[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 26, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: January 26, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                Amendment No. 1263 to Amendment No. 1262

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for 
its immediate consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Kerry], for himself, 
     Mr. McCain, Mr. Robb, Mr. Murkowski, Mr. Kerrey, Mr. Simpson, 
     Mr. Johnston, Mr. Pressler, Mr. Warner, Mr. Inouye, Mr. 
     Chafee, Mr. Pell, Mrs. Kassebaum, Mr. Mathews, Mr. Bennett, 
     and Mr. Akaka proposes an amendment numbered 1263 to 
     amendment No. 1262.

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the 
amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       Strike all after the first word in the pending amendment 
     and insert the following:
       Of the Senate.--It is the Sense of the Senate that--
       (1) The government of the United States is committed to 
     seeking the fullest possible accounting of American 
     servicemen unaccounted for during the war in Vietnam;
       (2) Cooperation by the Government of Vietnam on resolving 
     the fate of those American servicemen unaccounted for has 
     increased significantly over the last three years and is 
     essential to the resolution of outstanding POW/MIA cases;
       (3) Substantial and tangible progress has been made in the 
     POW/MIA accounting process;
       (4) Cooperative efforts between the U.S. and Vietnam should 
     continue in order to resolve all outstanding questions 
     concerning the fate of Americans missing-in-action;
       (5) U.S. senior military commanders and U.S. personnel 
     working in the field to account for U.S. POW/MIAs in Vietnam 
     believe that lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam 
     will facilitate and accelerate the accounting efforts;
       (6) Therefore, in order to maintain and expand further U.S. 
     and Vietnamese efforts to obtain the fullest possible 
     accounting, the President should lift the U.S. trade embargo 
     against Vietnam expeditiously; and
       (7) Moreover, as the U.S. and Vietnam move toward 
     normalization of relations, the Government of Vietnam should 
     demonstrate further improvements in meeting internationally 
     recognized standards of human rights.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. I understand the amendment is in the form of a second-
degree amendment?
  Mr. KERRY. It is in the form of a second-degree amendment to the 
amendment of the Senator from Arizona.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts is recognized.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, the amendment that I have sent to the desk 
commences what I and other Senators believe is a very important 
discussion for the U.S. Senate.
  I have sent this amendment to the desk with 16 cosponsors. They are: 
Senator McCain; Senator Robb; Senator Murkowski; Senator Bob Kerrey of 
Nebraska; Senator Simpson; Senator Johnston; Senator Pressler; Senator 
Warner; Senator Inouye; Senator Chafee; Senator Pell; Senator 
Kassebaum; Senator Mathews; Senator Bennett; and Senator Akaka.
  This amendment seeks to address the question of our current 
relationship with Vietnam and the embargo that is currently in place 
pending judgments about the accounting of our prisoners of war.
  Mr. President, I know this is a sensitive issue, as does the Senator 
from Arizona. We bring it to the floor with the utmost sensitivity and 
with a great deal of consideration. We believe very deeply in one 
simple concept: That if we urge the President of the United States, as 
this amendment seeks to do, to expeditiously lift the embargo against 
Vietnam, we will do a better, faster and more thorough job of providing 
answers to our families and to our veterans about POW-MIA.
  We do not offer this amendment to pick a fight with anyone. We do not 
do it with any disrespect to anybody. To the contrary. I think it is 
fair to say we do it with the utmost respect, particularly to the 
families who have carried with them deep questions for 20-plus years 
about what happened to loved ones who were lost in Vietnam. But we are 
convinced that the goal of achieving the biggest accounting possible of 
our veterans is best served by moving forward in a cooperative process 
that will get Americans into Vietnam and help us to find the answers 
that we seek regarding those loved ones.
  I know that some are going to come to the floor and say, ``Don't 
reward Vietnam.'' This is not a reward. We will explain 100 different 
ways why it is not. Some will say, ``Don't take your leverage away.'' 
We will point out it is not a question of taking away leverage, but 
rather a question of giving us more leverage, about how this is a 
mechanism for opening the doors that have been shut for 20 and 25 
years.
  More than 25 years ago, many of us who are cosponsors of this 
legislation put on the uniform of our country and volunteered to go 
across the ocean to Vietnam to fight for freedom. We hoped ultimately 
for a democratic nation. Like so many others, I joined and I 
volunteered and I went because I wanted to beat back communism, I 
wanted to give the Vietnamese a chance for themselves. For reasons far 
too numerous and, frankly, not even relevant to the discussion today, 
that particular effort failed.
