For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the Internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest on the show today is Sidney Shandberg.
He's a former reporter for New York Newsday.
He's the author of The Death and Life of Dith Prenn, and that is the book upon which the movie The Killing Fields is based.
Welcome to the show, sir.
It's good to be here.
It's very good to have you here.
All right, so you have this article that you've written for The Nation, and, in fact, I guess the longer version is at TheNationInstitute.org.
It's called John McCain and the POW Cover-Up.
The war hero candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.
And I'd just like to start by saying that, well, forgive me, this goes for me.
It's an indictment of my own view probably, but I believe I can extend this to most of the American population.
I think the common conception of the POW, MIA crowd is that maybe there's something there, and yet these people seem so committed that they very well could be wrong, if you take my meaning, as though they believe so strongly that they might not accept evidence that contradicts them or something.
It seems like the kind of thing that you don't see much real scholarship and real journalism about, more like the kind of thing you would read about in Soldier of Fortune or something, where you can't really trust whether you know if these people are doing a good job or not, whether it's real journalism or not.
And I'm certain that there must be a thousand exceptions to that, but I'm completely ignorant of them.
This is the first real journalism that I've seen along these lines, at least in a long, long time.
So I want to thank you for doing this, and I guess tell you how glad I am to have the opportunity to let you discuss this story in a very reasonable, journalistic sort of fashion, rather than personal, emotional involvement, that sort of thing.
Oh, fine.
I appreciate that.
All right.
So, first of all, can you please share with us what you call in this article the mass of evidence that POWs were, in fact, left behind in Vietnam?
What sort of evidence do you have that proves this case?
Before we get into John McCain, I really want to know about these guys left behind in Vietnam as much as you can tell me.
Well, the evidence is voluminous, and first of all, if people really want to see it, they can go to my article, which is on nationinstitute.org.
Very simple.
You'll find it there.
And it's lengthy.
It's about 8,000 words.
It has linked to it documents and other evidence.
In particular, the report that was made by the Senate Special Committee on POWs and MIAs in 1993.
John Kerry headed that committee.
John McCain, who was a member of the committee and probably the most important member, the most influential member, because he had been a POW.
And most people who continuously say that nobody was left behind haven't read that report.
Now, that report in its executive summary whitewashed the issue and said that only a small number, that was the phrase that they used, a small number, could have been left behind in Vietnam.
The evidence shows that the number is not small, and that our president and the National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, the president was President Nixon.
Well, what happened was that at the peace table, the American side had very little leverage.
Henry Kissinger has written about this in his books.
And the Vietnamese refused to give us a list of the prisoners.
They would repatriate until after we signed the peace treaty.
We accepted that condition.
So we didn't see their list until we had actually put our signatures on the peace treaty.
That's a fact.
That's not something that's debatable.
When the list was shown to our government, it had 591 names on it.
The only problem was that our intelligence agencies had numbers much higher, some of them as much as 600 men more than that.
That is over 1,000 men were left behind, is what our intelligence agencies were saying.
They were saying that the Vietnamese held possibly over 1,000 and were returning 591.
Oh, I see.
I'm sorry.
Okay, so there are several hundred missing off that list.
That's what our intelligence showed.
And now in the article, I think you say that Nixon had promised some more reparations or something, and the Vietnamese were holding these men that they hadn't declared on the list as a bargaining chip in order to get those reparations, which they never got, and then the whole thing just kind of went away rather than being resolved.
What I'm trying to get at is that the evidence is much more specific than that.
The president, looking at this intelligence, then wrote a letter to Pham Van Dong, the premier of Hanoi, and said, just pointing to Laos, where many of our airmen were shot down, several hundred, over 300.
And the president in his letter said, we have records of men who were shot down and captured alive, more than 300 of them, and you are sending us only nine men back from Laos.
And then he added, this is unbelievable.
That's all on the record.
That is in that report, and it's in my piece.
