Sydney Schanberg In 2000: The War Secrets Sen. McCain Hides; Former POW Fights For Public Access

[Hissyspit]

http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com/cin_secretworldofmccain.htm

The War Secrets Senator John McCain Hides
Former POW Fights Public Access to POW/MIA Files
By Sydney Schanberg
April 25, 2000

NEW YORK (APBnews.com) — The voters who were drawn to John S. McCain in his run for the Republican presidential nomination this year often cited, as the core of his appeal, his openness and blunt candor and willingness to admit past lapses and release documents that other senators often hold back. These qualities also seemed to endear McCain to the campaign press corps, many of whom wrote about how refreshing it was to travel on the McCain campaign bus, “The Straight Talk Express,” and observe a maverick speaking his mind rather than a traditional candidate given to obfuscation and spin.

But there was one subject that was off-limits, a subject the Arizona senator almost never brings up and has never been open about — his long-time opposition to releasing documents and information about American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the missing in action who have still not been accounted for. Since McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for 5 1/2 years, his staunch resistance to laying open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed his career. Critics say his anti-disclosure campaign, in close cooperation with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, has been successful. Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy.

For example, all the Pentagon debriefings of the prisoners who returned from Vietnam are now classified and closed to the public under a statute enacted in the 1990s with McCain’s backing. He says this is to protect the privacy of former POWs and gives it as his reason for not making public his own debriefing.

But the law allows a returned prisoner to view his own file or to designate another person to view it. APBnews.com has repeatedly asked the senator for an interview for this article and for permission to view his debriefing documents. He has not responded. His office did recently send APBnews.com an e-mail, referring to a favorable article about the senator in the Jan. 1 issue of Newsweek. In the article, the reporter, Michael Isikoff, says that he was allowed to review McCain’s debriefing report and that it contained “nothing incriminating” — although in a phone interview Isikoff acknowledged that “there were redactions” in the document. Isikoff declined to say who showed him the document, but APBnews.com has learned it was McCain.

Many Vietnam veterans and former POWs have fumed at McCain for keeping these and other wartime files sealed up. His explanation, offered freely in Senate hearings and floor speeches, is that no one has been proven still alive and that releasing the files would revive painful memories and cause needless emotional stress to former prisoners, their families and the families of MIAs still unaccounted for. But what if some of these returned prisoners, as has always been the case at the conclusion of wars, reveal information to their debriefing officers about other prisoners believed still held in captivity? What justification is there for filtering such information through the Pentagon rather than allowing access to source materials? For instance, debriefings from returning Korean war POWs, available in full to the American public, have provided both citizens and government investigators with important information about other Americans who went missing in that conflict.

Would not most families of missing men, no matter how emotionally drained, want to know? And would they not also want to know what the government was doing to rescue their husbands and sons? Hundreds of MIA families have for years been questioning if concern for their feelings is the real reason for the secrecy.

MORE

[nc4bo]

1. No one can tell me that McAnus doesn't have a ton of skeletons in his closet..

he's slime - his foundation is built upon his POW experience.

There's information there he does not want out, I believe it with my heart.

I also have the same beliefs when it comes to his medical records.


Both are a Pandora's Box.

[Spazito]

2. If McCain has nothing to hide, he would make his file public....

"Hundreds of MIA families have for years been questioning if concern for their feelings is the real reason for the secrecy."

His whole campaign is built on his "John McCain the sacrosanct POW" yet he continues to shamelessly hide behind the families of MIAs in order to hide his own record.

[MagickMuffin]

3. I found this article yesterday while researching Orson Swindle, it is from Feb. 14, 2000

I don't know much about the author of this article, however, he points out some damning details about McCain (McCheat) and it isn't pretty. Very interesting read.

