[spokeshave]

I seem to remember that McCain teamed up with John f’n Kerry to ignore the MIA troops so a commercial opening to Vietnam could be accomplished.

[spokeshave]

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.

I am not a military person....but have a long memory.

[matthew fuller]

Yep- they conspired to write off all of the MIA’s, so Vietnam could trade with us. seems like there were thought to be about 1500 of them, and the roster just went to zero.

[Will88]

I seem to remember that McCain teamed up with John f’n Kerry to ignore the MIA troops so a commercial opening to Vietnam could be accomplished.

Yes they did in 1993 as I recall. The purpose of those hearing was to discredit anyone with evidence that there might be POW/MIAs still alive in Vietnam. I watched part of them and kept track. Formed a very low opinion of Juan and it has gotten substantially lower since on numerous occasions.

[Tucker39]

I wonder if Juan rigged it so that his wife, as a Budweiser distributor, gets a cut from the Anheuser-Busch products going into Nam? Always follow the money trail. It would be a stretch for that to happen; except if a U.S. Senator has rigged it as the only way A-B gets in on the action in Nam.