Americans abandoned worst treason in US history (I)

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Written By Alan Stang

I had thought that by now – after all these years – it would be over, that, although the pain would never leave, it would persist as nothing more than a dull ache. I was wrong, of course. The book that inspires these comments brought it all back as bad as before, worse, because the book contains much I hadn’t known. I could only read a few pages at a time. Then I had to wait until the rage and guilt subsided, guilt because despite my puny efforts, the best that I could do, the subjects of the book are still abandoned; rage because of the reason that is true.

This is a book about treason, not a single act of treason, but treason that continues for many years, for decades, treason perpetrated by the highest officials in our government through Republican and Democrat administrations, breathtaking treason on every page, treason that makes Benedict Arnold look like George Washington; that makes Aldrich Ames look like Audie Murphy.

The book is An Enormous Crime: The Definitive Account of American POWS Abandoned in Southeast Asia (New York, Thomas Dunne Books [St. Martin’s], 2007), by former North Carolina Congressman Bill Hendon and Florida lawyer Elizabeth Stewart, whose father is missing in action in North Vietnam.

Yes, it is an enormous crime, so enormous that all the words I know seem insufficient. They don’t adequately describe what happened; they don’t cover the subject. “Enormous” itself doesn’t do the job. The treason I’m talking about is more than mere treason, however long and extensive. It doesn’t just betray the country. It is treason that violates the sacred relationship between men in combat, between you and me and the men we send to fight.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13. But here you will read about men who lay down their friends’ lives for love of career and self-protection, men who would deliberately betray Jesus, boast about it and – even worse than Judas – lack the decency to commit suicide. Here is what you will find in An Enormous Crime:

It establishes beyond even a hint of doubt that the Vietnamese Communists kept hundreds of our POWS after the war and that the traitors who ran our government at the time conspired with the Communists to abandon them. The book establishes those facts with a tsunami of evidence of all kinds, literally thousands of reports over many years – totaling 66,000 pages published here for the first time – from eye witnesses, from signal intelligence, from satellite imagery, to such an extent that no one without some other agenda could conclude otherwise.

Many of the reports corroborate each other. The signals could have been made only by downed Americans who know the secret codes. The satellites are of course American and can read the label on your lingerie. They can tell the exact coordinates of the sites. There can be absolutely no doubt that hundreds of Americans were there long after the U.S. government cut and ran in 1973.

Bill Hendon and Elizabeth Stewart pored over these thousands of official documents for twenty five years. The record shows that every Administration starting with Nixon’s colluded in the treason. Nixon of course was a Socialist. He said as much when he announced he was a Keynesian, a disciple of Communist favorite and sexual predator John Maynard Keynes.

The treason consisted and still consists of destroying the evidence, of lying about it, of discrediting the witnesses, of doing everything possible to bury the Prisoners Of War alive, of sabotaging every effort to liberate them. Remember, these are men with names we knew were there. Yes, there were periodic investigations; but the purpose of a federal investigation, especially here, is to conceal the subject it is investigating.

All the traitors are here, starting with Nixon and Kissinger. Frank A. Capell, the late intelligence officer, exposed Heinz Kissinger as a member of Odra, a Soviet spy ring in Germany after World War II, code named “Bor.” His guttural stench is worse than a week old corpse. Herr Kissinger has committed so much treason over so many years, has betrayed and killed so many that, honestly, I wonder why someone, God forbid, hasn’t blown his God damned head off.

What did Heinz do here? He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Communist Le Duc Tho by accepting the North Vietnamese demands in toto without negotiation, keeping the agreement secret from our loyal ally, theRepublic of Vietnam in Saigon, one of the main participants. He said he would go to Hanoi “to pay our respects to the heroic people of North Vietnam,” and later reflected that his acceptance of the agreement was “my most thrilling moment in public service.”

