Tag Archives: John Kerry

WELCOME TO THE N.S.C., DR. HALPERIN: WILL YOU GIVE DEMOCRACY THE SHAFT ELSEWHERE — AS HAS BEEN DONE IN VIETNAM?

(Washington, D.C.): At a Washington
forum last night, a senior National
Security Council official announced that
Dr. Morton Halperin would be finding work
in the Clinton Administration, after all.
Unable to secure Senate advice and
consent to become the Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping
because of serious concerns about his
judgment and record with respect to both
issues, Halperin will apparently be put
in charge of at least one of them in the
White House: According to NSC Staff
Director Nancy Soderberg, Halperin
will become a Special Assistant
to the President and the National
Security Council’s Senior Director for
Democracy.

It is fitting that this unmistakable
expression of contempt by the Clinton
Administration for the Senate and for the
promotion of genuine democracy
should be announced on the same day Mr.
Clinton lifted the trade embargo against
communist Vietnam. (In fact, in her
remarks last night Ms. Soderberg, a
former member of Senator Ted Kennedy’s
staff, coupled the Halperin revelation
with a bit of crowing about the
President’s decision concerning the
embargo taken earlier in the day.)

After all, the President’s willingness
to provide economic life-support to the
communist regime in Hanoi — in the face
of its relentless, systematic and often
brutal repression of basic human rights
and political freedoms in Vietnam —
makes one thing abundantly clear: Mr.
Clinton’s commitment to real
democracy, like so much else, is a
rhetorical one. To be sure, the rhetoric
is often lofty; in the end, however, it
is empty.

‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’

This should be no surprise, given the
influence exerted on him by the likes of
Morton Halperin, Strobe Talbott, Anthony
Lake and Peter Tarnoff. These
individuals, and many others in the
Clinton Administration, consistently
misunderstood the greatest struggle for
democracy in history — the Cold War.
Many of them routinely expressed sympathy
for freedom’s enemies in Moscow, Havana,
Warsaw, Managua, Luanda, Kabul, Phnom
Penh and, of course, Hanoi. Even
if Mr. Clinton himself had a more
reliable moral compass, he would be
unlikely to stay on course in defining
American support for democracy, given the
wayward instincts of those to whom he has
entrusted responsibility for
policy-making in this area.

The same mindset that prompted the
Administration to prop up the Vietnamese
communists is at work elsewhere, with no
less ominous implications for democracy.
Thanks to the Clinton team:

  • Communist North Korea is
    being offered economic and
    political ties in exchange for
    agreeing to severely limited —
    and utterly ineffectual —
    inspections of some of
    its nuclear-related facilities.
    As with Hanoi, such U.S.
    concessions to Pyongyang will
    perpetuate a brutal totalitarian
    regime, deferring perhaps
    indefinitely     the realization
    of democracy there. What is more,
    North Korea’s unchecked sales of
    ballistic missiles and other
    military hardware to Iran and
    Syria, among other pariah states,
    is likely to endanger democracy
    elsewhere (notably, in Israel).

  • In the name of a vague
    and thus far dangerously futile
    “peace process,” two of
    the Middle East’s most notorious
    despots are gaining political and
    other benefits from the United
    States.     Hafez Assad of
    Syria and the PLO’s autocratic
    leader, Yaser Arafat, nonetheless
    continue to exhibit negligible
    interest in yielding absolute
    control over their respective
    constituencies — even as they
    persist in behavior that is
    inimical to genuine peace in the
    region.

  • Gerry Adams, the
    political front-man for the
    terrorist Irish Republican Army
    is afforded a bully pulpit in
    this country from which to
    legitimate his anti-democratic
    organization and revile Britain.
    As a result of this propaganda
    field day, serious new strains
    have developed in the U.S.-UK
    “special relationship”
    — traditionally, America’s most
    important strategic alliance in
    the defense of freedom.

  • China is receiving
    invaluable U.S. technological
    assistance in its effort to
    modernize the offensive potential
    of its armed forces even as the
    United States maintains the $20
    billion trade deficit that helps
    underwrite such a military
    build-up.    (1)
    Apart from seeking cosmetic
    changes in Beijing’s odious human
    rights record, the Administration
    seems indifferent to, if not
    actually willing to reward,
    the continuing lack of democratic
    reform in China. Notwithstanding
    current and future posturing on
    the question, it is a sure bet
    that Mr. Clinton will ultimately
    overlook the PRC’s deplorable
    disregard for human rights and
    grant the Chinese a renewal of
    Most Favored Nation status.

  • The unravelling of
    democratic and free market change
    in Russia also appears to be
    getting the
    “see-no-evil”
    treatment.     Russian
    reformers correctly charge Strobe
    Talbott and the Clinton
    Administration with
    “stabbing us in the
    back.” Matters will get
    worse as the so-called centrists
    — read, warmed-over Soviet
    apparatchiks — are embraced by
    this White House despite their
    clear determination to undo
    market and pluralistic political
    reforms.

  • Fragile democracies in
    Eastern Europe and the
    “near-abroad” are being
    hung out to dry as the
    Administration effectively
    accommodates Russian demands to
    retain a sphere of influence in
    the region.     Moscow’s
    veto of NATO membership for the
    Visegrad nations can only
    embolden the enemies of freedom
    who seek to do in Poland, Hungary
    and elsewhere what their
    counterparts in Russia are doing
    — namely, to exploit economic
    dislocation so as to facilitate a
    return to power.

  • Serbia’s quintessential
    anti-democrat, Slobodan
    Milosevic, continues to
    consolidate his control over a
    Greater Serbia via brutal
    “ethnic cleansing.”
    The lack of Western military
    responses to these Mussolini-like
    predations, to say nothing of
    reports that regular Yugoslav
    army forces are now being
    introduced into the war in
    Bosnia, merely serves to invite
    further intensification of the
    conflict there. It also emboldens
    others in the region — and
    beyond — who recognize the
    utility of playing the ethnic
    card to undermine and ultimately
    destroy democratic states.

Life-Support for Castro,
Too?

