AN ENORMOUS CRIME
There has been a body of anecdotal material floating around for decades about Viet-Nam war POWs that were “left behind” and were/are still in captivity in Viet-Nam and Laos. Just out is a new book on this…with more than just anecdotal evidence and heresay.
An Enormous Crime is nothing less than shocking. Based on thousands of pages of public and previously classified documents, it makes an utterly convincing case that when the American government withdrew its forces from Vietnam, it knowingly abandoned hundreds of POWs to their fate. The product of twenty-five years of research by former Congressman Bill Hendon and attorney Elizabeth A. Stewart, An Enormous Crime brilliantly exposes the reasons why these American soldiers and airmen were held back by the North Vietnamese at Operation Homecoming in 1973 and what these men have endured since.
Despite hundreds of postwar sightings and intelligence reports telling of Americans being held captive throughout Vietnam and Laos, Washington did nothing. And despite numerous secret military signals and codes sent from the desperate POWs themselves, the Pentagon did not act. Even in 1988, a U.S. spy satellite passing over Sam Neua Province, Laos, spotted the twelve-foot-tall letters “USA†and immediately beneath them a huge, highly classified Vietnam War-era USAF/USN Escape & Evasion code in a rice paddy in a narrow mountain valley. The letters “USA†appeared to have been dug out of the ground, while the code appeared to have been fashioned from rice straw.
Tragically, the brave men who constructed these codes have not yet come home. Nor have any of the other American POWs who the postwar intelligence shows have laid down similar codes, secret messages, and secret authenticators in rice paddies and fields and garden plots and along trails in both Laos and Vietnam.
An Enormous Crime is based on open-source documents and reports, and thousands of declassified intelligence reports and satellite imagery, as well as author interviews and personal experience. It is a singular work, telling a story unlike any other in our modern history: ugly, harrowing, and true.
From what the Chief can tell from this there has been an unprecedented betrayal by many, including some who should know better…for specific examples Senators Kerry and the real Manchurian Candidate himself, McCain…thoroughly documented in the large chapter of the book entitled “Fragged”.
It’s enough to make you want to cry, and then do…what?
“AMERICA IS AT THAT AWKWARD STAGE. IT’S TOO LATE TO WORK WITHIN THE SYSTEM, BUT TOO EARLY TO START SHOOTING THE BASTARDS.”
Is it still too early? The Chief begins to wonder!
H/T to Coast to Coast AM radio on this one.
Robert Gates has returned to Washington as secretary of defense with a quiet vengeance and with all the skills acquired in his rough-and-tumble years in the intelligence bureaucracy still intact. His laden resume, gathered over many decades, is evidence that Washington’s tortuous, often misguided foreign policies did not begin with the Bush administration, and will not end with it. In this three-part series, Roger Morris, formerly a senior staffer of the National Security Council, provides not just a portrait of the real Robert Gates, but a history of America’s global covert action and intervention.