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When John Kerry's Courage Went M.I.A.: Senator Covered Up Evidence of P.O.W.'s Left Behind
Village Voice ^ | February 25 - March 2, 2004 | Sydney H. Schanberg

Posted on 02/24/2004 10:37:29 AM PST by dead

Senator John Kerry, a decorated battle veteran, was courageous as a navy lieutenant in the Vietnam War. But he was not so courageous more than two decades later, when he covered up voluminous evidence that a significant number of live American prisoners—perhaps hundreds—were never acknowledged or returned after the war-ending treaty was signed in January 1973.

The Massachusetts senator, now seeking the presidency, carried out this subterfuge a little over a decade ago— shredding documents, suppressing testimony, and sanitizing the committee's final report—when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs.

Over the years, an abundance of evidence had come to light that the North Vietnamese, while returning 591 U.S. prisoners of war after the treaty signing, had held back many others as future bargaining chips for the $4 billion or more in war reparations that the Nixon administration had pledged. Hanoi didn't trust Washington to fulfill its pro-mise without pressure. Similarly, Washington didn't trust Hanoi to return all the prisoners and carry out all the treaty provisions. The mistrust on both sides was merited. Hanoi held back prisoners and the U.S. provided no reconstruction funds.

The stated purpose of the special Senate committee—which convened in mid 1991 and concluded in January 1993—was to investigate the evidence about prisoners who were never returned and find out what happened to the missing men. Committee chair Kerry's larger and different goal, though never stated publicly, emerged over time: He wanted to clear a path to normalization of relations with Hanoi. In any other context, that would have been an honorable goal. But getting at the truth of the unaccounted for P.O.W.'s and M.I.A.'s (Missing In Action) was the main obstacle to normalization—and therefore in conflict with his real intent and plan of action.

Kerry denied back then that he disguised his real goal, contending that he supported normalization only as a way to learn more about the missing men. But almost nothing has emerged about these prisoners since diplomatic and economic relations were restored in 1995, and thus it would appear—as most realists expected—that Kerry's explanation was hollow. He has also denied in the past the allegations of a cover-up, either by the Pentagon or himself. Asked for comment on this article, the Kerry campaign sent a quote from the senator: "In the end, I think what we can take pride in is that we put together the most significant, most thorough, most exhaustive accounting for missing and former P.O.W.'s in the history of human warfare."

What was the body of evidence that prisoners were held back? A short list would include more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live U.S. prisoners; nearly 14,000 secondhand reports; numerous intercepted Communist radio messages from within Vietnam and Laos about American prisoners being moved by their captors from one site to another; a series of satellite photos that continued into the 1990s showing clear prisoner rescue signals carved into the ground in Laos and Vietnam, all labeled inconclusive by the Pentagon; multiple reports about unacknowledged prisoners from North Vietnamese informants working for U.S. intelligence agencies, all ignored or declared unreliable; persistent complaints by senior U.S. intelligence officials (some of them made publicly) that live-prisoner evidence was being suppressed; and clear proof that the Pentagon and other keepers of the "secret" destroyed a variety of files over the years to keep the P.O.W./M.I.A. families and the public from finding out and possibly setting off a major public outcry.

The resignation of Colonel Millard Peck in 1991, the first year of the Kerry committee's tenure, was one of many vivid landmarks in this saga's history. Peck had been the head of the Pentagon's P.O.W./M.I.A. office for only eight months when he resigned in disgust. In his damning departure statement, he wrote: "The mind-set to 'debunk' is alive and well. It is held at all levels . . . 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 . . . The sad fact is that . . . a cover-up may be in progress. The entire charade does not appear to be an honest effort and may never have been."

Finally, Peck said: "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."

