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Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient
Clinton's "Moral Imperative" To Bomb Yugoslavia Reeks with Hypocrisy By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch
Nov. 1998 - May 1999 Issue
President Bill Clinton vowed in April from Norfork Virginia, that the United States would hold Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic responsible for the safety of the three U.S. soldiers the Yugoslavians had captured the day before.
"President Milosevic should make no mistake, the United States takes care of its own . . . we will hold him and his government responsible for their safety and for their well being," Clinton said to the U.S. military forces in Norfork.
Clinton's stern warnings to Mr. Milosevic sounds great and looks good on the evening news, but it is vintage Clinton hypocrisy at its most blatant.
The President's words of course were carefully crafted to give the appearance of a tough commander who truly cares about the U.S. servicemen and women he is ordering into combat.
But Clinton's words are hollow and meaningless.
To see through his shallow display of patriotic leadership, one only has to look back five years to February 3, 1994, when he ordered the 18-year U.S. imposed trade embargo against communist Vietnam lifted, an act that set the stage for full diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam.
Clinton betrayed this country and its servicemen when he caved to powerful corporate lobbyist by lifting the Vietnam trade embargo, thus opening the door for greedy interest to tap into Vietnam's slave labor market. Those actions helped jump start Hanoi's troubled economy and took away any incentive for Vietnam to explain what happened to the U.S. prisoners of war who were in its possession, but not released at the end of the war.
It must be noted at this point that Clinton left the United States to dodge the draft rather than fight the communist North Vietnamese who were committing hideous crimes against the non-communist population of South Vietnam.
Every imaginable gruesome atrocity the Clinton administration is accusing President Milosevic and his government of committing against the ethic Albanians in Kosovo, the communist Vietnamese committed against U.S. POWs and the South Vietnamese.
Communist Vietnamese policy on holding U.S. prisoner of war was brutally simple - ignore all international laws and freehandedly use humiliation, threats, deprivation, torture and execution to manipulate any prisoners that resisted. A captured American was forced to collaborate or endure Hanoi's deadly torture.
There is no question about the intentional deprivation, beatings, torture and murder that U.S. and South Vietnamese prisoners of war were subjected to by the communist Vietnamese during the war. Many of the torturers are easily found today. They are still running the Vietnamese government.
The U.S. Department of Defense estimated in 1973 that the communist Vietnamese had tortured to death more than 55 U.S. prisoners. Military archivists and POW activists claim the number is much higher.
Even though the records of atrocities committed by Hanoi against U.S. POWs and the South Vietnamese are very clear and precise, not one Vietnamese has ever been held accountable for the war crimes communist Vietnam committed.
The United States under Clinton has not "taken care of its own."
Quite the contrary, by lifting the trade embargo against Vietnam, Clinton actually rewarded top communist Vietnamese officials including two of the most ruthless: Vietnam's prime minister Vo Van Kiet and its Communist Party General Secretary, Do Muoi. The record is absolutely clear.
 President Bill Clinton, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) congratulate each other at 1995 White House ceremony normalizing relations with Vietnam.
Beginning in the 1950s and continuing until the fall of Saigon in 1975, with Kiet in the South and Muoi in the North, communist Vietnam orchestrated as official policy the use of terror as a weapon targeted directly at the noncommunist civilian population of Vietnam.
Communist terrorists blew up churches, schools and bridges, and murdered thousands of South Vietnamese civilian officials. In some cases, the communists murdered the wives, children and even livestock and pets of the officials.
The killing was sometimes done in family units. Douglas Pike described the "elimination" of an entire family in his book The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror: "... A death squad entered the home of a prominent community leader and shot him, his wife, his married son and daughterinlaw, his young unmarried daughter, a male and female servant and their baby. The family cat was strangled, the family dog was clubbed to death, and the goldfish scooped out of the fishbowl and tossed on the floor. When the communists left, no life remained in the house. A `social unit' had been eliminated."
In 1955, as a leader in North Vietnam's reform movement, Muoi helped annihilate Vietnam's middle-class landowners. Over 50,000 Vietnamese landowners were murdered that year, making it one of the bloodiest periods in Vietnamese communist history. Many others fled south.
After North Vietnam violated the Paris Peace Agreements in 1975 and took over South Vietnam by bloody military force, they murdered thousands more civilians. Those that were not executed were taken from their homes and jailed for years in forced labor concentration camps. Some are still being held today.
Millions of others were forced to abandon their homes and Vietnam in small boats. Thousands died at sea.
During the war, Kiet was a senior member of the communist National Liberation Front (NLF) Central Committee. Known as the Viet Cong, the NLF was responsible for orchestrating the war in South Vietnam.
