"McCain and the POW Cover-up"

New article by Sydney Schanberg in The Nation, scheduled for the 6 Oct 2008 print edition, is available online now. You can read the shorter version or the expanded version, which details the evidence and adds supporting documents.

Lede:

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.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain's military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the US prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

(h/t: Instaputz | Wikipedia entry for Sydney Schanberg)

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[Added after reading the extended version]

In fairness, even if everything Schanberg writes is true, the cover-up is hardly all McCain's fault. Blame extends all the way back to the Nixon Administration, long before McCain came into Congress. However, there do seem to be a number of places where he was a key player later on, and there are clearly many questions he ought to answer.

I don't know if this will become an issue in the current campaign, and I'm not sure if I want it to be. As much as I don't want John McCain to be elected, it seems like too solemn a matter to be treated as just another political football.