I'm sure that we are all very familiar with the Republican party propaganda machine constantly proclaiming that they alone support the troops and that the rest of us are unpatriotic. Well in a new book entitled An Enormous Crime co-written by former US Congressman Bill Hendon who was a Republican from North Carolina during the Reagan years provides evidence that Nixon/Kissinger allowed 700 POW's to remain imprisoned in Vietnam and Laos because they reneged on a treaty deal that they had made at the Paris Peace conference which ended our involvement in SouthEast Asia.
US Congressman Bill Hendon (R-NC), served two terms on the U.S. House POW/MIA Task Force (1981-1982, 1985-1986); as Consultant on POW/MIA Affairs with an office in the Pentagon (1983); and as a full time intelligence investigator assigned to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs (1991-1992). He has traveled to South and Southeast Asia 33 times on behalf of America’s POWs and MIAs. Hendon is considered the nation's foremost authority on intelligence relating to American POWs held after Operation Homecoming and an expert on the Vietnamese and Laotian prison systems. He lives in Washington, DC.
Pictured below is a 1988, U.S. spy satellite taken while passing over Sam Neua Province, Laos, it spotted the twelve-foot-tall letters "USA" and immediately beneath them a huge, highly classified Vietnam War-era USAF/USN Escape & Evasion code in a rice paddy in a narrow mountain valley. The letters "USA" appeared to have been dug out of the ground, while the code appeared to have been fashioned from rice straw.
Former Republican congressman Bill Hendon from North Carolina and attorney Elizabeth Stewart, the co-authors of An Enormous Crime provide indisputable evidence in their book that at around 700 POW's were intentionally left behind in Southeast Asia. They claim in their book that during the Paris Peace Negotiations to end the Vietnam war a deal was cut to pay 4.5 billion to North Vietnam to rebuild their country. Before the payment was made North Vietnam released a large number of POW's however Nixon and Kissinger reneged on the arrangement so the 700 POW's were never released. The authors claim that the Watergate scandal caused the deal the Nixon administration made with the North Vietnamese to be broken. Evidently this was just another one of many secret deal's that the Nixon White House kept from Congress and the American public.
The Authors also claim that in the early 1980's Reagan was interested in bringing the POWs back but his advisors talked him out of it by claiming it would become a hostage crisis reminiscent of the Iranaian debacle that had just brought down the Carter Administartion. It should be noted that several of Reagan's advisors had worked for the Nixon administration most notably General Alexander Haig who played a large role in both administrations. Believe it or not Dick Cheney worked with both the Nixon and Reagan administrations. It should also be noted that the Carter Administration had been totally unaware of the secret deal negotiated by Kissinger to be fair it is also possible that Gerald Ford may have not known anything about it either since Nixon had basically been forced to appoint him as Vice President due to Ford's reputation for honesty and for his bi-partisanship.
I had always thought that there was no POW's left behind and that the POW-MIA movement was just conspiracy theory Rambo stuff. But I read where the French had to buy their POW's back from the North Vietnamese in the 1970's and they had lost had their Vietnam Colonial War in the mid- 1950's.
1970-1976: After the French pay an unspecified sum of money to the Vietnamese, the communists release POWs captured in 1954! The North Vietnamese had previously claimed all of them had died.
We also paid Castro to release the Cuban-American prisoners of war a year after the CIA sponsered failed Bay of Pigs fiasco.
As bad as Nixon was he had enough sense to negotiate an end to the war which is far better than what we currently have. Obviously Nixon had many faults but at least he was pro-choice, not a Neo-Con ,and definitely not owned by the Religious Right. He was a crook but not an extremist.
This is how today's Republican Party supports the troops.
We just need to stay out of wars and stop policing the damn world.