[David]

Here is the reply from Ted Sampley.


When Republican Senator John McCain, on February 13, 2004, distributed a press release personally attacking me and Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry (V.V.A.J.K), it was no surprise. The New York Times printed McCain's attack the following day.

McCain's smear is predicated on lies, innuendo and misinformation printed in Prisoners of Hope, a book written and published in 1994. McCain and his fellow senator John Kerry, a liberal Democrat, teamed up and secretly helped ghost write the book as part of their post Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs campaign to discredit and shutdown the leading POW/MIA activists.

In the February 13, release, McCain instructed reporters to be "cautious" of Ted Sampley or any organization to which he belongs and to thoroughly investigate "Sampley's background and history of spreading outrageous slander and other disreputable behavior before inadvertently lending him or his allegations any credibility."

"I am well familiar with Mr. Sampley, and I know him to be one of the most despicable people I have ever had the misfortune to encounter," McCain (of Charles F. Keating fame) warned the media. " I consider him a fraud who preys on the hopes of family members of missing servicemen for his own profit. He is dishonorable, an enemy of the truth, and despite his claims, he does not speak for or represent the views of all but a few veterans. The many veterans I know would think it a disgrace to be considered a comrade or supporter of Ted Sampley."

Back in 1972, while stationed at Fort Bragg, I volunteered my off duty time to a small POW/MIA group (Americans Who Care) which helped Joe McCain when he traveled through North Carolina seeking to raise public awareness about his brother POW John McCain. Joe, like so many other citizens was concerned about Hanoi's atrocious abuse of U.S. prisoners of war and wanted to ensure that POW McCain would be released when the war was over.

Yet, McCain categorizes me as "one of the most despicable people" he "ever had the misfortune to encounter?" What does that say about his relationship with the Vietnamese prison guards whom he claims brutally tortured him daily?

Even though McCain's slanderous attack on me has been repeated in the worldwide media, no reporter, journalist, or columnist explained exactly what McCain meant and I am not sure they knew. Apparently all they needed to know was that a "bonafide POW war hero" said it, whatever it meant, so it must be creditable enough to publish.

McCain's press release is classic black propaganda defined as an attack on a person or group using "lies, misrepresentations and innuendo fashioned to injure, impede or destroy the activity of another person or group." The lies are usually issued from contrived sources removed from the actual author. Its overall objective is to cause another person or a group to be labeled despicable, evil, frauds and non-creditable.

In this case, the method used to deliver the lies is "Prisoners of Hope." The removed sources were Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John McCain and Army Col. Joe Schlatter of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

McCain and Kerry used such tactics very effectively against POW/MIA families and activists during the 1991-92 Senate Select Committee on POW and MIA Affairs. Kerry was co-chairman and McCain, a committee member.

The Select Committee, established August 1991, was tasked with the mission of resolving the lingering POW/MIA issue by either gaining the release of American prisoners of war believed to be alive under the control of Hanoi, but never released, or explaining what happened to the missing prisoners.

In hindsight, it is obvious that McCain and Kerry were more interested in using the Select Committee as a means to justify lifting the U.S. imposed trade embargo against Vietnam than resolving the issue of missing U.S. servicemen.

From the onset of the hearings, Kerry and McCain's obvious bias for Vietnam were the source of many confrontations between the Select Committee and the POW/MIA activists.

At one point during the Select Committee hearings, the Kerry/McCain team were caught coaching DIA witnesses on how to discredit satellite imagery that showed the presence of living U.S. POWs in both Vietnam and Laos. When the activists found out about the witness tampering, they confronted Kerry and demanded his resignation. Numerous letters were written to the Select Committee demanding an outside investigation of the incident.

To deflect attention from their many clearly unethical acts, Kerry and McCain teamed up again and turned on the activist, managing to divert the entire Select Committee away from investigating Vietnam focusing instead on investigating the POW/MIA families and activist for alleged fraudulent fund raising.

The Kerry/McCain team disguised their investigation of the POW/MIA families and activists and the subpoenaing of private and organizational financial records by claiming they only wanted "to get to the truth." Kerry and McCain explained that they were looking for "professional predators" who were at work within the POW/MIA issue "feeding on the false hopes of the POW/MIA families."

In actuality, Kerry and McCain adopted the presumption that anyone or organization who raised funds based the assertion that Vietnam was still holding living American POWs was committing fraudulent fund-raising and deserved to be publicly chastised and prosecuted in court.

