"The Mia Cover-Up"

[thedrifter]

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.o...code=94-P_15at


Sempers,

Roger

[Lock-n-Load]

Contact Irene Mandra-USMC...Imandra@optonline.net..she is President of MIA-POW Families and their fight vs the USA Dept of State and the USA Defense Dept for stonewalling all MIA-POW Families since 1952..."Nazi Germany" still rules the Beltway.

[MillRatUSMC]

http://www.oldglorytraditions.com/vietnamwar_s.htm
U.S. ACCOUNTED-FOR AND UNACCOUNTED FOR FROM THE VIETNAM WAR
(Sorted by Name)

There's no listing of MIA's just,
KIA/BNR--Killed in action, Body not recovered.
A POW is just a POW even if we don't know that he or she has been captured by our enemies.

Below is a Marine,STAEHLI, BRUCE WAYNE USMC
Presumptive finding of death instead of MIA or KIA/BNR.
My note;
I believe that L/Cpl Bruce W. Staehli has been reverted back to MIA or KIA/BNR.

STAEHLI, BRUCE WAYNE

Name: Bruce Wayne Staehli
Rank/Branch: Lance Corporal/USMC
Unit: l/3/9 3 MAR DIV
Date of Birth: 24 September 1948
Home City of Record: Crown Point Lake IN
Loss Date: 30 April 1968
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 164930N 1070200E
Status (in 1973): Missing In Action
Category: 2
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Others In Incident: none missing
Refno: 1152

Source: Compiled from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W. NETWORK in 1998.

SYNOPSIS: Bruce Staehli was a Marine in Vietnam when the fighting was intense. His Marine brothers at Khe Sanh had fought the Vietnamese in one of the bloodiest battles of the war earlier in the year, while the Marines at Hue were fighting the enemy in the streets. By April, the Marines at Khe Sanh had finished operation Pegasus and had embarked on a series of missions called Scotland II to search and clear the area of enemy presence.

It was perhaps on such a mission that Bruce Staehli disappeared on April 30, 1968, near the city of Dong Ha, South Vietnam. Dong Ha is only a few miles from the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and less than 30 miles northeast of Khe Sanh. Staehli is the only missing man from the action that day, and there is good reason to believe the enemy knows his fate. He may have been captured.

When American prisoners were released 5 years later, the Staehli family was shocked and disappointed that their son was not one of them. Experts say there were hundreds expected to be released who were not.

Since the end of American involvement in Vietnam, thousands of reports of Americans still held captive in Southeast Asia have been received by the U.S. Government. Official policy states that there is not enough proof to act, but that presumably, one or more American is held. Critics of that policy, including individuals in government, say the proof is there, but that no one is willing to pay the price of freedom for these captive Americans.

If one of them is Bruce Staehli, what must he be thinking of us?

My note;
This is one reason why, we should NEVER get rid of the POW/MIA Flag or as some called it that old "Black Flag"...

Praying that the Staehli family will have closuer to what happen to L/Cpl Bruce W. Staehli back in April of 1968...

My note;
Read once that there still some French in Vietnam that were captured by the Viet Minh during the first Indichina War.
I just got finishing viewing the "Panist" at the end of the movie, it state that the German officer that help the "panist" died as a POW of the Soviets in 1952, that was seven years after the end of the war with Germany.
Also the Soviets took some our POW's from Korea in the 1950's.
That fact was uncovered at the collapse of the KGB of the Soviet Union in the 1990's.
What happen to those POW's?
We need an accounting of their fate...

Semper Fidelis
Ricardo