thedrifter
02-09-04, 07:39 AM
EXCERPTS FROM "THE MIA COVER-UP" BY JOHN CORRY
February 1994
(Emphasis Added Throughout)
A March 1973 memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, "There are approximately 350 U.S. military and civilian POW/MIAs in Laos." An earlier memo to Henry Kissinger says that some 215 of the 350 "were lost under circumstances that the enemy probably has information regarding their fate." No information was ever forthcoming, however, and only twelve prisoners returned from Laos....Therefore, some 1,200 might still have been alive. (A later Pentagon document gives a precise number of 1,278.) The possibility that they were alive, however, was ignored, and even misrepresented.
* * *
[T]he Vietnamese were trying to hide something. [U.S. field] investigators were shown pre-selected items. They were shown not the register that listed all the items, but instead an excerpt from the register. Apparently, they insisted then on examining the entire register, and when they did, they discovered it was a fake. Moreover, "certain items of high interest" that were supposed to be in the museum were missing.
The investigators, however, listed in their report the items they were able to see, literally translating the museum's own descriptions. They found, for example, "a flag used to request food used by the American colonel pilot Hynds, Wallace G., and was captured at Ha Tinh, and "bandit pilot identification card number FR 15792 of Hynds, Wallace Gouley and was captured alive in Ha Tinh on 28-5-1965."
That Colonel Hynds was captured alive seems indisputable; the Pentagon, however, has always listed a Col. Wallace Gurley Hynds as killed in action. There are six other men whose names were found in that one provincial museum who were all listed as being captured alive, although the Pentagon had declared them all dead.
* * *
A North Vietnamese military doctor, who defected to the South in 1971, told American officials that Hanoi was holding hundreds more prisoners than it had acknowledged. In 1979, another Vietnamese Communist defector told the Defense Intelligence Agency that in the mid-1970s Vietnamese officials had talked about holding 700 American prisoners as "bargaining assets....
* * *
In Hanoi, meanwhile, Gen. John Vessey, the presidential emissary to Vietnam on POW-MIA affairs, said he had spoken to General Quang and that Quang denied he had made the report.... Vessey was making a strange argument. If Hanoi kept a separate prison system for the POWs who were not returned, the POWs who did return would hardly be aware of it....Even before the arrival of the boat people, though, U.S. intelligence agencies suspected that Hanoi had help POWs outside the known prisoner system.... Some reports are clear enough. A CIA document only recently declassified, suggests that POWs were held in camps other than the ones identified during the war....[T]he CIA again said cautiously, "the possibility of a second prison system for the detention of American POWs cannot be disregarded"....[T]he Defense Department had speculated along these same lines before the CIA did.
* * *
In the appalling history of POW-MIA policy, though, nothing is more scandalous than the issue of live sightings. Since 1975, the Defense Intelligence Agency has received more than 15,000 live-sighting reports about American prisoners in Southeast Asia. Approximately 1,650 of the reports are first-hand. That means a source says he has actually seen an American held in captivity, or under conditions that cannot be easily explained....No live-sighting reporting, however, has every been accepted as proof by the Defense Intelligence Agency that an MIA is still alive, or ever has been alive, in Southeast Asia. This defies the laws of probability. It also moves us into the area of culpable negligence. It is permissible now to wonder if the Defense Intelligence Agency has ever been seriously interested in uncovering the truth about our missing men, or whether it has always been an instrument in a cover-up.
* * *
This led in 1986 to the Director's POW/MIA Task Force Report, or the Gaines Report, after Air Force Col. Kimball M. Gaines who was its principal author. Consider the following excerpts... "There exists a mindset to debunk....Within POW/MIA Division it has evolved over time as an investigative technique, whereby intense effort is initially focused on veracity of sources with a view toward discrediting them."...In other words, the DIA bullied those who came forth with information about MIAs: it called an "inordinate" number of them liars; it sought to discredit reports of live sightings. The Pentagon immediately classified the Gaines Report.
