The War Secrets Sen. John McCain Hides: Former POW Fights Public Access to POW/MIA Files

Expendable: Abandoned POWs in Vietnam 

The true story of Robert Garwood and the abandonment of US POWs in Vietnam. Hundreds of US POWs were abandoned during the Paris Peace talks in 1973 by Kissinger. In 1979 Bobby Garwood startled the world when he surfaced, bringing details of hundreds of other prisoners being secretly held in Vietnam. After the war the Vietnamese even allowed PLO terrorists to interrogate US Prisoners. Over the years John Kerry and John McCain would become accused as being the main 'cheerleaders' for covering up this betrayal and silencing of Bobby Garwood. The film documents Bobby's story in his own words - here how he escaped via a black market operation and witnessed the brutality inflicted on him, other POWs and South Vietnamese people in Vietnam's horrific re-education camps.

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McCain has said again and again that he has seen no “credible” evidence that more than a tiny handful of men might have been alive in captivity after the official prison return in 1973. He dismisses all of the subsequent radio intercepts, live sightings, satellite photos, CIA reports, defector information, recovered enemy documents and reports of ransom demands — thousands and thousands of pieces of information indicating live captives — as meaningless. He has even described these intelligence reports as the rough equivalent of UFO and alien sightings.

The voters who were drawn to John S. McCain in his run for the Republican presidential nomination this year often cited, as the core of his appeal, his openness and blunt candor and willingness to admit past lapses and release documents that other senators often hold back. These qualities also seemed to endear McCain to the campaign press corps, many of whom wrote about how refreshing it was to travel on the McCain campaign bus, “The Straight Talk Express,” and observe a maverick speaking his mind rather than a traditional candidate given to obfuscation and spin.

But there was one subject that was off-limits, a subject the Arizona senator almost never brings up and has never been open about — his long-time opposition to releasing documents and information about American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the missing in action who have still not been accounted for. Since McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for 5 1/2 years, his staunch resistance to laying open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed his career. Critics say his anti-disclosure campaign, in close cooperation with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, has been successful. Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy.

For example, all the Pentagon debriefings of the prisoners who returned from Vietnam are now classified and closed to the public under a statute enacted in the 1990s with McCain’s backing. He says this is to protect the privacy of former POWs and gives it as his reason for not making public his own debriefing.

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