Ted Sampley is a former Green Beret and a veteran of the Vietnam War. He has long been a political activist who, according to the Wilmington, NC, Morning Star, "has never shrunk from a fight, even when his allies were few and his enemies numerous..." He once even received an accolade for his reporting in the "Darts & Laurels" column of the Columbia Journalism Review, a remarkable achievement in view of his political orientation relative to theirs. Sampley, who maintains the U.S. Veteran Dispatch Web site, broke the story that the "unknown soldier" from the Vietnam War was quite well known to Army authorities and had been for years. The Army was obliged, with much embarrassment, to hand over the remains to the dead soldier's family, who had not been properly notified until Sampley blew the whistle. More recently Sampley has been exposing Sen. John McCain's intemperate, and at times vicious, attacks upon his fellow former POWs whose only "offense" would seem to be that they have tried to assist the families of American POWs who have been callously abandoned by their government to years of hellish torment. McCain has repeatedly slandered authentic war heroes such as "Red" McDaniels, whose boots he isn't fit to shine, and even had the Justice Department investigate organizations whose sole purpose was to get an accounting of the fate of family members, with a view to bringing criminal action against them. According to Sampley "He accused the activists of fraud because in some of their fund-raising literature they claimed that the U.S. government knowingly left U.S. POWs behind after the Vietnam War and that some remain alive today." The JD could find no grounds for such action, indeed they would have stirred up a hornet's nest had they brought indictments, because all indications are that the government did, in fact, knowingly leave POWs behind. Why then has Sen. McCain been so vindictive in going after these groups? What possible political benefit could he hope to gain thereby? Perhaps more to the point, why has he been so diligent in playing Little Sir Echo to the government of Vietnam by seconding every demand on their wish list? And if, as he recounted in his book, "Faith of My Fathers," his captors had strung him up by his fractured arms, causing him hours of excruciating agony, why did he hasten to embrace the Grand Inquisitor, Col. Bui Tin, on the occasion of the latter's visit to Washington to testify before a Senate committee? Surely he must have been aware that Bui Tin was responsible for the torments suffered not only by himself, but by his fellow prisoners at the "Hanoi Hilton." It is difficult to believe that the senator's great show of affection for his former tormentor was entirely genuine. Could he have been influenced by the knowledge that Col. Bui Tin was in a position to turn his interrogation records over to the committee, and had already discussed the possibility of doing just that? To characterize this man as a "war hero" seems an exaggeration, to say the least. If one examines the record it is clear that McCain had little control over the things that happened to him. Was he tortured? Yes, but so was everyone else at the Hanoi Hilton. It wasn't run like an airline -- that is, newcomers were not shown a chart of the accommodations and asked, "Which do you prefer, tortured or non-tortured?" Getting batted around by the staff was a regular part of the room service at the Hanoi Hilton. McCain implies in his book that he was singled out for "special attention" because his father was an important Navy admiral. Yet foreign press accounts published at the time indicate that it was McCain himself who called the attention of his captors to his father's important position.

One vet observed sardonically, "He used his celebrity, his father was Adm. McCain, to gain special treatment for injuries received. Although everyone has a breaking point his was amazingly low! He has referred to POW/MIA families as "whiners and vultures, and lunatic fringe."

And that would appear to be the sticking point with many former POWs; why has McCain been so disrespectful, not to say abusive, to the families of POW/MIAs? They come to Washington in desperation, seeking help to locate their loved ones only to be subjected to a torrent of abuse by the terrible-tempered senator, who then goes so far as to sick the Justice Department on them. This sort of behavior by an elected official requires some explanation, but none has been forthcoming. (Needless to say, McCain's bootlicking toadies in the mainstream press would never dream of asking him such awkward questions). Instead we are offered boilerplate endorsements by pro-McCain veterans who, for all their impressive decorations, seem a bit shell-shocked by it all.