Kiet achieved an influential and highranking position as a member of the NLF Central Committee. This position allowed him to participate in making NLF war policy in all of South Vietnam, including how American and South Vietnamese POWs would be treated in South Vietnam.
With Kiet helping call the shots, it became NLF policy to conduct "reprisal executions" intended to instill fear and create confusion and suspicion among the Vietnamese population. The NLF ordered the deaths of many American prisoners of war.
As a ranking NLF Central Committee member, Kiet ordered a failed attempt to assassinate U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara while he was in South Vietnam on May 12, 1964. Vietnam Executed Three U.S. POWs
In 1965, the world heard a horrible report concerning the public executions of American prisoners of war. Green Beret Capt. Humberto Roque "Rocky" Versace of Norfolk, Va. and camp mate SFC Kenneth M. Roraback were chosen by Kiet and the Central Committee for execution. Both men had refused to violate their allegiance to the U.S. Military Code of Conduct and become willing participants in the reeducation propaganda used in the camps.
Versace was marched to Central Committee headquarters in September 1965 and publicly executed Sept. 26, after being forced to kneel and apologize for his "war crimes." He was shot in the back of the head. Communist photographers reportedly filmed the murder and it is widely speculated that Kiet was present.
Although reports vary on the circumstances of Roraback's death, witnesses say a Viet Cong guard was ordered to execute Roraback. The guard's chosen method of murdering the American prisoner was to walk up behind Roraback and shoot him in the back of his head as he was eating his meal of rice and water.
The executions of Versace and Roraback were announced Sept. 26, 1965 over the Liberation Radio, the voice of the Viet Cong Central Committee.
Both men, the radio broadcast announced, were shot in reprisal for the deaths of two Viet Cong terrorists who were executed by the South Vietnamese.
Just a few months earlier, the NLF Central Committee executed Army E4 Harold Bennett of Perryville, AR.
A State Department spokesman branded the slayings of the three U.S. prisoners of war, which were reported in the October 1, 1965 edition of Newsweek, as an "act of wanton murder" in violation of the Geneva Convention.
Fellow prisoner Lt. Nick Rowe said Versace, who the Viet Cong had labeled "unrepentant," was being tortured by guards in an indoctrination hut a few feet from Rowe's cage when Versace defiantly told a Viet Cong guard, "I'm an officer in the United States Army. You can force me to come here, you can make me sit and listen, but I don't believe a damn word of what you say!"
Rowe said those defiant words were the last any American ever heard from Versace.
Soon after, according to a U.S. government report, Versace was marched to Central Committee headquarters and forced to kneel and apologize for his "crimes" before he was shot in the back of the head.
Rowe, who was held in one of Kiet's death camps for five years and was the only U.S. officer to escape from the Viet Cong, chronicled the brutal and inhumane treatment of himself and other U.S. prisoners in his book, Five Years to Freedom.
In some prison camps in the South over which Kiet was responsible, the death rate of U.S. prisoners was as high as 40 to 50 percent.
U.S. prisoners under Kiet's deadly control suffered a higher casualty rate than the U.S. prisoners who were held in the infamous Andersonville POW camp during the Civil War. The U.S. government tried, convicted and hung the Confederate commander of Andersonville after the war. More Evidence Of Communist Vietnamese War Crimes
According to U.S. government records, the following list U.S. prisoners of war are just a few among hundreds who were tortured to death by the Vietnamese, many of whom were purposely exposed to the harsh elements of the jungle and starved to death because they dared to resist communist indoctrination.
Capt. Orien Judson Walker, Jr ., MACV, was held prisoner for nearly a year before, according to the Vietnamese, he became sick from starvation. He was intentionally denied medical treatment and was separated from other American prisoners so they could not care from him.
According to the Vietnamese, Walker, of Boston, Mass., died Feb. 4, 1966.
Sgt. Leonard M. Tadios , MACV, was held prisoner for nearly two years. He was starved and intentionally denied medical treatment. Tadios, from Lanai, Hawaii, died March 18, 1966 after being isolated from other prisoners and left to die alone.
Sgt. 1st Class Joe Parks , MACV, from Cedar Lane, Texas, was held for two years as a prisoner of the Viet Cong. He became ill as a result of starvation. The Viet Cong removed Parks from the care of his fellow POWs, denying him food and medical treatment. Parks died a slow and painful death as a result.
Capt. Donald Cook , U.S. Marine Corps, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for jeopardizing his own health by sharing his meager supply of food and scarce medicines with other U.S. prisoners who were sicker. Cook, from Essex Junction, Vermont, became legendary for his refusal to betray the military Code of Conduct.
Capt. Donald Cook, U.S. Marine Corps, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The communists isolated him from other American prisoners and refused him food and medicine until he was dead.
