Why Do Swift Vets and POW's for Truth Endure?

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.
- Winston Churchill

This post by Bob Chamberlain, resource and research director at swiftvets.com forum, explains it as well as any I have seen. Based on Articles by Sydney H. Schanberg for Village Voice, it is not easy reading but is worth the effort. If you respect and cherish our freedom and the sacrifices made by our armed forces, don't you then have a responsibilty to make the effort to understand how and why they feel so strongly about John Kerry?

John Kerry, alone, is not responsible for what happened to these men - for the fact that our government left hundreds of men like them behind in Vietnam. John Kerry, alone, is not responsible for the fact that the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, which he volunteered to chair, did nothing to resolve the status of these men. But John Kerry's deliberate actions and personal ambitions are part of the reason these men never came home and may have continued to live in terrible captivity for decades after the Vietnam war ended for the rest of America. John Kerry is not solely responsible - but John Kerry is the only one of those responsible who is presently running for President. Out of respect for men like Thomas Moore and David Hrdlicka, out of respect for their families and their children who have never forgotten, we must hold John Kerry accountable.

John Kerry has never shown any real concern for our POW/MIA's. In the years before the end of the Vietnam war, John Kerry was a public and outspoken advocate of the Communist negotiating position to end the war. Specifically, he demanded that America surrender unconditionally, publicly announce a final date for the complete withdrawal of our troops, begin withdrawing our troops - and then (and only then) begin discussing the fate of our POW's. We have transcripts and even video footage of some of his pronouncements on the subject. On the Dick Cavett Show, June 30, 1971, John Kerry stated, “Now, if we were to set a date for withdrawal from Southeast Asia, we can – the [Communist] Vietnamese, first of all, have said [the POW issue] will be settled prior to the arrival of that date, but we can set a time limit on that. If the prisoners of war aren't back prior to the arrival of that date, then I think we would have – for the first time in all of our history in Vietnam we would have a legitimate reason for taking some kind of reaction to it.”

Eventually, the American government was forced by the rising anti-war sentiment to accept the terms offered by the Communists. On paper, America did not surrender unconditionally. The North Vietnamese agreed (on paper) not to invade South Vietnam. Of course, two years later, the North Vietnamese did invade - and America just sat on the sidelines and watched. But most importantly, America did accept the idea of setting a date for withdrawal - before talking about our prisoners. And when we got around to talking about our prisoners, we discovered that the Vietnamese claimed to have many hundreds fewer prisoners that the US believed to be the case. But what was President Nixon to do? There was no way that the John Kerry's and Jane Fonda's in America would allow him to rescind the promised troop withdrawals and go back to war. One condition of peace the Communists and John Kerry were adamant about was the US responsibility to make reparation payments to Vietnam. There is strong evidence that the Vietnamese held back prisoners as hostages to insure reparations were paid. President Nixon held out a carrot to the Communists - a promise of several billion dollars in reconstruction and economic aid. But the North Vietnamese held firm on their claim of holding only 591 POW's. Perhaps if President Nixon had actually started making these payments, the North Vietnamese might have "discovered" a few more POW's. But he didn't and they didn't - and only 591 men came home. So President Nixon applied the stick in the form of diplomatic and economic sanctions. Again, this did not work. Faced with a situation that he was powerless to change, President Nixon took the only course left open to him. He simply declared that all of our prisoners had been returned. This is the position our government has adopted officially ever since. No administration since Nixon has been willing to admit that America abandoned hundreds of men in Vietnam. To make such an admission would deeply tarnish the image of America and certainly cause great harm to the moral of our military. And what good would such an admission do if it did not lead to the return of our men? What were they to do, reopen the Vietnam war just to bring back the remains of a few hundred long-dead men?

My personal answer is yes. And it should have been done in 1973 while our men were still alive. Men are not potatoes. You do not weigh the worth of a man to determine if restoring him to life and liberty is a cost you are willing to pay. You keep faith with thse who have kept faith with you. You bring your men back - alive or dead - 700 hundred men or 1 man. It makes no difference. I would have marched to Hanoi to bring back one man and willingly accepted the risk of falling along the way. That is the way of honor, and few military men - then or now - feel any differently. You take care of your own. But John Kerry, Jane Fonda and hundreds like them had so inflamed American public opinion against the war that this way of honor was no longer open to the American government. I hold John Kerry responsible for his part in this. I hold John Kerry even more responsible because he publicly states that he is proud of his actions - and sees no need to apologize for them. We must hold John Kerry accountable.

In 1991, John Kery had an opportunity to atone, at least in part, for his actions that contributed to America leaving men behind in Vietnam. There was considerable evidence that US prisoners were left alive in Vietnam after the treaty was signed. This evidence included more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live U.S. prisoners; nearly 14,000 secondhand reports; numerous intercepted Communist radio messages from within Vietnam and Laos about American prisoners being moved by their captors from one site to another; a series of satellite photos that continued into the 1990s showing clear prisoner rescue signals carved into the ground in Laos and Vietnam; and multiple reports about unacknowledged prisoners from North Vietnamese informants working for U.S. intelligence agencies. The intelligence data made clear that Hanoi's motive for holding back prisoners was ransom. The North Vietnamese kept them as pawns to extract from Washington the reparations money they believed they had been promised by Nixon and Kissinger.