And so what I'm really saying is, yes, it was unbelievable, and they didn't return these men, and anybody that wants to find out about what's on the record, and my long piece is still not, there's plenty more beyond that, but it's just one single piece.
And all you have to do is go there, nationinstitute.org.
It goes much further than that.
During this committee's life, between 1991 and 1993, there were lots of hearings.
At one of the hearings, two men who served as defense secretaries, during the Vietnam War, under President Nixon, testified under oath at a public hearing that men were left behind.
Now, are the people who dispute this situation, are they prepared to say that two defense secretaries under oath were telling lies?
What motive would they have?
And on and on it goes.
This committee found out that from the moment of that peace accord to 1992, when the committee brought the subject up, none of our intelligence agencies had ever been told what the code locator symbols were for prisoners.
That is, airmen and others who had been trained that if they were caught, they could scratch these numbers into the ground, or somehow get this information out, that they had never been taught, these intelligence agencies, to look for evidence of this.
So, for nearly two decades, our intelligence agencies were not looking and were not asked to look for these symbols.
Was that an accident, or was it a cover-up?
I'll let you decide.
Here's my response to people who want not to believe that this happened, that this terrible national shame happened.
That is, read the piece, call your congressman, write to your president, tell them, open up these files.
What John McCain did was he pushed through legislation that suppresses these government files showing that men were left behind.
Well, now, hold on about McCain's role in this for a moment.
I want to ask you about, I think you say in the article that you talked to a CIA officer who told you that their belief is that certainly by now all these men are dead.
Is that right?
Even if they were all dead, it doesn't matter.
Think about it.
We have families in the United States of these men, and the Pentagon has a list of men who are missing and unaccounted for.
We have more than 700 names on that list still unaccounted for from Vietnam.
All those families still want to know what happened to their men.
If they were executed afterward because the reparations didn't come and therefore they became useless to Vietnam as bargaining chips, to me it doesn't matter.
All I'm saying is to the naysayers, to the ones who choose not to believe this truth, is get the files released, and then read the files, and let us all look at them, and then we can have a better discussion.
But right now the files that do exist, those are the files I'm referring to now and the ones I was able to uncover through whistleblowers and others in those intelligence agencies.
But just by doing reporting, all those tell me that there was a significant number left behind.
The thing about they've all been executed by now, I wasn't saying so therefore let's all forget the whole thing.
That's part of the story.
That's part of the history of what happened here.
These men were left behind, and apparently they were eventually shot in the back of the head.
Doesn't make it sound any less important to me, so I don't want to get too diverted onto that tangent.
The naysayers are the naysayers.
Americans have said, well, if they're dead, so what?
Well, there was no so what on the end of my question.
I just want to make that clear.
Obviously this is important.
Okay, and now I want to talk about the politics of this, and particularly renowned war hero John McCain, who himself was a POW in Vietnam, and the story that you tell in this article about what started out as the truth bill, which somehow died in committee, I guess, and was replaced by the McCain bill.
So what was the truth bill going to do, and then what was the McCain bill instead?
Well, the truth bill said that all the documents have to be made public and have to be given to the families, have to be shown to the families.
And the McCain bill said that none of them should be shown to the families, and these should not be opened up and they should be kept sealed.
And on a second bill that he intervened on at the behest of the Pentagon, the second bill had punitive passages.
In other words, this was called the Missing Personnel Act, and the passages said that any government employee in any government agency who withheld or suppressed files about POWs or men missing in action were subject to a felony, a charge of a felony and a fine.
McCain's amendment to that bill, which he pushed through in a House-Senate conference committee and it never came to the floor, that amendment removed all of those penalties.
And what was his explanation?
His explanation was that if you put those penalties in, you wouldn't get anybody to work in the office at the Pentagon that handles POW-MIA affairs.
So, in effect, he was saying that unless people are allowed to suppress the information, they won't work in that office.
That's exactly what he was saying.
He didn't say it, but that's what his actions said.
He didn't say those words.
And he has done this again and again and again.
Now, why does he do it?
Someone would have to get inside his head, and I'm not qualified for that.
