Clinton and our abandoned POWs

Thursday, November 23, 2000

On April 12, 1993, the New York Times reported the discovery of a speech in the archives of the Communist Party Politburo in Moscow that Lt. Gen. Tran Van Quang had delivered to the North Vietnamese politburo in September 1972. He reported that 1,205 American prisoners had been captured on all fronts in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and were being held in prisons in North Vietnam. Additional airmen captured in the next three months increased that total to 1,262.

North Vietnam promised to return all of our POWs by March 27, 1973. They returned only 591, and only 547 of them were military who had been imprisoned in North Vietnam. That meant that they were holding back 715 military POWs. A North Vietnamese intelligence officer named Le Dinh, who defected in France in 1978, told Defense Intelligence Agency investigators that he had heard generals say at staff meetings that over 700 America POWs were being held in Vietnam as "a strategic reserve."

The Defense Department tried to discredit the speech by Gen. Quang, but there was a great deal of evidence that we had left many POWs behind, including numerous reports from Vietnamese refugees who had seen the American prisoners. But the official line was that all POWs had been returned and all the evidence to the contrary was false even though insiders who had access to intelligence records knew that the evidence was valid.

Researcher Roger Hall, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, has been trying for seven years to get the Defense Department and the CIA to produce their records on the POWs that Clinton ordered declassified by November 1993. He is now suing the CIA for failing to deliver documents he requested under the Freedom of Information Act. The court has rejected the CIA's motion for summary judgment, and Hall, resources permitting, will now be able to depose under oath CIA officials about these records and their reasons for withholding them.

He says that the agency has given the judge a copy of a list of live POWs and their last known locations. If true, this is proof that government has been lying to cover up our abandonment of these men for 27 years. It is surely time for this cover-up to end.

President Clinton's recent trip provided an opportunity for him to improve his legacy by demanding that the North Vietnamese honor their 1973 commitment to return all of our POWs. But that was not on his agenda. He went to Vietnam accompanied by 30 representatives of American corporations such as Boeing, looking for trade and investment opportunities.

The League of POW/MIA families declined a White House invitation to participate in this trip. It strongly rejected statements by administration officials that Clinton's trip would in some way put the Vietnam War behind us, saying, "Given their official statements that reflect an expectation of reparations in one form or another, even the Vietnamese do not view it that way. We see this visit as the last step of the Clinton Administration to normalize economic and political relations with Vietnam." Dolores Alfond of the National Alliance of Families sent Clinton a letter saying that he should concentrate on finding the live prisoners that we abandoned and work for their release. She said Vietnam has not even returned the bodies of many of the prisoners who died there in captivity.

Clinton and our media have long since forgotten all about those "strategic hostages." Instead of raising this important issue in Hanoi, the media provided us with stories such as the one appearing on the front page of the Washington Post on November 19th. It referred to Clinton choking up and his eyes "welling with tears" as Americans and Vietnamese looked for evidence of an American aircraft shot down during the Vietnam War. Clinton created this image by deliberately dabbing his eyes. It was an Oscar-winning performance made for television and the cameras, and the media fell for it.

As we celebrate another Thanksgiving, let's say a prayer for the brave Americans who may still be alive in Vietnamese prisons, wondering if they will ever see their homeland and their loved ones again. They may also be wondering how their commander-in-chief could come to Vietnam, toast their captors, offer them American aid and not lift a finger to try to obtain their freedom.

Reed Irvine is chairman of Accuracy in Media.