* * *
The DIA is programmed to discredit the possibility that anyone was left behind in Southeast Asia, or that anyone remains there now. Its intellectual dishonesty has been stunning, and its investigative process a fraud. On occasion, it has seemed criminal.
* * *
Tan Lap, where the major was held, has another distinction as well. It is one of five Vietnamese prisons -- the other are Quyet Tien, Yen Bai, Ha Son Binh, and Thanh Hoa -- where, according to reports from the boat people and others, POWs were buried in cemeteries in the late 1970s and 1980s. The reports are credible; some are from former Vietnamese prisoners who say they dug the grave. Not one of the cemeteries, however, has been excavated by any of the teams now looking for MIA remains. Instead, the teams dig up old crash sites. The crash sites yield little or nothing; the cemeteries could yield a great deal -- evidence, perhaps, about men who were murdered. It seems, though that the Defense Department does not want to know.
* * *
[S]ix staff members on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs who were charged with investigating intelligence reports...drew an obvious conclusion: "that American prisoners of war have been held continuously after Operation Homecoming and remain[ed] in captivity in Vietnam and Laos as late as 1989." [The investigators were for technical reasons using live-sighting reports that extended only through 1989.]
The conclusion, however, was not welcomed by the DIA, or even by most members of the Senate Committee....John Kerry, the committee chairman, told one of the investigators that if the report every leaked out, "you'll wish you'd never been born." Senator Kerry wants to normalize relations with Vietnam. When the briefing was over, Frances Zwenig, the committee staff director, ordered that all copies of the investigators' report be destroyed, She also said she wanted the computer files purged. Zwenig, who is now the executive assistant to United Nations Ambassador Madeleine Albright, also wants to normalize relations with Vietnam.
* * *
[S]ome of the distress signals may have been made years ago. On the other hand, some of them may be new....At the very least, they are further proof that a cover-up has been, and still is, in progress. We have broken faith with men who fought for their country, and we are being blighted by an ever-widening moral stain.
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-P_15at
Sempers,
Roger
:marine:
February 1994
(Emphasis Added Throughout)
A March 1973 memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, "There are approximately 350 U.S. military and civilian POW/MIAs in Laos." An earlier memo to Henry Kissinger says that some 215 of the 350 "were lost under circumstances that the enemy probably has information regarding their fate." No information was ever forthcoming, however, and only twelve prisoners returned from Laos....Therefore, some 1,200 might still have been alive. (A later Pentagon document gives a precise number of 1,278.) The possibility that they were alive, however, was ignored, and even misrepresented.
* * *
[T]he Vietnamese were trying to hide something. [U.S. field] investigators were shown pre-selected items. They were shown not the register that listed all the items, but instead an excerpt from the register. Apparently, they insisted then on examining the entire register, and when they did, they discovered it was a fake. Moreover, "certain items of high interest" that were supposed to be in the museum were missing.
The investigators, however, listed in their report the items they were able to see, literally translating the museum's own descriptions. They found, for example, "a flag used to request food used by the American colonel pilot Hynds, Wallace G., and was captured at Ha Tinh, and "bandit pilot identification card number FR 15792 of Hynds, Wallace Gouley and was captured alive in Ha Tinh on 28-5-1965."
That Colonel Hynds was captured alive seems indisputable; the Pentagon, however, has always listed a Col. Wallace Gurley Hynds as killed in action. There are six other men whose names were found in that one provincial museum who were all listed as being captured alive, although the Pentagon had declared them all dead.
* * *
A North Vietnamese military doctor, who defected to the South in 1971, told American officials that Hanoi was holding hundreds more prisoners than it had acknowledged. In 1979, another Vietnamese Communist defector told the Defense Intelligence Agency that in the mid-1970s Vietnamese officials had talked about holding 700 American prisoners as "bargaining assets....