On one occasion, Kiet's cadre put a pistol to Cook's head, demanding that he denounce the United States. Cook resisted and calmly recited the nomenclature of the parts of the pistol. The Viet Cong were so infuriated at Cook's continued resistance that they isolated him from other American prisoners and refused him food and medicine.
Hanoi claims Cook died as a result of malaria and, like all the others listed above, the Vietnamese communists claim they do not know where his remains are buried.
1Lt. Lance P. Sijan , U.S. Air Force pilot, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was the pilot and LtCol. John W.
Armstrong the bombardier/navigator of an F4C Phantom fighter/bomber sent on a mission over Laos on November 9, 1967.
Sijan and Armstrong were flying low over the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" when, at approximately 9 p.m., the aircraft was hit by a surfacetoair missile (SAM). The two were forced to bailout over the famed Mu Gia Pass in the mountainous border region of Laos and Vietnam. Sijan was unable to observe what happened to Armstrong. Both Sijan and Armstrong were classified Missing in Action for the next six years.
Sijan evaded capture for nearly 6 weeks.
During this time, he was seriously injured and suffered from shock and extreme weight loss due to lack of food. The extremely rugged terrain was sometimes almost impassable, but Sijan continued to try to reach friendly forces.
After being captured by North Vietnamese forces, Sijan was taken to a holding point for subsequent transfer to a POW camp. In his emaciated and crippled condition, he overpowered one of his guards and crawled into the jungle, only to be recaptured after several hours. He was then transferred to another prison camp where he was kept in solitary confinement and interrogated at length. During the interrogation, the already weak and injured pilot was severely tortured by the Vietnamese.
1Lt. Lance P. Sijan, U.S. Air Force pilot, posthumously the Congressional Medal of Honor for his extraordinary heroism during captivity. During the interrogation, the already weak and injured pilot was severely tortured by the Vietnamese. He was later removed from the care of the other U.S. POWs and they were told he was being taken to a hospital. Sijan was never seen alive again.
Sijan lapsed into delirium and was placed in the care of another American POW. During intermittent periods of consciousness, he never complained of his physical condition, and kept talking about escaping.
Barely alive, Sijan continued to fight.
He was finally removed from the care of the other U.S. POWs and they were told he was being taken to a hospital. Sijan was never seen alive again.
He was awarded posthumously the Congressional Medal of Honor for his extraordinary heroism during his evasion and captivity.
His remains were returned on March 13, 1974.
Armstrong remains missing in action.
During the period he was cared for, he also told the story of his shootdown and evasion to other Americans. After their release, his incredible story was chronicled in "Into the Mouth of the Cat," an account written from stories brought back by returning American POWs.
In 1977, a Pathet Lao defector, who claimed to have been a prison camp guard, stated he had been guarding several Americans. According to his report, one was named "Armstrong." There are only two Armstrongs listed as MIA. There is little question that the other Armstrong died at the time of his crash. The Defense
Intelligence Agency placed no validity in the report.
Capt. William "Ike" Eisenbraun , U.S. Army Special Forces, from Los Angeles, California, fought in Korea and received a Purple Heart. He volunteered for duty in Vietnam in 1961 and was one of the earliest to go to Southeast Asia as an advisor to the Royal Lao and South Vietnamese armies.
On his fourth tour of duty, Eisenbraun was captured while serving as Senior Advisor, Headquarters, MACV, on jungle outpost Ba Gia near Quang Ngai, when it was overrun in one of the "bloodiest battles" of the war. Eisenbraun was later reported to be in good health by two captured Vietnamese who later escaped.
It was eventually learned that Eisenbraun died while a POW. The Vietnamese said he died as a result of a fall, but a fellow POW said that Eisenbraun had died as a result of beatings after an escape attempt in 1967.
Ike had provided leadership for the prisoners and was an obstacle to the Viet Cong in interrogating the other prisoners. POW Bobby Garwood said that Eisenbraun had taught him survival skills for the jungle such as which insects to eat. Garwood said that Eisenbraun had been severely beaten following the escape attempt and one night soon after was taken from his cage and not returned.
The next morning, Garwood was told that Eisenbraun had fallen from his hammock and died (around September 8, 1967). He was buried at the camp in Quang Nam Province along with other POWs who died of torture and starvation. His remains have never been returned.
LCpl. Edwin R. Grissett , Jr., U.S. Marine Corps, from San Juan, Texas, was on a search mission for a missing Marine Corps officer when he became separated from his unit in January, 1966 and was captured by the Viet Cong.
Normally weighing about 190 pounds, after two years in captivity he weighed only 125 pounds. He suffered particularly from dysentery and malaria, and in his weakened condition, begged his fellow POWs not to tell him any secrets because he found it difficult to resist the tortures of the Viet Cong.
