McCain and the POW Cover-up
by Sydney H. Schanberg


John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a
Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from
the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who,
unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has
quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that
keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified
documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a
determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became
instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the
books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied
from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as McCain has
made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential
campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also turned
their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about
the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There
exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness
depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained
to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual
code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit
that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two
defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of
evidence suggests that a large number--probably hundreds--of the US
prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was
signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy
combat pilot John S. McCain.

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 produced the
creation, in late 1991, of a Senate "Select Committee on POW/MIA
Affairs." The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most
pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking
machine.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies
suppressed or tried 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 the 1990s. 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 reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the
prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a
February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon
pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid. The North
Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise
being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners--just as it
had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and
withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for
prisoners and brought them home.

Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to
the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not
returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, secretaries of defense
under Nixon, said in a public session and under oath that they based
their conclusions on strong intelligence data--letters, eyewitness
reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger
chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the
issue: "I think that as of now that I can come to no other
conclusion...some were left behind."

Furthermore, over the years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
received more than 1,600 firsthand reports of sightings of live American
prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand accounts. Many witnesses
interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed
"credible" in the agents' reports. Some of the witnesses were given
lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these
witness reports. Yet the DIA, after reviewing them all, concluded that
they "do not constitute evidence" that men were still alive.

There is also evidence that in the first months of Reagan's presidency,
the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being
held by Hanoi. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an
official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in
the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush,
CIA director William Casey and National Security Adviser Richard Allen.
Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee
on June 23, 1992.

Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors, and no information was
released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert
Caldwell, obtained the portion of the testimony relating to the ransom
offer and wrote about it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen
testified. He said he told Reagan that "it would be worth the president
going along and let's have the negotiation." When his testimony appeared
in the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel,
this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story, saying his memory
had played tricks on him.

But the story didn't end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty
in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard
part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981. The
Senate POW committee voted not to subpoena him to testify.

On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, sister of missing airman Capt.
Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an
organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate
committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the
government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified
program known as PAVE SPIKE.

The devices were primarily motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to
pick up enemy troop movements. But they also had rescue capabilities.
Someone on the ground--a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor
gang--could manually enter data into the sensor, which were regularly
collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated,
without any challenge from the committee, that in 1974, a year after the
supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a
person or people had manually entered into the sensors--as US pilots had
been trained to do--"no less than 20 authenticator numbers that
corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US
POW/MIAs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, says the transcript:
"This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not
discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE."

McCain, whose POW status made him the committee's most powerful member,
attended that hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her
criticism of the panel's work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a
while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his
"patriotism." The bullying had its effect--she began to cry.

After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching
tirade, but McCain simply turned and stormed out of the room. The PAVE
SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don't know anything
about those 20 POWs.

The committee's final report, issued in January 1993, began with a
forty-three-page executive summary--the only section that drew the
mainstream press's attention. It said that only "a small number" of POWs
could have been left behind in 1973. But the document's remaining 1,180
pages were quite different. Sprinkled throughout are findings that
contradict and disprove the conclusions of the whitewashed summary. This
insertion of critical evidence that committee leaders had downplayed and
dismissed was the work of a committee staff that had opposed and finally
rebelled against the cover-up.

Pages 207-209 of the report, for example, contain major revelations of
what were either massive intelligence failures or bad intentions. These
pages say that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no
branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of
satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the
distress signals US forces were trained to use in Vietnam--nor had they
ever been tasked to look for such signals from possible prisoners on the
ground.

In a personal briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me
privately that as it became more and more difficult for either
government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged
prisoners, those prisoners became not only useless as bargaining chips
but also a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international
community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly
that the remaining men--those who had not died from illness or hard
labor or torture--were eventually executed. My own research has
convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few--if any--are
alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing was conducted "off the
record," but because the evidence from my reporting since then has
brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point
in not writing about the meeting.)

For many reasons, including the absence of a constituency for the
missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very
few Americans are aware of McCain's role not only in keeping the subject
out of public view but in denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That
is because McCain has hardly been alone in this hide-the-scandal
campaign. The Arizona senator has actually been following the lead of
every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director,
Pentagon chief and National Security Adviser, among many others
(including **** Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush's defense secretary).

An early and critical attempt by McCain to conceal evidence involved
1990 legislation called the Truth bill, which started in the House. A
brief and simple document, the bill would have compelled complete
transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence said
that the "head of each department or agency which holds or receives any
records and information, including reports, which have been correlated
or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of
war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the
Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records
held or received by that department or agency."

