People, This is real a deep rabbit hole that goes back to Nixon - Reagan - Bush 41 - Clinton. This is an issue I think the Bush republicans really want to back away from. Their implications and actions, or lack there of, what was really known about MIA, go much deeper then Kerry's. After 20 years of MIA stories, questions and guesses, Kerry and McCain's committee sought to find closure and will never under any circumstances be left without doubts. This is what the pain of war is about and is why, WAR must ALWAYS be the LAST option.
Reagan refused to comment...
Reagan, now an ex-president, refused to answer any questions on any subject: the committee did not contest his refusal. Bush, who was now president and whose marks were all over this issue from his days as C.I.A. chief in the 1970s, was never even approached. The committee cited "unique concerns about Executive Privilege." And Casey was dead.
Even though he never testified, former Secret Service agent Syphrit was harassed and as a result left the Treasury Department some months ago, after 25 years of government service.
As the years passed, the original human failure -- leaving men behind in the rush to get out -- was compounded by human weakness, as one administration after another saw the overwhelming evidence yet did almost nothing. They either felt powerless to make the Vietnamese give the prisoners back or refused on principle to pay ransom (though the French had done so, successfully, after their Vietnam war). Frozen in a posture of inaction, U.S. officials apparently concluded that telling the truth about the POWs would not only be admitting a national scandal, but would spark a hostage crisis of major proportions, one that Washington did not know how to solve. So they obfuscated and lied. And with each new disclosure of prisoner evidence, the lies had to multiply and swell. Were the truth told, too many Washington careers would be destroyed, too many powerful people burned.
<snip>
Senator John McCain
One of Kerry's fellow debunkers, Senator John McCain, in a radio appearance the next day, brushed off the evidence as "raw files." The Arizona Republican, a cosponsor of the embargo-lifting resolution, said there couldn't have been a secondary prison system "because we would have known about it." But that's exactly what these documents show: That at some point after the war, we did know about it.
In the Senate debate itself, McCain, like Kerry, provided no facts of his own but simply launched into a diversionary tirade against "the professional malcontents, conspiracy mongers, con artists, and dime-store Rambos who attend this issue ..."
The Kerry-McCain resolution passed easily, 62 to 38, and though it was non-binding on the president, it gave him, in McCain's words, "political cover." Within days, Clinton had ended the 19-year-old embargo against trading with Vietnam. Four months later, in May, the two countries announced they were establishing diplomatic missions in each other's capitals, the last step before an exchange of ambassadors and full recognition.
But lifting embargoes and calling intelligence reports "raw files" cannot erase the tangible evidence. In order to knock down intelligence reports such as those above on the prisons, you have to produce further hard information demonstrating convincingly why the earlier reports were not credible. No such further reports have been provided.
POW files
There's a myth in Washington that virtually all the government's POW documents have been declassified and are available to the public. Bush, in 1992, issued the first declassification directive. Clinton, after taking office in 1993, said he had speeded up Bush's executive order, and last November, on Veterans Day, he announced the process completed.
Wonderful. Try finding any of the C.I.A.'s key operational files on POWs in the National Archives or the Library of Congress. Try finding satellite imagery of POW distress signals. Where are the missing memos and cables on the Vietnamese ransom offers? The truth is that the most significant files, from the highest levels of government and the intelligence community, were not covered by the Bush and Clinton executive orders and remain under lock and key.
(Not that declassifying files necessarily brings them to light. The Pentagon, for example, says it sent stacks of declassified National Security Agency documents to the Library of Congress. But here is how one researcher, Roger Hall, described the situation in a letter to The Washington Times:"... the material has been deliberately mislabeled and scattered into different categories. Those who wish access to these documents are thwarted by the deliberate and malicious concealment of information. There is no way for any average citizen -- or expert -- doing research on the POW/MIA issue to find this particular material.")
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