Francisco Goya ‘Disasters of War’The American War in Vietnam is the war that just keeps on giving. Thirty seven years after the Peace Treaty that removed the US military from the country comes now the revelations that many Americans did not, in fact, return home in 1974 when Hanoi released its prisoners and both sides announced that there were no more Americans in captivity.
Long- time journalist extraordinaire Sydney Schanberg – who exposed the Killing Fields of Cambodia with his book, “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” which was later made into an Academy Award winning film – has been following the story of American servicemen held in captivity since the 1980’s. According to Schanberg, hundreds were held after the signing of the Peace Accords in exchange for promised ‘reconstruction funds’ that never materialized.
On Memorial Day, when the nation’s capital is clogged with the motorcycles of surviving Vietnam Vets many carrying the sad black and gray flags depicting beaten down prisoners and ‘POW- MIA’ the issue is not only relevant but deserves to go viral.
The story has emerged from Counterpunch’s resident uber- liberal crank Alexander Cockburn:
The ghosts that haunt Senator John McCain are about 600 in number and right now they are mustering for an onslaught. McCain, one of America’s foremost Republicans and President Barack Obama’s opponent in 2008, is currently locked in a desperate bid for political survival in his home state of Arizona. After 20 years of immunity from challenge from his fellow Republicans, he’s now involved in a close primary battle with J.D. Hayworth, a former congressman turned radio broadcaster who sports the Tea Party label. Hayworth says McCain is a fake Republican, soft on issues like immigration. The polls have been tightening, and if McCain got bludgeoned by some new disclosure, it could finish him off.
That very disclosure is now bursting over the head of McCain, the former Navy pilot who was held in a North Vietnamese prison for five years, and returned to the US as a war hero. His nemesis is Sydney Schanberg, a former New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting from Cambodia that formed the basis for the Oscar-winning movie, The Killing Fields.
In recent years Schanberg has worked relentlessly on one of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War, one that still causes hundreds of American families enduring pain. Did the US government abandon American POWs in Vietnam? By 1990 there were so many stories, sightings, intelligence reports, of American POWs left behind in Vietnam after the war was over, that pressure from Vietnam vets and the families of the MIAs prompted the formation of a special committee of the US Senate to investigate. The chairman was John Kerry, a Navy man who had served in Vietnam. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member.
Schanberg’s entire article can be found on Patrick Buchanon’s uber- constipated conservative journal, ‘The American Conservative’. The topic makes for some strange bedfellows, no?
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What’s more, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistle blowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of “debunking” POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.
The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.
One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon’s performance was an insider, Air Force Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon’s position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement.
Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general’s briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war’s end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.
Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a Feb. 2, 1973 formal letter to Hanoi’s premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political conditions.” But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party “in accordance with its own constitutional provisions.” That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored—and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners—just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.
In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi’s desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture—were eventually executed.
If this is true, how horrific and unnecessary. More likely most died of broken hearts, knowing that they had been cheaply abandoned by the government they had sworn service to, knowing that they would never see their loved ones again.
The entire article is indeed required reading; the villain of the piece is the execrable ‘Mr Super- Patriot- and Ex- POW Man’ John McCain. Schanberg holds McCain’s feet to the fire for his major role in the cover up with the likelihood that the ghosts of citizens abandoned in a far off land are now coming back to haunt his faltering political career.
Are Schanberg’s accusations true? The matter of hostages never surfaced before Congress during the peace negotiations or after the signing of the treaty. Schanberg’s story is suggestive: that the public discussion in Washington that was mandated by the Nixon codicil never took place in a timely manner. Reparations were dismissed out of hand. America’s crusade in Vietnam mandated that communist expansion would never be subsidized. Who knew what the stakes were and whether they were real?
Hostage discussions and debates about them in the Capital are posed Schanberg as a bit of Nixonian cynicism. The discussion which did eventually take place was both delayed and warped until it fell into the dilatory control of Mssrs. McCain and Kerry years after the fact. Was the codicil anything more than a prop to Schamberg’s story? Did any Congressional committee ever examine the hostage demand behind closed doors or did the Pentagon simply take it upon itself to abandon Americans that might be left in Vietnam jails out of bureaucratic inertia?
Simply posing the questions is accusation on its own. Without the codicil Schanberg’s logic simply falls apart. The story is hollow at its core as there is no way to verify if any of the hostages ever existed or not.
