A new approach to the POW/MIA issue

The search so far for our POWs and MIAs has not been successful for a number of reasons.

Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam have no real reason to cooperate and provide us with any information they have, and they have a very great incentive not to. The US government was more interested in ending the war in 1975 than it was in finding our people. Later US corporations had a financial incentive to encourage the government to sweep everything under the rug so they could start exploiting virgin markets. The Defense Department, whether deliberately or through wholesale incompetence, did not fully investigate live sighting reports or pilot distress signals. Compounding the problem is the fact that the military purposefully did not maintain accurate records of incursions into Laos or Cambodia.

Foreign “information sources” turned out to be scam artists who used age-old tricks to extract money from honest and sincere people. Jimmy Carter fulfilled a campaign promise to resolve the POW/MIA issue. He ordered the military services to make an administrative determination that all of our missing personnel were “Presumed Dead.” Several House and Senate Committees have looked at the issue. At least one was headed by two Senators of questionable reliability and motives. The list could go on, but you get the picture. That’s where we are now, so let’s look at what all this means.

Lessons Learned

1. We cannot trust any government to give us any reliable information.

2. We cannot trust foreign sources who have a financial incentive to provide false or misleading information.

3. We need reliable boots on the ground to gather intelligence.

Well, we have boots on the ground. We just haven’t used them.

The world has changed dramatically during the past thirty years. Trade barriers are falling, and as a result money and business opportunities have been flowing out of the US and the other first world countries and into the third world developing countries, including Southeast Asia. In conjunction with this movement of capital the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Export Import Bank have started a parallel flow of money into these developing countries to prop up the infrastructure. This money is funneled into the country through Non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. A non-governmental organization is a non-profit organization that often conducts humanitarian and development work around the world. NGOs are essential to poverty relief efforts. Many NGOs are affiliated with religious organizations. In essence, they are do-gooders. If you look at the individuals actually performing the work I think it safe to say we would probably not agree with their politics, but they do have a finely honed sense of justice.

With the influx of money, trade, and NGOs there has also been a huge increase in the number of religious associations and churches sending missionaries into third world countries, including those in Southeast Asia.

The important point here is that the NGOs and missionaries do not perform most of their work in the cities. They go throughout the country, into the small villages and the poorly populated areas. If there are still living POWs in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam it seems much more likely that the government would hold them in these out of the way regions, where there is less traffic, there is very little satellite surveillance, and the population is more likely to be afraid of the military and government – and less likely to report anything unusual.

I propose that we make an effort to identify the NGOs and religious missions active in these countries, find a reliable American contact within the organization, and try to identify prisons where non-asian prisoners over the age of 50 are being held, and then try to cross reference that information with the embassies, who keep track of their citizens being held by foreign countries. I will volunteer to maintain a database of the organizations. You can contact me with the information. If anyone wants to volunteer to help make contact with the organizations, or has contacts that might make this work, please contact me.