OT John (the traitor) Kerry covers up MIA?

When John Kerry's Courage Went M.I.A.
Senator covered up evidence of P.O.W.'s left behind
by Sydney H. Schanberg
February 24th, 2004 1:00 PM


Related Articles:

"Did America Abandon Vietnam War POWs?" by Sydney H. Schanberg

"Follow the Microfiche"



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.

--

Scott in Florida

I was invited to a rally to hear Senator Kerry, in Pennsylvania with Dim
candidate for Senate, but after calling the troops stupid Casey asked Kerry
to stay out of the state. LOL


mike


"Scott in Florida" <askifyouwant@mindspring.net> wrote in message
news:e9ufk25bqeci2mifbjdr1dol9tn9ep7315@4ax.com...[color=blue]
> When John Kerry's Courage Went M.I.A.
> Senator covered up evidence of P.O.W.'s left behind
> by Sydney H. Schanberg
> February 24th, 2004 1:00 PM
>
>
> Related Articles:
>
> "Did America Abandon Vietnam War POWs?" by Sydney H. Schanberg
>
> "Follow the Microfiche"
>
>
>
> 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.
>
> --
>
> Scott in Florida
>[/color]

In article <wJudnSnX2YA4XNXYUSdV9g@ptd.net>,
"Mike Hunter" <mikehunt2@mailcity.com> wrote:
[color=blue]
> I was invited to a rally to hear Senator Kerry, in Pennsylvania with Dim
> candidate for Senate, but after calling the troops stupid Casey asked Kerry
> to stay out of the state. LOL
>
>
> mike[/color]

The dimmies here and in Iowa canx him too.

[color=blue]
>
>
> "Scott in Florida" <askifyouwant@mindspring.net> wrote in message
> news:e9ufk25bqeci2mifbjdr1dol9tn9ep7315@4ax.com...[color=green]
> > When John Kerry's Courage Went M.I.A.
> > Senator covered up evidence of P.O.W.'s left behind
> > by Sydney H. Schanberg
> > February 24th, 2004 1:00 PM
> >
> >
> > Related Articles:
> >
> > "Did America Abandon Vietnam War POWs?" by Sydney H. Schanberg
> >
> > "Follow the Microfiche"
> >
> >
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > --
> >
> > Scott in Florida
> >[/color][/color]
--