McCain’s Role

The Truth Bill

(click image to download)An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”

The McCain Bill

(click image to download) DOD cites the McCain Bill in denying a FOIA request

(click image to download)Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, at left, when the Pentagon cited McCain’s bill in rejecting a FOIA request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

There are really no words for slime this bad, or for the people who expect us to take it and still keep them in fine tailoring.

Mass of Evidence
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What’s more, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of “debunking” POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general’s briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war’s end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.

http://www.nationinstitute.org…..9182008pt1

The FBI was quick to thank Prof. Meselson for bringing up the fact that the scientific literature showed “B. cereus”, a cousin to anthrax, incorporated silica into its cell naturally. The presence of silica in these anthrax samples could explain away findings of “silicon” fingerprints in the anthrax samplees.

In retrospect, Meselson’s mention of B. cereus was a Godsend to the FBI wanting to deflect attention to the fact that the US was creating bioweapons (if the US sites were). I find it curious that the scientists hadn’t published articles that anthrax itself incorporated silica. Why resort to anthrax’s cousin? Unless the FBI was looking for an ex post facto explanation of the presence of silicon (as opposed to silica).