  But we come to the floor today convinced that that difficult period 
of 25 years ago and the democracy and the freedom that we sought then 
do not have to become the story of a chapter of failure. Rather, if we 
take the right steps, in the days ahead, Vietnam can become, finally, a 
chapter of success for this country.
  We believe that it is by giving meaning to the 58,000-plus names on 
the Wall in Washington, by ending some of the divisions in this country 
and understanding how we can best answer the difficult questions that 
remain for families that we can, indeed, begin the process of writing 
that final chapter of this war. Millions of Vietnamese citizens 
supported us, and they are still in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of 
soldiers supported us. They are still in Vietnam, some of them without 
arms or legs and only their scars as the witness to their service for 
our country and our ideals. They could benefit by the infusion of 
American assistance and ultimately a relationship. They would benefit 
by more Americans being in their country to guarantee human rights and 
to guarantee that they ultimately may be able to have the chance to 
live in the kind of society that we originally fought for.
  So much is at stake in the decision we make or not make. But what is 
really critical, as colleagues make a judgment about whether or not we 
should move forward, is the basic goal: How do we best get the 
accounting for our families? That is the issue. The President of the 
United States has followed a policy first established by President 
Reagan, followed through on by President Bush, that he is going to try 
to get the fullest accounting possible of our missing. Mr. President, 
you cannot do that if you are not there. You cannot get that accounting 
if the Vietnamese do not cooperate with us. You cannot get that 
accounting if you are not talking to the Vietnamese soldiers, the 
Vietnamese leaders, the generals, the others who know something about 
that war. You cannot get the answers if you do not have access to the 
archives. You cannot get the answers if you cannot go around their 
countryside asking questions and searching.
  For 19 years or so, we were not able to do any of the things that I 
just talked about and, in fact, we did not get answers. Families lived 
year after year after year not knowing what happened to some loved one 
and, frankly, not having the Government of this country do enough to 
find out. Then finally, in 1988, Gen. John Vessey went over to Vietnam 
and began a process of engagement. President Reagan is to be commended 
for having entered into that effort to try to guarantee that we had a 
greater accountability process. General Vessey painstakingly built up a 
process by which we gave a little, they gave a little, we gave a 
little, we kept pressure, we kept the process going, and we have begun 
to get answers.
  When I started with the POW-MIA Select Committee, we had 2,268 people 
on the list of those missing or POW in Vietnam. We are now down to 
2,238--not a huge reduction. But the reason that that reduction is not 
as great as it might be reflecting the answers we have truly found is 
that in order for a name to come off the list, you have to have the 
remains back in this country and the remains have to be fully 
identified. We have had difficulty--difficulty finding remains, 
difficulty getting the remains hopefully identified. In some cases, we 
do not find enough of the remains to be able to positively identify. In 
other cases, not for the want of the Vietnamese turning over remains, 
we are simply not able to make an identification. But we have been able 
to make many identifications.
  What I think is a far more significant figure--and I think this is an 
important figure when you measure it against the assertions of some 
veterans groups and some individuals regarding this issue. We often 
hear people say: ``We're not making progress. The Vietnamese can do 
more, there's not enough progress.'' Let me first ask colleagues to 
reflect on what is happening in Vietnam today in the context of this 
effort.
  No two nations that ever fought a war against each other have ever 
entered into as significant an arrangement or as significant an 
endeavor to try to find the missing as we have been doing in 1992, 
1993, and 1994. This is the most significant remains retrieval and 
identification effort in the history of warfare. You cannot find a time 
with the Romans or the Greeks or the Germans or the Japanese, or anyone 
else, where two nations that have fought against each other are side by 
side out on those battlefields trying to find remains and find the 
answers. This is the single most important effort.
  In an effort to try to put the Vietnamese to the test back in the 
early 1990's, or late 1980's, General Vessey went through the list of 
2,268 names. Out of those 2,268 names, 1,600-plus are in Vietnam; 500 
or so are in Laos, and the remainder in Cambodia.
  Of those 2,268 General Vessey--I think it was 69 at the time--General 
Vessey went through the loss incidents of those cases, and he chose the 
hardest cases, the cases where we would have some cause for possible 
belief that someone might have survived their incident.
  General Vessey read the folder, the loss incident, and he took those 
cases where we had a belief that captain so and so, or major so and so, 
or lieutenant so and so might have survived his incident or that we 
just did not know what happened to him. You might have had two 
airplanes flying beside each other and then there was an explosion and 
one disappeared in a fireball. They did not see a parachute. On the 
other hand, the last thing they knew the person was alive and flying 
the plane. They did not have any contact on the ground. They did not 
see the parachute. We list the person as MIA. They are on the list.