The Select Committee was formed because of the volumes of intelligence pointing to the existence of live POWs still in captivity.

McCain, the "former POW hero," wasted no time making headlines by alleging that most of the activist involved in POW/MIA issue were only in it for the money. He stated in front of a room full of cameras, "the people who have done these things are not zealots in a good cause. They are criminals and some of the most craven, most cynical and most despicable human beings to ever run a scam."

In two sentences McCain effectively branded nearly all the activist POW/MIA families and Vietnam veteran activists as "despicable" and "criminals."

Now you know what McCain was talking about when he referred to me as "despicable" and a "fraud who preys on the hopes of family members of missing servicemen for his own profit."

Another activist whom Kerry and McCain attempted to malign was former POW, Navy Capt. Eugene "Red" McDaniel (Ret.).

McDaniel, who journalist Monika Jensen-Stevenson characterized as "one of the most tortured Americans in the history of war" was lumped into the fraud category because he had committed the unpardonable offense, in Kerry's and McCain's eyes, of drafting a letter signed by fifty of his fellow POWs urging that the Vietnam trade embargo not be lifted until Hanoi provided a full and honest accounting of all American POW/MIAs.

Nearing the end of the Select Committee, the Kerry/McCain team announced to the press that they had turned their findings over to the Justice Department and assured them that multiple indictments would follow.

Much later, after the national media had lost interest, a Justice Department official quietly acknowledged that the investigation had been completed and they had found no illegal activities and no reason to indict anyone.

I was one of the leading activists who demanded Kerry's resignation for witness tampering and one of the first the Kerry/McCain tag team singled out for investigation. They subpoenaed my personal financial records, those of the US Veteran Dispatch ( my privately owned veteran's newspaper) and Homecoming II Project, a now defunct non-profit POW/MIA organization which I had been appointed to chair.

After dissecting all of the seized records, the best the Kerry/McCain fraud investigators could deliver was an accusation that over the period of a couple of years Homecoming II had paid Ted Sampley $300,000.00 for t-shirts. I was not aware of the accusation until after it had been printed in the Select Committee Final Report. That accusation is an unadulterated lie.

It was manufactured to impugn me personally by implying that my motive for demanding an honest accounting of U.S. POW/MIAs is greed. Kerry and McCain could not document that accusation then, or can they now. They lied.

At the time of the Select Committee, Homecoming II was the most active POW/MIA organization in the country. We had office's in Washington, Thailand and in North Carolina, where I live. The U.S. Veteran Dispatch is a newspaper that I have been publishing since 1986. We were printing up to 20,000 copies per month which were distributed free to the public unless it was received by mail. The newspaper was funded through the sale of veteran related materials.

By causing the activists to be investigated for fraud, Kerry and McCain not only drew attention away from their unethical acts, but also away from findings the Select Committee was finally being forced to acknowledge - "there is evidence, moreover that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number [U.S. POW's held captive by Vietnam] after Operation Homecoming," (quoted from page 7 of the Select Committee January 13, 1993 report).

From the beginning it had been Kerry and McCain's objective to discredit all evidence pointing to the possibility of living US POW's left behind in Vietnam. Instead of giving the POW's the benefit of the doubt by trying to prove that they were still alive, the Kerry/McCain team took the position that there was no proof that POW's were still alive.

Both Kerry and McCain continued to work hard to normalize diplomatic and trade relations with communist Vietnam. Kerry and McCain knew that President Bill Clinton was being pressured to lift the embargo and that he needed their help because candidate Clinton had promised, in an April 27, 1992 campaign letter, not to normalize relations or offer any assistance to Vietnam until it had fully assisted in solving the live POW issue.

"Before I would normalize relations or provide assistance to any of the countries involved, they would be required to open their files and actively assist in solving this issue. I firmly believe that America should never leave its warriors on the battlefield. This is not a political issue; it is a moral test of those values and traits that made America great," Clinton said in the letter.

POW/MIA family organizations remained adamantly opposed to removing the embargo. They believed, rightfully so, that the embargo was the only leverage powerful enough to force Vietnam to come clean.

By 1994, the way was clear for Kerry and McCain to provide political cover for President Clinton with his efforts to lift the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam.

In a smoothly choreographed political maneuver, Clinton used the two "Vietnam War heroes" and their "no POWs are left alive conclusion" as justification to lift the trade embargo...having them stand side by side with him when he made the announcement.