Interestingly, in the immediate run-up
to President Clinton’s announcement
ending the trade embargo against Vietnam,
CNN broadcasted a report
revealing that unnamed NSC officials want
next to lift the embargo on Fidel
Castro’s Cuba. A recently
concluded congressional staff trip to
Havana may have been the first step
toward repeating the successful Vietnam
strategy quarterbacked by Sen. John Kerry
(D-MA) and utilizing congressional and
business delegations to conjure up
political support for new U.S.
concessions.(2)

If the same cynical calculus is
reached by White House operatives that
led them to ignore the steadfast
opposition of POW families, veterans
organizations and Vietnamese-Americans to
lifting the embargo on Vietnam — namely
that key constituencies can be
disregarded without undue political costs
— it is predictable that the
Administration’s democracy mavens will
gladly do for Havana what they have just
done for Hanoi.

The Bottom Line

As things stand now, the legacy of the
Clinton Administration is likely to be
that — even as it and its friends have
sought to rewrite the history of the Cold
War — the fruits of that epic struggle
for freedom and democracy will be largely
squandered around the globe. Those who
would have lost the Cold War can be
forgiven for trying to downplay their
past mistakes. One might overlook as well
the laughable efforts by the likes of
Morton Halperin, Strobe Talbott and Tony
Lake to deprecate the accomplishments of
those, such as Ronald Reagan, who
rejected their advice and were proved
right.

What is utterly unacceptable,
however, is that such individuals
continue to pay lip service to the
importance of promoting democracy — and
are entrusted with accomplishing it on
behalf of the U.S. government — at the
same moment that they are engaged in
policies antithetical to that objective.
In fact, the Administration is engaged
around the globe in actions that will
prevent democratic institutions from
being established where they do not now
exist and endangering them in many places
where they have begun to take root.

President Clinton will ultimately have
the responsibility for the terrible
consequences sure to flow from his dismal
personnel choices and misbegotten
security policies. This will be the more
pointed in light of his apt criticism of
President Bush in the 1992 campaign:

“From the Baltics to Beijing,
from Sarajevo to South Africa, time
after time, George Bush has sided
with the status quo rather
than democratic change — with
familiar tyrants rather than those
who would overthrow them — and with
the old geography of repression
rather than a new map of
freedom.”

It is, however, the people of the
United States — and their counterparts
elsewhere who aspire to freedom and
democracy — who will have to pay the
price for these fresh, and tragic,
mistakes.

– 30 –

1. See the Center
for Security Policy’s recent Decision
Brief entitled, ‘Inquiring
Minds Want to Know: Does Bill Perry Have
What It Takes to Make Sound Defense
Policy? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_13″>No. 94-D 13, 2
February 1994).

2. The Center has
obtained a secret video of Sen. Kerry
meeting in Hanoi in December 1992 with
Vietnam’s communist president and former
minister of defense Le Duc Anh. In it,
the Vietnam veteran and former anti-war
activist told his host that “All we
need to lift the trade embargo is to show
the American people that there is a process“
for resolving the POW-MIA accounting — not
real results as President-elect
Clinton once promised. He promised that,
“I can assure you that we will not
make public anything embarrassing to your
government.”

EXCERPTS FROM “THE MIA COVER-UP” BY JOHN CORRY

February 1994

(Emphasis Added
Throughout)

A March 1973 memo to the Joint Chiefs
of Staff says, “There are
approximately 350 U.S. military and
civilian POW/MIAs in Laos.” An
earlier memo to Henry Kissinger says that
some 215 of the 350 “were lost under
circumstances that the enemy probably has
information regarding their fate.”
No information was ever forthcoming,
however, and only twelve prisoners
returned from Laos….Therefore,
some 1,200 might still have been alive.
(A later Pentagon document gives a
precise number of 1,278.) The possibility
that they were alive, however, was
ignored, and even misrepresented.

* * *

[T]he Vietnamese were trying to hide
something. [U.S. field] investigators
were shown pre-selected items.
They were shown not the register that
listed all the items, but
instead an excerpt from the register.
Apparently, they insisted then on
examining the entire register, and when
they did, they discovered it was
a fake. Moreover, “certain items of
high interest” that were supposed to
be in the museum were missing.

The investigators, however, listed in
their report the items they were able to
see, literally translating the museum’s
own descriptions. They found, for
example, “a flag used to request
food used by the American colonel pilot
Hynds, Wallace G., and was captured at Ha
Tinh, and “bandit pilot
identification card number FR 15792 of
Hynds, Wallace Gouley and was captured
alive in Ha Tinh on 28-5-1965.”

That Colonel Hynds was
captured alive seems indisputable; the
Pentagon, however, has always listed a
Col. Wallace Gurley Hynds as killed in
action. There are six other men whose
names were found in that one provincial
museum who were all listed as being
captured alive, although the Pentagon had
declared them all dead.

* * *

A North Vietnamese military
doctor, who defected to the South in
1971, told American officials that Hanoi
was holding hundreds more prisoners than
it had acknowledged. In 1979, another
Vietnamese Communist defector told the
Defense Intelligence Agency that in the
mid-1970s Vietnamese officials had talked
about holding 700 American prisoners as
“bargaining assets….

* * *

In Hanoi, meanwhile, Gen. John Vessey,
the presidential emissary to Vietnam on
POW-MIA affairs, said he had spoken to
General Quang and that Quang denied he
had made the report…. Vessey was making
a strange argument. If Hanoi kept a
separate prison system for the POWs who
were not returned, the POWs who did
return would hardly be aware of it….Even
before the arrival of the boat people,
though, U.S. intelligence agencies
suspected that Hanoi had help POWs
outside the known prisoner system….
Some reports are clear enough. A CIA
document only recently declassified,
suggests that POWs were held in camps
other than the ones identified during the
war….[T]he CIA again said cautiously, “the
possibility of a second prison system for
the detention of American POWs cannot be
disregarded”….[T]he
Defense Department had speculated along
these same lines before the CIA did.

* * *

In the appalling history of
POW-MIA policy, though, nothing is more
scandalous than the issue of live
sightings. Since 1975, the
Defense Intelligence Agency has received
more than 15,000 live-sighting reports
about American prisoners in Southeast
Asia. Approximately 1,650 of the reports
are first-hand. That means a source says
he has actually seen an American held in
captivity, or under conditions that
cannot be easily explained….No
live-sighting reporting, however, has
every been accepted as proof by the
Defense Intelligence Agency that an MIA
is still alive, or ever has been alive,
in Southeast Asia. This defies the
laws of probability. It
also moves us into the area of culpable
negligence. It is
permissible now to wonder if the Defense
Intelligence Agency has ever been
seriously interested in uncovering the
truth about our missing men, or whether
it has always been an instrument in a
cover-up.