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What did Kerry do in furtherance of the cover-up? An overview would include the following: He allied himself with those carrying it out by treating the Pentagon and other prisoner debunkers as partners in the investigation instead of the targets they were supposed to be. In short, he did their bidding. When Defense Department officials were coming to testify, Kerry would have his staff director, Frances Zwenig, meet with them to "script" the hearings—as detailed in an internal Zwenig memo leaked by others. Zwenig also advised North Vietnamese officials on how to state their case. Further, Kerry never pushed or put up a fight to get key government documents unclassified; he just rolled over, no matter how obvious it was that the documents contained confirming data about prisoners. Moreover, after pro- mising to turn over all committee records to the National Archives when the panel concluded its work, the senator destroyedcrucial intelligence information the staff had gathered—to to keep the documents from becoming public. He refused to subpoena past presidents and other key witnesses.

When revelatory sworn testimony was given to the committee by President Reagan's national security adviser, Richard Allen—about a credible proposal from Hanoi in 1981 to return more than 50 prisoners for a $4 billion ransom—Kerry had that testimony taken in a closed door interview, not a public hearing. But word leaked out and a few weeks later, Allen sent a letter to the committee, not under oath, recanting his testimony, saying his memory had played tricks on him. Kerry never did any probe into Allen's original, detailed account, and instead accepted his recantation as gospel truth.

A Secret Service agent then working at the White House, John Syphrit, told committee staffers he had overheard part of a conversation about the Hanoi proposal for ransom. He said he was willing to testify but feared reprisal from his Treasury Department superiors and would need to be subpoenaed so that his appearance could not be regarded as voluntary. Kerry refused to subpoena him. Syphrit told me that four men were involved in that conversation—Reagan, Allen, Vice President George H.W. Bush, and CIA director William Casey. I wrote the story for Newsday.

The final Kerry report brushed off the entire episode like unsightly dust. It said: "The committee found no credible evidence of any such [ransom] offer being made."

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A newcomer to this subject matter might reasonably ask why there was no great public outrage, no sustained headlines, no national demand for investigations, no penalties imposed on those who had hidden, and were still hiding, the truth. The simple, overarching explanation was that most Americans wanted to put Vietnam behind them as fast as possible. They wanted to forget this failed war, not deal with its truths or consequences. The press suffered from the same ostrich syndrome; no major media organization ever carried out an in-depth investigation by a reporting team into the prisoner issue. When prisoner stories did get into the press, they would have a one-day life span, never to be followed up on. When three secretaries of defense from the Vietnam era—James Schlesinger, Melvin Laird, and Elliot Richardson—testified before the Kerry committee, under oath, that intelligence they received at the time convinced them that numbers of unacknowledged prisoners were being held by the Communists, the story was reported by the press just that once and then dropped. The New York Times put the story on page one but never pursued it further to explore the obvious ramifications.

At that public hearing on September 21, 1992, toward the end of Schlesinger's testimony, the former defense secretary, who earlier had been CIA chief, was asked a simple question: "In your view, did we leave men behind?"

He replied: "I think that as of now, I can come to no other conclusion."

He was asked to explain why Nixon would have accepted leaving men behind. He said: "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 . . . "

Another example of a story not pursued occurred at the Paris peace talks. The North Vietnamese failed to provide a list of the prisoners until the treaty was signed. Afterward, when they turned over the list, U.S. intelligence officials were taken aback by how many believed prisoners were not included. The Vietnamese were returning only nine men from Laos. American records showed that more than 300 were probably being held. A story about this stunning gap, by New York Times Pentagon reporter John W. Finney, appeared on the paper's front page on February 2, 1973. The story said: "Officials emphasized that the United States would be seeking clarification . . . " No meaningful explanation was ever provided by the Vietnamese or by the Laotian Communist guerrillas, the Pathet Lao, who were satellites of Hanoi.

As a bombshell story for the media, particularly the Washington press corps, it was there for the taking. But there were no takers.

I was drawn to the P.O.W. issue because of my reporting years for The New York Times during the Vietnam War, where I came to believe that our soldiers were being misled and disserved by our government. After the war, military people who knew me and others who knew my work brought me information about live sightings of P.O.W.'s still in captivity and other evidence about their existence. When the Kerry committee was announced (I was by then a columnist at Newsday), I thought the senator—having himself become disillusioned about the Vietnam War, and eventually an advocate against it—might really be committed to digging out the truth. This was wishful thinking.