But it is true that McCain does have a lot of material in those files that he himself probably would not want released.
He has said that after he was tortured, he told us, and we knew this, that he gave confessions to the North Vietnamese.
He was a war criminal.
He gave them his flight passages.
He told them about the aircraft carrier where he launched from.
He said that his missions were to bomb schools, hospitals, orphanages, and so forth.
And those confessions were played by loudspeaker over the prison system, and they were also broadcast on Hanoi radio, and the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies picked them up.
All those things are in the files that would come out if these restrictions that McCain and his allies have placed on the files were removed.
And we would all find out about it.
My feeling is that he's very, very leery of that.
I mean, a lot of people, if they read what he said at that time, would not be inclined to vote for him.
And I think that he feels a certain desperation.
If you read his autobiography, he talks about how disgraced he felt when he broke under torture and gave the confessions, and how even now he still cringes, he says.
Those are his words.
When he thinks about his father possibly finding out about them.
His father was Rear Admiral John McCain II, and he was Commander-in-Chief Pacific during the Vietnam War.
And McCain never found out, even after he came home, whether his father had heard of this while McCain was in prison.
It was only after his father died in 1981 that he learned through a friend that, yes, someone in the Pentagon had brought the confessions to the attention of his father.
So I think there's a lot of stuff in his head.
I don't think people understand how much prisoners go through.
They don't come out the same person that they went in, especially if they were tortured.
I think that he has what some students of psychiatry say are snakes in his head.
And I think this is his possible motive for doing all this, because he's never given any other compelling explanation for why he does it.
And this is the same guy who beats everybody over the head with his former POW status every chance he gets.
It's his leading non-sequitur.
No matter what the conversation, oh, yeah, well, I was a POW.
And I think, I don't know how many thousands, but there were a lot of POWs in Vietnam, and they don't all run around beating everybody over the head with it like he does.
No, and most of them say that being a POW doesn't make you a hero, because they are much more modest and realistic than he is.
I think the reason that he does that, that he goes through this rift every time of how he spent five and a half years.
A lot of prisoners spent a lot more than that.
He spent five and a half years and didn't have a kitchen table and all that sort of thing.
I think he does that to defend, you know, as a preventive act to stop people from talking about or reading about the other side of things and the things he's done as a senator.
And it's worth noting, and my piece goes into this to some degree, that the mainstream press has never written about this legislation.
Not throughout his entire career.
Really?
About the legislation itself?
Well, you can go Google and see if anybody has ever questioned why a man whose image as a POW war hero is the foundation of his political celebrity, how he wouldn't do everything in his power to help bring back POWs and help the families.
And he hasn't.
If you go to the families and talk to them, you won't find anybody praising John McCain.
He's become their enemy.
And he has had confrontations with them, one of which is mentioned in my piece, physical confrontations.
The story is very complicated.
Complicated in that it goes across a lot of issues.
But the facts are kind of clear.
And even without these documents that have been suppressed, it's very, very clear that he has done this, that he has buried this and kept this stuff classified.
And that kind of bait-and-switch, that, oh yeah, we're going to do this investigation and then switch out one bill for another and one set of parameters for another, that's the kind of thing that will never fool the family of somebody who was last seen alive.
But it's always good enough to fool NBC News with Brian Williams or whatever.
It's always going to be good enough for them.
Well, I think that the mainstream press has been, I don't know what the real word is, but they've lacked spine.
Because after the war ended, or after the American role in the war ended, they ran away from the subject.
Now, over the period of the Vietnam War, several thousand American reporters in ships covered Vietnam.
And yet you won't see a word about this stuff over the years.
None of this real digging.
Nobody going to the archives.
The National Archives has material, some of which I use in the piece.
Some of this is out there.
It's not a real secret.
The only secret is the fact that there's been this very successful Washington campaign to keep this story suppressed.
Well, everybody's, I think, afraid that they'll get swiftboated as a swiftboater.
You're right, that they'll be called names.
