#5 The War Secrets Sen. John McCain Hides
Excerpt:
Cannot discuss it
As for her description of the motion sensor evidence about prisoners in Laos, McCain’s response at the hearing was that this data was in a 1974 report that the committee had read but was still classified, so “I cannot discuss it here. … We hope to get it declassified.”
The question to the senator now is: What happened to that report and what happened to the pilots who belonged to those authenticator numbers? Intelligence sources in Washington say the report was never declassified. It became clear over the months of hearings and sparrings that the primary goal of the Kerry-McCain alliance was to clear the way for normalization of relations with Vietnam. They did it in two ways — first, by regularly praising Hanoi for its “cooperation” in the search for information about the unaccounted-for prisoners and then by minimizing and suppressing the volume of evidence to the contrary that had been unearthed by the committee’s staff investigators.
Recasting the issue
Kerry and McCain also tried, at every opportunity, to recast the issue as a debate about how many men could still be alive today, instead of the real issue at stake: How many men were alive in 1973 after the 591 were returned? Although much evidence was kept out of the committee’s final report in January 1993, enough of it, albeit watered down by the committee’s majority, was inserted by the determined staff to demonstrate conclusively that all the prisoners had not come home. Still, if the reader didn’t plow through the entire 1,223-page report but scanned just the brief conclusions in the 43-page executive summary at the beginning, he or she would have found only a weak and pallid statement saying that there was “evidence … that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number” after the repatriation of 1973. On page 468 of the report, McCain provided his own personal statement, saying that “we found no compelling evidence to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some evidence — though no proof — to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans may have been kept behind after the end of American’s military involvement in Vietnam.” |
[The Hill] Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blasted President Trump over his pardon of former Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Friday, arguing it "undermines his claim for the respect of rule of law."