that the tape … had been broadcast outside the prison
and had come to the attention of my father.”
Is McCain haunted by these
memories? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing would rekindle
his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions.
Many stories have been written
about McCain’s explosive temper, so volcanic that colleagues are loath to speak
openly about it. One veteran congressman who has observed him over the years
asked for confidentiality and made this brief comment: “This is a man not at
peace with himself.”
He was certainly far from calm
on the Senate POW committee. He browbeat expert witnesses who came with
information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced
McCain and pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his
legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to
tears. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: How dare you
question my patriotism? In 1996, he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family
members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a
mother in a wheelchair.
But even without answers to
what may be hidden in the recesses of McCain’s mind, one thing about the POW
story is clear: if American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and
left to die, that’s something the American public ought to know about.
10 Key Pieces of Evidence That
Men Were Left Behind
1. In Paris, where the Vietnam peace treaty was negotiated, the
United States asked Hanoi for the list of American prisoners to be returned,
fearing that Hanoi would hold some prisoners back. The North Vietnamese
refused, saying they would produce the list only after the treaty was signed.
Nixon agreed with Kissinger that they had no leverage left, and Kissinger
signed the accord on Jan. 27, 1973 without the prisoner list. When Hanoi
produced its list of 591 prisoners the next day, U.S. intelligence agencies
expressed shock at the low number. Their number was hundreds higher. The New York Times published a long, page-one story on Feb. 2, 1973 about the
discrepancy, especially raising questions about the number of prisoners held in
Laos, only nine of whom were being returned. The headline read, in part, “Laos
POW List Shows 9 from U.S.—Document Disappointing to Washington as 311 Were
Believed Missing.” And the story, by John Finney, said that other Washington
officials “believe the number of prisoners [in Laos] is probably substantially
higher.” The paper never followed up with any serious investigative
reporting—nor did any other mainstream news organization.
2. Two Defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War
testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not
returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, both speaking at a public session
and under oath, said they based their conclusions on strong intelligence
data—letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under
questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the
volatility of the issue: “I think that as of now that I can come to no other
conclusion … some were left behind.” This ran counter to what President Nixon
told the public in a nationally televised speech on March 29, 1973, when the
repatriation of the 591 was in motion: “Tonight,” Nixon said, “the day we have
all worked and prayed for has finally come. For the first time in 12 years, no
American military forces are in Vietnam. All our American POWs are on their way
home.” Documents unearthed since then show that aides had already briefed Nixon
about the contrary evidence.
Schlesinger was asked by the
Senate committee for his explanation of why President Nixon would have made
such a statement when he knew Hanoi was still holding prisoners. He replied,
“One must assume that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United
States … was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out and we were not
going to roil the waters…” This testimony struck me as a bombshell. The New
York Times appropriately reported it on page one but again there was no
sustained follow-up by the Times or any other major paper or national news
outlet.
3. Over the years, the DIA received more than 1,600 first-hand
sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 second-hand reports.
Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed
“credible” in the agents’ reports. Some of the witnesses were given
lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness
reports, which are impressive in their detail. A lot of the sightings described
a secondary tier of prison camps many miles from Hanoi. Yet the DIA, after
reviewing all these reports, concluded that they “do not constitute evidence”
that men were alive.
4. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, listening stations picked
up messages in which Laotian military personnel spoke about moving American
prisoners from one labor camp to another. These listening posts were manned by
Thai communications officers trained by the National Security Agency (NSA),
which monitors signals worldwide. The NSA teams had moved out after the fall of
Saigon in 1975 and passed the job to the Thai allies. But when the Thais turned
these messages over to Washington, the intelligence community ruled that since
the intercepts were made by a “third party”—namely Thailand—they could not be
regarded as authentic. That’s some Catch-22: the U.S. trained a third party to
take over its role in monitoring signals about POWs, but because that third
party did the monitoring, the messages weren’t valid.