But the point is, it isn't about swiftboating.
I've written about this off and on ever since that committee existed.
And I've written long pieces and so forth.
The mainstream press has absolutely ignored this stuff.
As you said, you've never seen any of this.
And that's why my goal is to get people to just read this piece and then come away and decide what you want to think and whether you want to push for more information.
That's really why I want them to read the piece that I've written.
Well, you know, there's YouTube that's going around, which is just serving as an example of John McCain as kind of a lunatic, where he's screaming at and belittling this lady at a Senate committee hearing and releasing her to tears at the table, and it's on this issue.
And he's, I don't want to quote him exactly because I don't remember, but he's basically calling her a kook and a crank and a conspiracy nut, and how dare she get up there and say that he is not 100% greatness and that everything that he's doing isn't good enough, and reduces her to tears at the table.
I mean, boy, that guy is one smug son of a bitch.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, well, and he's also known for his volcanic temper.
I think that there's much that we have to learn about McCain.
But on the other hand, it's an issue that goes far beyond him.
The only reason that we should know about his role is because he's running for the presidency.
And this is serious business.
We've had a very, very bad eight years under one administration, the leadership of which has, just looking around at the wreckage, it certainly hasn't been what the country needed.
And I don't think Americans should want that to happen again.
But as I say, it goes far beyond failures by John McCain.
There have been failures up and down for the last 35 years about this issue.
And while this goes on, you hear politicians get up and give lip service to how wonderful these brave men and women are and so forth and so on.
Well, if you want to challenge my use of the phrase lip service, then go look at the condition of the Veterans Administration hospital system.
John McCain has voted time and again against putting more money into that system.
And that's in his record.
No one writes about it.
So when I say that the role of the press is important, yes, it is, because it has been silent all these years too.
And one of the things that impresses me about this story is one of the things that Daniel Ellsberg addresses in his book, Secrets, a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And that is the actually quite astounding ability of government bureaucrats to keep secrets.
Everybody always, I think it was originally a Ben Franklin quote, right?
You can't have three people know a secret because somebody will tell kind of thing.
But Ellsberg explains, and this story clearly reveals, that hundreds, thousands of people will know extremely explosive stories that the American people have every right in the world to know about, and they keep their mouths shut, press or no press.
Right.
Well, on another level, I can understand how it would be hard for people to believe that our government would do a thing like this.
And every time we have a scandal that is unearthed 30 or 40 years after the fact, we look at this and say, how could they do this?
And I think that's one of the factors when people are shown evidence that, in this case, that many of our prisoners were left behind, that they say, this couldn't be.
Well, we would know about it.
I mean, someone would have told us.
Well, the someone who would have told them wasn't there.
And, you know, everybody's got a whole, you know, their lives are busy elsewhere.
And if the instruments of the press and of Congress aren't speaking out about these things, then often the information just goes, not ignored, but just not delivered to the public.
And so that's kind of sad.
So I'm writing about my, you know, my own profession.
I mean, I'm talking about them, and it's embarrassing.
And, you know, this story, this particular story that I've written has been out for more than a week, and it's had a lot of attention on the Internet, but not one single mention in the mainstream press.
Now, that'll tell you something.
Anyway, I just hope people go and read it.
I'm not troubled by what they believe now, but I would urge them, I would like them to go and read it.
And I don't make things up.
I have a reputation, and I'll stand by that.
And I think that I would just say, well, if you don't believe it, then refute it.
Don't just sit there and say, I don't believe it, but refute it.
Not just rebut it, but find evidence that proves it wrong.
And then I'll come talking.
I mean, I'll come looking, and I'll write that.
But up until now, no one has refuted this evidence.
Can you speak to those left behind in Korea in World War II at all?
Well, World War II is not as clear as Korea.
Korea, the evidence suggests, vividly suggests, that at least 900, roughly 900 prisoners were held back.
And the reason I say clearly is that this information came from other POWs who were released.