In 1991, the US Senate formed the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to look into these reports and determine once and for all the status of the men we believed (in many cases, knew) to have been in Communist hands, but who had not been released. John Kerry volunteered to serve as Chariman of this committee. John Kerry's larger and conflicting goal emerged over time: He wanted to clear a path to the normalization of relations with Hanoi and lifting of the trade embargo. The lack of resolution of the POW questions blocked any such normalization. In the committee's early days, Kerry gave encouraging indications of being a committed investigator. He said he had "leads" to the existence of POW's still in captivity. He said the number of these likely survivors was more than 100 and that this was the minimum. But in a very short time, he stopped saying such things and morphed into his role of working for the normalization of relations with Vietnam while denying that any significant number of live American prisoners had not been returned. John Kerry, using his power as chariman of the committee, covered up voluminous evidence that a significant number of live American prisoners, perhaps hundreds, were never acknowledged or returned. John Kerry suppressed testimony, had documents shredded and sanitized the committee's final report.

When Defense Department officials were coming to testify, Kerry had his staff director, Frances Zwenig, meet with them to "script" the hearing, as detailed in an internal Zwenig memo leaked by others. A protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig as the conduit to the Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses." Zwenig advised North Vietnamese officials on how to state their case and promised them that they would not be asked any embarrassing questions.

A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the chairman had gotten cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring POW information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. An internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."

After promising to turn over all committee records to the National Archives when the panel concluded its work, John Kerry ordered crucial intelligence documents gathered by the committee staff to be shredded. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo, from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst, reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said, "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."

The Kerry committee's final report, issued in January 1993, delivered the ultimate insult to history. The 1,223-page document said there was “no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia”. As for the primary investigative question, what happened to the men left behind in 1973, the report conceded only that there is "evidence ... that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number" of prisoners in 1973, after Hanoi released the 591 POW's it had admitted to. The huge document contained no findings about what happened to the supposedly "small number" who had remained in captivity in Vietnam after 1973. If they were no longer alive, then how did they die? Of the so-called "possibility" of a "small number" of men left behind, the committee report went on to say that if this did happen, the men were not "knowingly abandoned," just "shunted aside."

Two senators, Bob Smith and Charles Grassley, refused to go along with the majority finding in the final report that said there was "no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia." But their dissent was relegated to a tiny footnote. The footnote said the two could not accept this finding "because they believe that live-sighting reports and other sources of intelligence are evidence that POWs may have survived to the present."

A year after he issued the committee report, on the night of January 26, 1994, Kerry was on the Senate floor pushing through a resolution calling on President Clinton to lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. In the debate, Kerry belittled the opposition, saying that those who still believed in abandoned POW's were perpetrating a hoax. "This process," he declaimed, "has been led by a certain number of charlatans and exploiters, and we should not allow fiction to cloud what we are trying to do here."

Kerry's resolution passed, by a vote of 62 to 38.

Everybody got something out of Kerry’s actions as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs - except for the POW/MIA’s and their families that the committee was supposed to help. The Vietnamese achieved the normalization of relations and the lifting of the trade embargo that they so desperately wanted. John Kerry got his picture hung in the War Remnants Museum in Saigon honoring his contribution to the communist victory in Vietnam.

In June of 1993, less than six months after the committee's report was released, as reported in a Boston Herald article by Michael E. Knell, "Colliers International brokered a $905 million dollar deal to develop a deep sea port in Vietnam.." To skirt the trade embargo still in effect against Vietnam, Colliers International acted through its partner firm Colliers Jardine based in Singapore. At the time the deal was brokered, C. Stewart Forbes, John Kerry’s first cousin, was the Chief Executive Officer of Colliers International.

Francis Zwenig, John Kerry’s legislative assistant and staff director of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, went on to become Vice President of the U.S.-Vietnam Trade Council and is now senior director for the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council, with responsibility for Vietnam.

The fate of our POW’s and MIA’s remains as unresolved as ever. All Americans should be ashamed. John Kerry does not bear sole responsibility for the failure of the Senate Select Committee to resolve any of the POW questions or to return any of our missing men. But John Kerry is the only one of those responsible who is presently running for President. Out of respect for men like Thomas Moore and David Hrdlicka, out of respect for their families and their children who have never forgotten, we must hold John Kerry accountable.

From the families of POWs:

Chief Master Sgt,Thomas Moore, USAF
Colonel David L. Hrdlicka, USAF
Colonel Charles E. Shelton
Captain Carl Edwin Jackson, U.S.A.F.
Charles Gale Dusing

An Open Letter to John Kerry