Here, from CIA files, is an
example that clearly exposes the farce. On Dec. 27, 1980, a Thai military
signal team picked up a message saying that prisoners were being moved out of
Attopeu (in southern Laos) by aircraft “at 1230 hours.” Three days later a
message was sent from the CIA station in Bangkok to the CIA director’s office
in Langley. It read, in part: “The prisoners … are now in the valley in
permanent location (a prison camp at Nhommarath in Central Laos). They were
transferred from Attopeu to work in various places … POWs were formerly kept in
caves and are very thin, dark and starving.” Apparently the prisoners were
real. But the transmission was declared “invalid” by Washington because the
information came from a “third party” and thus could not be deemed credible.
5. A series of what appeared to be distress signals from Vietnam
and Laos were captured by the government’s satellite system in the late 1980s
and early ’90s. (Before that period, no search for such signals had been put in
place.) Not a single one of these markings was ever deemed credible. To the
layman’s eye, the satellite photos, some of which I’ve seen, show markings on
the ground that are identical to the signals that American pilots had been
specifically trained to use in their survival courses—such as certain letters,
like X or K, drawn in a special way. Other markings were the secret four-digit
authenticator numbers given to individual pilots. But time and again, the
Pentagon, backed by the CIA, insisted that humans had not made these markings.
What were they, then? “Shadows and vegetation,” the government said, insisting
that the markings were merely normal topographical contours like saw-grass or
rice-paddy divider walls. It was the automatic response—shadows and vegetation.
On one occasion, a Pentagon photo expert refused to go along. It was a missing
man’s name gouged into a field, he said, not trampled grass or paddy berms. His
bosses responded by bringing in an outside contractor who found instead, yes,
shadows and vegetation. This refrain led Bob Taylor, a highly regarded
investigator on the Senate committee staff who had examined the photographic
evidence, to comment to me: “If grass can spell out people’s names and secret
digit codes, then I have a newfound respect for grass.”
6. On Nov. 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, the sister of missing
airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an
organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate
committee’s public hearings. She asked for information about data the
government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program
known as PAVE SPIKE.
The devices were motion
sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. Shaped on
one end like a spike with an electronic pod and antenna on top, they were
designed to stick in the ground as they fell. Air Force planes would drop them
along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other supply routes. The devices, though
primarily sensors, also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground—a downed
airman or a prisoner on a labor gang —could manually enter data into the
sensor. All data were regularly collected electronically by U.S. planes flying
overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge or contradiction by the
committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of
prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually
entered into the sensors—as U.S. pilots had been trained to do—no less than 20
authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator
numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos. Alfond added, according to the
transcript, “This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has
not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.”
McCain attended that committee
hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel’s
work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning
anger-pink, he accused her of “denigrating” his “patriotism.” The bullying had
its effect—she began to cry.
After a pause Alfond recovered
and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned away and
stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We
still don’t know anything about those 20 POWs.
7. As previously mentioned, in April 1993 in a Moscow archive,
a researcher from Harvard, Stephen Morris, unearthed and made public the
transcript of a briefing that General Tran Van Quang gave to the Hanoi
politburo four months before the signing of the Paris peace accords in 1973.
In the transcript, General
Quang told the Hanoi politburo that 1,205 U.S. prisoners were being held. Quang
said that many of the prisoners would be held back from Washington after the
accords as bargaining chips for war reparations. General Quang’s report added:
“This is a big number. Officially, until now, we published a list of only 368
prisoners of war. The rest we have not revealed. The government of the USA
knows this well, but it does not know the exact number … and can only make
guesses based on its losses. That is why we are keeping the number of prisoners
of war secret, in accordance with the politburo’s instructions.” The report
then went on to explain in clear and specific language that a large number
would be kept back to ensure reparations.
The reaction to the document
was immediate. After two decades of denying it had kept any prisoners, Hanoi
responded to the revelation by calling the transcript a fabrication.