South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu later said Kissinger “gave me the impression that he was a representative of Hanoi, not America.” Yes, that is what he was. In a Nixon letter to the Reds kept secret from Congress for years, Heinz promised Hanoi $4.75 billion in reparations. When Congress balked, Heinz wrote the POWS off. Knowing that the Reds had kept hundreds, Nixon lied and announced that they all had come home.

The treason has continued through every administration and continues today. Jimmy Carter did everything he could to declare the POWS dead – and did so while CIA was sending the White House messages that quoted top Hanoi officials who were saying they did indeed hold American POWS.

Of course Jimmy Carter’s treason rivals Kissinger’s. It is difficult to find a betrayal of America in the past thirty years, and there have been so many – from the treasonous surrender of our Canal in Panama, to the betrayal of our loyal ally in the Republic of China, to the support of Fidel Castro – in which this dour, humorless skunk has not played a decisive role.

Throughout the administrations, Republican and Democrat, verified sightings of American POWS in Communist hands kept arriving in Washington. It is important to establish not only that the Republicans were as treasonous as the Democrats, but also that the Reagan Administration was as bad as the worst.

One of the reasons was that by the time Reagan took office, the Vietnamese “boat people” had set sail, fleeing the country however they could. Many of these people were friends, even allies, who had served beside us in uniform. They were comrades in arms. And they reported dozens of eyewitness sightings of American POWS in Communist hands to U.S. authorities.

You and I would have thought such sightings were opportunities. But the Reagan Administration treated them as crises the Administration had to overcome. For instance, in 1981, a CIA reconnaissance team crossed theMekong into Laos, and traveled overland to “Fort Apache,” where they observed a tall, dark-haired man who “could have been a Caucasian.” CIA officials withheld that information from the Pentagon. William G. Graver, CIA, later testified that his bosses “did not want to put gasoline on the issue.” What? Yes, that’s what he said.

Again and again, the Reagan Administration denied POW files to Hendon and other sitting Congressmen, even including files Hendon had worked on himself as a civilian employee of the Pentagon. Hendon and the others consulted an attorney about filing suit against DOD. What legitimate reason could there have been to deny Hendon those files? Instead of looking for living men, the Administration focused on the pretext of looking for remains.

A couple of former Green Berets did go to court, accusing the Reagan Administration of burying or discrediting reports of living POWS. A week later, Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, issued a report that said in effect there were no living POWS. Recently, Hamilton was a member of the Nine Eleven Commission. He is a media-made “dignitary,” who has made a career of burying inconvenient truths.

Major General Colin Powell became “livid” when Congressman Duncan Hunter asked him to help fly to Washington a Vietnamese who had seen live POWS in Hanoi twice. Powell angrily refused, snatching away a letter Hendon tried to hand to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Of course, Colin Powell is no George Patton.

No matter how strong a sighting report was, no matter how credible the source, no matter how well corroborated, the government’s POW “investigators” flunked it. Every one. No one was telling the truth. The sighting was a “fabrication,” a “mistake,” a “Russian,” a “Swede”; co-author Hendon reports there was not even a category on the official form to report a verified sighting.

One of the most revealing aspects of this treasonous horror is that while Washington was doing everything it could to suppress the facts and discredit the witnesses, those witnesses again and again volunteered to return to the Vietnamese Communist hell to rescue the American comrades-in-arms they had served with and now had seen there. That’s right; these Vietnamese volunteered to do the job Washington should have done. What could they hope to gain by taking such a risk, if no one was there?

One refugee said that he and some other resistance fighters had tried to rescue some Americans they had seen in a camp near Nha Trang in August, 1983, but that the Reds drove them off. A royal Lao sergeant saw twenty six American POWS at the mouth of a cave inside Laos. Back in Thailand, his commander ordered him to return to Laos to rescue the Americans, but, by the time they arrived, the Americans had been moved. Senate intelligence investigators compared his report to what they already knew and concluded he was completely credible.