Does it really matter? Isn’t the real issue the potential fact of Americans in Vietnam jails long after the war ended rather than the silly rationalizations piled on top of the fact by people with axes to grind? Both the Vietnamese and Americans miscalculated, is it unreasonable that any hostage issue was miscalculated as well? The ‘codicil’ could have been nothing more than a diplomatic maneuver that simply took on a half- life of its own and is irrelevant.
By 1974 America was ready to move on and no American was eager to send more money down the Vietnam rathole. But, that assumption does not forgo conditions. The question – never really posed or answered is, ‘more money for what, exactly’?
Americans would have certainly spent to retrieve remaining POW’s – or to hammer what remained of Hanoi and Haiphong into powder with B52’s as ‘inducement’ to send all Americans home.
At issue was a pittance: $3.25 billion. As many here @ Economic Undertow understand, the creation of money is nothing more than the process of wishing it into existence. A ‘bad’ check is written to a borrower in any amount of funds and opposing entries are made into a ledger. It’s that simple; money is an artifact of double- entry bookkeeping. It is debt pure and simple: this includes all money including gold that is intended to be used as money or held in some form as reserve against money costs.
Outside the blessing by governments, there is no difference between ‘official’ money and counterfeit. Why couldn’t the USA counterfeit some money and release our soldiers held incommunicado?
Why didn’t the Fed/Treasury just print up some cash for grins on television? “Give us our real prisoners and we will give you fake money!”
All money is ‘fake’. Only collective suspension of disbelief makes it real. That, and commerce; giving money to Vietnam would have expanded commerce. The Vietnamese would have been compelled to spend that money, at some point in the chain, on American goods and services.
If Nixon and Kissinger did not understand this process, certainly Arthur Burns, Nixon’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve did. How hard would it have been for the Fed to lend the $3.25 bil to the Treasury so as to allow the needed funds to be sent to Hanoi? A fiscal approach – which would have entrained Congress – would have been painless as the funds- counter on any sovereign debt denominated in the money lent amounts to exactly nothing in the sense that these funds are in circulation generating more money returns than they ‘cost’.
Let’s go ahead and add the cost of the fiscal ‘bailout’ to the national Sovereign Debt of the United States. Since the national debt of the US in 1974 was approximately $343.7 billion the cost of bringing all of our soldiers home would have meant an increase of less than 1% of our current debt at the time. If there were 600 soldiers in captivity held for ransom, the cost per man would have been $540 million.
Failing a fiscal approach, Burns could have exercised the monetary process and produced the funds with the Treasury and done so in any number of ‘facilities’ created for that purpose.
The monetary solution would have added $3 billion in Treasuries to the Fed’s reserves. It would have expanded the Fed’s balance sheet. How tragic.
Bernanke hasn’t invented anything new; the Fed could have opened ‘swap lines’ with the Hanoi central bank and transferred the funds. Nobody would have ever known anything about it … unless the Fed was audited, that is.
By the way, how much did the rest of the war cost?
Money ‘lent’ to Vietnam would have gone into circulation – perhaps for Vietnam to buy fuel from newly- formed OPEC. The funds would have had some economic return alongside the obvious human returns. Far better returns than were achieved during the war where fuel and ordnance was wasted flying in circles over the forests, dropping bombs on trees. A consequence of the anti- tree campaign was inflation that began in 1968. The few added billions would have been inconsequencial infationary ‘stimulus’, eradicated without a trace by the deflationary shock of the 1973 oil embargo.
Had the funds had not gone into circulation, there would have been no effect on commerce in the US which at the time was being massively impacted by the embargo. The cash may as well not have existed at all.
The fraud is supposition of the cynical requirement that any payments to Vietnam be vetted by a hostile Congress. Whose fraud is it, anyway? Nixon’s? Kissinger’s? Schanberg’s? The assumption is that Congress would be opposed to paying any money (lent out of thin air) to bring back remaining veterans from the war. The blame for suspended payments was hypothetically laid at Congress’ door yet Congress never debated the issue!
Administrations during and since have always insisted that there were no more prisoners under the control of the Vietnamese.
It’s hard to divide and measure cynicism in retrospect. What’s hard to believe that our government and Congress – which ended the Vietnam fiasco on grounds of its human cost to the country – would turn ever aside from a small additional money cost. This idea is more absurd than the multi- decade cover up. Time will tell and if the facts support Schanberg then heads should indeed roll.
Either McCain’s or Schanberg’s.
Depravity is often little more than cheapness given a stage … or obsession. The banality of evil must certainly include the failure to spend a little free money, or at least discuss spending it honestly.