Similarly, Washington—which had
over the same two decades refused to recant Nixon’s declaration that all the
prisoners had been returned—also shifted into denial mode. The Pentagon issued
a statement saying the document “is replete with errors, omissions and
propaganda that seriously damage its credibility,” and that the numbers were
“inconsistent with our own accounting.”
Neither American nor Vietnamese
officials offered any rationale for who would plant a forged document in the
Soviet archives and why they would do so. Certainly neither Washington nor
Moscow—closely allied with Hanoi—would have any motive, since the contents were
embarrassing to all parties, and since both the United States and Vietnam had
consistently denied the existence of unreturned prisoners. The Russian
archivists simply said the document was “authentic.”
8. In his 2002 book, Inside Delta Force, retired Command Sgt. Maj. Eric Haney described how in 1981 his
special forces unit, after rigorous training for a POW rescue mission, had the
mission suddenly aborted, revived a year later, and again abruptly aborted.
Haney writes that this abandonment of captured soldiers ate at him for years
and left him disillusioned about his government’s vows to leave no men behind.
“Years later, I spoke at length with a former highly placed member of the North
Vietnamese diplomatic corps, and this person asked me point-blank: ‘Why did the
Americans never attempt to recover their remaining POWs after the conclusion of
the war?’” Haney writes. He continued, saying that he came to believe senior
government officials had called off those missions in 1981 and 1982. (His
account is on pages 314 to 321 of my paperback copy of the book.)
9. There is also evidence that in the first months of Ronald
Reagan’s presidency in 1981, the White House received a ransom proposal for a
number of POWs being held by Hanoi in Indochina. The offer, which was passed to
Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a
meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President Bush, CIA
director William Casey, and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Allen
confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23,
1992.
Allen was allowed to testify
behind closed doors and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion relating to
the ransom offer and reported on it. The ransom request was for $4 billion,
Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that “it would be worth the president’s
going along and let’s have the negotiation.” When his testimony appeared in
the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter
to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story and claiming
his memory had played tricks on him. His new version was that some POW
activists had asked him about such an offer in a meeting that took place in
1986, when he was no longer in government. “It appears,” he said in the letter,
“that there never was a 1981 meeting about the return of POW/MIAs for $4
billion.”
But the episode didn’t end
there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John
Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation
in the Roosevelt Room in 1981, when the offer was discussed by Reagan, Bush, Casey,
Allen, and other cabinet officials.
Syphrit, a veteran of the
Vietnam War, told the committee he was willing to testify, but they would have
to subpoena him. Treasury opposed his appearance, arguing that voluntary
testimony would violate the trust between the Secret Service and those it
protects. It was clear that coming in on his own could cost Syphrit his career.
The committee voted 7 to 4 not to subpoena him.
In the committee’s final
report, dated Jan. 13, 1993 (on page 284), the panel not only chastised Syphrit
for his failure to testify without a subpoena (“The committee regrets that the
Secret Service agent was unwilling …”), but noted that since Allen had recanted
his testimony about the Roosevelt Room briefing, Syphrit’s testimony would have
been “at best, uncorroborated by the testimony of any other witness.” The
committee omitted any mention that it had made a decision not to ask the other
two surviving witnesses, Bush and Reagan, to give testimony under oath. (Casey
had died.)
10. In 1990, Col. Millard Peck, a decorated infantry veteran of
Vietnam then working at the DIA as chief of the Asia Division for Current
Intelligence, asked for the job of chief of the DIA’s Special Office for
Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. His reason for seeking the transfer,
which was not a promotion, was that he had heard from officials throughout the
Pentagon that the POW/MIA office had been turned into a waste-disposal unit for
getting rid of unwanted evidence about live prisoners—a “black hole,” these officials
called it.
Peck explained all this in his
telling resignation letter of Feb. 12, 1991, eight months after he had taken
the job. He said he viewed it as “sort of a holy crusade” to restore the
integrity of the office but was defeated by the Pentagon machine. The
four-page, single-spaced letter was scathing, describing the putative search for missing men
as “a cover-up.”
