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This is from an earlier post today.

Is this action treasonous?

"McCain along with Kerry have sold the Vietnam POWs and MIAs down the drain."

"This writing by Sydney H. Schlanberg pretty well states the degree of disgust those of us concerned with Vietnam War POWs have for McCain.

by Sydney H. Schanberg
June 7th, 2005

John McCain has won the press's heart and a sizable chunk of the public's
by championing progressive causes, not least his dogged drive to clean up
campaign financing.

The reporters covering the 2000 presidential primaries virtually swooned
inside his campaign bus, which, you'll remember, was named the Straight
Talk Express. The Arizona senator's message was: The rest of the candidates
are dedicated spinners; I'll tell you the truth. Now the press is gushing
over his leadership in breaking the Senate stalemate on the White House's
nominees for federal judgeships. Journalists love this kind of politician.
He's different, a Republican maverick, a thorn in the side of his own party
and its president, George W. Bush. To sum up, he makes great copy. He also
has made some laudable contributions to better government.

There is one part of his record, however, that the press almost never asks
him about. They never ask why this decorated navy pilot and Vietnam P.O.W.
has spent so much of his time and energy as a senator pushing through
legislation to block the release of information about American P.O.W.'s and
M.I.A.'s who are still not accounted for.

Working hand in hand with the Pentagon and the intelligence community,
McCain has kept hidden critical documents about a body of prisoners who
were alive but secretly held back by Hanoi when the war ended as bargaining
fuel for war reparations. They were never returned. They are now merely
listed as either dead or missing in action. Seven successive presidents,
starting with Richard Nixon, have privately endorsed this cover-up and
blackout on P.O.W. documents¯while claiming to have directed the Pentagon
and the intelligence agencies to declassify everything possible. Sure. And
all your toys are made by Santa's elves.

The reality is that while this shell game was going on, literally thousands
of P.O.W. documents that could have been declassified long ago and provided
to the families of the missing and the public have been legislated into
secrecy. John McCain was a major player in this lockdown.

A couple of examples will give you an idea of McCain's role. In 1991, he
authored what has always been called the "McCain Bill." Simply put, it
created a tight bureaucratic maze from which few P.O.W. documents can
possibly emerge. And in 1996, McCain succeeded in amending¯and gutting¯the
Missing Service Personnel Act, removing all its enforcement teeth. The
original act contained criminal penalties for anyone, such as a government
official, civilian or military, who destroys or covers up or withholds from
P.O.W. families any information about a missing soldier. McCain just erased
this part of the law. He said the penalties would have a chilling effect on
the Pentagon's ability to recruit personnel for its P.O.W.-M.I.A. office.

Why hasn't the press¯and in particular the Washington press corps¯gone
after this story? Part of the reason is that immediately after the Vietnam
War, the press hunkered down. When Washington tried to blame graphic news
stories and TV footage, not its flawed policy, for the U.S. failure in
Vietnam, the press for the most part did not confront its accusers and seek
to set the public record straight. Instead, it went largely silent and
compliant. Much of America was also running away from the black eye that
was Vietnam.

Even when the facts about P.O.W.'s were in plain sight, journalists shied
away. When the war-ending treaty was negotiated in Paris in January 1973,
Hanoi refused to produce¯until after the signing¯its list of the American
P.O.W.'s to be repatriated. U.S. officials were stunned when the list was
handed over. It had 591 names, hundreds fewer than American intelligence
data showed were alive in captivity. The American list for prisoners in
Laos, for instance, had 311 names. Of the 591 returnees on Hanoi's list,
only nine were from Laos. And that was just Laos.

The Laos disparity was reported clearly in the lead of a page one story in
The New York Times in late January 1973. The mainstream press never
followed up. Not to this day. Everyone focused on the obvious story: the
591 who were coming home. John McCain, on crutches from the torture he had
borne, was one of them.

How many Americans remember that in 1992 two defense secretaries who served
the Nixon administration in the Vietnam era, Melvin Laird and James
Schlesinger, testified before a Senate special committee on P.O.W.'s¯on
television, under oath¯that they believed, from strong intelligence data,
that a number of living prisoners in Vietnam and Laos had not been
returned? Schlesinger told the committee: "I can come to no other
conclusion . . . some were left behind." Their testimony has never been
challenged. Schlesinger, before becoming defense secretary, had been the
CIA director.

Incidentally, Senator McCain was a pivotal member of that P.O.W. committee,
which was co-chaired by his friend Senator John Kerry. The committee's
final report, in early 1993, whitewashed the evidence that men were left
behind. In effect, the report reversed the focus of the inquiry from "What
happened to the prisoners left behind in 1973?" to "Are there any prisoners
still alive today in Indochina?"

If you recall none of these events, you are forgiven. The press made little
of them. The Schlesinger-Laird testimony, for instance, was a one-day story
and, in The New York Times, it wasn't even the lead of the article. The
Washington press corps never pursued the story further.

In 1993, a document surfaced from Soviet archives. Its heading said it was
a report delivered late in the war by a senior North Vietnamese general,
Tran Van Quang, to members of Hanoi's Communist Party Central Committee. In
it, Quang said the army was holding 1,205 American prisoners¯614 more than
the 591 who were returned. He said only some of them would be handed over
initially after a peace treaty. The rest, he said, would be secretly held
for leverage until Hanoi received reconstruction reparations for the
heavily bombed country. The Pentagon immediately called it a forgery, a
plant, but offered slim evidence. The Russian archivists said flatly that
it was an authentic document.

As far as we know, Hanoi never received any reparations money. The U.S.
said its firm policy was never to ransom prisoners; this claim may or may
not be true. No serious effort has been made by Washington or the press to
investigate the mystery of the Quang document.

A ransom demand was made to the U.S. in the early days of the Reagan
administration, according to sworn testimony to the P.O.W. committee from
Reagan's national security adviser, Richard Allen. He later recanted,
saying his memory had played tricks on him. Both the committee and the
press docilely accepted his recantation and let the story die there.

Despite all the denials and suppression of key files by McCain and others,
ample evidence exists in the National Archives that men were held back by
Hanoi. The press can easily use the National Archives if it chooses.

Readers interested in more information can turn to a P.O.W. story I did for
the Voice last year about John Kerry's role. That piece ("When John Kerry's
Courage Went M.I.A.," February 24, 2004) has links to several other pieces
I've done over the years. And if you do a Google search for "Sydney
Schanberg, John McCain, P.O.W.'s," you'll find a longer, more detailed
story I wrote in 2000 about the specific legislation McCain has brokered to
keep documents hidden and about his rationale for these laws. He says,
u the American P.O.W.'s to be repatnconvincingly, that it's better for the
military and the nation if these documents are closely held. He also says
that while there was "evidence" of a number of prisoners not returned,
there is still no "proof."

A television movie about McCain's five and a half years as a P.O.W. debuted
over the Memorial Day weekend on A&E. It's called Faith of My Fathers,
based on his 1999 memoir of the same name. It could become part of his
campaign ammunition should he seek the presidency again in 2008.

For a man who is so candid about so many other issues, one would hope he
will help us better understand his senatorial record on P.O.W.'s. And
perhaps the Washington press corps will ask him about it.

This response was from an earlier post today (What's wrong with McCain.

Is this action treasonous?

35 posted on 06/12/2005 11:20:14 AM PDT by DJ Taylor (Once again our country is at war, and once again the Democrats have sided with our enemy.)
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