____________________________________________________

(last paragraph)

Such treachery comes naturally to McCain -- selling out and stabbing his former friends in the back is his preferred tactic. Ask the families of the POW/MIAs who enthusiastically backed McCain when he first ran for Congress only to be dry-gulched by him when he no longer found them useful. As a gratuitous sadistic flourish, McCain even had them investigated by the Justice Department on trumped-up charges. The fact that they were exonerated on all counts has yet to make an impression on McCain's airhead supporters who continue to trumpet the phony charges in deceitful neo-McCarthyite fashion. John McCain is an abysmal mediocrity who would never have made it on a level playing field. He was fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. He racked up three life threatening "Dangerous Downs" at flight school -- the last one for flying his aircraft into the sea while asleep -- enough to get anyone without his political influence bounced down the back stairs. As for his record as a senator, can anyone remember a single significant thing this man has accomplished in more than a dozen years as a member of that august body? Anything other than sell out the POWs and promote the interests of Communist Vietnam, that is. To those who have recently determined that we just HAVE to have this man as our next president, I pose the following question: why?

MORE @ link:

http://www.uhuh.com/politics/mccain/mcainwnxs.htm

The article goes on to point out McCain's (McCheat's) history after he came back from his break up of his marriage, to his mobster connections.

[karynnj]

4. Sampley is a con man

He was also a SBVT. He lived off offering families hope where none really exists. There are proportionately FEWER people missing from the Vietnam War then the Korean or WWII.

John Kerry headed the committee - and he made 14 trips to Vietnam, and nefotiated the ability to go anywhere with no advance knowledge, If you believe this of McCain, you have to believe he either conned Kerry or Kerry acted to cover for Nixon leaving people who had already been there for 20 to 25 years. Frnkly, I don't believe it.

[MagickMuffin]

5. I thought I recognized Sampley's name, but couldn't place him

Thanks for pointing out that he is a SBVT.

Funny how he was going after McCain (McCheat) back in 2000, and then set his sights on Kerry in 2004. He even teamed up with Bud Day in his attacks on Kerry.

I don't think Kerry would cover anything up, it's not really his style.

BTW: Bud Day was not only a POW with McCain (McCheat) but was McCain's (McCheat's) divorce attorney.

Another point I'd like to make is the whole article wasn't just about Sampley's opinion but other Vietnam Vets as well, who were questioning McCain's (McCheat's) objection to releasing documents concerning the POW's/MIA's.

[starroute]

6. There definitely were people making a fraudulent buck off the MIAs

For example, there was Bruce Eberle, the long-time GOP direct-mail fundraiser, whose operations some of us were looking into back in 2004 because of his connection with more recent scams. However, the fact that scams existed does not mean that McCain was not also protecting himself by hiding behind a well-practiced sense of outrage.

(In fact, the MIA situation is very reminiscent of that with Jack Abramoff, where McCain released a very small percent of the incriminating emails his committee had subpoenaed while keeping suppressed those which might have pointed beyond Abramoff and his immediate associates.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Eberle

From 1991 to 1993, hearings in the State Senate Committee on POW-MIA affairs revealed that donations collected by Eberle & Associates for a MIA rescue operation run by Colonel Jack Bailey (USAF, Ret.), involving a boat, the Akuna, said to be located off the coast of Vietnam was in fact being used for other purposes. Associated Press reported that the boat had actually been docked for two years. Bailey's group kept more than 88% of the $2.2 million in contributions.

Bruce Eberle and employees of Eberle & Associates who wrote the fliers, told investigators they believed Bailey. Yet they could not provide the Committee with any facts to back up their statement in a 1985 solicitation that "men are in terrible shape. Their time is running out."

Senator John McCain said, "In my opinion they are criminals and some of the most craven, most cynical and most despicable human beings to ever run a scam," <...> "They have preyed on the anguish of families, and helped to turn an issue which should unite all Americans into an issue that often divides us."

Bruce's fundraising group, Bruce Eberle & Associates, was dropped by Senator John Ashcroft in 1999, according to Deirdre Shes-Green of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "after Associated Press inquired about accusations that Eberle used phony prisoner-of-war sightings to solicit money from veterans for another client."