Peck charged that, at its top
echelons, the Pentagon had embraced a “mind-set to debunk” all evidence of
prisoners left behind. “That national leaders continue to address the prisoner
of war and missing in action issue as the ‘highest national priority,’ is a
travesty,” he wrote. “The entire charade does not appear to be an honest
effort, and may never have been. … Practically all analysis is directed to
finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective, active
follow through on any of the sightings, nor is there a responsive ‘action arm’
to routinely and aggressively pursue leads.”
“I became painfully aware,” his
letter continued, “that I was not really in charge of my own office, but was
merely a figurehead or whipping boy for a larger and totally Machiavellian group
of players outside of DIA … I feel strongly that this issue is being
manipulated and controlled at a higher level, not with the goal of resolving
it, but more to obfuscate the question of live prisoners and give the illusion
of progress through hyperactivity.” He named no names but said these players
are “unscrupulous people in the Government or associated with the Government”
who “have maintained their distance and remained hidden in the shadows, while
using the [POW] Office as a ‘toxic waste dump’ to bury the whole ‘mess’ out of
sight.” Peck added that “military officers … who in some manner have ‘rocked
the boat’ [have] quickly come to grief.”
Peck concluded, “From what I
have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even
inadvertently, was, in fact, abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is
being played is no more than political legerdemain done with ‘smoke and
mirrors’ to stall the issue until it dies a natural death.”
The disillusioned colonel not
only resigned but asked to be retired immediately from active military service.
The press never followed up.
My Pursuit of the Story
I covered the war in Cambodia
and Vietnam, but came to the POW information only slowly afterward, when
military officers I knew from that conflict began coming to me with maps and
POW sightings and depositions by Vietnamese witnesses.
I was then city editor of
the New York Times, no longer involved in foreign
or national stories, so I took the data to the appropriate desks and suggested
it was material worth pursuing. There were no takers. Some years later, in
1991, when I was an op-ed columnist at Newsday, the aforementioned special Senate committee was formed to probe
the POW issue. I saw this as an opening and immersed myself in the reporting.
At Newsday, I wrote 36 columns over a two-year period, as well as a
four-part series on a trip I took to North Vietnam to report on what happened
to one missing pilot who was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh trail and captured
when he parachuted down. After Newsday, I wrote thousands more words on the subject for other outlets.
Some of the pieces were about McCain’s key role.
Though I wrote on many subjects
for Life, Vanity Fair, and Washington Monthly, my POW articles appeared in Penthouse, the Village Voice, and APBnews.com. Mainstream publications just weren’t interested. Their disinterest
was part of what motivated me, and I became one of a very short list of
journalists who considered the story important.
Serving in the Army in Germany
during the Cold War and witnessing combat firsthand as a reporter in India and
Indochina led me to have great respect for those who fight for their country.
To my mind, we dishonored U.S. troops when our government failed to bring them
home from Vietnam after the 591 others were released—and then claimed they
didn’t exist. And politicians dishonor themselves when they pay lip service to
the bravery and sacrifice of soldiers only to leave untold numbers behind,
rationalizing to themselves that it’s merely one of the unfortunate costs of
war.
John McCain—now campaigning for
the White House as a war hero, maverick, and straight shooter—owes the voters
some explanations. The press were long ago wooed and won by McCain’s seeming
openness, Lone Ranger pose, and self-deprecating humor, which may partly
explain their ignoring his record on POWs. In the numerous, lengthy McCain
profiles that have appeared of late in papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, I may have missed a clause or a sentence along the way, but I
have not found a single mention of his role in burying information about POWs.
Television and radio news programs have been similarly silent.
Reporters simply never ask him
about it. They didn’t when he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination
in 2000. They haven’t now, despite the fact that we’re in the midst of another
war—a war he supports and one that has echoes of Vietnam. The only explanation
McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW files
is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh
grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the
scores of POW families I’ve met over the years, only a few have said they want
the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say
that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.
