The Village Voice reports:
An abundance of evidence had come to light that the North Vietnamese, while
returning 591 U.S. prisoners of war after the treaty signing, had held back
many others as future bargaining chips for the $4 billion or more in war reparations
that the Nixon administration had pledged. In the [Congressional] committee’s
early days, Kerry had given encouraging indications of being a committed investigator. e
said the number of these likely survivors was more than 100 and that this
was the minimum. But in a very short time, he stopped saying such things and
morphed his role into one of full alliance with the executive branch, the
Pentagon, and other Washington hierarchies, joining their long-running effort
to obscure and deny that a significant number of live American prisoners had
not been returned. As many as 700 withheld P.O.W.’s were cited in credible
intelligence documents, including a speech by a senior North Vietnamese general
that was discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar.
I sure hope Kerry’s already caluclated spin on this potential bombshell. Though
it sounds like everyone was complicit to normalize relations so we could start building
those sweatshops to make my Express khakis. What happened to the heroic Kerry of many decades ago?
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