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus by McCain), the bill went
nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a
few months later a new measure, the McCain bill, suddenly appeared. It
created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents
could emerge--only the records that revealed no POW secrets. The McCain
bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.

McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel
Act, which was strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal
penalties against "any government official who knowingly and willfully
withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to
the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person." A year
later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military
bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling
amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the
criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the
field to speedily search for missing men and report the incidents to the
Pentagon.

McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it
impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA
matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only "willing to
work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the
law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of
debunking the existence of live POWs.

McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence has been woven
together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and
unpatriotic myth. He calls it the work of the "bizarre rantings of the
MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry
out classified documents as "hoaxers," "charlatans," "conspiracy
theorists" and "dime-store Rambos." Family members who have personally
pressed McCain to end the secrecy have been treated to his legendary
temper. In 1996 he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members
who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a
mother in a wheelchair.

The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on
legislation that seals POW information is that he believes the release
of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of
those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW
families I've met over the years, only a few have said they want the
books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest
say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.

It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors
to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior. That
confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at
Hoa Lo--to try to break down other prisoners--and was broadcast over
Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal
who had bombed a school and other civilian targets. The Pentagon has
copies of the confessions but will not release them. Also, no outsider I
know of has ever seen a nonredacted copy of McCain's debriefing when he
returned from captivity, which is classified but can be made public by
McCain.

In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers,
McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was
being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his
propaganda value (his high-ranking father, Rear Adm. John S. McCain II,
was then the commander of US forces in the Pacific). Also in this
memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given
the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he
writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide.
Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out
about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall
wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."

McCain still didn't know the answer when his father died in 1981. He got
his answer eighteen years later. In his 1999 memoir, the senator writes,
"I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the
prison and had come to the attention of my father."

Does this hint at explanations for McCain's efforts to bury information
about prisoners or other disturbing pieces of the Vietnam War? Does he
suppress POW information because its surfacing rekindles his feelings of
shame? On this subject, all I have are questions. But even without
answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of someone's mind, one
thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were
dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the
American public ought to know about.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/schanberg

No responses yet? HMMMMM

I think McCains complete military records should be made public. I would also like to see records of his captivity in North Viet Nam. I have read that the reason he was so involved with normalizing relations with Viet Nam was so that he could have those records buried as part of the deal. I suppose the Russians also have some records on him.

This should all be public record.

I agree. What possible reason could he have for not wanting his so called noble service exposed unless he has something to hide?

I wonder if McCain is in fact a Machurian candidate.

John Mc Cain is probably a traitor and has worked hard to cover his tracks at the expense of the true patriots and their families.

that's a scary thought

he may be still involved in military intelligence.

he seemd to have the handle on how to fix Iraq.

The generals knew who to put out there and serve mcCain's perspective to the terrorists, huh?

but that is not enough for you whiners, is it?

You have nothing on McCain.

it is another liberal distraction to further fuel what hillaryus calls the "the right wing conspiracy against the clintons"

wah wah wah.


have some more KOOL AID, and quit crying.

Wouldee, that might be true, except that this is being brought up by Pat Buchanan, but better than that its also being pushed by the folks that ran the Vietnam vets against John Kerry.

He must be one of them there "Georgetown cocktail party" types McCain disdains.

Not a Georgetown type, just a real conservative, although hes got some issues, he believes in most of the traditional conservative principles.

Noninterventionism.
Fiscal responsibility.
Reducing the size/scope of Government.
Responsible monetary policy.
Protecting the Soveriegnty of the country, which means no amnesty.

McCain spouts the appropriate rhetoric, but yet, he's actually voted against all the historic and traditional Conservative values.

PB is a guest on Rachel Maddow's comedy show quite often.

I can't trust him to do more than get his panties in a knot, most days.

As for the swiftboaters, I never believed they made a difference at all, in the outcome for Kerry.

and Obama's handlers are only plagiarizing rove-otics.

know what I mean?

it's all spin.

Sometimes I take potshots at McCain too when he looks like obama. it mirrors things quite nicely, don'tcha think?

But obama gets the lion share of my attention.

the liberals are just too easy to use as an example for what is really really wrong with Americans' grasp on reality.

The silent majority brace differently.

I would rather test the waters and see just how many people can stomach reality.

For that, I get called a loon, or worse.


But it sure is humorous.

You're just above it all, eh Woodie?

Funny, I focus more on McCain, because he's a fake.
With Obama, we can count on him doing certain things, McCain is saying one thing and doing the opposite, yet the brainwashed masses don't seem to notice.