The War Secrets Senator John McCain Hides
Former POW Fights Public Access to POW/MIA
Files
Sydney Schanberg
NEW YORK (APBnews.com)
The voters who were drawn to John S. McCain
in his run for the Republican presidential nomination this year
often cited, as the core of his appeal, his openness and blunt
candor and willingness to admit past lapses and release documents
that other senators often hold back. These qualities also seemed
to endear McCain to the campaign press corps, many of whom wrote
about how refreshing it was to travel on the McCain campaign bus,
"The Straight Talk Express," and observe a maverick speaking his
mind rather than a traditional candidate given to obfuscation
and spin.
But there was one subject that was off-limits,
a subject the Arizona senator almost never brings up and has never
been open about-his long-time opposition to releasing documents
and information about American prisoners of war in Vietnam and
the missing in action who have still not been accounted for. Since
McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for
five-and-a-half years, his staunch resistance to laying open the
POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed
his career. Critics say his anti-disclosure campaign, in close
cooperation with the Pentagon and the intelligence community,
has been successful. Literally thousands of documents that would
otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated
into secrecy.
For example, all the Pentagon debriefings
of the prisoners who returned from Vietnam are now classified
and closed to the public under a statute enacted in the 1990s
with McCain's backing. He says this is to protect the privacy
of former POWs and gives it as his reason for not making public
his own debriefing.
But the law allows a returned prisoner to
view his own file or to designate another person to view it. APBnews.com
has repeatedly asked the senator for an interview for this article
and for permission to view his debriefing documents. He has not
responded. His office did recently send APBnews.com an email,
referring to a favorable article about the senator in the January
1 issue of Newsweek. In the article, the reporter, Michael Isikoff,
says that he was allowed to review McCain's debriefing report
and that it contained "nothing incriminating"-although in a phone
interview Isikoff acknowledged that "there were redactions" in
the document. Isikoff declined to say who showed him the document,
but APBnews.com has learned it was McCain.
Many Vietnam veterans and former POWs have
fumed at McCain for keeping these and other wartime files sealed
up. His explanation, offered freely in Senate hearings and floor
speeches, is that no one has been proven still alive and that
releasing the files would revive painful memories and cause needless
emotional stress to former prisoners, their families and the families
of MIAs still unaccounted for. But what if some of these returned
prisoners, as has always been the case at the conclusion of wars,
reveal information to their debriefing officers about other prisoners
believed still held in captivity? What justification is there
for filtering such information through the Pentagon rather than
allowing access to source materials? For instance, debriefings
from returning Korean war POWs, available in full to the American
public, have provided both citizens and government investigators
with important information about other Americans who went missing
in that conflict.
Would not most families of missing men,
no matter how emotionally drained, want to know? And would they
not also want to know what the government was doing to rescue
their husbands and sons? Hundreds of MIA families have for years
been questioning if concern for their feelings is the real reason
for the secrecy.
Prisoners Left Behind
A smaller number of former POWs, MIA families,
and veterans have suggested there is something especially damning
about McCain that the senator wants to keep hidden. Without release
of the files, such accusations must be viewed as unsubstantiated
speculation. The main reason, however, for seeking these files
is to find out if there is any information in the debriefings,
or in other MIA documents that McCain and the Pentagon have kept
sealed, about how many prisoners were held back by North Vietnam
after the Paris peace treaty was signed in January 1973. The defense
and intelligence establishment has long resisted the declassification
of critical records on this subject. McCain has been the main
congressional force behind this effort.
The prisoner return in 1973 saw 591 Americans
repatriated by North Vietnam. The problem was that the US intelligence
list of men believed to be alive at that time in captivity-in
Vietnam, Laos, and possibly across the border in southern China
and in the Soviet Union-was much larger. Possibly hundreds of
men larger. The State Department stated publicly in 1973 that
intelligence data showed the prisoner list to be starkly incomplete.
For example, only nine of the 591 returnees came out of Laos,
though experts in US military intelligence listed 311 men as missing
in that Hanoi-run country alone, and their field reports indicated
that many of those men were probably still alive. Hanoi said it
was returning all the prisoners it had. President Nixon, on March
29, 1973, seconded that claim, telling the nation on television:
"All of our American POWs are on their way home." This discrepancy
has never been acknowledged or explained by official Washington.
Over the years in Washington, McCain, at
times almost single-handedly, has pushed through Pentagon-desired
legislation to make it impossible or much harder for the public
to acquire POW/MIA information and much easier for the defense
bureaucracy to keep it hidden.
this article copyright 2000 Sydney Schanberg and
APBnews.com
You Are Being Lied To copyright 2001
The Disinformation Company, Ltd.
