AT LAST, A SMOKING GUN ON THE VIETNAM-ERA P.O.W.- M.I.A. COVERUP

At 11:00 a.m., Thursday, July 14, the
Sheraton Hotel in Crystal City, Virginia,
will be the site of an extraordinary
press conference. On this occasion, the National
Alliance of POW-MIA Families
will be revealing to the press around
2,000 photographs taken by the North
Vietnamese army and news agency. These
photos are of American prisoners of war,
aircraft crash-sites and pilot
identification cards.

Some of the subjects are among those
prisoners who returned at the end of the
war. But many others are
servicemen — photographed alive or dead
— who are still officially considered
“unaccounted for.”
Incredibly, these materials were secretly
withheld from the public — including
family members of some of those
servicemen appearing in these photographs
who claim that they had not been
previously informed about the existence
of these photos by the American
government, even though the Defense
Department now acknowledges having them
for more than two years. The
explanation may lie in the fact that
these photos represent damning new
evidence of the extent to which the
American and Vietnamese governments have
covered up critical information on
missing U.S. servicemen.

The National Alliance obtained these
“TOP SECRET” photos from a
former agent of the Defense Intelligence
Agency. They testify, among other things,
to the great pains North Vietnam took to
document its inventory of captured or
dead American prisoners and their
equipment — to the point of labeling and
warehousing prisoners’ uniforms, flight
helmets and aircraft identification
numbers. In addition, hundreds of pilot
identification cards (including those of
men still listed as missing) are shown in
pristine condition. There are also photos
depicting Vietnamese searching through
crash-sites together with Soviet
bloc advisors, indicating that there is
much more information in Hanoi and Moscow
that can and must be made
public.

Importantly, these photos also appear
to put to rest several, long-disputed
issues:

• American servicemen
  officially listed as missing in
  the Vietnam conflict were
  captured alive.
• American servicemen
  listed as missing or deceased
  “with body
  unrecoverable,” were at one
  point in the hands of Vietnamese
  and Soviet bloc officials.
• Vietnamese excavation
  teams examined downed aircraft
  even in extremely remote
  areas. This proves
  that most crash sites now being
  excavated by joint American and
  Vietnamese military teams at
  great cost to U.S. taxpayers were
  scoured and live
  prisoners, or their bodies, were
  removed decades ago.

The Center for Security Policy
believes that members of
Congress, journalists and the public at
large who wish to know the truth about
the hundreds of American servicemen still
unaccounted for from the Vietnam War
should see this exhibit. At a
minimum, the troubling questions raised
by these photographs demand a new
and independent evaluation of
all available information related to the
missing Americans.

Answering these questions should be
the sole focus of the
upcoming meeting between Secretary of
State Warren Cristopher and his
Vietnamese counterpart in Bangkok on 22
July. Clearly, unless and until
Hanoi and Washington are fully
forthcoming on this score, there must be
no further progress toward normalization
of political or economic relations with
communist Vietnam.