Near starvation in late November 1969, Grissett caught and killed the camp's kitchen cat.
Fellow POWs watched helplessly as guards beat Grissett for the crime. He never recovered. A returned POW reported that Grissett died on December 2, 1969. Returned U.S. POW Told Of The Torture
Former prisoner of war Ret. U.S. Navy Capt. Eugene B. McDaniel wrote in his book Scars & Stripes about his own mental state after being tortured for several days: "I felt myself sliding then. I was being beaten, whipped, falling to the point of nothingness. Death would be welcome. I wanted the pain to stop . . . I was bleeding, wracked with fever, my mind numbed by the electric shock, in and out of nightmarish hallucinations.
"Suddenly I was not a Navy flyer at all; I was not a patriot at this point, and being an American meant nothing in the reality of the moment. I was simply a human being sliding further and further toward death, and there was nothing at all to reach out for anymore, within or without."
The Vietnamese officer who ordered that torture session with McDaniel and many other POWs was nicknamed "Rabbit." McDaniel said Rabbit, now identified as Col. Nguyen Minh Y and working in Hanoi for Vietnam's General Political Department, was a master psychologist who often boasted that the Vietnamese would always control the POWs "even if they returned to the United States." U.S. Ambassador Said Torturers Were Just Doing Their Jobs
The new U.S. ambassador to Vietnam and former prisoner of war Pete Peterson, during a May 29, 1997 interview with Associated Press writer Ian Stewart, said he had "forgiven his captors men, he said "who were just doing their jobs."
Peterson had spent a "hellish 6 1/2 years of torture and isolation" as a prisoner of war after his F-4 Phantom was shot down in 1966 over North Vietnam.
"Hoa Lo was a very stark and very repulsive place," he said, using the Vietnamese name for the prison. "Some of the areas were incredibly close quarters, very tiny cells with no light, almost dungeon-like."
"We [U.S. POWs] agreed to take whatever torture was dished out to the point of permanent physical injury or death or something just short of that," he said.
Peterson, as ambassador, is the highest-ranking United States representative in Vietnam. The Clinton State Department appointed him to that position. When he speaks to the press, he speaks for his boss, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She in turn speaks for her boss, President Clinton.
So, technically Ambassador Peterson was verbalizing Clinton foreign policy when he told The Associated Press that the communist thugs who tortured and murdered U.S. prisoners of war were "men just doing their jobs."
He also declared to The Associated Press that he was determined to find ways to heal wounds between the U.S. and Vietnam and move on. "I have a huge mission here," he said. "The overall mission is to somehow bring us to normalization in relations."
"Heal wounds" and "somehow bring us to normalization of relations" with a criminal government that murdered and refused to account for American servicemen they were holding prisoners of war?
Those conciliatory statements are certainly not indicative of a president determined to hold another government responsible for war crimes.
Secretary of State Albright said about Slobodan Milosevic recently that those engaged in war crimes in Kosovo would remain vulnerable to prosecution and carry that threat with them for the rest of their lives.
How can Ms. Albright dare make such a statement with a straight face when one of her ambassadors has told the world press that the Vietnamese who tortured and murdered prisoners of war were "men just doing their jobs?"
Peterson's POW experience is a good example of the magnitude of evidence available proving Vietnamese war crimes against U.S. POWs and how the Clinton administration has conveniently glossed over and ignored it. Ambassador Peterson Witnessed War Crimes
After his release in 1973, Peterson reported to his superiors information about the "murder" of a number of U.S. POWs, including Air Force Maj. Edwin Atterberry and Navy Lt. James Connell. Peterson was the last American to see Atterberry alive when, on May 10, 1969, he witnessed Atterberry, with his arms tied behind him and a rope around his neck, being thrown out of a jeep and dragged into a torture chamber after an escape attempt.
POW Peterson, who could see part of the prison camp from his cramped cell, later saw the limp and beaten body of Atterberry loaded into a truck and hauled away. The Vietnamese have steadfastly refused to admit murdering Atterberry or provide details of his death.
Connell was last seen alive by Peterson December 9, 1969 at the prison camp in Hanoi called the Zoo. A U.S. government intelligence report said, "Peterson feels that Connell was killed by the North Vietnamese, since he resisted everything in the North Vietnamese prison system and was in solo [solitary confinement] during his entire internment."
Connell suffered severe nerve damage to his wrists and hands after being tortured in an unsuccessful attempt to extract a war crimes confession from him. Because his captors thought he was faking the paralysis, for 120 successive days they sadistically applied electrical shock on his injuries and poked needles into his fingers and under his nails to see if he would respond.
Despite the excruciating pain, Connell betrayed no reaction. "If your hands are useless," his interrogators threatened, "we will cut them off."
