Regarding the suppressed history in this present matter, here is the core of it from Schanberg’s 8,130-word article:
“ . . . a senior North Vietnamese general’s briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them [half of them] at war’s end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.
“Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a Feb. 2, 1973 formal letter to Hanoi’s premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political conditions.” But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party “in accordance with its own constitutional provisions.” That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored—and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners—just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.
“In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners [approximately 600 in number] had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi’s desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture—were eventually executed.”
The US refused to pay Vietnam ”$3.25 billion in ‘postwar reconstruction’” (for Vietnam to deal with the consequences of America’s massive bombing, Agent-Orange toxification, etc., of their country) in order for Vietnam to release the remaining (the unreleased) half of the 1,205 US soldiers—prisoners who had participated in perpetrating these things upon Vietnam—prisoners whom Vietnam were holding for ransom. That’s $6.6 million per soldier who would be set free, under the agreed terms ending the war. A way could have been found to pay this without making the ransom public—for example, the CIA routinely spends money that’s non-official—but a US soldier’s safety and life just wasn’t worth it, to top US government officials, the people (including in the White House and in Congress) who held the power to honor the commitment that had been made to Vietnam. They didn’t want the American people to know, conclusively, that the US had lost the Vietnam war and even promised to pay $6.6 million per person to get 600 US soldiers freed. The French government had paid the ransom for theirs; the US government never paid the ransom for theirs. Whereas the French government took this as a governmental responsibility, the American government treated its soldiers who had carried out their missions for the US as merely taking lumps for what they had done (though the US aristocracy had actually sent them there to do it). So, the US aristocracy abandoned them. it was bipartisan perfidy by America’s aristocracy. But, this should be seen in the broader perspective: only around 600 Americans got slaughtered, not around 3,000, like in the 9/11 matter and the similar cover-up of the international aristocratic machinations behind that.
Of course, this news-story that Schanberg had worked decades to uncover, was far less important than some news-stories—such as America’s war, since 1990, to conquer Russia; an increasingly hot war that now seems rather likely to end in a globe-destroying nuclear war—but, still, it’s too big for America’s aristocracy to allow to be made public, because it shows that the real conflict in America isn’t between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, but between the US government and the US public. The aristocracy can’t allow that to become known, no matter how big a story it is, because it’s just one step away from admitting that the government represents some aristocracy, not the public. It would blow the cover off the American political reality.
This also explains, for example, why another of the great investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh, has been unable to get his most-important recent reports published in the United States, but only turn-downs for these articles, from his traditional publisher, The New Yorker magazine, and other US outlets that he has offered them to. These articles, which ultimately were published in the London Review of Books, present US President Barack Obama’s lying about the source of the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria, attributing it to Bashar al-Assad when Obama had to have been aware that it was not, and, in fact, the Obama administration itself was involved (along with the Sauds, and Qataris, and the Erdogan regime in Turkey) in preparing the attack. Obama continues to blame Assad for it (it was set up as a “false-flag attack”—the type of attack that’s designed specifically to be blamed on an ‘enemy’), because Assad is allied with Russia, while the US is allied with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which want to pipeline their oil and gas through Syria into the EU. For the Qataris and Sauds, it’s more about money, but for the US regime it’s about strangulating Russia’s economy by cutting off Russia’s largest oil-and-gas market—Europe—and cutting in America’s allies, the royal families who own Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Furthermore, the US government knows that the Saudi royals provided most of the financing for al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, and that also the royal families of Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait, are top funders of jihadist groups throughout the world. All of these matters are unpublishable in the US, because those are “US allies” (i.e., aristocracies that are allied with the US aristocracy).
When Unz, recently, on July 13th, made another try at getting the word out about the late Sydney Schanberg’s big story, he also wrote there about the ‘news’ media’s persistent cover-up of it when he had in 2010 published it (unfortunately at least two years too late) and when he brought together a symposium about it whose panelists included many leading journalists and publishers; Unz wrote:
“I felt confident we would attract a great deal of mainstream attention. I was on friendly terms with quite a number of established reporters and opinion columnists, and sent them advance copies of the material, speaking with some of them by phone, and discovering that all were as shocked by Syd’s revelations as I had been. Yet the result once again was utter and complete silence from mainstream media outlets, and no response to any of my follow-up notes. I was later told that one of America’s best-known investigative reporters read the story and found it stunning, yet he never said a word about it in public.”
Speaking for myself now (not quoting anyone here): I have experienced this news-suppression numerous times. I have been confidentially told by some top people in news media, and in academia, that certain realities cannot be made public, certain truths are simply unpublishable. (Perhaps that’s also the reason why this—which somehow, surprisingly, managed to be accepted for publication—was the last article that Huffington Post published from me, though they have continued to receive all of my submissions—and then they mysteriously zapped the 60K “Likes” on it, and replaced that number with “17K“ instead. And the “2,782 Comments“ were somehow mysteriously then shown below that, under “Conversations,” to have been only “1860 Comments.”)
I think the reason why the essential truths are not reported to the public isn’t that journalists and their editors don’t know those facts but instead that the owners would fire and blackball any reporters and editors and producers who enabled the public to know those facts—it’s simply forbidden, though there’s no published rule forbidding it.
For example, the best-selling nonfiction books aren’t published and successfully promoted to the best-seller lists because they’re the best on their respective topics, but because—just to mention here the main filter that’s used—they’re the ones that the aristocracy are not united about suppressing. The works that the aristocracy are united about suppressing are generally the highest quality nonfiction works of all, because widespread public knowledge of their facts would generate a revolution overthrowing the aristocracy: the public would come to understand that the problem isn’t “Republicans” and it isn’t “Democrats” and it isn’t “Whites” and it isn’t “Blacks” and it isn’t “Jews” and it isn’t “Muslims” and it isn’t “Catholics,” etc.: it’s instead the aristocracy themselves and their agents, some of which individuals are public figures, but the most important of whom are not (except that they might be on some lists of billionaires and centi-millionaires—but the very wealthiest people aren’t even listed there). And, of course, numerous crackpot books and articles are published about “the Illuminati” and about “the Warburgs,” “the Masons,” etc., which use lousy sources and misrepresent even those, and which therefore pose no threat at all to the individuals who really are in control; so, no ban exists against those works (the bad works), but only against the works that are soundly sourced and that do get the history right.
Often, the best works about public affairs don’t even get published at all—and the few that do get published, get iced by the ‘news’ media (regardless of their quality), and thus flop.
And that’s the reality. In a dictatorship. Getting to the truth, and getting it published, can be dangerous to one’s career, if one’s country is a dictatorship, such as in the US.
And here are just a few more examples of that.
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.
Investigative writer and historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of “They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910–2010,” and of “CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.”