Isn’t it possible that what
really worries those intent on keeping the POW documents buried is the public
disgust that the contents of those files would generate?
How the Senate Committee
Perpetuated the Debunking
In its early months, the Senate
Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs gave the appearance of being committed to
finding out the truth about the MIAs. As time went on, however, it became clear
that they were cooperating in every way with the Pentagon and CIA, who often
seemed to be calling the shots, even setting the agendas for certain key
hearings. Both agencies held back the most important POW files. Dick Cheney was
the Pentagon chief then; Robert Gates, now the Pentagon chief, was the CIA
director.
Further, the committee failed
to question any living president. Reagan declined to answer questions; the
committee didn’t contest his refusal. Nixon was given a pass. George H.W. Bush,
the sitting president, whose prints were all over this issue from his days as
CIA chief in the 1970s, was never even approached. Troubled by these signs,
several committee staffers began asking why the agencies they should be probing
had been turned into committee partners and decision makers. Memos to that
effect were circulated. The staff made the following finding, using
intelligence reports marked “credible” that covered POW sightings through 1989:
“There can be no doubt that POWs were alive … as late as 1989.” That finding was
never released. Eventually, much of the staff was in rebellion.
This internecine struggle continued
right up to the committee’s last official act—the issuance of its final report. The Executive Summary, which
comprised the first 43 pages, was essentially a whitewash, saying that only “a
small number” of POWs could have been left behind in 1973 and that there was
little likelihood that any prisoners could still be alive. The Washington press
corps, judging from its coverage, seems to have read only this air-brushed
summary, which had been closely controlled.
But the rest of the
1,221-page Report on POW/MIAs was quite different.
Sprinkled throughout are pieces of hard evidence that directly contradict the
summary’s conclusions. This documentation established that a significant number
of prisoners were left behind—and that top government officials knew this from
the start. These candid findings were inserted by committee staffers who had
unearthed the evidence and were determined not to allow the truth to be
sugar-coated.
If the Washington press corps
did actually read the body of the report and then failed to report its
contents, that would be a scandal of its own. The press would then have
knowingly ignored the steady stream of findings in the body of the report that
refuted the summary and indicated that the number of abandoned men was not
small but considerable. The report gave no figures but estimates from various
branches of the intelligence community ranged up to 600. The lowest estimate
was 150.
Highlights of the report that
undermine the benign conclusions of the Executive Summary:
• Pages
207-209: These three pages contain
revelations of what appear to be either massive intelligence failures or bad
intentions—or both. The report says that until the committee brought up the
subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with
analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the
specific distress signals U.S. personnel were trained to use in the Vietnam
War, nor had they ever been tasked to look for any such signals at all from
possible prisoners on the ground.
The committee decided, however,
not to seek a review of old photography, saying it “would cause the expenditure
of large amounts of manpower and money with no expectation of success.” It
might also have turned up lots of distress-signal numbers that nobody in the
government was looking for from 1973 to 1991, when the committee opened shop.
That would have made it impossible for the committee to write the Executive
Summary it seemed determined to write.
The failure gets worse. The
committee also discovered that the DIA, which kept the lists of authenticator
numbers for pilots and other personnel, could not “locate” the lists of these
codes for Army, Navy, or Marine pilots. They had lost or destroyed the records.
The Air Force list was the only one intact, as it had been preserved by a
different intelligence branch.
The report concluded, “In
theory, therefore, if a POW still living in captivity [today], were to attempt
to communicate by ground signal, smuggling out a note or by whatever means
possible, and he used his personal authenticator number to confirm his
identity, the U.S. government would be unable to provide such confirmation, if
his number happened to be among those numbers DIA cannot locate.”
It’s worth remembering that
throughout the period when this intelligence disaster occurred—from the moment
the treaty was signed in 1973 until 1991—the White House told the public that
it had given the search for POWs and POW information the “highest national
priority.”