* * *

This led in 1986 to the Director’s
POW/MIA Task Force Report, or the Gaines
Report, after Air Force Col. Kimball M.
Gaines who was its principal author.
Consider the following excerpts… “There
exists a mindset to debunk….Within
POW/MIA Division it has evolved over time
as an investigative technique, whereby
intense effort is initially focused on
veracity of sources with a view
toward discrediting them.”…In
other words, the DIA bullied those who
came forth with information about MIAs:
it called an “inordinate”
number of them liars; it sought to
discredit reports of live sightings. The
Pentagon immediately classified the
Gaines Report.

* * *

The DIA is programmed to discredit the
possibility that anyone was left behind
in Southeast Asia, or that anyone remains
there now. Its intellectual
dishonesty has been stunning, and its
investigative process a fraud. On
occasion, it has seemed criminal.

* * *

Tan Lap, where the major was held, has
another distinction as well. It is one of
five Vietnamese prisons — the other are
Quyet Tien, Yen Bai, Ha Son Binh, and
Thanh Hoa — where, according to reports
from the boat people and others, POWs
were buried in cemeteries in the late
1970s and 1980s. The reports are
credible; some are from former Vietnamese
prisoners who say they dug the grave. Not
one of the cemeteries, however, has been
excavated by any of the teams now looking
for MIA remains. Instead, the
teams dig up old crash sites. The crash
sites yield little or nothing; the
cemeteries could yield a great deal — evidence,
perhaps, about men who were murdered.
It seems, though that the Defense
Department does not want to know.

* * *

[S]ix staff members on the Senate
Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs who
were charged with investigating
intelligence reports…drew an obvious
conclusion: “that American prisoners
of war have been held continuously after
Operation Homecoming and remain[ed] in
captivity in Vietnam and Laos as late as
1989.” [The investigators were for
technical reasons using live-sighting
reports that extended only through 1989.]

The conclusion, however, was not
welcomed by the DIA, or even by most
members of the Senate Committee….John
Kerry, the committee chairman, told one
of the investigators that if the report
every leaked out, “you’ll wish you’d
never been born.” Senator
Kerry wants to normalize relations with
Vietnam. When the briefing was over,
Frances Zwenig, the committee staff
director, ordered that all copies of the
investigators’ report be destroyed, She
also said she wanted the computer files
purged. Zwenig, who is now the executive
assistant to United Nations Ambassador
Madeleine Albright, also wants to
normalize relations with Vietnam.

* * *

[S]ome of the distress signals may
have been made years ago. On the other
hand, some of them may be new….At the
very least, they are further
proof that a cover-up has been, and
still is, in progress. We
have broken faith with men who fought for
their country, and we are being blighted
by an ever-widening moral stain.

Open the ‘Cold Spot’ files

BY: Al Santoli
The Washington Times, January 24, 1994

In the last battle of the Vietnam War, surviving American families and veterans are fighting to
learn the fate of missing servicemen. Similar to victims of secret nuclear tests, they are trying to
pry the truth from an entrenched bureaucracy that lacks adequate congressional or administrative
oversight.

Many veterans now look to the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. John Shalikashvili, to
resolve the MIA tragedy with integrity and honor.

In an orchestrated campaign, U.S. civilian and military officials — supported by business
consultants and publicists — praise Hanoi for “excellent cooperation” and “not holding anything
back.” Hundreds of live sightings of American prisoners by Vietnamese, Lao and even a Japanese
monk have been trivialized.

Pentagon analysts have debunked Soviet documents independently supported by testimony
from unrelated sources. A tepid State Department statement admits that prisoners could have
been held back in Laos under control of Hanoi. More poignantly, documents from still-secret
Defense and CIA archives point to a multi-agency coverup.

Example: “Cold Spot” was a joint CIA-Air Force program to intercept North Vietnamese and
Laotian Communist radio communications from 1971 to 1975. Americans flew electronic spy
planes, and indigenous soldiers with CIA advisors conducted land-based operations. Some
intercepts describe the movement and detention of U.S. prisoners — long after Operation
Homecoming.

An Oct. 8, 1973, communique from the governor of Nghia Lo to the Minister of Defense in
Hanoi confirmed the transfer of “112 USA pilots” from Lai Chau [near the Laotian border]. The
“USA prisoners” were taken to a prison that previously held “Thai [captured in Laos] and
Vietnamese” prisoners. And, “their snapshots were finished and I will send them to Hanoi to
register with the Ministry of Defense . . . and names and ages of all will be attached.”

On Nov. 11, 1973, the governor of Sontay Province reported to the Minister of Defense in
Hanoi: “112 USA prisoners in prison in Sontay Province.” He named a doctor who treated 10
prisoners with “pain in their hearts. . . . They are not in a good way. Therefore, I quickly send
this cable for you to decide what to do.”

There is no record of U.S. officials cross-referencing these and other “Cold Spot” records with
in-person interviews of Vietnamese officials, prison commanders and doctors named in the
communiques.

In the past, intelligence analysts have debunked such documents using a Murphy’s Law gambit
— that because the U.S. government had declared all prisoners returned, any contrary evidence
must be false.

This “unprofessional . . . mindset to debunk” was harshly criticized in 1985-86 DIA internal
evaluations. However, rather than replace the chastised analysts, the Clinton administration
refused to investigate detailed accusations, and the same entrenched bureaucrats have been
promoted to wrap up MIA investigations.

In the field, the most experienced U.S. expert, Garnett Bell — who has a near-photographic
memory of the Vietnamese prison and military systems — was replaced as chief of the Pentagon’s
Hanoi office by young infantry officers lacking intelligence backgrounds, historical knowledge or
language proficiency. These novices must deal with devious Vietnamese political officers, many of
whom had decades of experience playing a shell game with French MIAs.

Media junkets are taken to observe groups of American soldiers digging for crash sites. On the
other hand, dissenting intelligence officers state that during the war it was communist policy to
scavenge crash sites and warehouse hundreds of U.S. remains that are continuously doled out as
political chips.

Former investigators describe the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force Full Accounting (JTFFA) as a
$100 million per year “boondoggle manipulated by Vietnamese security officers” who accompany
all JTFFA teams to interview villagers.

In 1992, the JTFFA chief, Maj. Gen. Thomas Needham, shredded 20 years worth of original
U.S. investigative files in Bangkok. And in a slick political maneuver, Sen. John Kerry had 120
boxes of potentially explosive National Security Agency files reclassified before Senate
investigators could study them.

