The POW coverup?

This is a story that makes everyone uneasy as it dredges up memories of Vietnam and has been a cause driven by conspiracy-minded people who fly POW/MIA flags in their yards and over their gas stations. The findings of the select committee were also celebrated as a bipartisan success at unearthing the final truth and easing the minds of those whose loved ones were still uncounted for. John Kerry mentioned his work with John McCain on it often during the 2004 campaign.

But it is definitely another of those things from McCain's past the candidate would rather not be hearing about these days.

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain's military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the US prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

It's never been clear to me why McCain has been so adamant in his denial that evidence exists that American servicemen may have been left behind. Angry, resentful denials.

Thanks to alert reader "RO" for the tip.