  You may have had a much more compelling case where you actually had a 
parachute and you had somebody dropping to the Earth, and you had radio 
communication with the person. Then they were on the ground and they 
heard the enemy coming, and in the radio communication they said, ``I 
hear the men. I'm going to have to sign off now.'' And that is the last 
we knew of that person. We know they reached the ground. We know they 
were alive. We know they were in the vicinity of the enemy, but we 
never heard from them again.
  Or we had instances where we knew someone was captured. We knew they 
were in prison. We knew they died. But we did not get their remains 
back, so that raises a question: How can you have somebody in captivity 
and not know where the remains are?
  General Vessey put 196 of these tough cases in front of the 
Vietnamese. For someone who says we are not making progress, I ask them 
to measure what has happened to those cases. They have gone from 196 
cases down to 73 cases, and of those 120 or so cases that we have 
resolved, we now know to a certainty what happened to that person. We 
know now to a certainty that person is not languishing alive in a 
bamboo cage in Vietnam. We know to a certainty that person was not a 
captive. We know to a certainty where they died, how they died, and we 
are now in the process of trying to excavate and find their remains. We 
are currently spending about $1.7 million per remains which we are 
trying to retrieve in Vietnam.
  Now, for people who say to me, ``Senator, that's not important; the 
Vietnamese could just tell you all about it,'' I ask them to look at 
the reality of what happened just last week in Vietnam when I was 
there. We had a site in Quang Ngai Province where we lost five 
personnel, ground troops on a long-range mission. They went up into a 
small hillside and all five of them were shot. We know they were shot 
at the time because our rescue people went in to get them. When our 
rescue people got there, they found only two bodies buried in a very 
shallow area of rock, but they saw a trail of blood leading down from 
those two bodies into a field. They recorded this in the reports at 
that moment in time.
  The Vietnamese in the last weeks have helped us find the people who 
shot those men. They helped us find the people who were witnesses to 
the burial. And by finding the people who were witnesses to the burial, 
we were able to find an area in the field that we literally isolated 
and took over as an archaeological dig. We dug up some farmer's field 
with the help of the Vietnamese finding it because they told us that 
the three other bodies were lain out one, two, three beside each other 
right there in the field.
  Now, Mr. President, I would like to share with my colleagues 
photographs of this effort that some people say is not cooperative.
  This is an archaeological dig in a particular field in Vietnam. This 
is what we are doing, case by case, in order to eliminate the 
possibilities. We cannot do this without the cooperation of the 
Vietnamese. If they do not help us find the place, if they do not let 
us fly to the place, if they do not go to the place to dig with us, if 
they do not help us get the permission of the local people, if they do 
not help us find the people who know what happened, this does not 
happen and a family does not learn anything.
  Right up here in the back is the hillside, and I landed in a 
helicopter right over here the other day and walked through this dig 
the day I was there. The day after this it was even larger. This is an 
example of how complicated it is to find the remains.
  Here is another picture from another angle of the dig area. These are 
Americans, American soldiers, I might add, active duty American 
military personnel, working side by side with Vietnamese military 
personnel. They are out there in the jungle with snakes and unexploded 
ordnance, in extraordinarily uncomfortable conditions, week after week, 
without their mail. We do not have diplomatic relations so they do not 
have anything coming in. They are out there digging on a daily basis. 
This is an example.
  Here is a closer example of the extent of this dig, with people going 
in, walls caving in, constant work, bucket for bucket. Every single 
bucket of earth that is unearthed is sifted and the Vietnamese are 
setting up lines of people to help us sift through it.
  Here is another example of this dig from another angle with folks 
just sort of walking around looking at it.
  Here is an example of Vietnamese themselves working right in the dig, 
villagers, army personnel and others helping us, bucket by bucket, to 
bring this out.
  Well, this paid off. On the last day of the dig, just as they were 
about to give up, they uncovered the three bodies lain out one by one, 
right beside each other, precisely in the manner that was described.
  Now, we have not positively identified those three bodies yet, but 
one would assume, given the extent of information and knowledge we have 
about what happened, that the chances of positive identification are 
enormous. This is precisely how we have identified cases to date.
  This is painstaking. Why do we have to do it? We have to do this 
because until you found those three bodies, you had people running 
around this country claiming every conspiracy in the world: That they 
went to Russia; they went to China; or they may be alive.