Clinton State Department point-men Winston Lord and Ken Quinn are classic
conflict-of-interest cases. In 1970, Mr. Lord helped to create the coverup of U.S. casualties in
Laos. Henry Kissinger claims in “White House Years” (page 455) that Mr. Lord coordinated a
National Security Council study that purposely misled President Nixon on U.S. forces lost in
Laos.

CIA documents from 1967-68 show U.S. captives by name in specific Laotian prisons. In
1970 at CIA headquarters in Laos, Pat Mahoney, an Air Force expert in special operations,
discussed photos of American prisoners and a wall map of prison sites. The CIA station chief
said, “The politicians have tied our hands from launching rescues.”

The Vietnamese commander of the Ho Chi Minh Trail area of Laos who oversaw the
movement and detention of U.S. prisoners there between 1964-72 was Gen. Tran Van Quang
(quoted in the infamous Soviet document). Yet, neither Gen. John Vessey nor Winston Lord
raised the issue of prisoners in Laos when they met with Gen. Quang.

On Jan. 18, 1993, a delegation from the American Legion met with Pentagon and
administration officials and mentioned the “Cold Spot” archives. The officials gave no response.
The Legion has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to gain access to the records and to
prevent another shredding party by Gen. Needham or his inter-agency peers.

Before the administration rewards Hanoi’s duplicity with any more political or economic
concessions, Gen. Shalikashvili should make sure that all POW/MIA files — such as “Cold Spot” –
are made public. He should meet with Mr. Smith and representatives of the major veterans and
family organizations to review charges of malfeasance and coverup.

To conclude the Vietnam War with honor, a new team of experienced investigators of
unimpeachable integrity must be appointed.

Al Santoli is a former congressional investigator, and author most recently of “Leading the
Way. How Vietnam Veterans Rebuilt the U.S. Military.”

WHAT ABOUT AN ‘OPERATION COMING CLEAN’ ON AMERICAN POW/MIA’S ABANDONED IN INDOCHINA?

(Washington, D.C.): The Clinton
Administration’s dubious priorities could
not be more clearly displayed than by its
sharply contrasting attitudes toward two
groups of Americans: (1) the score or so
citizens who are believed to have been
exposed four decades ago to radiation
testing without informed consent and (2)
possibly hundreds of servicemen who were
left behind alive in Indochina when the
Vietnam war ended.

It scarcely needs to be said that the
former have, in recent days, become the cause
célèbre of Secretary of Energy
Hazel O’Leary, the centerpiece of her
“Operation Coming Clean.”
Indeed, Mrs. O’Leary has seen fit to
issue a veritable torrent of sweeping,
alarming and, in important respects,
ill-informed statements about these
experiments.(1)

As a direct result: telephone
hot-lines have been hastily established
to handle the large volume of calls from
understandably concerned citizens;
Administration officials have glibly
endorsed the Secretary’s seemingly
open-ended notion of compensating
“victims” of radiation testing;
with great fanfare, a presidentially
sponsored interagency task force has been
established to examine these tests and to
recommend next steps; and congressional
investigations into the matter have been
encouraged.

What About the POW/MIAs?

In stark contrast to the zeal the
Clinton Administration is showing in
“coming clean” where doing so
might advance its agenda of
“de-nuclearizing” the United
States, it is evincing negligible
interest in coming clean about facts that
might impede another cherished
agenda item: normalization of economic
and diplomatic relations with communist
Vietnam.

Presumably, an Administration that
believes revealing the Department of
Energy’s secrets is an essential
prerequisite for restoring public faith
in that agency could not be opposed to
full disclosure of what successive U.S.
governments have known — or had strong
reason to believe — was the fate of
Americans left incarcerated in Vietnam
and Laos after 1973. Yet, the Clinton
Administration seems to be terrified by
such a prospect.

The likely explanation: Such
revelations would provoke a vehement
public reaction against a regime in Hanoi
that has cruelly brutalized and
manipulated U.S. military personnel,
perhaps for decades. American
policy-makers understand full well that
such a reaction would spike normalization
of relations with Vietnam indefinitely.

‘See No Evil…’

Consequently, the Clinton
Administration (building upon the Bush
Administration’s sorry record in this
area) has made the virtually exclusive
focus of its highly publicized joint
“full accounting” efforts with
Vietnam a search for remains —
rather than the recovery of live human
beings. In fact, early last summer, the
President announced that all live
sighting investigations were being
wrapped up.

This narrow focus has allowed the
Administration to give Hanoi credit for
“cooperating” and “making
good progress” on joint accounting
as long as it serves up a steady stream
of remains — even those ultimately
determined to be from animals or
non-Caucasians!

So desperate has the Administration
become to close out POW/MIA cases at all
costs that it has taken to declaring the
recovery of a single tooth
proof-positive that a missing serviceman
is dead. Burials with full military
honors of caskets holding only the
recovered tooth have been held at
Arlington National Cemetery over the
strenuous objections of family members.

The Clinton team had not reckoned on
one thing, though. Before it was able to
effect full normalization of relations
with Vietnam, proverbial chickens from
the one real concession the
Administration had made to the POW/MIA
activists began coming home to roost: The
vast quantities of relevant — but
heretofore classified — information that
President Clinton promised to have
released by last Veterans’ Day contain
substantial evidence that the U.S.
government knew men were left behind
alive and in enemy hands when the war in
Vietnam was ended.

Even the Washington
Post…

So compelling is this evidence that
even Thomas Lippman, a long-time reporter
for the Washington Post and
inveterate skeptic about allegations of
live POW/MIAs, was moved to call public
attention to it. In a lengthy front-page
story entitled “POW Pilots
Left in Laos, Files Suggest: Evidence
Emerging that Officials Knew Locations of
Prisons” published in
yesterday’s editions of the Post,
Lippman referred to a number of documents
that suggest that “some men were
abandoned to their fates when the last
U.S. troops left Indochina….”

Interestingly, among these materials
is a 1992 congressional deposition by
Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, the new Secretary
of Defense-designate, to the effect that
“in ’73 a large number of us thought
there were [prisoners in Laos] simply
because we had known people had gotten to
the ground, that there were substantial
prisoners in Laos that were unaccounted
for….” Lippman notes that Adm.
Inman subsequently changed his opinion
when none of the prisoners ever surfaced
or was found, concluding that
“either the original assumption of
their safe landing was incorrect or the
[communist] Pathet Lao shot the prisoners
rather than keep them.”(2)

It is important to note one point not
mentioned in the Lippman article:
Throughout the Vietnam war and in its
aftermath, the Vietnamese communist party
controlled Laos. In fact, in
December 1992, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA),
then-chairman of the Select Committee on
POW/MIA Affairs, advised Vietnam’s
president, Le Duc Anh, that he had been
repeatedly told by high Laotian
government officials to talk to the
Vietnamese if the U.S. wanted information
about prisoners in Laos; they controlled
the prisoners. In addition there is
controversial satellite imagery
suggesting that as recently as mid-1992
American prisoners were incarcerated in a
Vietnamese prison camp.

It Ain’t Necessarily So

If, however, Adm. Inman had an
opportunity to receive a two-hour
briefing prepared by Sen. Robert Smith
(R-NH) — as Tom Lippman, Ross Perot and
some forty others interested in the
POW/MIA issue did on 15 December — he
might well change his mind again.
This three-part briefing offers
persuasive evidence that the U.S.
government had credible reports through
the late 1980s that American servicemen
remained in captivity in Indochina.
Washington’s only response, however, was
to seek to discredit the sources of such
information and to mislead the Congress
and the public about the truth, as Sen.
Smith has formally contended in a recent
letter to Attorney General Janet Reno.

Unfortunately, the Smith briefing —
compelling as it is — is not a complete
story. Not all of the relevant documents
have been made available; moreover, many
of those that are have been heavily
redacted. Still, the briefing
does suggest what can be done if the
U.S. government is willing genuinely to
“come clean.“

Should a decision be made to do so in
this area, comparable to the
leave-no-stone-unturned approach
ostensibly now in effect in the
Department of Energy, a coherent
picture of what Washington knew about
live POW/MIAs — and when it knew it —
could finally be compiled.
The result would be, at long last, an
honest basis for pursuing with Hanoi the
present status of all American personnel,
both the quick and the dead. If U.S.
servicemen are still alive and in
captivity, their return must be made a
non-negotiable precondition to any
further progress toward normalization of
relations with Vietnam.

The Bottom Line

The United States government
owes at least as great a debt to those
who served their country, were lost in
combat and who did not come home from
Indochina — and to their families — as
it does to those relatively few who were
improperly used as subjects in medical
radiation experiments. If the
Clinton Administration is serious about
its commitment to “come clean”
and to restore faith in government, to
say nothing of its stated determination
to provide the fullest possible
accounting for Vietnam era POW/MIAs,
it can do no less for these servicemen
than it is doing for the uninformed
participants in such experimentation.

At a minimum, Adm. Inman has a moral
obligation to commission a comprehensive
review of the newly declassified material
so as to establish whether or not his
original assessment about live servicemen
being left in Laos was correct. If
it is to be rigorous and honest, such a
review must not be conducted by the
“usual suspects” — i.e., those
from Assistant Secretary of State for
East Asian and Pacific Affairs Winston
Lord on down through the various bureaus
of the Office of the Secretary of Defense
and Defense Intelligence Agency who have
a vested interest in preventing,
rather than facilitating, a true
“full accounting.”(3)
Certainly, such an independent analysis
should be completed before the
Department of Defense is asked to agree
to the now-imminent decision to make
further U.S. economic or other
concessions to Hanoi.

In this regard, the Center for
Security Policy welcomes the strong
statement made yesterday by Sen. Minority
Leader Robert Dole (R-KA) expressing his
opposition to lifting the trade embargo
on Vietnam at this time. It
encourages Sen. Dole — and every other
member of Congress — to make a priority
of receiving the Smith briefing before
any further disservice is done to a group
of Americans, the missing POW/MIAs,
already monstrously ill-served by this
Administration and its recent
predecessors.

– 30 –

1. For example,
consider the following excerpt from a
recent Decision Brief by the
Center (U.S.
‘De-Nuclearization’: Who Is Minding the
Store?, href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=93-D_103″>No. 93-D 103,
9 December 1993):

“Without shedding any new
light on the subject, [Secretary
O’Leary] managed to hype stories that
have been in the public domain since
1986. Worse yet, she exacerbated the
adverse publicity by commingling the
eighteen instances in which informed
consent was evidently not obtained
with 800 experiments involving some
600 people in which it was….The
effect of the Secretary’s remarks
will almost certainly be further to
discredit her organization
— and not, as she claimed, to create
the new basis for public trust and
confidence in the Department or her
stewardship of it.”

Particularly offensive is the
determined effort being made by Clinton
Administration officials to portray these
medical tests as “Cold War
experiments.” In fact, they had
nothing to do with the Cold War —
except to have coincided with its
earliest years. Instead, they were part
of a civilian medical research program
that produced, among other things, highly
valuable radiation therapies for the
treatment of cancer. This does not
justify the practice of using mentally
handicapped patients where informed
consent may not have been possible. By
the same token, that practice (utilized
in a relative handful of instances and
long-since abandoned) should not be
permitted, as the Administration
evidently intends, to impugn the Cold War
struggle against communism or the
military activities legitimately related
thereto.

2. Interestingly
though, while Adm. Inman was director of
the National Security Agency from
1977-81, a series of radio intercepts of
Laotian military units guarding prison
camps contained sufficient information on
U.S. captives to cause President Reagan
to order a rescue attempt at the prison
camp at Nhom Marot, Laos in early 1981.
Ironically, the mission had to be aborted
when it was disclosed on the front page
of the Washington Post.

3. For more on
Secretary Lord’s serious conflict of
interest and the reasons why he should
recuse himself from decision-making
concerning the POW/MIA issue and
normalization of relations with Vietnam,
see the Center’s Decision Brief
entitled MacNeil-Lehrer
Post-Mortem: If Clinton Wants the Truth
on Vietnam, He Better Not Look To Winston
Lord, ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=93-D_80″>No. 93-D 80,
20 September 1993).

‘New Democrat’ Watch #7: New Imf Loans To Vietnam — Ill-Advised, Undeserved And Betrayal Of Stance On Human Rights

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday, President Clinton met for over an hour with representatives of the families of Vietnam-era POW/MIAs and veterans groups opposed to new, U.S. taxpayer-underwritten lending to Vietnam. Such loans are to be considered by the International Monetary Fund on 12 July. If approved with Washington’s (overt or tacit) support, they would inexorably lead to the lifting of the embargo and de facto normalization of relations with communist Vietnam.

The President told his interlocutors that, despite press reports to the contrary, he had not yet decided to approve the IMF loans. They urged him not to do so on the following grounds:

Vietnam Is Not ‘Cooperating’ on Still Unaccounted For Americans

An extraordinary new book entitled The Men We Left Behind: Henry Kissinger, the Politics of Deceit and the Tragic Fate of POWs after the Vietnam War by Mark Sauter and Jim Sanders, establishes that Hanoi has yet to come clean about the fate of all American servicemen who were missing in action or prisoners of war in Vietnam and Laos. It also reveals an appalling degree of complicity on the part of the U.S. government — both executive branch officials and some members of Congress — that has continued to the present day. The President was presented with a copy of this book by Dolores Alfond, chairman of the National Alliance of POW/MIA Families, who urged him to read it before acting on the IMF loan.

Interestingly, one of those whose devious and insidious conduct figures prominently in The Men We Left Behind — Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) — slipped into the White House to see President Clinton shortly before the families and veterans’ appointment. Sen. Kerry’s purpose: to give the President a letter signed by a number of his colleagues urging approval of the IMF loans and otherwise to undercut once again those who oppose normalization of relations with Vietnam under present circumstances.

In the meeting that followed, the President was specifically disabused of the notion that Vietnam had earned American reciprocity through its recent "cooperation" on accounting for POW/MlAs. As the National League of Families noted in a 16 June press release: "In reality, the last two or three years have been the worst since 1981 in terms of accounting for our missing loved ones….The number of unaccounted-for Americans has been reduced by only ten in 1992 and only one in 1993. This lack of results is due to Vietnam’s failure."

If President Clinton is true to his word, this reality alone should be enough to block improved U.S.-Vietnamese ties at this time. After all, last Memorial Day, Mr. Clinton told the families and veterans gathered at the Vietnam Memorial:

 

"We will do all we can to give you not only the attention you have asked for but the answers you deserve….We are pressing the Vietnamese to provide this accounting [of POW/MlAs] not only because it is the central outstanding issue in our relationship with Vietnam, but because it is a central commitment made by the American government to our people. And I intend to keep it."

 

Vietnam Continues to Interfere in Cambodia

Just as Hanoi is not really cooperating on resolving outstanding questions pertaining to the POW/MIA issue, so too it is failing to live up to another important precondition stipulated by the Bush Administration’s "road-map" for improving U.S.-Vietnamese relations: cooperation on bringing peace and democracy to neighboring Cambodia. As noted in a recent Center Decision Brief(2), Vietnam and its proxies in Cambodia actively tried to subvert the U.N.-monitored election in May through a systematic campaign of violence and intimidation conducted against the non-communist opposition.

When such sabotage failed to have the desired effect and electoral returns gave a plurality to the royalist democratic FUNCIPEC party led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Hanoi’s surrogates first refused to accept the returns, then announced that the eastern provinces of Cambodia would secede rather than be ruled by a government led by non-communists. Only with the collapse of the secessionist movement did the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian People’s Party finally agree to participate in a coalition transitional government. This latest position, however, appears to be little more than a holding operation, designed to preserve Hanoi’s options — perhaps to "rule from below" like the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, perhaps to seek a violent return to power once the U.N. pulls out in August.

A U.S. Double-Standard on Human Rights?

The representatives of the American Legion and the Disabled American Veterans reminded President Clinton that another consideration must also be factored into any decision to improve relations with communist Vietnam: Over 58,000 U.S. servicemen and women lost their lives and tens of thousands of others were maimed to defend the freedom of the people of South Vietnam. This sacrifice would be unalterably demeaned were the United States to agree to IMF loans and other steps that would provide economic life-support to those who continue to deny basic human rights to the Vietnamese.

Such a step would be all the more indefensible in light of Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s recent, vehement rejection of the Bangkok Declaration. This declaration, which was adopted by Vietnam, China, Myanmar and other enemies of freedom on 2 April 1993, disputes the universality of human rights. It pronounces, among other things, "the interdependence and indivisibility of economic, social, cultural and civil and political rights and the need to give equal emphasis to all categories of human rights."

Secretary Christopher used his address to the U.N. Human Rights Conference in Vienna on 14 June to make the following points of considerable relevance to the pending decision about rehabilitating communist Vietnam:

 

"…The United States stands with the men and women everywhere who are standing up for [democracy and human rights]….President Clinton has made reinforcing democracy and protecting human rights a pillar of our foreign policy — and a major focus of our foreign assistance programs."

 

"In this post-Cold War era, we are at a new moment. Our agenda for freedom must embrace every prisoner of conscience, every victim of torture, every individual denied basic human rights….In the battle for democracy and human rights, words matter, but what we do matters more. What all of our citizens and governments do in the days ahead will count far more than any discussions held or documents produced here."

"[We] will support the forces of freedom — of tolerance of respect for the rights of the individual — not only in the next few weeks in Vienna, but every day in the conduct of our foreign policy throughout the world. The United States will never join those who would undermine the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights]."

 

"We reject any attempt by any state to relegate its citizens to a lesser standard of human dignity. There is no contradiction between the universal principles of the U.N. Declaration and the cultures that enrich our international community. The real chasm lies between the cynical excuses of oppressive regimes and the sincere aspirations of their people."

 

The Bottom Line

Much is riding on President Clinton’s impending decision on the renewal of IMF lending to Vietnam. Should new financial support to Hanoi and other steps toward full normalization of relations go forward under present circumstances, Vietnam’s communist dictators will obtain a new lease on political life. If so, American families and veterans concerned with obtaining the truth about their missing loved ones will be permanently stonewalled. Cambodia, Laos and others will continue to be subjected to aggression, subversion and domination from Hanoi.

And the U.S. commitment to democracy and human rights around the world — so elegantly enunciated last month by Warren Christopher on behalf of the Clinton Administration — will be shown to be selective at best and, at worst, completely and cynically disconnected from actual American policy. This would represent a further, odious betrayal not only of the long-suffering people of Vietnam. It would also defile the memory of all those Americans who demonstrated by making the ultimate sacrifice what a real commitment to democracy and freedom is all about.

– 30 –

1. "New Democrat" Watch is a series of Decision Briefs designed to illuminate important security policy decisions pending before the Clinton Administration. These decisions will do much to determine the compatibility of Clinton policies with the U.S. national interest. They will also provide objective measures of the President’s follow-through on his commitment to abandon the left-wing, "Old Democrat" behavior that has afflicted and undermined his presidency thus far.

2. See ‘New Democrat’ Watch #3: Will Clinton Reward Hanoi For Its Latest Cambodian Power Play? (No. 93-D 47, 14 June 1993).

Oops! Untimely Disclosures Of Secret Findings Threaten To Upset Clinton’s Foreign Applecarts

If a Republican filibuster in the Senate has brought to an early end President Clinton’s honeymoon on domestic policy, the Clinton ship of state has been no less severely rocked by two powerful mines struck while navigating the often-treacherous waters of international affairs. While at this point the full extent of the damage done to the Administration’s program by the recent revelation of two heretofore secret reports can only be surmised, its credibility concerning — and therefore the prospects for effectively managing — the crisis in Bosnia and U.S. policy toward Vietnam has unquestionably been seriously eroded.

Cover-up on Bosnia

The first report was one prepared at the Administration’s request by a 26-member government team. The group had been sent to Bosnia to evaluate what could be done swiftly to alleviate the suffering of innocent civilians there. Not surprisingly, the officials from the State, Defense and other departments concluded the obvious: It is not enough to provide food and medicine to the victims of Serbian aggression. What is killing and maiming them is artillery shells and other weapons fire, not malnutrition.

The report concludes, accordingly, that what is needed is "safe havens," which can of course only be made safe by deploying ground forces and air cover for protection. As this position is inconsistent with President Clinton’s current determination to avoid committing troops to the conflict in Bosnia, the Administration’s reluctance to disclose this finding is understandable.

What is not acceptable, however, is the fact that, when the fact-finding team was authorized to relay its conclusions to the Congress last week, the Clinton Administration instructed the briefers to delete any reference to their central recommendation. As a result, Members were given a seriously misleading picture of the situation on the ground and misinformed about the group’s assessment of the United States’ options.

Regrettably, this subterfuge seems of a piece with other recent Clinton decisions toward the former Yugoslavia — notably, his acquiescence to Russia’s insistence that further action on tightening the sanctions against Serbia, to say nothing of lifting the Bosnian arms embargo, be postponed until after April 25th (the date of Boris Yeltsin’s referendum). Such actions have the effect of signalling to Belgrade that its predations in Bosnia may continue unchecked; that there need be no fear of meaningful Western intervention to defend the innocent, let alone to punish the aggressor; and that Russia can easily manipulate the U.N. and prevent meaningful responses to Serbia’s aggression.

Hanoi’s POW Lies

The second report was discovered in February in the archives of the Soviet Union’s military intelligence unit, the GRU. It details a 1972 briefing by Gen. Tran Van Quang, the then-Deputy Chief of Staff of the North Vietnamese Army to his country’s Communist Party Politburo concerning the exact number of Americans captured by Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Gen. Quang helpfully breaks out the POWs by rank, by location of capture and by attitude toward the war — from "progressive" (that is, apologetic) to "reactionary" (read, defiantly supportive of the war effort).

Most importantly, the report confirms what many have long believed: Hanoi in 1972 held 1,205 American prisoners of war, three times the number it has previously disclosed and 614 more than it permitted to be repatriated at the end of the war. It is in the words of Stephen Morris, the Harvard researcher who discovered the document, the "smoking gun" long sought in connection with the POW-MIA issue.

Unfortunately for the Clinton Administration, as with the Bosnia report, the revelation of this explosive document comes at a particularly inopportune time. It had just announced that Gen. John Vessey, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been appointed President Bush’s special emissary to Vietnam, was going to return to Hanoi next week. The object of the Vessey trip was transparent: to finalize the whitewash of North Vietnam’s prevarications about American POWs and MIAs so as to clear the decks for normalized bilateral trade and diplomatic relations.

Now, we are told, the Quang report will be the first item discussed between Gen. Vessey and his Vietnamese interlocutors — presumably a short conversation since the latter have already denounced it as a fabrication. Doubtless, a concerted effort will be made by Hanoi and its friends in the United States to discredit this document. Indeed, its troubling disclosures will probably be swept under the same rug that Sen. John Kerry’s special committee on POW-MIA affairs and successive U.S. administrations have used to cover-up evidence of North Vietnamese bad faith and official American guilty knowledge of the same.

The Bottom Line — A Lost Moral Compass

Still, the existence of the Quang report — like the true character of the Bosnia study — should make it more difficult for the Clinton to perpetrate the appeasement policy it had in mind. The real question is this: Will President Clinton continue to ignore the commitments to democracy, to opposing totalitarian oppression and to resisting its aggression and genocide that he made repeatedly during the campaign?

If so, he will presumably persist in trying — despite these embarassing setbacks — to abandon those aspiring to peace and freedom in Bosnia, Vietnam and beyond. In the process, he will inevitably further desecrate the memory of those Americans and others who have not simply paid lip-service to such ideals but have given their lives to defend and promote them.

Congress Forgets the Meaning of Defense

By MALCOLM WALLOP
The Wall Street Journal, August 2, 1990

At the 1987 Washington summit, Soviet spokesman Georgi Arbatov posed a rhetorical
question: “What will you do when we deny you an enemy?.” Three years later U.S.
policymakers seem to believe they are now confronting that problem.

Several weeks ago the Senate Armed Services Committee completed work on a major
defense bill that cancels or severely cripples a number of important strategic programs. On
Tuesday, the House Armed Services Committee marked up a defense bill that could do
yet more damage to national security. The trouble here is that no one is asking whether the
Soviets are merely denying us the perception of an enemy. The Soviets may even be doing
so in order to undermine the American consensus for a strong defense. Soviet success in
any case shows that lawmakers’ will to believe in Mikhail Gorbachev’s benign intentions is
too strong.

The U.S. Defense Department is, of course, certainly not entitled to a blank check.
Reasonable cuts in defense spending are the necessary response to the world’s changing
military and political situation, and to our own deficit woes. But the Pentagon is not a cash
cow to be milked to nourish a bloated welfare state. Its mission is to safeguard our
freedom by keeping our military forces strong and ready.

Military Unpreparedness

Take a look at history. Every time the U.S. has embarked on a drastic unilateral
reduction in military capability for a short-term gain, the ultimate result has been a high
cost — in American blood as well as treasure.

We were woefully unprepared when we entered World War I. Recruits drilled with
broomsticks instead of rifles, and the U.S. had to borrow artillery, tanks and aircraft from
the French and British. In the 1930s, isolationism gave us a weak military. With Pearl
Harbor, we learned the cost. U.S. submarines went to war with torpedoes that would not
explode on contact. Our aviators and their obsolete aircraft were shot down in scores by
Japanese pilots flying modern Zeros. After World War II, the lesson repeated itself. The
U.S. demobilized precipitously and announced that it had no security interest in East Asia.
The result was the North Korean invasion of South Korea 40 years ago this summer, and
the death of 50,000 Americans.

Congress today is overlooking the high price of unpreparedness in its zeal to spend the
peace dividend — before there is a dividend, and before there is true and certain peace.

The defense legislation pending in the House would terminate the B-2 Stealth bomber
program and stall the modernization of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The legislation in
the Senate also stops modernization of ICBMs. There is no strategic rationale for these
steps. The process that produced the legislation was not a thoughtful exercise in defense
policy analysis, but an accountant’s exercise. The very term “peace dividend” is the
language of accountants. So it should come as no surprise that Congress is acting with
little consideration of specific threats, strategic imperatives or military requirements. The
result is strategy made by bookkeepers.

The most glaring example of the triumph of short-term politics over sound defense
policy is the attitude toward strategic programs, space and the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Even though the Warsaw Pact may no longer pose the threat of conventional war for
NATO, the Soviet threat at the strategic end of the warfare spectrum remains real. The
Soviets are modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenal. Their military space program
and their own “Star Wars” plans continue unabated.

Yet in Washington, the committee mark-up sessions and the legislation that followed
showed no concern over the use of nuclear power for diplomatic leverage or blackmail.
The sessions have ignored the possibility that the Soviets are merely following one of their
old military doctrines: “victory without war.” One way to explain American failure to aid
Lithuania’s freedom struggle — morally or financially — is that the U.S. is already
intimidated by the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Sen. Sam Nunn, chairman of the Armed
Services Committee, has made many speeches and issued many statements explaining the
Senate bill’s strategy, but not one discusses the critical importance of space to U.S.
security and prosperity — an astonishing omission for any strategy that claims to “look
forward, not backward.”

In a trip to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in February. President Bush said,
“In the 1990s, strategic defense makes more sense than ever before.” But the Senate
Armed Services Committee authorized nearly a billion dollars less than the president’s SDI
request. The House Armed Services Committee proposes to cut SDI by nearly $2 billion.
When the two chambers split the difference, the result could be a major reduction in SDI
funding, an actual decline in real dollars, not merely a cut in the planned increase.

There are worse prospects for SDI than reduced funding. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D.,
N.M.) and Sen. Richard Shelby (D., Ala.) intend to offer an amendment to the Senate
defense bill that would radically restructure SDI. This comes at the moment when the
program stands on the threshold of producing concrete benefits. By cutting $400 million
from Phase 1 of SDI and “brilliant pebbles,” the most promising near term technology, the
amendment would foreclose the deployment an actual defense system, and steer SDI
toward long-term open ended research. The Senators would sacrifice the Defense
Department’s freedom to manage the program efficiently, and allocate the bulk of funds to
established interests — interests not coincidentally located in New Mexico and Alabama.

Sen. Nunn has predicted that a “broad national debate” on strategic defense will result
from this amendment. He’s quite right. The American people will have the chance to
decide whether they want SDI to become a technological welfare program or whether they
went to get any return — in the form of an actual defense — from the six years and nearly
$20 billion invested in SDI. They must decide through their elected representatives
whether to ensure by law that SDI will never produce any real security and will instead
become merely another expensive entitlement program.

Ironically, scientists and engineers working on SDI don’t favor pure research either.
They, too, hope for a usable product. In a recent report for the Strategic Defense Initiative
Organization, leading scientists from both Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratories agree that “Brilliant Pebbles offers effective and survivable space based
means for addressing near and long-term missile threats in the boost phase.”

Building on the steady and dramatic technical progress to date, and under the Strategic
Defense Initiative Organization’s new director Henry Cooper, there is the real possibility
that SDI funds will be spent to build the protection that the American people think they
have been paying for all along — unless Congress passes the Bingaman-Shelby Amendment
into law.

If we turn our backs on SDI, we’re not just rejecting the option of defense against
ballistic missiles. SDI also means progress in the critical arena of space. It is significant that
the Senate defense bill would also terminate the MILSTAR space-based command and
control program, and that Sens. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) want
to kill off our anti-satellite capability as well.

As long as there is conflict between competing interests and ideologies, space will not
be exempt from it. Indeed, we are entering an era when space control is becoming the
crucial military leverage, and may determine the course of future conflicts — without a shot
ever being fired by terrestrial forces.

Military forces have historically opened the way into new frontiers of human endeavor,
whether it was navies opening up the high seas, or, as in our own history, the Army
exploring the new Western frontier, and providing security for settlers, homesteader and
railroads.

pattern. The military’s initial investment and sustained operations in space will push
technology forward, bring down the cost of launching and keeping platforms in orbit, and
provide the nucleus of future settlements and commercial ventures. As in the past “trade
will follow the flag.”

Via SDI to Space

The first step toward the essential mastery of space is SDI, the greatest technical and
strategic innovation of the past quarter century. A strategic defense system will greatly
reduce the military utility or blackmail potential of nuclear armed ballistic missiles. But
SDI will give us more than just a missile defense. It will also lead the way to U.S.
dominance in the ultimate high ground of space, and the “high seas” of the future.

The list of civil and commercial as well as military benefits to be gained from space is
endless. But the investments will be, shall we say, astronomical. Can we expect businesses
to risk huge investments in space unless their security is reasonably assured, unless U.S.
interests in space can be defended as they are on the earth’s surface? If congressional
leaders, especially leaders of the armed services committees, allow Congress to forestall
the immeasurable advantages of a space-based strategic defense, then their pretensions to
the role of strategist ring hollow.

As Congress takes up action on the defense bill, the American people need to remind
their representatives that American moral strength, political resolve, military capability and
technical prowess over the past 40 years have brought us to the threshold of victory. When
we are so close to seeing the end of Soviet imperialism, the dividend ought to be more
than a transitory or illusory peace. By our continued resolve, peace, when it comes, will be
genuine and lasting.

Sen. Wallop (R., Wyo. ) is a member of the Armed Services Committee.