Via Billy
Dated
Eighteen months ago, TAC
publisher Ron Unz discovered an astonishing account of
the role the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, had
played in suppressing information about what happened to American
soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. Below, we present in full Sydney
Schanberg’s explosive story.
Sydney Schanberg has been a journalist for nearly 50 years. The
1984 movie “The Killing Fields,” which won several Academy Awards, was
based on his book The Death and Life of Dith Pran.
In 1975,
Schanberg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting “at
great risk.” He is also the recipient of two George Polk awards, two
Overseas Press Club awards, and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for
distinguished journalism. His latest book is Beyond the Killing Fields
(www.beyondthekillingfields.com). This piece is reprinted with permission from The Nation Institute.
* * *
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a
Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from
the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who,
unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain
has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions
that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as
classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically
imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their
families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and
closing the books.
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