American MIAs

[Nono]

About 20 years ago I met an American up in northern Thailand near the border with Laos who (shrugs) claimed he was working for an association dedicated to freeing American prisoners still held by the Laotians and Vietnamese.

I believed (and still do) that anyone who truly had been assigned that task wouldn't have been telling me about it. Be that as it may, I scorned the idea that there could be any Americans still in captivity, for the simple reason that their existence -- then as now -- would be so contrary to their captors' interests.

Haven't given the matter much thought in the intervening years, but I've just seen a documentary on the tube that is food for thought. In it, numerous people, from family members of MIAs to US senators, give fairly convincing evidence for some sort of cover-up. And two striking claims emerged:

1) Part of the Nixon/Kissinger deal with North Vietnam in '72-'73 was that the US would provide major reconstruction aid. It seems plausible that the North Vietnamese held on to a number of prisoners as collateral. And, indeed, this aid package was later scotched by the US Congress. So any collateral presumably would have been kept.

(After the French got kicked out of Indochina, they got their POWs back in exchange for economic aid.)

2) The Soviets were very interested in the crews of advanced US aircraft -- in particular the F-111 -- who mastered technology that they were anxious to have. It seems that the late Boris Yeltsin told an American interviewer that American POWs had indeed been brought to the Soviet Union to work in their aviation industry.

Hmmm... Anyway, does anyone know anything about the state of this controversy today?

No rant please. Just the facts.

[jose]

I met a few Americans, living in Thailand 25 years ago who claimed they were in Vietnam and refuse to go back to the US, most were into chasing the dragon( and water will change to cherry wine) Steely Dan - Time Out Of Mind Lyrics that might account for some ofthe MIA´s i gave up smoking heroin a long time ago. why would they want to go back? they have their mamosans and their grass and their smack

[Zeebadee]

" In 1992, a visiting Harvard professor named Steven Morris found a Soviet document in a Russian archives while he researching other information in Russia. The document, a six page report from the Vietnamese Lieutenant General Tran Van Quang, contained significant information about American POWs. The General reported to the Soviet Politburo specific numbers of POWs captured from specific regions. The numbers, not surprisingly, were substantially higher than those the Vietnamese had given the United States. Dr. Morris and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski went on PBS to discuss this document. Brzezinski, formerly with the KGB, theorized that the Vietnamese had kept the prisoners for leverage in future negotiations. Surprised that the United States followed through with the pull out of American troops, the Vietnamese no longer needed the POWs. Having publicly committed to having no more American POWs, the communists realized that releasing them at a later date would cause immense damage to any international credibility they sought to establish. Brzezinski believed that they were executed soon after 1975. Both Kissinger and Brzezinski stated that the document was apparently authentic."
Left Behind


"The 1972 Russian document on American Prisoners of War being held in North Vietnam is the most important document on the subject which has ever been released to the American government and the people. Its significance lies in the fact that it was a top secret document of the former Soviet Union's Armed Forces Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedivatelnoye Upravleniey --- GRU) the military intelligence arm of what as then the closest ally and patron of the communist party and government of North Vietnam. It purports to be the transcript of a report by a Deputy Chief of Staff of the Vietnamese People's Army, Lieutenant General Tran Van Quang, to the Politburo of the Vietnam Workers' [Communist] Party, on September 15, 1972. In spite of the massive intelligence gathering and analysis undertaken by the United States' own Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency for nearly thirty years, no other document of this sensitivity on this subject has ever been publicized, and almost certainly ever been acquired, by the U.S. government.

If the most fundamental information in the document is true, then the government of Vietnam has at best been holding hostage for twenty years, and has at worst murdered, over seven hundred American prisoners of war. These prisoners were people that the government of North Vietnam had promised to return under the terms of the Paris Peace Agreements, which North Vietnam had signed on January 27, 1973. Although we have abundant evidence of other massive violations of the Paris Peace Agreement, and of other international peace agreements the Vietnamese communist leaders have signed --- most notably the Geneva agreement of 1954 ending hostilities in Indochina and the Geneva Agreement of 1962 on Laos --- this would be the only case where Hanoi's treaty violation involved the holding hostage and possible murder of American citizens."
Testimony of Dr. Stephen J. Morris - July 14, 1993

Who really knows what the truth about this is? I have no doubt that our own government is just as willing as any of the others to leave all this in the past.

[Nono]

Left Behind: "Zbigniew Brzezinski ... formerly with the KGB"

A man who was for four years the National Security Adviser of the United States of America used to be with the KGB?