At the same time, to ensure that the POW issue could be not be resurrected by the POW/MIA families and activist, Kerry and McCain consummated their deceit by spoon feeding tainted and false data to Susan Katz Keating, an ambitious Washington Times reporter who was hoping to write a bestseller book - Prisoners of Hope..

Kerry and McCain also relied heavily on their secret Pentagon collaborator, Army Col. Joe Schlatter who from 1986 to 1995, was tasked with running the Defense Intelligence Agency Special Office for POW-MIA Affairs.

Schlatter's job while heading the POW/MIA office was to correlate and interpret the hundreds of intelligence reports about living American POWs left in Southeast Asia that were pouring into the Pentagon.

Schlatter had actually early on in his assignment begun to systematically kill on paper the several hundred U.S. servicemen described as prisoners in the intelligence reports.

Later when called upon by the Kerry/McCain team, Schlatter joined in attempting to discredit (killing the messenger) any individual or group that got in the way of plans to normalize U.S. trade relations with Vietnam.

Schlatter made sure that Keating was issued a special Pentagon identification card giving her extensive access to his office, thoughts and opinions. Schlatter often acted as a private conduit between the Kerry/McCain team and Keating.

By November 1994, Keating had written and published Prisoners of Hope; Exploiting the POW Myth in America (Random House). In her acknowledgments, Keating makes mention of her indebtedness to "contacts within the Department of Defense." In addition, she gave "special mention" to "POW hero, Senator John McCain, who graciously returned every phone call and answered every question."

It did not take the POW families long to learn that Keating's Prisoners of Hope was a foul regurgitation of Kerry and McCain's allegations against the activists who had diligently kept the POW/MIA issue before the American people for years, people Keating labeled as "phonies and unscrupulous."

Keating wrote that the POW/MIA issue was a "destructive national myth" and that President Clinton should immediately get rid of it by declaring dead all servicemen listed as missing in action. He did shortly afterward.

Prisoners of Hope is sloppy, plagued by lies, and gross errors. Using innuendos, lies and scrambled facts, along with the help of Kerry and McCain, Keating, attacked all the leading POW/MIA activists. She hoped to convince her readers "that for more than 20 years POW/MIA families, veterans, and concerned citizens, faked the issue of American servicemen still missing from the Vietnam War to "scam the American public of millions of dollars" in donations.

Keating accused former Vietnam POWs "Red" McDaniel and Mark Smith, Senator Bob Smith, R-NH, former Congressman Billy Hendon, R-NC, former Congressman John LeBoutillier, R-NY, former Army Lieutenant Colonel James "Bo" Gritz, former Army Green Beret Ted Sampley and others of being "charlatans and frauds" who were helping to "further" the POW/MIA "conspiracy myth" for "profit."

Even after many victims of Keating's poison pen offered factual evidence of her misrepresentations and negligence, the establishment press still took Keating's work at face value.

Instead of recognizing Prisoners of Hope as undocumented literary garbage, they gave it "rave" reviews, adding that it was time for POW families to move on and forget the "ghosts" of Vietnam.

In 1995, not long after Keating's Prisoners of Hope hit the book stores and the discount table, Col. Schlatter retired.

From the safety of his retirement, Col. Schlatter finally admitted his true colors on the Internet, "I am a retired Army colonel and my politics are somewhat to the left; I am a yellow-dog Democrat and voted for Bill Clinton twice. I favor serious gun control."

Col. Schlatter's admittance that he is a "leftist," a Clinton loyalist who favors "serious gun control," and a "Yellow Dog Democrat, (meaning he would vote for a yellow dog before he would a Republican)" might explain why he so vigorously defends the communist Vietnamese?

Forever the loyal partisan collaborator, Co. Joe Schlatter has kept the lies in Keating's failed book alive by posting it's contents on the Internet on news groups such as alt.war.vietnam.

By 1997, he created a "MIA Facts" web domain miafacts.org. Any time information or comments pertaining to the POW/MIA issue or information critical of McCain and Kerry appear on the Internet, Col. Schlatter will jump in suggesting that the poster should visit his web pages to read "the real truth" about what he calls the "POW/MIA myth." Miafacts.org is peppered with twisted facts, lies, and distortions, pure black propaganda.

By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch
February 29, 2004