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[kmudd]

Senator Shuns the Evidence on Four MIAs


Newsday; 10/26/1993; SYDNEY H. SCHANBERG




Newsday

10-26-1993

Senator Shuns the Evidence on Four MIAs

SYDNEY H. SCHANBERG

KEYWORD HIT
SEN. JOHN KERRY of Massacusetts, in his haste to carry out his agenda of
getting the White House to remove the embargo against Vietnam, has done
some extraordinary things. One of his recurring feats has been to try to
turn fiction into truth. The following is an example.
The senator, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Select
Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, announced about a year ago that, on the
basis of what he called fresh and "impressive" evidence, he had
concluded that four American soldiers who went missing in Vietnam on
April 21, 1967, had been killed instantly in an ambush on that day.
"At least in our judgment," Kerry said, "we believe we can say we
know what happened. We believe they died . . . " He spoke these
definitive words about the four soldiers at a press conference in Hanoi
in November, 1992, after being handed the so-called evidence by a
Vietnamese official who said it was his personal diary from the war. The
official, Col. Pham Duc Dai, now the director of Vietnam's military
museums, said he had been an eyewitness to the deaths of the four
Americans in 1967 in the central province of Quang Ngai. The diary, he
said, contained a full account.
This diary has since been exposed as hearsay or worse. Reliable
American intelligence reports say that the four men were captured alive.
Yet Kerry has never retreated from his declaration that the four died in
an ambush.
He continues to say, as he did at that Hanoi press conference, that
Vietnamese cooperation on the issue of missing Americans has been
"significant" and needs to be rewarded. In a reference to relaxing or
lifting the U.S. trade embargo that has been in place since the end of
the war in 1975, Kerry said then that he would "urge the president to
take certain actions."
About a month after the press conference, Kerry's spokeswoman said
that his meeting with Dai had been "a very compelling moment
emotionally" and that "in his mind, this resolves the fate of the four,
and maybe their families can accept that."
But the overwhelming evidence on this case - and on many, many
others - gives the families no earthly reason to accept the stories
they've been told. They also have no reason to trust Kerry and all the
others in Congress, the executive branch and the Pentagon who have been
toiling for nearly two decades to cover up the intelligence data that
demonstrate large numbers of American prisoners were never returned and
never credibly accounted for by Hanoi.
Let us look, as an example, at the case of the four men whom Kerry
wrote off as having died on April 21, 1967. Nine months before Kerry
declared them dead on the basis of Dai's diary, the American
investigative team in Hanoi handed the Vietnamese the U.S. intelligence
summary of the case. It said that after the four disappeared on a
riverbank near Binh Son in Quang Ngai province: "Several sources
reported that a Binh Son district Vietnamese communist unit had captured
four Americans on 21 April at this location on the Thuong Hoa River.
This information can relate only to Specialist ------and the three other
missing soldiers."
Shortly after the four men disappeared in 1967, a number of
intelligence sources - sources deemed reliable - came in with
sightings and details that, in the language of one Pentagon report,
"coincide so closely as to fairly well substantiate that these four men
were in fact captured."
Another document, this one from the Central Intelligence Agency,
cited credible agency informants who also reported that the four had
been captured alive and were being readied for movement "soon to a
western area."
The intelligence documents I quote from in this column were given to
me by a relative of one of the four men. The relative obtained them
through a request to the Pentagon. These documents, though declassified,
are not made available to the general public and are given only to those
MIA families who file official requests. I am not using the names of the
four men here because I do not know how much the other families have
been told by the government.
To get back to the evidence, Dai's diary has been rendered
valueless. After telling reporters at the Kerry press conference last
November that he was an eyewitness to the incident ("I saw the ambush,
and all four soldiers were killed right then."), he admitted five months
later to American MIA investigators that he had not been at the site and
had seen nothing. The whole "diary" account, he said, was hearsay
provided to him later by villagers in the area. The investigators'
report said: "Source never personally saw the bodies nor remains
associated with this case."
Further, most of the central details in Dai's account do not stand
up against the body of evidence. For instance, when the four
disappeared, other soldiers on the same patrol were no more than 250
yards ahead of them, traveling in a sampan on the way back to their
base. Had there been an ambush, as Dai's "diary" says, these men would
have heard shots. They heard none. This information comes from the
debriefings done at the time.
I do not suggest that the four men are alive today, only that the
evidence says they did not die in an ambush on April 21, 1967.
The Vietnamese took them prisoner. The Vietnamese know what happened
to them. We can understand why Hanoi might be uncomfortable telling us
the truth. But why are Kerry and others like him uncomfortable with it?

[ArmyWife]

It's hard to know what to believe on POW/MIA questions. I had such high hopes that Scott Speicher would be found in Iraq, and that's been a big disappointment.

[Chuck54]

[zinfella]

[quote="
I frankly am not impressed with John McCain. He is a war hero from Vietnam. Big Deal. He doesnt stand up for babies that are being murdered everyday (today) in this country. Anyone that has the opportunity to speak out against murder and does not do so in order that his political hide is saved is a COWARD.


I am done[/quote]

I'm not going to bad mouth John McCain, but I will tell you that he isn't getting my vote. A lot of us here in Arizona think John is not the guy that we elected originally. He is standing up for Kerry, and he is not standing up for the conservative values that he was elected to protect. He's also behind the move to get everyone that attends a gun show to register. He's unopposed by another republican in the primary, and that ain't good. We have good men here to replace him, but they aren't running.
_________________
No whiners!

[thordaddy]

Sure does shed new light on the McCain "smear" supposedly conducted by Bush in South Carolina in 2000. You remember that one. The "smear" where a Vietnam Veteran standing next to Bush said McCain turned his back on Veterans. The "smear" that is currently the emphasis behind the new MoveOn.org internet ad with McCain. McCain is obviously not a maverick, but part of the all-Senators club in Washington.