Report: McCain Suppressed Info on Fellow Vietnam POWs Left Behind

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/23/report_mccain_suppressed_info_on_fellow

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: A POW. Well, PAVE SPIKE was an instrument that we would drop from planes that would monitor motion, which meant soldiers up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail bringing supplies to the war from North Vietnam. But it also had another function. Soldiers, airmen were trained in how to use this thing, and then they could punch in their coded locator number, which was a classified thing. And at one point, twenty names, twenty locator numbers, all separate, were punched into these spikes that fell in the ground.

And she got up, and she said, “What about this? Who were these men? What happened to them?” And she was told that it was classified and so forth. But he responded by saying, “How dare you challenge my patriotism?” He twists lot of things during the life of this committee into “How dare you challenge my patriotism?” And he’s, of course, done that throughout his campaign for the presidency. And he began to scream. His face grew pink and then darker pink. He was pounding on the desk. She began to cry. I mean, she hesitated. She reached into her purse, took out a handkerchief and began to dab her eyes, finally composed herself. She said, “I’m not challenging your patriotism. I’m asking you to keep this committee alive and keep digging for information and give us the information.” And he just stood up at that point, and he was almost about to explode, spun around and raced out of the committee room. And—

SNIP

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you say McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which was strengthened in ’95 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties against any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to their disappearance or status of a missing person.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Yes. He managed to dilute all the legislation that had said every public official in the United States federal government has to reveal to the public and to the family all information about POWs, who may be—who are missing and unaccounted for and may be alive, to the families and to the public. And he took out all of the punishment information from those laws. There was no—you could do it and get away with it, in other words, and the cover-up could continue. And so, he explained that by saying, uncompellingly, that he did it because he said you could never get anybody to work in the POW—in the Defense Department’s POW office if you had these penalties, if you made it a felony with a big fine. So, he was saying that he wanted to allow this cover-up to continue. I mean, that’s all it did.

Sydney Schanberg's article in The nation is here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/schanberg

His *full* article is at http://www.nationinstitute.org/p/schanberg09182008pt1

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Another crack in the "McSame is a big hero" mythology.

He is no braver than any other soldier who was in captivity, and from what the Rolling Stone said, he was a lot less brave than many.