Reply #6: Excellent

[seemslikeadream]

Enter John McCain.

Given his wartime experiences as a POW in Vietnam, Sen. John McCain was by default the most powerful and influential member of the Select Committee. Members on both sides of the aisle deferred to his judgment; reporters hung on his every pronouncement. And so when McCain, his chief of staff Mark Salter and their allies on the Select Committee joined forces with top Bush administration officials to assail, ridicule, attack, discredit, photoshop, retouch, manipulate, massage and/or “cherry-pick” the intelligence in order to destroy its intelligence value and keep the matter of live POWs from becoming an issue in the 1992 election, the live POWs never had a chance.

How McCain and Salter and the others went about doing this is a case study in how powerful government officials can manipulate intelligence to make it say what they want it to say - and the main reason we believe that John McCain must not be Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces.

During that spring and summer of 1992, McCain and the other members of the committee were briefed on some 925 HUMINT reports the investigators had deemed plausible, credible. These intelligence reports were some of the several thousand reports the U.S. government had received from human sources who testified they had personally observed or had been told or had otherwise learned about American servicemen in captivity after Operation Homecoming. Many of the reports corroborated one another as to location, time and circumstance, e.g., independent sources repeatedly reported seeing American POWs being held in the same area; in the same town or village, and/or at the exact same prison at the same time or over a period of time – and, of course, absent IMINT and/or SIGINT, corroboration by independent human sources is the best lie detector ever devised by man. But what did McCain and Salter make of this crucial intelligence? Not one of these reports of American POWs held prisoner after Operation Homecoming was credible, they loudly declared; instead, all 925 sources were either (1) lying, or (2) confused about what he or she had actually seen. Not one report, McCain and Salter declared, related to American POWs trapped in Indochina after Operation Homecoming.

The SIGINT – the half-dozen or so postwar intercepts of secret Pathet Lao radio transmissions where the PL were heard describing how, when, where and/or why they were holding and/or moving American POWs from one point to another inside their country - got the same treatment. When analyzed carefully by committee intelligence investigators and cross-checked with the HUMINT, it was clear these postwar radio intercepts alone collectively described the confinement and/or movement of well over 100 American POWs inside Laos. McCain’s and Salter’s ruling? Same as with the POWs described in the HUMINT, “nothing to any of it. All radio intercepts are false."

Finally came the IMINT – the priceless postwar satellite images showing missing pilots' names, their official secret four-digit authenticators, secret USAF/USN escape and evasion (E&E) codes given to them and/or other “I’m alive, get me the hell out of here” messages our men had laid out on the ground in hopes U.S. spy satellites would image their plea and rescue forces would be dispatched - and the similar, shocking result. A missing USAF flight officer’s name along with a valid USAF/USN escape and evasion code imaged in a field adjacent to a prison in northern Vietnam on June 5, 1992 – photoshopped right out of the image, disappeared, gone! Nineteen four-digit authenticators matching those of missing airmen imaged in rice paddies along Route 4 in northern Laos - similarly photoshopped right out of the satellite image! The name of another USAF pilot and four digit number laid out beside a jungle road in northern Laos - "naturally occurring shadows on the ground," they said. A valid E&E code followed by the four-digit authenticator of another USAF flight officer in a field adjacent to a prison in northern Vietnam – “natural shadings in the field … not man-made intentional signals.” The letters "USA," each 12 feet tall and together stretching over 37 feet across, and below them a huge 24 foot tall by 19 feet across valid secret USAF/USN E&E code imaged in a rice paddy in northern Laos - "a young Laotian boy's handiwork that he had copied off an envelope," McCain and Salter "explained" in McCain's 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For. And on and on it went.


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