Say Anything Blog

From the Village Voice via Instapundit:

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.

If true, this is a knock-out blow to Kerry who has made his service in Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign.

In January of 1993 a Senate committee Kerry was a member of, which was charged with investigating the possibilities of surviving soldiers in Vietnam, issued a final report stating that there was no "compelling evidence" proving there were any soldiers still in custody. Kerry stood behind the committee's findings by saying, "No nation has gone to the lengths that we did to account for their dead. None--ever in history."

Yet the Village Voice article points to a wealth of information that would seem to indicate that there were in fact soldiers left behind in Vietnam:

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.

This POW/MIA website contains a lot more information about soldiers left behind in Vietnam, among other places. To me, this is some pretty convincing information.

While it may be a bit disturbing that so much evidence was ignored by Kerry's committee and the Pentagon, some of Kerry's actions while on the Senate committee are even more disturbing:

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.

And that's just one example from the article.

Now many of you may be thinking about dismissing this information as election-year smear campaigning, but consider the source. The Village Voice is not exactly a bastion of pro-Republican sentiments and the author (Sydney H. Schanberg) is certainly not a supporter of George W. Bush. To be honest, I'd like to see John Kerry answer some questions about this story, and I'd also like to see an investigation into what exactly John Kerry's actions were while a member of the Senate committee.