In the committee's early days, Kerry had given encouraging indications of being a committed investigator. He said he had "leads" to the existence of P.O.W.'s still in captivity. He said the number of these likely survivors was more than 100 and that this was the minimum. But in a very short time, he stopped saying such things and morphed his role into one of full alliance with the executive branch, the Pentagon, and other Washington hierarchies, joining their long-running effort to obscure and deny that a significant number of live American prisoners had not been returned. As many as 700 withheld P.O.W.'s were cited in credible intelligence documents, including a speech by a senior North Vietnamese general that was discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar.

Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

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The Kerry committee's final report, issued in January 1993, delivered the ultimate insult to history. The 1,223-page document said there was "no compelling evidence that proves" there is anyone still in captivity. As for the primary investigative question —what happened to the men left behind in 1973—the report conceded only that there is "evidence . . . that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number" of prisoners 31 years ago, after Hanoi released the 591 P.O.W.'s it had admitted to.

With these word games, the committee report buried the issue—and the men.

The huge document contained no findings about what happened to the supposedly "small number." If they were no longer alive, then how did they die? Were they executed when ransom offers were rejected by Washington?

Kerry now slides past all the radio messages, satellite photos, live sightings, and boxes of intelligence documents—all the evidence. In his comments for this piece, this candidate for the presidency said: "No nation has gone to the lengths that we did to account for their dead. None—ever in history."

Of the so-called "possibility" of a "small number" of men left behind, the committee report went on to say that if this did happen, the men were not "knowingly abandoned," just "shunted aside." How do you put that on a gravestone?

In the end, the fact that Senator Kerry covered up crucial evidence as committee chairman didn't seem to bother too many Massachusetts voters when he came up for re-election—or the recent voters in primary states. So I wouldn't predict it will be much of an issue in the presidential election come November. It seems there is no constituency in America for missing Vietnam P.O.W.'s except for their families and some veterans of that war.

A year after he issued the committee report, on the night of January 26, 1994, Kerry was on the Senate floor pushing through a resolution calling on President Clinton to lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. In the debate, Kerry belittled the opposition, saying that those who still believed in abandoned P.O.W.'s were perpetrating a hoax. "This process," he declaimed, "has been led by a certain number of charlatans and exploiters, and we should not allow fiction to cloud what we are trying to do here."

Kerry's resolution passed, by a vote of 62 to 38. Sadly for him, the passage of ten thousand resolutions cannot make up for wants in a man's character.

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Additional research: Jennifer Suh


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: 2004; 2008; 229; coverup; johnkerry; kerry; mccain; pow; powmia; vietnam
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To: Stonewall Jackson; Conspiracy Guy
Interestingly enough, Uncommon Valor is just finishing on one of the Cinemax channels. It's coming on again at 1:15 a.m central time on AMAXW.
81 posted on 03/17/2004 9:56:55 PM PST by hmmmmm
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To: proudofthesouth
I am beginning to feel the same way; as I have said before, at least with the Clintons, we KNEW what they were about: themselves and themselves alone.

This guy......I just do not know...
82 posted on 03/17/2004 10:07:42 PM PST by Howlin (Bush has claimed two things which Democrats believe they own by right: the presidency & the future)
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To: Howlin
BTTT
83 posted on 03/18/2004 1:28:50 AM PST by CyberAnt (The 2004 Election is for the SOUL of AMERICA)
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To: hmmmmm
Hey! Its March 18th. Are you a time traveler? ; )
84 posted on 03/18/2004 4:36:21 AM PST by Conspiracy Guy (I'm voting for John Kerry by casting my vote against him. He's much too busy.)
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To: Rodney King
Wow! Schanberg is a liberal. He is the NY Times reporter in the movie "The Killing Fields" who blames Nixon because the communists in Cambodia behaved like communists always do.

There's a certain amount of hypocrisy involved for Schanberg to lecture anybody about leaving people behind...I don't have time to explain here, see Mona Charen's Useful Idiots for details...but it's still a stinging indictment.

