What is he hiding?? - Truckers' Trucking Forum

Kalamity Jane · **^ Top** #1 06.04.2008

This is pretty interesting stuff...and scary too. I've often wondered how McCain came home and so many didn't.

The War Secrets Sen. John McCain Hides
Former POW Fights Public Access to POW/MIA Files
By Sydney Schanberg

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.

~Snip~

The entire article... [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

KJ

lobshot · **^ Top** #2 06.04.2008

..........and I have often wondered why the Klinton's refuse to list the donors to the library. Maybe someday we will find out.

Kalamity Jane · **^ Top** #3 06.04.2008

Hopefully...but this is rather odd.

KJ

Ronnocomot · **^ Top** #4 06.04.2008

Date of publication? April 25, 2000

Thanks for the "news".

Kalamity Jane · **^ Top** #5 06.04.2008

It's still timely, don't think anything has changed and I hadn't seen it until this morning. I doubt I'm alone....

KJ

Ronnocomot · **^ Top** #6 06.04.2008

Before the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. took over [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. in 1975 and killed approximately 2 million people, Schanberg wrote positively in The New York Times about the coming regime change, writing about the Cambodians that "it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A dispatch he wrote on April 13, 1975, written from [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. , ran with the headline "Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life."

Yeah, except for the 2 million dead.

Kalamity Jane · **^ Top** #7 06.04.2008

I don't think that your post has anything to do with my OP Ronno...different topic all together. I never should have gone to Nam...and it's good we got out. However, you knew that's what I'd say...so let's try to stay on topic...it's about McCain and his service, and history.

KJ

lobshot · **^ Top** #8 06.04.2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kalamity Jane

I don't think that your post has anything to do with my OP Ronno...different topic all together. I never should have gone to Nam...and it's good we got out. However, you knew that's what I'd say...so let's try to stay on topic...it's about McCain and his service, and history.

KJ

KJ, part of the topic is the guy who wrote the article that you are trying to make something out of. Dont you see that? If someone has written totally off the wall articles before, dont you see how that reflects on his
credibility? Like maybe he has an ax to grind?

ETS FTW · **^ Top** #9 06.04.2008

Lobshot,

Come on, you should know by now that facts and logic mean little to KJ. I do admire people like you who have the patience to deal with loons like her. I sure don't.

Mastertech · **^ Top** #10 06.04.2008

KJ, is it possible that he isn't hiding anything?
How many other vets from that war don't want to talk about it and go to their graves having never said a word?
So is this really all that unusual, I am not sure it is.

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