The American Conservative reported: “McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying, ‘Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.’ A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.”
“About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said, ‘This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington.” He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, “would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks.’”
“McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.”
What’s even sicker is how McCain demonized the two Pentagon chiefs’ sworn testimonies who testified under oath about the men left behind, while insisting that all the evidence — to include documents, witnesses, satellite photos — be completely buried. He would go on to paint the entire story as an “unpatriotic myth” calling the testimony of anyone coming forward Vietnam’s POW’s the “bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists.” To this day, McCain regularly vilifies those who try to get their hands on these classified documents (that he’s worked for decades to conceal) as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “dime-store Rambos.”