• Page
13: Even in the Executive
Summary, the report acknowledges the existence of clear intelligence, made
known to government officials early on, that important numbers of captured U.S.
POWs were not on Hanoi’s repatriation list. After Hanoi released its list
(showing only ten names from Laos—nine military men and one civilian),
President Nixon sent a message on Feb. 2, 1973 to Hanoi’s Prime Minister Pham
Van Dong saying, “U.S. records show there are 317 American military men
unaccounted for in Laos and it is inconceivable that only ten of these men
would be held prisoner in Laos.”
Nixon was right. It was
inconceivable. Then why did the president, less than two months later, on March
29, 1973, announce on national television that “all of our American POWs are on
their way home”?
On April 13, 1973, just after
all 591 men on Hanoi’s official list had returned to American soil, the
Pentagon got into step with the president and announced that there was no
evidence of any further live prisoners in Indochina (this
is on page 248).
• Page
91: A lengthy footnote
provides more confirmation of the White House’s knowledge of abandoned POWs.
The footnote reads, “In a telephone conversation with Select Committee
Vice-Chairman Bob Smith on December 29, 1992, Dr. Kissinger said that he had
informed President Nixon during the 60-day period after the peace agreement was
signed that U.S. intelligence officials believed that the list of prisoners captured
in Laos was incomplete. According to Dr. Kissinger, the President responded by
directing that the exchange of prisoners on the lists go forward, but added
that a failure to account for the additional prisoners after Operation
Homecoming would lead to a resumption of bombing. Dr. Kissinger said that the
President was later unwilling to carry through on this threat.”
When Kissinger learned of the
footnote while the final editing of the committee report was in progress, he and his lawyers lobbied fiercely through two Republican allies on the panel—one of them was
John McCain—to get the footnote expunged. The effort failed. The footnote
stayed intact.
• Pages
85-86: The committee report
quotes Kissinger from his memoirs, writing solely in reference to prisoners in
Laos: “We knew of at least 80 instances in which an American serviceman had
been captured alive and subsequently disappeared. The evidence consisted either
of voice communications from the ground in advance of capture or photographs
and names published by the Communists. Yet none of these men was on the list of
POWs handed over after the Agreement.”
Then why did he swear under
oath to the committee in 1992 that he never had any information that specific,
named soldiers were captured alive and hadn’t been returned by Vietnam?
• Page
89: In the middle of the
prisoner repatriation and U.S. troop-withdrawal process agreed to in the
treaty, when it became clear that Hanoi was not releasing everyone it held, a
furious chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer, issued an
order halting the troop withdrawal until Hanoi complied with the agreement. He
cited in particular the known prisoners in Laos. The order was retracted by
President Nixon the next day. In 1992, Moorer, by then retired, testified under
oath to the committee that his order had received the approval of the
president, the national security adviser, and the secretary of Defense. Nixon,
however, in a letter to the committee, wrote, “I do not recall directing
Admiral Moorer to send this cable.”
The report did not include the
following information: behind closed doors, a senior intelligence officer had
testified to the POW committee that when Moorer’s order was rescinded, the
angry admiral sent a “back-channel” message to other key military commanders
telling them that Washington was abandoning known live prisoners. “Nixon and
Kissinger are at it again,” he wrote. “SecDef and SecState have been cut out of
the loop.” In 1973, the witness was working in the office that processed this
message. His name and his testimony are still classified. A source present for
the testimony provided me with this information and also reported that in that
same time period, Moorer had stormed into Defense Secretary Schlesinger’s
office and, pounding on his desk, yelled: “The bastards have still got our
men.” Schlesinger, in his own testimony to the committee a few months later,
was asked about—and corroborated—this account.
• Pages
95-96: In early April 1973, Deputy
Defense Secretary William Clements “summoned” Dr. Roger Shields, then head of
the Pentagon’s POW/MIA Task Force, to his office to work out “a new public
formulation” of the POW issue; now that the White House had declared all
prisoners to have been returned, a new spin was needed. Shields, under oath,
described the meeting to the committee. He said Clements told him, “All the
American POWs are dead.” Shields said he replied: “You can’t say that.”