When the communists led Connell away for the last time, he told another prisoner, Donald Spoon, "they want my hands . . . they are going to cut them off." Spoon said he took Connell's last statement to mean the interrogators planned to break him even if it meant cutting off his hands. Connell was never seen alive again. Bombing Advocate Senator Was Victim Of Vietnamese War Crimes
One of the Senate's strongest advocates for a more intensified bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and U.S. land force invasion of Kosovo is Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ.). He was a 27-year-old fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy when he was shot down over Hanoi, Vietnam, in October 1967.
When he ejected from the Skyhawk, he broke his right knee and both arms. He was pulled from a lake by an angry crowd of Vietnamese, who bayoneted him in the left ankle and groin, in addition to smashing his shoulder with a rifle butt.
Sen. McCain admitted that he would have probably died in prison had the Vietnamese not been told that he was the son of a senior American admiral. His father, John Sidney McCain Jr., was named commanderinchief of U.S. forces in the Pacific shortly after his capture.
When Sen. McCain was asked during an April edition of CNN's Crossfire what the consequences should be if harm were to come to the three U.S. POWs being held by Slobodan Milosevic's forces, the senator answered:
"I think he and every single person that ever laid a hand on these young men would be held responsible, and we would do whatever is necessary forever to hunt them down and to give them what they deserve . . . we have got to send a lesson to everybody else that that's not the way to treat Americans who are taken prisoner."
Sen. John McCain warmly greets Vietnamese Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet during a 1992 meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam. In 1965, Kiet ordered the executions of at least
three American prisoners of war: Capt. "Rocky" Versace, SFC. Kenneth Roraback, and Sgt. Harold Bennett.
That is a tough threat coming from a politician who, in 1994, led a passionate and successful bipartisan campaign before the U.S. Senate to normalize relations with the thug government of Vietnam.
Is it a coincidence that Sen. McCain and his wife Cindy hold millions of dollars worth of stock in Hensley & Company, the second largest Anheuser-Busch distributor in the nation and that Hensley & Company is owned by Cindy's father and in 1994, pending normalized trade relations with Vietnam, Anheuser-Busch was planning to build a major distillery in Vietnam? Did Sen. John Kerry Commit A War Crime In Vietnam?
Sen. John Kerry, (D-MA) is another key congressional leader today advocating for Clinton to "stop the ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo.
Kerry became extremely defensive when David Warsh, an economics columnist for The Boston Globe, questioned the circumstances for which Kerry was awarded the Silver Star while serving as a Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) commanding a Swift boat in Vietnam.
According to the official citation accompanying the Silver Star for Kerry's actions on the waters of the Mekong Delta on February 28, 1969: "Kerry's craft received a B40 rocket close aboard. Once again Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry ordered his units to charge the enemy positions. . . Patrol Craft Fast 94 then beached in the center of the enemy positions and an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft 94 and fled. Without hesitation Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hooch and killed him, capturing a B40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber."
In an article printed in the October 21st and 28th 1996 edition of The New Yorker, Kerry was asked about the man he had killed.
"It was either going to be him or it was going to be us. It was that simple. I don't know why it wasn't us I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of the hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't pull the trigger he turned and ran. He was shocked to see our boat right in front of him. If he'd pulled the trigger, we'd all be dead . . . I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and I can't. The things that probably really turn me I've never told anybody. Nobody would understand," Kerry said.
Warsh quoted the Swift boat's former gunner, Tom Belodeau, telling a different story. He said the Viet Cong soldier who Kerry chased "behind a hooch" and "finished off" actually had already been wounded by the gunner.
Warsh wrote that such a "coup de grace" would have been considered a war crime.
Did Kerry commit a war crime when he went behind the hooch and "finished off" a wounded enemy soldier? Kerry Turned War Protester And Politician
After Kerry was awarded the Silver Star, he found it advantageous to quit the Navy, and become a leader organizing opposition in America against the Vietnam War.
He was fundamental in organizing antiwar activists to demonstrate in Washington, including the splattering of red paint, representing blood, on the Capitol steps.
Kerry became even more of a press celebrity during a highly publicized "antiwar" protest when he threw medals the press reported were his over a barricade and onto the steps of the Capitol.
Kerry never mentioned that the medals he so gloriously tossed were not his own.
The 1988 issue of Current Biography Yearbook explained:
" . . . the ones he had discarded were not his own but had belonged to another veteran who asked him to make the gesture for him. When a `Washington Post' reporter asked Kerry about the incident, he said: `They're my medals. I'll do what I want with them. And there shouldn't be any expectations about them.'"
Kerry's medals have reappeared, today hanging in his Senate office, now that it is "politically correct" for an U.S. Senator to be portrayed as a Vietnam War hero.
