The Nation again raises questions about John McCain’s participation in efforts to keep hidden information regarding American POWs left behind after the Vietnam War. McCain has helped pass legislation that prevents families of Vietnam POWs from obtaining answers as to the fates of their loved ones. Such actions seem subhuman, but are failing to gain any attention in the mainstream media during this most important election of our times.
An early and critical attempt by McCain to conceal evidence involved 1990 legislation called the Truth bill, which started in the House. A brief and simple document, the bill would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men.
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus by McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later a new measure, the McCain bill, suddenly appeared. It created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge–only the records that revealed no POW secrets. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which was strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties against “any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person.” A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and report the incidents to the Pentagon.
McCain’s lack of character in other areas makes it very plausible the Republican presidential candidate would hinder efforts to find these hundreds of missing POWs. What isn’t plausible is the fact that he’s getting away without answering question 1 on this topic. There is a signicant double standard in the treatment of the presidential candidate. And while the Republicans continue to cry wolf, it is inherently clear that if McCain were held to the same standards as Obama by the media, he wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected.
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