There was a witness at the Kerry Committee hearings who talked about this, and he was at Panmunjom in 1953, at the end of the Korean War, to deal with the POWs who were coming out and to assist in their repatriation.
And many of the men who came out said, we aren't the only ones.
They have put 450 men on each of two railroad trains to go to China and the Soviet Union.
And the scuttlebutt, that's all it can be called, because we don't know what happened to them, was that many of them were wounded, had injuries, and that they were going to be used for medical experimentation.
So there's no particular reason to disbelieve this, because it came from our own POWs who were returned.
And they said, on each of those two trains, there were 450, so that makes 900.
And there was a report not confirmed, that is still not corroborated, of another 350 on another train.
So that's what we know about Korea.
Do we know why they didn't follow through with the negotiations or whatever?
Or did they try everything they could to get them back?
How shall I put this?
I am not as conversant about Korea.
I understand.
I've immersed myself in the Vietnam thing, so I don't know who tried what.
But according to the witness, who had been during World War II an attache with General Eisenhower, and now he was still in the service in intelligence, and he was at Panmunjom bringing this information back, and he reported in his testimony that he went to Eisenhower, who was now president, and in the Oval Office told him about these men, and the president said some words to the effect that I don't think we can do anything about this, because it will start World War III.
Because we were in the middle of the Cold War, and that was the opinion at the top.
And so they didn't push very hard, and they didn't tell the families about it.
And that is this man's testimony.
And there were two academics who were part of the government who came in and testified that this man's name was Korso.
I can't think of his first name.
And he was now retired from the military.
And they said that his intelligence was bad, that he was working from bad intelligence, which is not very believable, because he was there and they weren't.
And people have written books about this, books that were ignored.
You won't see them reviewed, and so forth.
And that was also true of the Vietnam.
There are several books out there by people, reporters and others, who wrote about the Vietnam POWs, but never got reviewed in any mainstream publication.
So all of this is part of the same picture.
I don't know about World War II.
Okay.
All right, wow.
So John McCain, the war hero.
I guess the most important point to emphasize about this, like you said, the reason it's so important that we're talking about John McCain is because he's running for president right now.
In fact, Henry Kissinger is one of his advisors.
I don't guess he'll have an official position in the government or anything.
But these men are, I don't know, the worst traitors to American soldiers in history, right?
As bad as Benedict Arnold, at least, it sounds like to me.
Well, I won't get into whether people should go to jail or whatever, but I do think that the American public deserves to know about this, and about McCain and about the others.
And it deserves to know, we deserve to know who did what.
Some people certainly tried.
And you can find that in my piece in the sense that the staff, many of the people on the staff of that committee rebelled against Kerry and McCain.
And in doing so, they were able to insert into the final document, the final report, a lot of the evidence.
And I write about that in the piece.
But the executive summary that comes at the front of this report is the only thing that the press quoted from.
And the front of that summary was a whitewash which said that only a small number could have been left behind.
And so I think it's just important that people, I'm not asking them not to trust their government ever.
We all want to trust our government, but we have now seen, especially in recent years, that our government does tell us a lot of lies.
And lies in people's lives at stake, and send soldiers into harm's way, and then praise them in public in speeches, and then do nothing for them or very little for them when they come home.
So I think that's an issue that we ought to be concerned about.
Absolutely, not just that they lie, but that those that they say are the very best among us, who join the military to serve them, they throw them in the garbage when they're done with them.
As we cover too often on this show, stories like that.
All right, well listen, again everybody, the article is McCain and the POW Cover-Up.
The war hero candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.
You can find it at thenation.com, and the full version at thenationinstitute.org with the links to all the PDF files and documentary evidence.
And like that, we'll have a link to it up on the radio entry for this here at antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your time today, Sidney.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, folks, that's Sidney Shanberg.
He is a former reporter for New York Newsday, author of The Death and Life of Dith Pran, which was the book that the movie The Killing Fields was based on.
And again, that article is McCain and the POW Cover-Up.
It's at thenationinstitute.org.
This is Antiwar Radio, and we'll be right back.
