they are the ones who traded 5 taliban leaders for the deserter and deemed him a hero. They also want to paint the soldiers speaking out as lunatics or whatever. You didn't say anything about the administration specifically, no.
The government is trying too hard to do damage control. If they'd just shut up about it, people would probably stop talking about it. Regardless, a PFC is not worth five high upper-level terrorists.
Damage control? Fucking Obama had his Mission Accomplished moment by bringing this guy's parents onto the White House lawn to celebrate the trade, then afterwards when facts started coming out he said Washington "whipped something up" to tarnish it. The only damage was done by this administration trying to look like heroes without bothering to fact check.
I'm pretty sure they fact-checked on this one. It's not like the DoD didn't have somebody sitting at the table when the decision to make the trade was done. The question is why they over-reached on the celebration. There are lots of different angles on that one and nobody comes out looking good. What happened to politics stops at the water's edge? That's the thing that made the US into a world power. If it's gone it's the thing that will bring us down.
Your donkey is showing. This guy is very likely a deserter that walked freely into a Taliban camp, 6 people died in the search for him and 5 esteemed Taliban lieutenants are now free. And there are STILL POWs in Vietnam who nobody bothers locating, actual soldiers who were in combat, fighting a politician's war that blew up in their collective faces, yet this asshole gets the red carpet. Fuck off with your justifications, this whole situation is a travesty.
The POW's in Vietnam are being held with Bigfoot. No disrespect intended but there's no reason that anybody in Vietnam would be holding POW's at this point. If you want conspiracy theories involving POW's invent a good one, like the North Vietnamese passed a few select prisoners to the Soviets because the Kremlin thought they might have some information worth extracting.
Lol "no disrespect", they aren't POWs by the government now, they are just American field slaves who their country's asshole politicians don't care about. Fuck you with your bigfoot comment, that's a bitch thing to say.
Where in Vietnam can you not go at this point? The answer: there's no where in Vietnam that you cannot go at this point. Go find your POW's if you think they are there. After WWI we had the Unknown Soldier Memorial. We didn't assume the Germans were holding slaves in a potato field somewhere in central Germany. It's racist to assume that the Vietnamese would hold American POW's for some reason for decades after the war, particularly when they've been our friends for a good two decades now, maybe more than that.
Give me a break, Vietnam has been a huge flesh trade country forever, is still a Communist country and tracks the movement of outsiders like any other Communist nation. Even in the resort cities. Racist? You're 0-fer in finding a coherent point on this forum today. Racist that. "our good friend Vietnam." What a joke. We've been "good friends" with Iraq and Afghanistan as well, check out how well that worked out.
Yes, but you're assuming with this statement that the government of Vietnam is engaged in some massive conspiracy to keep American POW's for decades after that war for some reason that you couldn't explain coherently if you tried. They won the Vietnam War. They needed help after the war and they wanted good relations with us eventually. Keeping POW's makes ZERO sense in that regards. If it came out that they actually had kept POW's they'd be in horrible trouble both internally from people who need US investment and engagement and externally in the community of nations. Your belief that they have POW's is irrational in the absence of any proof to the contrary. It's a rightwing nutjob presentation. Now, if you want to make the case that they passed prisoners to the Soviets at least there's some coherency there. That theory doesn't require a continuing conspiracy that goes up to the highest levels of government over the last 4 decades. And BTW, the US intelligence community can read the label on a can from orbit. You really think the Vietnamese have underground fields somewhere that they are holding American POW's in? John McCain has been to Vietnam how many times trying to chase down leads?
No, you're assuming that I am assuming that there is some massive conspiracy by the government to keep government POWs, and you're being dense doing it. Any number of former VC soldiers who now run farms in Vietnam can have former POWs that now are simply indentured servants, and they also probably have money deals with local magistrates to keep those things quiet. And yeah, maybe somebody traded flesh with the Soviets and with China (and likely they were operating outside government channels), but the point is that there are still hundreds of US soldiers who were left behind there and not reported dead, and our country just traded 5 Taliban militants for a guy who it's becoming apparent was not captured but defected. Without blinking to the point that they started it out with a White House press conference, trying to look like heroes. You're deflecting, I guess it's deflection day.
I'm not deflecting. I'm pointing out to you that the odds on American slaves being held in Vietnam is basically nil. You really think that we wouldn't have concrete evidence if that was happening? What, you think those VC soldiers track the passes of US satellites overhead and move the slaves inside when an inconvenient picture could get taken? Really? Worry about real things. American POW's in Vietnam in 2014 and Bigfoot are not real.
US satellites? What the fuck? You think our country is using US satellites to look for American field slaves in Vietnam? I don't even know what you were thinking when you posted that. And yes, you are deflecting, as you often do when your argument is flimsy. Basically nil, why, because you don't want to think about it?
No, nil because I don't let my life be guided by .1% assumptions like the US POW in Vietnam assumptions. There were over 1,200 people missing in action at the end of the Vietnam war. More than 700 sets of remains have been found from those 1,200 people since then. None of the sets gave any evidence of having died after the end of the war. The remains were turned over to the families after they were recovered. Do you know how many US soldiers were MIA at the end of WWII? I'll let you look it up. Then you can tell us who is holding them prisoner and where.
Sets of buried dead remains of 700 out of 1200, that's supposed to convince anyone of what? That the Vietnamese or nice to people they are at war with? That left 500 unaccounted for, and I suppose we are to assume that they just got onto a spaceship with Richard Dreyfus and lived out nice lives on the moon? 5 fucking hundred, dude. .1% asssumption? You're rapidly approaching shill territory.
Whoa. Brad, please leave the race card-playing claptrap to the cynical, intellectually lazy tools such as Rev. Al and the like.
If you see the Vietnamese as subhuman slime it is easy to decide that they undertook the mass enslavement of POW's after the war. If you see them as patriots just interested in kicking colonial occupiers out then it's not. One of those is a racist assumption and the other is reality.
I see the Vietnamese as human beings, as capable of corruption and inhumanity as any other race of people, asshole.
Periodically in the decades after WWII a farmer in the Philippines would be clearing a dense stand of jungle at the edge of his fields and he'd take down a large tree and find the wreckage of a plane in it, often with several sets of remains of the crew who had not managed to get out before it went down. The WWII MIA number went down decade by decade as people were accounted for. The same thing has happened in Vietnam. It would happen in North Korea also if we had access to the areas that people went missing in during the Korean War. It's an emotional issue but the facts are that almost all if not all of the people who went missing in Vietnam are dead and have been dead for a long time. The odds are good that all of them are dead but we'll never know that for sure. Inventing a POW slave meme doesn't fix anything. It makes it harder for the families to get closure. It makes tons of cash for a few predators who milk the issue for all that it's worth, often at the expense of those same families. It's not like people haven't been all over Vietnam looking for POW's at this point. They have. They just haven't found any. It's time to let the issue rest so that the families involved can come to closure on it. Giving them false hope is like making them relive the loss every day.
