Reply #57: Only the ones who are inclined to believe folks are still alive there. [View All]

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There may still be remains to recover there though. You have to understand that folks there are more than happy to recover and turn over whatever evidence they find, for a price. There is great poverty there.

Some will use the tragedy of these MIA's and POW's for some political purpose or another, but the fact remains that their committee was the most extensive accounting to date. Anyone who can do better can step right up.

Here's a fairly balanced article:

Weighing the Evidence on POWs-By Robert S. Dudney, Executive Editor Air Force Magazine, July 1993

The Kerry panel noted that, immediately after Operation Homecoming, the White House expected Vietnam to swiftly account for the missing but was stonewalled. Debriefings of returning POWs cleared up some cases, but not all. The panel reported that seventy Americans were carried on the books as POWs for some time after the end of Operation Homecoming. Today, the Pentagon says it knows that forty-two of these individuals died prior to the exchange; Vietnam repatriated their remains. As for the others, said the committee, their fates "continue unknown to this day."

The committee thought it fair to ask whether US officials knowingly abandoned some POWs. "The answer to that question is clearly no," concluded the report. It explained that, given the evidence with which they had to work, "American officials did not have certain knowledge that any specific prisoner or prisoners were being left behind."

However, the committee said it was also fair to raise yet another question: Were the Americans who were expected to return, as a group, simply "shunted aside" and given short shrift by the government and American people, who should have pressed harder to find out what happened to them? "The answer to that question is essentially yes," said the senators.

The Kerry panel concluded that lingering frustration with the war, Watergate, and other crises pushed the MIA question out of mind, where it stayed until the trail of evidence grew very cold. The senators argued that the White House figuratively lowered its voice on the issue and that, eventually, the POW/MIA operation became "a bureaucratic backwater."

http://www.afa.org/magazine/perspectives/vietnam/0793pow.html