A Vang Pao militiaman told U.S. authorities he had been imprisoned for nine years, until October, 1985 in a cave in Laos with five American POWS. The militiaman said he would happily go back to rescue them or to take pictures of them. Meanwhile, the Americans did nothing or worse. Of course there were heroes in the matter, like Lieut. General Gene Tighe, Colonel Mike Peck, who quit in disgust citing a “mindset to debunk,” and Hendon himself, but they did not run the show.

Ross Perot offered to help. Remember that he had rescued his own men without government help from Teheran. For years, he had done what he could to help the POWS he knew had been left behind in the Nam. Here is An Enormous Crime’s version of the meeting on the subject between Reagan and Perot:

“[T]he president, reading from three-by-five index cards he held in his lap and motioning – almost lecturing, really – with his left hand, conveyed to Perot the crystal-clear ‘thanks but no thanks’ message . . . .” According to one Administration official, the President was “deliberately cool.”

What does this tell you? It tells me that Reagan knew perfectly well what was being done in his name. He was not an innocent bystander. Also, notice that he is reading from index cards, but he is holding them in his lap, presumably to pretend that he is not reading from index cards.

What kind of man – what kind of mind – must conduct such a crucial conversation from cards? By the way, I have had a few conversations with Ross “The Boss.” I was able to get through them without index cards or lecturing and he understood instantly what I was saying. Of course, I wasn’t the President.

In January, 1989, the Reagan Administration issued a final report which said there were no live POWS after 1973. In July, 1990, the Bush I Administration said the same thing. Meanwhile, reports of hundreds of living POWS were arriving, including one about a prison under the Ho Chi Minh Memorial in the center of Hanoi.

So foul did the betrayal become that Hendon and other congressional heroes and private citizens cobbled together a reward of $2.4 million of their own money, payable to anyone who escaped with an American POW and turned him over to U.S. authorities. But those treasonous authorities worked overtime telling people in Southeast Asia not to attempt rescue of those POWS and that there was no reward.

A Thai businessman came forward with information about Bill Milliner, a U.S. Army Warrant Officer missing for eighteen years. The businessman said Milliner was alive in Laos and could be brought to the Lao/Thai border for the reward. But the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC) told him to stop the rescue and there would be no reward. Hendon tried unsuccessfully to have the responsible officials tried.

An Enormous Crime
also records in detail the staggering treason perpetrated by Senators Kerry and McCain. Under Kerry’s direction, official POW records were destroyed, a felony. Kerry is not just a gigolo who specializes in marrying rich, obnoxious women. Because of his treasonous behavior and associations after he returned from his suspiciously brief tour in Vietnam, befouled with medals he had awarded himself, it would be no surprise to learn that he was a secret member of the Communist Party.

The aptly named McCain is of course an incredibly obnoxious, little puke himself, who goes out of his way to treat the POW families like garbage. For some reason, the encyclopedic Hendon/Stewart book omits the incident in which McCain actually embraced a North Vietnamese Communist torturer who had come to the District of Criminals to testify at one of McCain’s phony hearings. Which again raises the perennial question: did the Communists recruit McCain when he was a POW in Hanoi? What really happened in Hanoi, John? Is McCain the McChurian Candidate?

Along these lines, for many years Ann Mills Griffiths has run the National League of Families. The League started out looking for live POWS. Then Miss Griffiths was put on a government panel and the families rejoiced. Now the League would have an official voice in government. Instead, she was co-opted – which was probably the reason they hired her – and began to spout the government line.

No more live POWS. Now she was looking for remains. In fact, no one has worked harder over the years to bury live POWS than Ann Mills Griffiths. If the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court were to testify that he had seen a live POW still in Communist hands, she would figure out a way to discredit him. But politics makes strange bedfellows, right? Over the years, an eminently reasonable question repeatedly asks itself. With whom is Ann Mills Griffiths in bed? Who is it, Ann? Give us a name and serial number.

End of Part I

Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”

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