In 1991, the United States Senate created the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to examine the possibility that U.S. POW/MIAs might still be held by the Vietnamese.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), left, gestures under a bust of Ho Chi Minh, during a Nov. 1994 meeting in Hanoi with Do Muoi, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. In 1955, as a leader in the communist land reform movement, Muoi helped annihilate Vietnam's middle-class landowners. Over 50,000 Vietnamese landowners were murdered that year, making it one of the bloodiest periods in Vietnam's history.
As chairman of the Select Committee, Kerry proved himself to be a masterful chameleon portraying to the public at large what appeared to be an unbiased approach to resolving the POW/MIA issue.
His first act as chairman was to travel to Southeast Asia, where during a stopover in Bangkok, Thailand, he lectured the U.S. Chamber of Commerce there on the importance of lifting the trade embargo and normalizing relations with Vietnam.
During the entire life of the Senate Select Committee, Kerry never missed a chance to propagandize and distort the facts in favor of Hanoi.
Sydney H. Schanberg, associate editor and columnist for New York Newsday and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist veteran of the Indochina War whose book, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, became the subject of the Academy Awardwinning film The Killing Fields, chronicled some of Kerry's more blatant proHanoi biases.
In a Nov. 21, 1993 column, Schanberg wrote, "Highly credible information has been surfacing in recent days which indicates that the headlines you have been reading about a `breakthrough' in Hanoi's cooperation on the POW/MIA issue are part of a carefully scripted performance. The apparent purpose is to move toward normalization of relations with Hanoi.
"Sen. John F. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, is one of the key figures pushing for normalization. Kerry is currently on a visit to Vietnam where he has been doing two things: (1) praising the Vietnamese effusively for granting access to their war archives and (2) telling the press that there's no believable evidence to back up the stories of live POWs still being held.
"Ironically, that very kind of livePOW evidence has been brought to Kerry's own committee on a regular basis over the past year, and he has repeatedly sought to impeach its value. Moreover, Kerry and his allies on the committee such as Sens. John McCain, Nancy Kassebaum and Tom Daschle have worked to block much of this evidence from being made public."
In December of 1992, not long after Kerry was quoted in the world press stating "President Bush should reward Vietnam for its increased cooperation in accounting for American MIAs," Vietnam announced it had granted Boston, Massachusetts based Colliers International, a contract worth billions designating Colliers International as the exclusive real estate agent representing Vietnam. That deal alone put Colliers in a position to make tens of millions of dollars (after the U.S. normalized trade relations) on the rush to upgrade Vietnam's ports, railroads, highways, government buildings, etc.
C. Stewart Forbes, Chief Executive Officer of Colliers International, is Kerry's cousin.
In its 1993 final report, the Select Committee determined that live U.S. prisoners of war were left behind in the hands of the Vietnamese after the end of the war. The committee also claimed it found no "compelling" evidence proving the POWs remain alive today.
Kerry's committee stopped there without answering three of the most profound questions of the entire Senate POW/MIA investigation:
What happened to those U.S. prisoners of war that the Select Committee said were alive and in the hands of the Vietnamese but not released at the end of the war?
If they are dead, where are their remains?
Who is responsible for their deaths?
Kerry was portrayed in The New Yorker as a proud Vietnam veteran and "war hero" who, as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, dared to take on and defeat the "mendacious POW lobby." Mass Murder In Hue, South Vietnam
Relatives of some of the 5,000 men, women and children murdered by the North Vietnamese during the 1968 Tet offensive in Hue offer prayers over human remains retrieved from the killing field
American prisoners of war weren't the only targets of the communist "reprisal" policy. The NLF Central Committee, operating in conjunction with the North Vietnamese Regular troops, violated an agreedupon truce and launched a communist force which eventually reached 12,000, into the city of Hue on the night of the new moon marking the new lunar year, Jan. 30, 1968. That terrorist force stayed for 26 days before being driven out by U.S. military action.
In its wake, the North Vietnamese Army left 5,800 Hue civilians dead or missing. Many of the civilians were later found buried with their hands tied behind them, in mass graves with evidence indicating some had been buried alive.
Many of those murdered were individuals or members of groups who the NLF Central Committee felt represented a potential danger or liability to their new social order. The NLF Central Committee had black listed the victims by their titles or social positions rather than individual names. The communists referred to these titles or positions as "social negatives." The NLF Central Committee had provided the black list to the North Vietnamese, in the form of "death orders." A Partial List of NLF Terrorist Acts
The following is a partial chronological list of terrorist acts, which were a part of the National Liberation Front's campaign of terror against the civilian population of South Vietnam.