* * *
In Hanoi, meanwhile, Gen. John Vessey, the presidential emissary to Vietnam on POW-MIA affairs, said he had spoken to General Quang and that Quang denied he had made the report.... Vessey was making a strange argument. If Hanoi kept a separate prison system for the POWs who were not returned, the POWs who did return would hardly be aware of it....Even before the arrival of the boat people, though, U.S. intelligence agencies suspected that Hanoi had help POWs outside the known prisoner system.... Some reports are clear enough. A CIA document only recently declassified, suggests that POWs were held in camps other than the ones identified during the war....[T]he CIA again said cautiously, "the possibility of a second prison system for the detention of American POWs cannot be disregarded"....[T]he Defense Department had speculated along these same lines before the CIA did.
* * *
In the appalling history of POW-MIA policy, though, nothing is more scandalous than the issue of live sightings. Since 1975, the Defense Intelligence Agency has received more than 15,000 live-sighting reports about American prisoners in Southeast Asia. Approximately 1,650 of the reports are first-hand. That means a source says he has actually seen an American held in captivity, or under conditions that cannot be easily explained....No live-sighting reporting, however, has every been accepted as proof by the Defense Intelligence Agency that an MIA is still alive, or ever has been alive, in Southeast Asia. This defies the laws of probability. It also moves us into the area of culpable negligence. It is permissible now to wonder if the Defense Intelligence Agency has ever been seriously interested in uncovering the truth about our missing men, or whether it has always been an instrument in a cover-up.
* * *
This led in 1986 to the Director's POW/MIA Task Force Report, or the Gaines Report, after Air Force Col. Kimball M. Gaines who was its principal author. Consider the following excerpts... "There exists a mindset to debunk....Within POW/MIA Division it has evolved over time as an investigative technique, whereby intense effort is initially focused on veracity of sources with a view toward discrediting them."...In other words, the DIA bullied those who came forth with information about MIAs: it called an "inordinate" number of them liars; it sought to discredit reports of live sightings. The Pentagon immediately classified the Gaines Report.
* * *
The DIA is programmed to discredit the possibility that anyone was left behind in Southeast Asia, or that anyone remains there now. Its intellectual dishonesty has been stunning, and its investigative process a fraud. On occasion, it has seemed criminal.
* * *
Tan Lap, where the major was held, has another distinction as well. It is one of five Vietnamese prisons -- the other are Quyet Tien, Yen Bai, Ha Son Binh, and Thanh Hoa -- where, according to reports from the boat people and others, POWs were buried in cemeteries in the late 1970s and 1980s. The reports are credible; some are from former Vietnamese prisoners who say they dug the grave. Not one of the cemeteries, however, has been excavated by any of the teams now looking for MIA remains. Instead, the teams dig up old crash sites. The crash sites yield little or nothing; the cemeteries could yield a great deal -- evidence, perhaps, about men who were murdered. It seems, though that the Defense Department does not want to know.
* * *
[S]ix staff members on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs who were charged with investigating intelligence reports...drew an obvious conclusion: "that American prisoners of war have been held continuously after Operation Homecoming and remain[ed] in captivity in Vietnam and Laos as late as 1989." [The investigators were for technical reasons using live-sighting reports that extended only through 1989.]
The conclusion, however, was not welcomed by the DIA, or even by most members of the Senate Committee....John Kerry, the committee chairman, told one of the investigators that if the report every leaked out, "you'll wish you'd never been born." Senator Kerry wants to normalize relations with Vietnam. When the briefing was over, Frances Zwenig, the committee staff director, ordered that all copies of the investigators' report be destroyed, She also said she wanted the computer files purged. Zwenig, who is now the executive assistant to United Nations Ambassador Madeleine Albright, also wants to normalize relations with Vietnam.
* * *
[S]ome of the distress signals may have been made years ago. On the other hand, some of them may be new....At the very least, they are further proof that a cover-up has been, and still is, in progress. We have broken faith with men who fought for their country, and we are being blighted by an ever-widening moral stain.
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-P_15at
Sempers,
Roger
:marine: