The American POWs: Pawns in Power Politics
Faulk, Richard
The American POWs: Pawns in Power Politics by RICHARD A. FALK The status of U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam has moved in recent months from the periphery of American public concern to stage...
...Among the visitors to camps from American peace groups, and from such countries as France and Japan, there seems to be general accord that POWs receive more food than do members of North Vietnam's army, that POWs are given medical treatment, that no systematic torture or brainwashing takes place, and that the POWs seem in good spirits...
...Combat...
...At no time in the history of the world has there been such a dramatic proposal," Mr...
...Committee Chairman Fulbright then asked Laird what would seem to be an innocent and rhetorical question: "Was there any doubt that America cares about them...
...It is true that North Vietnam was slow to meet Geneva standards on release of the names of POWs in its possession and on transmission of mail...
...As to actual conditions of treatment, reports vary...
...response can be explained only in terms of an unre-nounced commitment to use American military power to control the political destiny of South Vietnam...
...As the Eichmann case had established years earlier, any government that captures a war criminal is empowered to prosecute him, regard. . there is a lack of real insight into the relationship between the POW issue and ending the war...
...around honoring the servicemen who, participated in the raid of November 21, 1970, against the unoccupied prison camp at Son Tay deep in North Vietnamese territory...
...The evidence remains clouded as to whether the Administration knew at the time of the raid that the camp was empty...
...Government officials are guilty of war crimes...
...The most complicated, and in certain ways most valid, level of concern about the POWs has to do with their treatment during the course of their confinement...
...Of course, there is even more to the Son Tay raid than this...
...To a man, we found the Senators to be aware, concerned, sympathetic, and willing to take action to help these men...
...Today, by a curious inversion of circumstances, the U.S...
...It seems clear that the Son Tay raid of November 21, 1970, was intended partly as a gesture and partly as a message to contradictory audiences: One—The Son Tay raid was an essential gesture of concern with respect to the POWs stranded in North Vietnam...
...Throughout the war the United States has measured its "progress" not so much in territorial terms as by kill statistics—"the body count...
...A major diplomatic effort was then initiated by the United States to discourage the trials...
...The air war, by bringing the war to North Vietnam, by its indiscriminate patterns of bombardment, and by the widespread use of such prohibited weapons as antipersonnel cluster bombs and delayed action bombs, clearly raised issues of criminality...
...More precisely, the PRG's Eight-Point peace proposal of September 17, 1970, calls for the formation of a provisional coalition government drawn from the PRG, the present Saigon regime (excluding President Thleu, Vice President Ky, and Premier Khiem), and third-force groups, whether or not presently insi4e South Vietnam...
...that the Government's own Vietnam strategy is prolonging the prisoners' period of captivity, perhaps into the indefinite future...
...Nixon has made increasingly plain, his "plan" for ending the war is really a plan for winning the war (by securing South Vietnam for a staunchly anti-Communist regime in Saigon), but in a way that eliminates domestic political pressure by drastically reducing the flow of American blood and treasure...
...North Vietnam later cooperated with the war crimes tribunal organized by Bertrand Russell to expose the criminal nature of the war and has continued to gather information in support of its contention that it has been a victim of war crimes on a massive scale...
...And finally, there is a lack of real insight into the relationship between the POW issue and ending the war...
...The general endorsement of the Son Tay raid, even by critics of the war, suggests that the public relations effort has succeeded, at least temporarily, in making Americans believe that Hanoi is not entitled to retain American POWs any longer...
...Hanoi's decision not to proceed might well have been influenced by the strong diplomatic initiative mounted from Washington...
...Indeed, Van Dyke's careful analysis of the most publicized claims of torture by some released prisoners casts considerable doubt on the authenticity of their allegations...
...At the time when North Vietnam seemed inclined to prosecute American fliers as war criminals, there was very little that it could do to alleviate the pressure upon itself...
...Heavy bombardment throughout Indochina continues...
...He swamped the opposition...
...The absence of a U.S...
...As Mr...
...In this respect the deep penetration of North Vietnamese territory, the indications that additional rescue attempts were contemplated in the future, the accompanying heavy bombardment in the vicinity of Son Tay and in the area above the DMZ, were part of a hard-line message that could be read as warning Hanoi to accept the offer of a prisoner exchange or else suffer great destruction...
...This upsurge of interest is no random shift of public sentiment...
...International law experts and moralists have been divided on the legality of indiscriminate aerial bombardment of populated areas...
...Government charged that such a public display of prisoners violated the Geneva rules, specifically Article 13 of the Convention, which prohibits the public display of prisoners...
...But if such compassion is to be credible on a moral level, it must be related to all POWs, not just American POWs, and it must be in just proportion to the overall character and conduct of the war...
...North Vietnam's reservation, which was similar to that made by other Socialist countries, including the Soviet Union, accompanied its adherence in 1957 to the 1949 Geneva Convention: "The Democratic Republic of Vietnam declares that prisoners of war prosecuted and convicted for war crimes or for crimes against humanity, in accordance with principles laid down by the Nuremberg Court of Justice, shall not benefit from the present Convention, as specified in Article 85...
...More remarkable still, I think, is the close similarity between Ho's accusation and a conclusion pertaining to the air war against North Vietnam that is reached in General Telford Taylor's recent book on war crimes, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy...
...Obviously, prosecution of the pilots would have had an inflammatory impact on American policy-planners precisely because it was their war that was being adjudged...
...This is impressive progress, considering that prior to the formation of the Committee fewer than 100 of the prisoners had been heard from by their families...
...At the latest session of the U.N...
...It's amazing how effective he has been with all this news about the Son Tay raid...
...For instance, when Robert Sheer returned from North Vietnam in mid-September, 1970, with 379 letters from prisoners, U.S...
...Some analysts have contended that the reservation attached to Article 85 does not apply because these POWs have not been "prosecuted and convicted for war crimes...
...He is also a member of the Committee of Liaison with Families of American Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam...
...Even Laird said in his testimony to the Fulbright Committee that he "would assume" after the raid that other POWs "would be guarded more closely...
...Few politicians want to acknowledge that when American prisoners are released, Washington loses its only remaining major incentive to negotiate a reasonable end to the war...
...From all of these points of view it is clear that the POWs are being jeopardized by higher priorities than Washington is willing to acknowledge: first, that it would rather win the war for Thieu and Ky than obtain the release of the prisoners...
...This enumeration of public relations initiatives is only illustrative and could be extended indefinitely...
...the POWs were instruments of the policymakers . . •" The POW concern is both old and new, its oldness related to a persisting American self-serving desire to confine moral and legal inquiry about the war to one single—and in the overall setting of death and devastation comparatively minor—aspect of the Vietnam War, namely, treatment of a rather small number of American POWs in North Vietnam...
...Nixon could obtain the release of the American prisoners, the so-called low-cost, long-haul strategy of protracted warfare being pursued in Indochina could be carried on indefinitely without any serious prospect of adverse domestic political consequences...
...Such an objection is particularly inappropriate in view of the extravagant semi-official backing that has been accorded Perot's various efforts to publicize the prisoner issue— efforts that have, it seems, made it more difficult, not less so, for the North Vietnamese to improve the lot of American POWs...
...f The Nixon Administration has put forward in Paris an offer of prisoner exchange which it promotes with such adjectives as "generous," "reasonable," and "dramatic...
...To describe North Vietnam as *'an international outlaw" for refusing such an offer, given American destructive conduct in the South, the bombing of the North, and the cruel treatment accorded North Vietnamese and NLF POWs, is to invert the real moral situation and plunge ever deeper into an infernal realm of Government-sponsored fantasy...
...Finally, the climate on war crimes in the United States has changed drastically since 1966, largely as a result of the disclosures surrounding the My Lai massacre...
...A similar rationale was advanced by the American Broadcasting Company when it explained why it was appropriate to regard the half-time ceremony at this year's Army-Navy game as "non-political" and, therefore, as suitable for broadcast to its huge viewing audience...
...The proposals of North Vietnam and of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) of South Vietnam (the governmental organ of the National Liberation Front) at the far-is talks have made it clear that discussion leading to prisoner release can begin as soon as, but no sooner than, the principles and processes of an overall political settlement have been agreed upon...
...In this article I propose to demonstrate that the POW issue is being used to divert attention from the Administration's failure to negotiate an end to the war...
...the stimulation of a separate campaign by veterans' organizations urging 50,000,000 Americans to write letters to POWs for Christmas, 1970, and to dump 100 tons of prisoner mail at the headquarters of the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris...
...Some confusion has been purposely created by the Pentagon's cynical double policy of imposing a regime of silence on returned POWs who report no mistreatment and arranging maximum public exposure for those who allege bad conditions...
...Government responds positively to the latest PRG proposal, there is little realistic prospect of securing the release of prisoners...
...The case against the Nixon Administration on the POW issue seems overwhelming/' The whole approach of the Nixon Administration is designed to make people believe that the POW issue is properly separable from the overall settlement of the war, which it is not, never has been, and cannot be...
...Such an apparently one-sided offer can be understood only in relation to the no-negotiations posture of the United States in Paris and to the related inability to obtain the release of the prisoners so long as "active hostilities" continue...
...These instances of high-technology societies waging war against relatively helpless low-technology societies (with no capability for self-defense or retaliation) were apt precursors of the air war against North Vietnam...
...The POW issue becomes pernicious when pro-war forces, trading on the genuine sympathies of all Americans for the prisoners, focus public attention on prisoner mistreatment—and consciously and zealously exaggerate it— as a way of rallying support for the Administration's program of prolonging and expanding the war...
...For our honor we are prepared to fight to the last American" Three—The Son Tay raid was also intended as a message to Hanoi that the POW issue, unless handled in a conciliatory fashion by North Vietnam, could result in punishing escalations, including even the resumption of steady bombing...
...Chairman of the Consultative Council of the Lawyers Committee on American Policy Towards Vietnam, he visited North Vietnam in the summer of 1968...
...In the present climate a good American can be for or against the war and the issue is properly a subject of partisan politics, but all good Americans, regardless of their other views, are supposed to stand behind the Administration's effort to highlight the plight of American POWs...
...Again and again over the past year we have found that while there may be disagreement about the conduct of the war, our nation is united in its desire to gain the release of the prisoners...
...It is not surprising that some, although by no means all, of the champions of the POW issue have also been the most hawkish advocates of a win-policy in the war...
...Laird gave the following answer: "Yes, I think there was doubt...
...Its newness relates to the apparent discovery that it will be impossible for the United States to negotiate a release of American prisoners without negotiating a settlement of the war as a whole...
...This frenzy can begin to boomerang if it once becomes clear to the public that it is primarily the Government's fault that the POWs remain in captivity...
...Thus, H. Ross Perot, the Dallas computer billionaire, has organized his campaign on the POW issue (which has the Administration's full support) around this central proposition: "We have visited privately with a number of Senators who disagree with the Administration's position on the war, asking their active support in gaining the release of the prisoners...
...After this flurry of excitement, the idea of prosecuting American POWs as war criminals was dropped by Hanoi, if indeed it had ever been actively contemplated...
...To shift the focus of righteous indignation to the alleged wrongs of the other side involves a monumental public relations buildup when the burden of wrongdoing and criminality is so clearly on our side, by any fair-minded calculus...
...Undoubtedly the most impressive American triumph on Level Two has been to secure passage by a vote of sixty to sixteen, with thirty-four abstentions, in the U.N...
...On the merits, it seems to me that North Vietnam had a reasonable basis for regarding the captured pilots as potential war criminals...
...the frequent dedication of a minute of silence to American POWs prior to nationally televised football games...
...For the PRG the essence of a political settlement consists in pbtain-ing an American commitment to withdraw all its troops within a fixed period of six to nine months—the other side seems somewhat flexible about exact timing—and an agreement that the organization of elections of a permanent government in Saigon will be supervised by an interim coalition government composed of the main political forces active in South Vietnam...
...The most informed and reliable study now available of alleged torture of American POWs by the North Vietnamese has been made by John M. Van Dyke, formerly of the State Department's Legal Adviser's Office and currently attached to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara, California, who comes to the general conclusion that there have been instances of unauthorized mistreatment by particular prison guards or by townspeople near the scene of capture, but that there is no evidence at all that North Vietnam is pursuing a policy of torture or vengeance toward the POWs...
...The Nixon Administration has become increasingly aware that complaints about treatment may arouse indignation in this country, but will not obtain release of the POWs...
...However, the Gov^ ernment, instead of cooperating and facilitating this work, has attempted to discredit, harass, and obscure the tangible achievements of the Committee...
...In this second proposal to Washington, the struggle for control of South Vietnam would go on between the Saigon regime and the PRG and hence Washington would not be "imposing" any political solution on Saigon...
...It was not President Kennedy himself but the men he brought to Washington as advisers and who stayed on with President Johnson—the Rusks, Mc-Namaras, Bundys, and Rostows—who must bear the major responsibility for the war and the course it took...
...setting...
...Level One: POWs as War Criminals...
...The issue is an emotional one, and it has been confused by an unconscionable barrage of official propaganda...
...They have, in effect, conceded the validity of separating the POW issue from the settlement of the war, which is precisely the central objective and the basic fallacy of the Nixon approach...
...the placement, at Perot's request, of purported replicas of the North Vietnamese prisons in the rotunda of the Capitol...
...Diverse international figures, including the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Pope, sought to dissuade North Vietnam...
...It is true, of course, that all men of good will are united in their compassion for POWs who find themselves in vulnerable and tragic circumstances...
...Nor does it stem from a recent increase in the number of POWs—most are pilots who were captured during the heavy bombing raids conducted against North Vietnam in the Johnson Administration—nor from any sudden deterioration in their circumstances...
...Three separate techniques are being used to convince the public of this conclusion: % The treatment accorded POWs by North Vietnam is alleged to be so bad as to constitute an urgent humanitarian necessity to obtain their release ; 1f An actual effort at rescue is carried out with great fanfare and its leaders are hailed and decorated as national heroes...
...In the view of North Vietnam and many independent specialists in international law, the air war constituted a war crime both in its aggressive intent and in its daily execution...
...Government is itself engaged in a series of war crimes trials directed against soldiers who were present at My Lai, and these soldiers are largely defending themselves by pointing to those higher up in command—those whom Ho Chi Minh called "the main criminals" in 1966...
...Some of the confusion surrounding the POW issue arises from a failure to distinguish among three quite distinct levels of the prisoner problem...
...the organization of prisoner families into the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia...
...In part, this acquiescence on the part of the liberal opposition springs from genuine concern for the welfare of fellow Americans languishing in a distant land while a cruel and senseless war grinds on year after year...
...Only weeks earlier, ABC had refused to broadcast a half-time show called "America the Beautiful" during the Buffalo-Holy Cross game because, as Mr...
...It seems clear that if Mr...
...In addition, the prospect of criminal prosecution might have had a damaging impact on the morale of American pilots still active in the air war and might even have led to the reluctance of some to take part in future missions...
...It was, therefore, prudent for North Vietnam to abandon any effort to follow through with trials to demonstrate its contention that American POWs were manifest war criminals, but such prudence cannot be properly interpreted as a concession that such charges were unfounded or even that a course of prosecution was ill-conceived, if it was indeed conceived at all...
...Separating these three levels makes it easier to understand who is accountable for what...
...In this regard, testimony by Defense Secretary Laird before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee seems significant...
...and appealing for funds to enable still more publicity on the prisoner issue...
...On this basis, North Vietnam contends that it is not bound by the Geneva rules, including particularly the provisions dealing with scheduled and unscheduled inspection of prison facilities and prisoners by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRG...
...The U.S...
...Since the POW issue threatens to become—has already become, in fact—a major obstacle in the way of a negotiated settlement and even a pretext for re-escalating the war, it urgently demands the closest and most dispassionate analysis...
...let us go up to Hanoi and bring them home in boxes . . ." This macabre vision of "solving" the prisoner issue by dragging their corpses out of the rubble of North Vietnam needs to be understood not only as pathology, which it is, but as the logic that inevitably underlies the position of all those who support the war...
...Of course, there is doubt about whether the Government is showing concern, doubt based on its general lack of interest in bringing the war to an end and doubt raised by its continuing harassment of peace groups that have alone been able to provide families with tangible results...
...The Government's shift from a position of genuine, if somewhat hypocritical, concern for standards of prisoner treatment to the completely unreasonable and unwarranted demand for immediate prisoner release is designed to produce an atmosphere in which anything goes—including military incursions into North Vietnam— to obtain the return of these prisoners...
...General Assembly of a Resolution on the POW issue that centered on asserting an obligation of participants in a Vietnam-type conflict to apply the Geneva Convention, including its rules on ICRC inspection of prison facilities...
...Roone Arledge, president of ABC Sports, declared: "I don't think the safety of American prisoners is a political issue...
...Ironically, further doubts have been raised by the Son Tay raid itself, since it subjected the POWs to immense risks...
...General Assembly, North Vietnam distributed through the Hungarian delegation a document alleging war crimes committed by the United States Government in Vietnam since the beginning of the Nixon Administration...
...North Vietnam's further position is that in the spirit of leniency (that is, not as a matter of legal duty) American POWs have been treated humanely, have been allowed to exchange mail and receive gifts, and have received ample food and medical treatment...
...Much of the appeal for public support relies on the misleading claim that the prisoner issue is entirely separate from concern about the wisdom of the war, and, indeed, occupies a status above and beyond politics...
...Representative William Bray, Indiana Republican, has decided that "given Hanoi's attitude toward its own men—it probably counts one of ours worth 5,000 North Vietnamese...
...Without such gestures, the Nixon Administration's policy would inevitably come under eventual attack as entailing the sacrifice of the POWs^ to the cause of "Vietnamization" and for the sake of maintaining in power military puppets such as hieu and Ky...
...In my view, a national consensus of this kind is unwarranted and dangerous...
...negotiators in Paris and unnoticed by the media...
...Arguing that the raid was a success despite its failure to free any POWs, Mr...
...Level Two: POWs as Victims...
...The ceremony was an elaborate presentation of the Administration's pitch on the POW issue, built RICHARD A. FALK, Milbank Professor of International Law at Princeton University, is the editor of the two-volume series, "The Vietnam War and International Law/' published by the Princeton University Press in 1968 and 1969...
...Customs officials, evidently acting on orders, seized the letters and placed them under bond...
...war crimes and President Ho Chi Minh cabled the Columbia Broadcasting System in reply to its inquiry that there was "no trial in view...
...Oh, what a tangled web we've woven The part-Government, part-private public relations campaign has now reached immense proportions—including the hiring of a professional fund raiser...
...Additionally, the POW issue provides some of the doves with a tempting opportunity to demonstrate to middle America that they also are patriotic and just as devoted to the protection of American POWs as the most vigorous hawks...
...The use of air power in the 1930s by Mussolini's Italy against Ethiopia and by Nazi Germany on behalf of Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War were occasions of universal public outrage...
...If the officials who gave the go-ahead order knew (or suspected) that Son Tay was abandoned (Laird admitted to Senator Frank Church that intelligence photos taken before the raid never showed prisoners on the camp grounds) then the whole undertaking was a pure gesture that rested on callous deception and dishonesty...
...and the Pentagon's practice of regularly sending families allegations and alleged pictures of tortured Americans...
...American casualties have dropped sharply in recent months and the anti-war movement has been quiescent...
...The propaganda barrage on the prisoners often represents a bizarre blend of cruelty and perverse "humanitarianism" which was, perhaps, best summed up in the late Representative L. Mendel Rivers' judgment that "these men would ten thousand times rather be dead, and I am sure their families would rather they be, knowing that we tried to release them, than sitting as they are, not knowing, never knowing . . . And if they got to die...
...There was apprehension at the time that if the prosecutions had gone forward, the United States would have responded by destroying Hanoi and Haiphong, possibly by destroying the dikes, certainly by escalating the war to even higher levels...
...the issuance of 135 million POW-MIA (missing in action) postage stamps...
...Hedrick Smith, writing in The New York Times, attributed to an unidentified official in the Nixon Administration thoughts that seem widely shared by advocates of a no-negotiations approach to ending the war: "By taking the offense himself Laird has pushed the bombing and the understanding into the background...
...President Nixon's language on the offer of a prisoner exchange (in his press conference last December 11), is revealing: ". . . Ambassador Bruce . . . offered to exchange, upon the part of both the United States and South Vietnam, 8,200 North Vietnamese that we have prisoner for approximately 800 Americans and other allied prisoners that they had...
...the distribution of bumper stickers with the slogan, "Have a Heart Hanoi...
...The bombing was being intensified from month to month, and North Vietnam might have correctly concluded that there were few better ways to focus public awareness on its plight than by initiating a series of war crimes trials...
...bombing is relatively inexpensive, control of the air is unchallenged outside the cities of North Vietnam, and air warfare, even if not an effective way of attaining military objectives, assures widespread destruction of enemy-held territory, and, for this reason, discourages the liberation of populated areas...
...The proposal represents a major concession from an earlier NLF insistence on being the sole authentic voice of the South Vietnamese people...
...Such antiwar leaders as Benjamin Spock, such organizations as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, arid a group of anti-war Senators joined in the appeal to North Vietnam and warned of adverse consequences that might follow from any trials, and especially from the imposition of death penalties...
...Rather, the new wave of concern is the result of a deliberate and cynical effort on the part of the Nixon Administration to exploit the plight of the POWs for its own domestic and international purposes...
...The Resolution is not likely to exert any influence on North Vietnam, but it does have some value in the propaganda war being waged around the POW issue...
...By service manual regulations and by international law, American soldiers are not supposed to obey orders that call for the commission of war crimes, and prosecutions in North Vietnam and commentaries thereupon might have been thought to reinforce the general understanding in the Nuremberg Judgment that superior orders provide no legal justification for the commission of a war crime...
...Laird said that "what we have done here has shown all of these prisoners in North Vietnam that America does care...
...This Resolution, opposed by the Communist bloc and most of the more radical Third World states, supports the American contention that the Geneva system provides the basic measuring rod for the adequacy of treatment standards accorded POWs...
...Indeed, some released prisoners and some still detained have praised their captors for according them humane and beneficial treatment under difficult circumstances...
...It is noteworthy that this was the first occasion on which North Vietnam took an initiative to present its position within the U.N...
...Laird said...
...Such a proposal is as inclusive as possible, giving the minimum condition of eliminating from power those Vietnamese leaders who have persistently fought against their own population, first for French colonial interests and since then on behalf of the American intervention...
...It almost seems, in retrospect, that the policy-planners who conceived of "Vietnamization" (letting Asians die for Americans or, as Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker is reported to have put it, "merely changing the color of the bodies") forgot about the American POWs in North Vietnam, who are not legally entitled to release and repatriation until, according to Article 118 of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, "after the cessation of active hostilities...
...Representatives of this committee have returned from Hanoi with large numbers of letters for families and considerable other prisoner information, such as confirmed names of captured and dead Americans, thereby sometimes ending the suspense of those families with a member listed as missing-in-action...
...The POW issue first gained prominence on July 6, 1966, when captured American pilots were paraded through Hanoi in apparent preparation for their trial and punishment as war criminals...
...On the same day, Ho Chi Minh was also quoted as saying that "the main criminals are not the American pilots captured in North Vietnam but the persons who sent them there—Johnson, Rusk, McNamara—these are the ones who should be brought to trial...
...The North Vietnamese response to this position is that their policy is more beneficial to the POWs than would have been the case had they been prosecuted and convicted, and in all certainty given heavy sentences, very likely death sentences...
...and, second, that it is willing to risk the lives and welfare of the prisoners if this is what it takes to demonstrate concern to their families and a wider aroused public...
...The work of the Committee has been carried on quietly, for its own sake, and without any effort to make use of the families of the prisoners for political purposes...
...Ironically, the POW issue has been brought to the fore precisely because the President's Vietnam strategy fails to make any effective provision for return of the prisoners...
...In my judgment, the North Vietnamese position—indeed the position of the entire Socialist bloc—on the reservation to Article 85 is undesirable, since it encourages belligerents to characterize each other's POWs as war criminals...
...The problem is initially obscured by Hanoi's insistence that the Geneva rules do not apply since the prisoners are war criminals who fall within the scope of its formal reservation to Article 85 of the Geneva Convention, which reads: "Prisoners of war prosecuted under the laws of the Detaining Power for acts committed prior to capture shall retain, even if convicted, the benefits of the present Convention...
...Government officials, instead of citing the various accomplishments of the Committee as evidence of improvement in conditions for American POWs, only complain about the failure of North Vietnam to use "official channels...
...It is difficult to assess these apprehensions but it is doubtful in any event that a different approach by North Vietnam on this issue would have discouraged American leaders from manipulating the POW issue to generate hostile propaganda...
...As of the end of 1970, the Committee had received and delivered a total of more than 3,200 letters from prisoners, and had forwarded at least one letter each from 332 of the 339 confirmed prisoners held in North Vietnam...
...That's a ten to one ratio, but we're willing to do that...
...The emphasis on the POW issue has enabled the Administration to deflect attention from the periodic and significant re-escalations of the war and from the failure to abide by the understanding to halt bombardment of North Vietnam...
...many of them have accepted the Administration's main contention that on the POW issue all Americans of good will are united in their sense of outrage...
...Unless the U.S...
...If such practice is generalized, it defeats the humanitarian purposes that underlie the Geneva Conventions and probably leads to a general deterioration in treatment accorded POWs...
...Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used entirely different—and erroneous—figures, but to the same effect, offering the North Vietnamese 36,000 of their prisoners in exchange for 3,000 allied prisoners...
...less of where and when he acts, and under whose authority...
...Although the Russell Tribunal Proceedings of 1967 (recently republished by Simon and Schuster under the title Against the Crime of Silence) stand up well under the tests of time and independent scrutiny, they were mainly ignored at the time, except for purposes of discrediting...
...By mid-July there were further indications that North Vietnam intended to try some of the prisoners...
...the holding of a special joint session of Congress, again at Perot's request, to dramatize legislative concern...
...Nixon's policy of never discussing the war without castigating North Vietnam for its treatment of American POWs...
...It is part of the overriding spirit of this counter-insurgency war, nowhere better summarized than in the justly famous comment of an Army major at Ben Tre, South Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it...
...I can, however, understand the reluctance of North Vietnam to allow ICRC representatives into its territory during a period of warfare, probably partly because of some concern about adverse propaganda, partly because of a worry about intelligence leaks (not entirely unfounded in light of the Son Tay raid), and partly because the ICRC is looked upon as a Western-biased international institution whose claims of impartiality could not be entirely trusted...
...Nonetheless, the unwillingness of North Vietnam to agree to a prisoner exchange has actually led some American political figures to offer completely unfounded and highly racist explanations that imply they don't care about their men to nearly the same extent as we care for ours...
...But if these officials honestly believed that POWs were probably at Son Tay, then these POWs were being subjected to a serious risk of death not of their own choosing, mainly to let the folks at home know that the Administration cares...
...as it was, their seizure delayed delivery to the families...
...the mailing of 600,000 lejfcters, over actor Jimmy Stewart's signature, beginning with the question, "Mommy, will Daddy be home for Christmas this year...
...On July 24, 1966, the North Vietnamese government announced the formation of a committee to investigate U.S...
...Two—The Son Tay raid conveyed a message of concern to the families of prisoners and to the domestic constituency which the Administration has sought to stir to frenzy on this issue...
...Hence, a new phase of the POW issue has been initiated to portray the prisoners as hostages being improperly held by North Vietnam...
...True, the POWs were instruments of the policymakers, but they could also serve as surrogates in circumstances where "the main criminals" could not be apprehended...
...Furthermore, it seems evident that the Administration's emphasis on the humanitarian side of the prisoner issue is, in part, designed to neutralize the hostile propaganda generated by the My Lai disclosures and the upsurge of interest in the question of whether or not U.S...
...the action by President Nixon in changing the official name of Veteran's Day to Prisoner of War Day...
...I'm sure you've had an opportunity, as I have, to talk to the wives, mothers . . . and there is a question in their minds as to whether America is showing . . ." at which point Fulbright interjected "Well, that's no justification for it, I must say . . ." This dialogue, I think, is more revealing than it may seem...
...Nixon revealed his own frustrations, I think, when he added to his earlier comment on the prisoner exchange that "their failure to accept that offer will pinpoint something that is pretty generally known around the world and that is that this nation [North Vietnam] is an international outlaw, that it does not adhere to the rules of international conduct...
...Improvements in these respects have been taking place since December, 1969, when a peace activist, Cora Weiss, taking advantage of earlier initiatives of anti-war visitors to Hanoi, organized the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam...
...This confusion is deepened by the efforts of both Washington and Hanoi to make use of the prisoners in the struggle to influence world public opinion...
...North Vietnam and the PRG have more recently taken an additional peace initiative that has been ignored by U.S...
...and that official professions of concern for the welfare of the POWs are totally at odds with the treatment being accorded North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF) prisoners, and even with the neglect of America's war wounded in veterans' hospitals here at home...
...The concern for American POWs has become so excessive that it overshadows the need and possibility of bringing the war to an end, and thereby, incidentally, achieving the safe release of the prisoners...
...It took strenuous efforts by Sheer and the Committee of Liaison to obtain the release of the letters...
...Unfortunately, even some leading opponents of the war have been beguiled into supporting President Nixon on the POW issue or, at best, have been reduced to embarrassed silence or to occasional quibbles on tactics...
...At the December 23, 1970, session of the Paris talks the other side proposed an immediate cease-fire between American and Vietnamese fighting forces, to be followed by rapid and total withdrawal and the release of POWs...
...prisoners of war in North Vietnam has moved in recent months from the periphery of American public concern to stage center...
...Even Soviet diplomats were urged to play a role in persuading Hanoi not to go ahead...
...Arledge explained, "it was an editorial to get out of Vietnam...
...Level Thaee: POWs as Hostages...
...Senator Claiborne Pell, Rhode Island Democrat, has asserted that "their interest in their prisoners, once they are gone, is far less than our interest in our people because of the difference, maybe, in human life and human values we have...
Vol. 35 • March 1971 • No. 3