Douglas Pike, a former journalist and an officer of the United States Information Agency reported these incidents and many more in The Viet-Cong Strategy of Terror. During the Vietnam War, Mr. Pike was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Saigon for twelve years:
August 23, 1960: Two school teachers, Nguyen Khoa Ngon and Miss Nguyen Thi Thiet, are preparing lessons at home when communists arrive and force them at gun point to go to their school, Rau Ran, in Phong Dinh province. There they find two men tied to the school veranda. The communists read the death order of the two men, named Canh and Van. They are executed, presumable to intimidate the school teachers.
September 28, 1960: Father Hoang Ngoc Minh, much beloved priest of Kontum parish, is riding from Tan Canh to Kondela. A communist road block halts his car. A bullet smashes into him. The guerrillas drive bamboo spears into Father Minh's body, then one fires a submachine gun point blank, killing him. The driver Huynh Huu, his nephew, is seriously wounded.
September 30, 1960: A band of ten armed communists kidnap farmer Truong Van Dang, 67, from Long Tri, Trung Sisters Day celebration. After the explosion terrorists open fire on survivors. Two of the girls are killed and ten wounded. The girls are unarmed and traveling without escort.
October, 1961: A U.S. State Department study estimates that the communists are killing South Vietnamese at rate of 1,500 per month.
January 1, 1962: A Vietnamese labor leader, Le Van Thieu, 63, is hacked to death by terrorists wielding machetes near Bien Hoa, in the rubber plantation on which he works.
February 20, 1962: Terrorists throw four hand grenades into a crowded village theater near Can Tho, killing 24 women and children. In all, 108 persons are killed or injured.
April 8, 1962: Communists execute two wounded American prisoners of war near the village of An Chau in Central VietNam. Each, hands tied, is shot in the face because he cannot keep up with the retreating captors.
March 4, 1963: Two Protestant missionariesElwood Forreston, an American, and Gaspart Makil, a Filipino, are shot dead at a road block between Saigon and Dalat. The Makil twin babies are shot and wounded.
November 9, 1963: Three grenades are thrown in Saigon, injuring a total of 16 persons, including four children; the first is thrown in a main street, the second along the waterfront, and the third in the Chinese residential area.
February 9, 1964: Two Americans are killed and 41 wounded, including four women and five children, when a communist bomb is set off in a sports stadium during a softball game. A second portion of the bomb fails to explode. Officials estimate that if it had, fifty persons would have died.
October, 1964: U.S. officials in Saigon report that from January to October of 1964 the communists killed 429 Vietnamese local officials and kidnapped 482 others.
June 25, 1965: Terrorists dynamite the My Canh restaurant in Saigon, killing 27 Vietnamese, 12 Americans, two Filipinos, one Frenchman, one German; more than 80 persons are injured.
June 1965: Vietnamese officials report the rate of assassinations and kidnappings of rural officials has double din June over May and April; 224 officials were either killed or kidnaped.
December 30, 1965: Saigon editor Tu Chung of the newspaper Chinh Luan is gunned down in point blank fire as he arrives home at noon for lunch. Earlier he had published the texts of threatening notes he had received from the communists.
January 17, 1966: Communists in Kien Tuong detonate a mine under a highway bus, killing 26 civilians, seven of them children. Eight persons are injured and three are listed as mission.
January 18, 1966: Communists mine a bus in Kien Tuong province, killing 26 civilians.
February 14, 1966: Two mines explode beneath a bus and a threewheeled taxi on a road near Tuy Hoa, killing 48 farm laborers and injuring seven others.
May 22, 1966: Terrorists kill 18 sleeping men, a woman and four children during an attack on a housing center for canal workers in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang. "We are doing this to teach you a lesson," a communist cadre is reported to have said just before he pulled the trigger.
September 10, 1966: On the eve of South Vietnam's Constituent assembly elections, communists stage 166 separate incidents of intimidation, abduction and assassination, Polling places also are destroyed.
November 3, 1966: Communist squads infiltrate the outskirts of Saigon, fire 24 recoilless rifle shells on the city. Among the buildings hit are Saigon Central Market, Grall Hospital, Saigon Cathedral, a seminary chapel and several private homes. Eight persons are killed and 37 seriously wounded.
December 10, 1966: A terrorist throw a grenade into the Chieu Hoi district playground, Binh Duong City, severely injuring three children.
March 4, 1967: Only two badly wounded prisoners survive as communist prison guards near Can Tho tie 12 South Vietnamese captives together, shoot and stab them before fleeing from advancing South Vietnamese troops; both survivors live despite having their throats cut.
March 30, 1967: Recoilless rifle fire directed at homes of families of South Vietnamese troops demolishes 200 houses and kills 32 men, women and children in the capital city of Bac Lieu province.
