A repost that will make your blood boil......

The National Disinterest

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Bob Mack

I learned two important things during my long-ago stint in the U.S. Army. One was that you could depend on the guys stuck with you in whatever remote sh*thole the powers that be currently deemed vital to the national interest. The other was that you could never depend on the pr**ks in Washington that sent you there. In fact, a dispassionate study of the actions over time of our professional political class leads one to conclude that they generally share the sinister sentiments of former President ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon’s eminence grise:

In [Alexander] Haig‘s presence, [Henry] Kissinger is claimed to have referred pointedly to military men as “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy.

And ‘pawns’, of course, are the pieces on the chess board most readily sacrificed to protect the King.

Former U.S. Congressman Bill Hendon and co-author Elizabeth Stewart, in An Enormous Crime, document the betrayal of Vietnam-era prisoners of war by a government that should have been moving heaven and earth to get them back. The book alleges that

when the American government withdrew its forces from Vietnam, it knowingly abandoned hundreds of POWs to their fate…an Enormous Crime brilliantly exposes the reasons why these American soldiers and airmen were held back by the North Vietnamese at Operation Homecoming in 1973 and what these men have endured since.

Despite hundreds of postwar sightings and intelligence reports telling of Americans being held captive throughout Vietnam and Laos, Washington did nothing. And despite numerous secret military signals and codes sent from the desperate POWs themselves, the Pentagon did not act. Even in 1988, a U.S. spy satellite passing over Sam Neua Province, Laos, spotted the twelve-foot-tall letters “USA” and immediately beneath them a huge, highly classified Vietnam

War-era USAF/USN Escape & Evasion code in a rice paddy in a narrow mountain valley. The letters “USA” appeared to have been dug out of the ground, while the code appeared to have been fashioned from rice straw.

Tragically, the brave men who constructed these codes have not yet come home. Nor have any of the other American POWs who the postwar intelligence shows have laid down similar codes, secret messages, and secret authenticators in rice paddies and fields and garden plots and along trails in both Laos and Vietnam.

An Enormous Crime is based on open-source documents and reports, and thousands of declassified intelligence reports and satellite imagery, as well as author interviews and personal experience. It is a singular work, telling a story unlike any other in our modern history: ugly, harrowing, and true.

From the Bay of Pigs, where John and Robert Kennedy struck a deal with Fidel Castro that led to freedom for the Bay of Pigs prisoners, to the Paris Peace Accords, in which the authors argue Kissinger and Nixon sold American soldiers down the river for political gain, to a continued reluctance to revisit the

possibility of reclaiming any men who might still survive, we have a story untold for decades. And with An Enormous Crime we have for the first time a comprehensive history of America’s leaders in their worst hour; of life-and-death decision making based on politics, not intelligence; and of men lost to their families and the country they serve, betrayed by their own leaders.

In 1991, the Senate Select POW/MIA Committee was created to investigate the possibility that U.S. servicemen continued to be held prisoner in Southeast Asia. Senator and fellow Vietnam War veteran John Kerry was the chair of the committee, and its third key member was Senator and former Vietnam War POW John McCain. Kerry and McCain–the Gruesome Twosome. The Committee’s conclusion was predictable:

When John Kerry’s Courage Went M.I.A.

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.

[...] 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.”

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.

McCain and the POW Cover-Up

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 who people would logically imagine as 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 the Republican Party has made McCain’s military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War 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—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the U.S. prisoners held by 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.

There is certainly ample reason to doubt the conclusions of the above august representatives:

Bob Posted reference material to validate this post. Please go to "Be sure you are right then go ahead"