Secrecy // Current TV

CIA WANTS TO READ YOUR BLOG

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Police use secret GPS devices, Judge OK'd

For the first time, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled yesterday that the state... more

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Sustainable Cinema:The World According To Monsanto

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"Transparency" is Selective

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Obama could revoke Bush's presidential secrecy directive

Open the books. Let's see what was really going on.

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Canada least corrupt in Americas

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John McCain has a bizarre history of hiding evidence about his fellow POWs

McCain has worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home.

Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute; a longer version of this article is available at nationinstitute.org.

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 people would logically imagine to be 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 McCain has made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also 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 -- probably hundreds -- of the US prisoners held in 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.

The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate "Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs." The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or tried to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi Politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in the 1990s. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the Politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid. The North Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners -- just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.

*********CONTINUESMcCain has worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about... more

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Once elected, Palin hired friends and lashed foes

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who... more

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Woodward keeps US "secret killing program" a secret

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Steve Jobs Says He Doesn't Have Cancer (And Why It's Not Your Business Anyway)

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Jesse Helms on Secrecy

The late Senator Jesse Helms, who died on July 4, was an arch-conservative opponent of... more

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The PNAC website is down!

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Vierotchka
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Photographing secret sattellites - All 189 of them

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How To Find Secret Sites And Articles

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Al Gore Makes Waves On My Little Pond!

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4 years ago
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When Giuliani stepped down from being Mayor, he needed a warehouse.

When a mayor of New York leaves office, little goes out the door but memories - unless... more

jubal
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CIA WANTS TO READ YOUR BLOG

Police use secret GPS devices, Judge OK'd

Sustainable Cinema:The World According To Monsanto

"Transparency" is Selective

Obama could revoke Bush's presidential secrecy directive

Canada least corrupt in Americas

John McCain has a bizarre history of hiding evidence about his fellow POWs

Once elected, Palin hired friends and lashed foes

Woodward keeps US "secret killing program" a secret

Steve Jobs Says He Doesn't Have Cancer (And Why It's Not Your Business Anyway)

Jesse Helms on Secrecy

The PNAC website is down!

Photographing secret sattellites - All 189 of them

How To Find Secret Sites And Articles

Al Gore Makes Waves On My Little Pond!

When Giuliani stepped down from being Mayor, he needed a warehouse.

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