Sen. John Kerry (D-MA),... under a bust of Ho Chi Minh, during a Nov. 1994 meeting in Hanoi with Do Muoi, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. In 1955, as a leader in the communist land reform movement, Muoi helped annihilate Vietnam's middle-class landowners. Over 50,000 Vietnamese landowners were murdered that year, making it one of the bloodiest periods in Vietnam's history.
Sydney H. Schanberg, associate editor and columnist for New York Newsday and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist veteran of the Indochina War whose book, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, became the subject of the Academy Awardwinning film The Killing Fields, chronicled some of Kerry's more blatant proHanoi biases.
In a Nov. 21, 1993 column, Schanberg wrote, "Highly credible information has been surfacing in recent days which indicates that the headlines you have been reading about a `breakthrough' in Hanoi's cooperation on the POW/MIA issue are part of a carefully scripted performance. The apparent purpose is to move toward normalization of relations with Hanoi.
"Sen. John F. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, is one of the key figures pushing for normalization. Kerry is currently on a visit to Vietnam where he has been doing two things: (1) praising the Vietnamese effusively for granting access to their war archives and (2) telling the press that there's no believable evidence to back up the stories of live POWs still being held.
"Ironically, that very kind of livePOW evidence has been brought to Kerry's own committee on a regular basis over the past year, and he has repeatedly sought to impeach its value. Moreover, Kerry and his allies on the committee such as Sens. John McCain, Nancy Kassebaum and Tom Daschle have worked to block much of this evidence from being made public."
In December of 1992, not long after Kerry was quoted in the world press stating "President Bush should reward Vietnam for its increased cooperation in accounting for American MIAs," Vietnam announced it had granted Boston, Massachusetts based Colliers International, a contract worth billions designating Colliers International as the exclusive real estate agent representing Vietnam. That deal alone put Colliers in a position to make tens of millions of dollars (after the U.S. normalized trade relations) on the rush to upgrade Vietnam's ports, railroads, highways, government buildings, etc.
C. Stewart Forbes, Chief Executive Officer of Colliers International, is Kerry's cousin.
In its 1993 final report, the Select Committee determined that live U.S. prisoners of war were left behind in the hands of the Vietnamese after the end of the war. The committee also claimed it found no "compelling" evidence proving the POWs remain alive today.
Kerry's committee stopped there without answering three of the most profound questions of the entire Senate POW/MIA investigation:
What happened to those U.S. prisoners of war that the Select Committee said were alive and in the hands of the Vietnamese but not released at the end of the war?
If they are dead, where are their remains?
Who is responsible for their deaths?
Kerry was portrayed in The New Yorker as a proud Vietnam veteran and "war hero" who, as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, dared to take on and defeat the "mendacious POW lobby."
Excerpt:U.S. Veteran Dispatch, Nov. 1998 - May 1999 Issue ,http://www.usvetdsp.com/clinyugo.htm