85 posted on 03/18/2004 6:47:42 AM PST by Mr. Silverback (Your ultraconsrevativen click-gorilla.)
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To: dead; sultan88; Mudboy Slim; Corin Stormhands; jla; Flora McDonald; AdSimp; society-by-contract; ...
Thanks, dead.

Richmond ping.
More revelations about Kerry. I am sickened by what this reporter uncovered.

I can't believe something like this was actually in the Village Voice.
86 posted on 03/18/2004 6:50:20 AM PST by iceskater (No nation or state ever taxed itself into prosperity.)
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To: Miss Marple
Read about this thread from your ATRW post, and tracked it down. Thanks Jane.

I've known that the Tet offensive was not the failure usually depicted. Walter Cronkite is the culprit here with several accomplices, and the reason I detest him so much.

87 posted on 03/18/2004 2:29:51 PM PST by Molly Pitcher
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To: iceskater
Many thanks for the ping!
88 posted on 03/18/2004 2:38:25 PM PST by sultan88 ("I went down Virginia, seeking shelter from the storm...")
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To: Howlin
Are you saying that my words are horrible or what John Kerry did to the MIAs and POWs is horrible?

89 posted on 03/19/2004 8:26:02 AM PST by BushisTheMan
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To: BushisTheMan
Oh, gosh, no. I agree with every word you said; what I am doing is agreeing with you that what Kerry has done is unforgiveable, IMO.
90 posted on 03/19/2004 9:26:24 AM PST by Howlin
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To: Howlin
Wasn't sure at first.

I remember all too well soldiers returning from Vietnam and how they were treated (thanks to Kerry). I vowed then NEVER to let our soldiers down again. I did not protest FOR THEM as I should have.

Can you imagine Americans actually cheering when our guys got killed in Vietnam because it meant the anti-war guys could tally another one up in the body count.

Kerry and the VVAW are the scum of the earth!
91 posted on 03/19/2004 10:58:57 AM PST by BushisTheMan
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To: dead
bump
92 posted on 04/25/2004 6:27:53 PM PDT by mountaineer
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To: All

This is worthy of another Bump, it's been a while.


93 posted on 08/17/2004 7:38:03 AM PDT by chuknospam
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To: EggsAckley

The Village Voice has run a couple of articles over the past few months highly critical of Kerry. (They were posted on FR; I don't read VV.) I don't recall whether they were all by the same author, but this guy's name sounds familiar.


94 posted on 08/17/2004 7:44:31 AM PDT by maryz
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To: carlo3b

ping


95 posted on 08/17/2004 1:40:12 PM PDT by christie (http://www.hillaryforpresident-2008.com -- NOT!)
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To: LisaMalia

bttt


96 posted on 08/17/2004 1:47:33 PM PDT by wasp69 ("I drank what?" - Socrates (469-399 BC)
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To: dead
I think I can't feel any worse toward this traitor, Kerry, and then I read an article like this.

And let's be clear here ... Viet Nam HAD to be opened at ANY COST, all in the holy name of $$$ Free Trade and unimpeded commerce $$$

97 posted on 08/17/2004 3:47:32 PM PDT by CIBvet (It's about preserving OUR Borders, OUR Language and OUR American Culture)
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To: christie
Words can not describe the utter contempt I feel for anyone that would read this and still vote for this treasonous bastard.. However sadly, about half of the voting public will cast a vote for these maggots.. Liberal's will once again cast a blind eye to the pure evilness of their shallow, despicable, icons..

ANOTHER CIVIL WAR MAY BE OUR ONLY SALVATION.

98 posted on 08/17/2004 6:43:23 PM PDT by carlo3b (http://www.CookingWithCarlo.com)
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To: backhoe

BTTT backhoe you're a treasure! This article has sickened me...If only a hundreth of it is true, it's horrifying!


99 posted on 08/17/2004 6:53:02 PM PDT by lainde (Heads up...We're coming and we've got tongue blades!!)
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To: LisaMalia

bttt


100 posted on 08/17/2004 6:56:48 PM PDT by lainde (Heads up...We're coming and we've got tongue blades!!)
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