July 13, 1967: An explosion in a Hue restaurant kills two Vietnamese. Twelve Vietnamese, seven Americans and one Filipino are injured.
July 14, 1967: Terrorists dressed in Vietnamese Army uniforms capture a prison in Quang Nam province, releasing about 1,000 of the 1,200 inmates; they execute 30 in the prison yard. Ten civilians are killed and 29 wounded as the terrorists fight their way out of the area.
July 25, 1967 : Communists appear at homes in Binh Trieu, Long An province and kidnap four men, a woman and the woman's 16yearold son. All six are found the following morning along Highway 13, hands tied behind their backs, a bullet in each head.
August 5, 1967: During a special devices class in a secondary school in An Xuyen province, part of the September election "get out the vote" campaign, a terrorist gives a small girl a hand grenade with the pin extracted and tells her to carry it carefully to her teacher. At the classroom door the child drops the grenade, killing herself and injuring nine children.
A South Vietnamese father, mother and child lie mangled on the road to Saigon amid the wreckage of a civilian bus destroyed by a North Vietnamese army shell, April 27, 1975
December 5, 1967: A name that should be remembered as long as Lidice is Dak Son, a Montagnard village of some 2,000 in Phuoc Long province, the scene of what in some ways remains the worst atrocity in the entire atrocityridden war.
Some 300 communists stage a reprisal raid on Dak Son. The chief weapon: the flame thrower, 60 of them. The purpose: purely to terrorize.
The result: a Carhaginian solution, all but sowing of the salt.
After breaking through the flimsy hamlet militia defense, the communists set about systematically to destroy the village and the people in it.
Families are incinerated alive in their grassroofed huts or in the shelters dug beneath their beds. Everything combustible is put to the torch: houses, recently harvested grain on the ground, livestock, fences, trees, people.
One of the first Americans to approach the scene the following day: "As we approached the place I thought I saw charred cordwood piled up the way you pile up logs neatly beside the road. When we got closer I could see it was burned bodies of several dozen babies.
"The odor of burned flesh, which really is an unforgettable smell, reached us outside the village and of course got stronger at the center. People were trying to breath through cabbage leaves . . . I saw a small boy a smaller girl, probably his sister, sort of melted together in a charred embrace. I saw a mother burned black still hiding two children, also burned black. Everything was burned and black.
"The worst was the wail of the survivors who were picking through the smoldering ruins. One man kept screaming and screaming at the top of his lungs. For an hour he kept it up. He wasn't hurt that I could tell. He just kept screaming until a doctor gave him a shot of morphine or something . . . Fire bloats bodies I learned, and after a few hours the skin splits and peels and curls . . . The far end of the village wasn't burned; the communists ran out of flamethrower fuel before they got to it . . ."
Estimated toll: 252 dead, about twothirds of them women and children; 200 abducted, never to return.
December 14, 1967: Saigon reports a total of 232 civilians killed by acts of terrorism in one week.
February 16, 1969: Communists invade and occupy Phuoc My village, Quang Tin province, for several days. Later, survivors describe a series of brutal acts: a 78year old villager shot for refusing to cut down a tree for a fortification; a 73year old man killed when he could not or would not leave his home, pleading that infirmities prevented him from walking; an 11year old boy stabbed; several families grenaded in their homes.
March 13, 1969: Kon Sitiu and Kon Bobanh, two Montagnard villages in Kontum province, are raided by terrorists; 15 persons killed; 23 kidnaped, two of whom are later executed; three longhouses, a church and a school burned. A hamlet chief is beaten to death. Survivors say the communists' explanation is: "We are teaching you not to cooperate with the government."
August 26, 1969: A ninemonthold baby in his mother's arms is shot in the head by terrorists outside Hoa Phat, Quang Nam province; also found dead are three children between ages six and ten, an elderly man, a middleaged man and a middleaged woman, a total of seven, all shot at least once in the back of the head.
October 27, 1969: Communists booby trap the body of a People's SelfDefense Force member whom they have killed. When relatives come to retrieve the body the subsequent explosion kills four of them.
These are just a few of the war crimes committed against U.S. servicemen and the civilian population of South Vietnammore than enough to indict and convict Prime Minister Kiet and other many other Vietnamese communist.
Today, Vietnam's leadership still refuses time and again to account for American prisoners of war known to have been in Hanoi's hands during the war but not returned. In fact, the Vietnamese have not even returned the remains of Bennett, Versace or Roraback even though it was Kiet's committee that ordered them executed.
Although the people of Vietnam are still ruled by the same communist government that tortured and murdered U.S. POWs and non-communist Vietnamese, missiles and bombs are not falling on the their heads for the war crimes ordered by their leaders.
To the contrary, the Clinton administration is falling over backwards to appease Vietnam with billions of dollars in loans and aid.
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