Clements shot back: “You didn’t hear me. They are all dead.” Shields testified
that at that moment he thought he was going to be fired, but he escaped from
his boss’s office still holding his job.
• Pages
97-98: A couple of days later,
on April 11, 1973, a day before Shields was to hold a Pentagon press conference
on POWs, he and Gen. Brent Scowcroft, then the deputy national security
adviser, went to the Oval Office to discuss the “new public formulation” and
its presentation with President Nixon.
The next day, reporters right
off asked Shields about missing POWs. Shields fudged his answers. He said, “We
have no indications at this time that there are any Americans alive in
Indochina.” But he went on to say that there had not been “a complete
accounting” of those lost in Laos and that the Pentagon would press on to
account for the missing—a seeming acknowledgement that some Americans were
still alive and unaccounted for.
The press, however, seized on
Shields’s denials. One headline read, “POW Unit Boss: No Living GIs Left in
Indochina.”
• Page
97: The POW committee,
knowing that Nixon taped all his meetings in the Oval Office, sought the tape
of that April 11, 1973 Nixon-Shields-Scowcroft meeting to find out what Nixon
had been told and what he had said about the evidence of POWs still in
Indochina. The committee also knew there had been other White House meetings
that centered on intelligence about live POWs. A footnote on page 97 states
that Nixon’s lawyers said they would provide access to the April 11 tape “only
if the Committee agreed not to seek any other White House recordings from this
time period.” The footnote says that the committee rejected these terms and got
nothing. The committee never made public this request for Nixon tapes until the
brief footnote in its 1993 report.
McCain’s Catch-22
None of this compelling
evidence in the committee’s full report dislodged McCain from his contention
that the whole POW issue was a concoction by deluded purveyors of a “conspiracy
theory.” But an honest review of the full report, combined with the other
documentary evidence, tells the story of a frustrated and angry president, and
his national security adviser, furious at being thwarted at the peace table by
a small, much less powerful country that refused to bow to Washington’s terms.
That president seems to have swallowed hard and accepted a treaty that left
probably hundreds of American prisoners in Hanoi’s hands, to be used as
bargaining chips for reparations.
Maybe Nixon and Kissinger told
themselves that they could get the prisoners home after some time had passed.
But perhaps it proved too hard to undo a lie as big as this one. Washington
said no prisoners were left behind, and Hanoi swore it had returned all of
them. How could either side later admit it had lied? Time went by and as
neither side budged, telling the truth became even more difficult and remote.
The public would realize that Washington knew of the abandoned men all along.
The truth, after men had been languishing in foul prison cells, could get
people impeached or thrown in jail.
Which brings us to today, when
the Republican candidate for president is the contemporary politician most
responsible for keeping the truth about this matter hidden. Yet he says he’s
the right man to be the commander in chief, and his credibility in making this
claim is largely based on his image as a POW hero.
On page 468 of the 1,221-page
report, McCain parsed his POW position oddly, “We found no compelling evidence
to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some
evidence—though no proof—to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans
may have been kept behind after the end of America’s military involvement in
Vietnam.”
“Evidence though no proof.”
Clearly, no one could meet McCain’s standard of proof as long as he is leading
a government crusade to keep the truth buried.
To this reporter, this sounds
like a significant story and a long overdue opportunity for the press to
finally dig into the archives to set the historical record straight—and even
pose some direct questions to the candidate.
__________________________________________
Sydney Schanberg has been a journalist for nearly 50 years. The
1984 movie “The Killing Fields,” which won several Academy Awards, was based on
his book The Death and Life of Dith Pran. In 1975, Schanberg was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting “at great risk.” He is also the
recipient of two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, and the
Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism. His latest book is Beyond the Killing Fields (www.beyondthekillingfields.com)
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Marveloous. You made a believer out of me.
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