Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Sydney Schanberg has an astounding piece in the Nation
that pins McCain down as one of the prime opponents of letting POW
families who suspected their loved ones had been left behind find out
whether or not they were right.
They were. (Via TMiss)
As you might suspect with Republicans - Democrats, too - it was all about the $$$.
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 war reparations from Washington.
Throughout
the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue
tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to
deal with them separately. Finally, in a February 2, 1973, formal
letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion
in "postwar reconstruction" aid "without any political conditions." But
he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be
implemented by each party "in accordance with its own constitutional
provisions." That meant Congress would have to approve the
appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in
no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately
understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the
reparations promise being honored - and it never was. Hanoi thus
appears to have 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. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought
them home.
In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA
officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came,
it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that
it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those
prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also
posed a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international
community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly
that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard
labor or torture—were eventually executed.
We deliberately let those men die because Nixon wouldn't pay reparations he promised
to pay. That's how he ended the war. But he never meant to keep his
promise because it wouldn't have been feasible with the Red Meat
Republicans, the ones with "Nuke Hanoi" t-shirts who were already
screaming "Sell Out!" They would have bolted the GOP and joined militia
movements en masse.
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