helmsman wrote:

by Sydney H. Schanberg
February 24th, 2004 1:00 PM

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."

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 promising to turn over all committee records to the National Archives when the panel
concluded its work, the senator destroyed crucial 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."

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.

* He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The
shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote
internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo—from John F. McCreary,
a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst—reported that the committee's chief counsel, J.
William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's
the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S.
servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell
them? It's classified."

Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only
copies—but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information
would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that
all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National
Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent
researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.

* Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense
Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig [Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the
Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from
this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to
the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks
were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses."

* A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with
the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was
then defense secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the
chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a dominant committee member, had gotten
cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W.
information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to
suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. Another
internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for
the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being
controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."

* The Kerry investigative technique was equally soft in many other critical ways. He
rejected all suggestions that the committee require former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan,
and George H.W. Bush to testify. All were in the Oval Office during the Vietnam era and
its aftermath. They had information critical to the committee, for each president was
carefully and regularly briefed by his national security adviser and others about P.O.W.
developments. It was a huge issue at that time.

* Kerry also refused to subpoena the Nixon office tapes (yes, the Watergate tapes)
from the early months of 1973 when the P.O.W.'s were an intense subject because of the
peace talks and the prisoner return that followed. (Nixon had rejected committee requests
to provide the tapes voluntarily.) Information had seeped out for years that during the
Paris talks and afterward, Nixon had been briefed in detail by then national security
advisor Brent Scowcroft and others about the existence of P.O.W.'s whom Hanoi was not
admitting to. Nixon, distracted by Watergate, apparently decided it was crucial to get out
of the Vietnam mess immediately, even if it cost those lives. Maybe he thought there would
be other chances down the road to bring these men back. So he approved the peace treaty
and on March 29, 1973, the day the last of the 591 acknowledged prisoners were released in
Hanoi, Nixon announced on national television: "All of our American P.O.W.'s are on their
way home."

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.

Last line says it all.

dxAce
A Navy Veteran who will not be voting for John Fraud Kerry.

So you aren't voting for John Kerry.

I am.

WHO GIVES A **** EITHER WAY?!

This is a SHORTWAVE RADIO board, you stupid F00king morons--- NOT a board for
your rightwing lying SPAM.

STFU, then
GET STUFFED.
Then get RELEVENT.

Take your garbage to "RIGHTWING CHAT", don't post it here--- lest I am
compelled to respond with
"Bush's 1001 LIES"

Sorry folks, but I come to the shortwave board to read this ****---- NOT.

Oh, btw
When George Bush's courage went MIA, it never came back.

But I suppose you'd have to HAVE some first, before it could go MIA, eh?

he's most courageous sending other people's children off to die, I'll give him
that.

EBookSuppliers1 wrote:

So you aren't voting for John Kerry.

I am.

WHO GIVES A **** EITHER WAY?!

This is a SHORTWAVE RADIO board, you stupid F00king morons--- NOT a board for
your rightwing lying SPAM.

STFU, then
GET STUFFED.
Then get RELEVENT.

Take your garbage to "RIGHTWING CHAT", don't post it here--- lest I am
compelled to respond with
"Bush's 1001 LIES"

Sorry folks, but I come to the shortwave board to read this ****---- NOT.

Oh, btw
When George Bush's courage went MIA, it never came back.

But I suppose you'd have to HAVE some first, before it could go MIA, eh?

he's most courageous sending other people's children off to die, I'll give him
that.

It would appear from a quick Google search that you've never, ever posted any
shortwave material to this group. At least not under your newfound
'EBookSuppliers1' moniker.

Got radio?

dxAce
A Navy Veteran who will not be voting for John Fraud Kerry.

In article ,
(EBookSuppliers1) wrote:

So you aren't voting for John Kerry.

I am.

WHO GIVES A **** EITHER WAY?!

This is a SHORTWAVE RADIO board, you stupid F00king morons--- NOT a
board for your rightwing lying SPAM.

Snip

I haven't read any right wingers lying, just left wing losers like
yourself.

Lets see:

1. Never posted a radio related article before.
2. Made his post complaining about politics in the newsgroup a political
post.

You are not the sharpest knife in the drawer are you.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California

"EBookSuppliers1" wrote in message
...\

Nobody forced you to ready now did they StOOOpid?