  We have an obligation to find out the answer for our families. So we 
are doing it. But I wish to emphasize to every colleague the answers 
are not here in this country. The answers are in someone else's 
country, a country called Vietnam. And unless the Vietnamese let us do 
these things, our families will not get answers. It is that simple.
  Now, Admiral Larson, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific fleet, 
went to this dig, as he did to others in the ensuing days, and he has 
concluded, as have the other senior active duty military people who 
have served during this war, that we need to lift this embargo in order 
to guarantee that this kind of cooperation continues because we made a 
deal with the Vietnamese.
  The deal we made with the Vietnamese was if they help us get 
documents and they help us get archives and they help us get access and 
they help us with the excavations and the cases, we will reciprocate. 
That is the road map to deal with this embargo.
  (Mrs. FEINSTEIN assumed the Chair.)
  Mr. KERRY. Now, let me just say, Madam President, after I went to 
this dig, I flew up into the highlands. I landed in a place where our 
special forces used to work. There I saw the most remarkable sight. We 
landed in the midst of 2,000 Montagnard tribespeople who welcomed us 
there to help dig up their field and look for American remains. There 
was a huge hole in the middle of this extraordinary plateau and there 
were 100 Vietnamese troops in a bucket brigade working alongside 
Americans, bucket for bucket, lifting out the dirt from this hole in 
order to find out whether three bodies might still be within this 
aircraft because we do not know what happened to three crew members, 
although we recovered two of the crew members in this explosion in the 
loss of this aircraft.
  I walked down 3\1/2\ meters into the Earth, right beside the wheel 
base of this aircraft, and all around me in the red earth was 
disintegrated aluminum, shreds from this aircraft which I could pull 
out of the Earth with my hands, and did. Bucket for bucket, this is 
being sifted in order to discover whether or not there might be the 
remains of the three people we cannot find to determine whether or not 
they might have been alive. Were they prisoners somewhere? Were they 
not? One hundred Vietnamese soldiers.
  Now, we have a decision to make. We can lose this cooperation if we 
do not begin to act in a mature and sensible fashion with respect to 
this relationship.
  This cannot be a one-way street. We sat there for 19 years in a one-
way street, and we got nothing. For the last 2 years, we have had a 
two-way street, and we have gotten the greatest amount of cooperation 
that we have ever had. Let me describe that to my colleagues.
  A couple of years ago when I first went back to Vietnam, we had no 
office in Hanoi, no permanent office. We had one or two people 
occasionally visiting and working out of a hotel. We had no access to 
archives. We had no access to the countryside. We could not go out 
except on a few missions, and we had none of this kind of cooperation. 
We had no interviews of Vietnamese generals, battalion commanders, or 
the historians of their tradition houses, as they are called. We had no 
access to military bases. We had no access to prisons. We had not had, 
at that point in time, an ability to interview a whole bunch of people 
who held John McCain a prisoner who were involved in some of the major 
battles with us. We did not have the ability to follow up on live 
sighting reports, and many veterans in this country were saying, ``What 
are you guys doing? We are getting reports of live Americans, and you 
do not even go over there and look.'' Well, we did not have the ability 
to go and look wherever we wanted.
  Madam President, in the last 2 years we have had a remarkable change. 
We now have a permanent office in Hanoi. We now have 107 active duty 
military personnel in Vietnam. We have American military personnel who 
are allowed to travel anywhere they want in Vietnam without escort. We 
now have our general with a multiple reentry visa so he can come in and 
out whenever he wants to, which we did not have. We now have an 
archival researcher who has a permanent pass to go into the national 
defense archives of the Vietnamese and the national archives and 
research on a daily basis, and they are doing that.
  We now have had every single live sighting report that we had that 
was considered an active live sighting report followed up on. We have 
gone out and landed in their military bases unexpectedly. I did that 
with Senator Smith. We landed unauthorized in the middle of a military 
base, and 100 soldiers ran up to us. And we interviewed them and talked 
to them spontaneously about whether they had seen Americans.
  We went into prisons spontaneously. We were allowed into sections of 
the prisons they did not think we were going to go into. We were 
allowed to haul their prisoners out of their cells and interrogate them 
as to whether or not they had seen Americans or knew anything about 
prisoners of war.
  We have been allowed to go into every single one of their tradition 
houses. They have now been visited.
  They have turned over to us some 20,000 documents, 5,000 photographs, 
and those documents have helped us with specific cases about specific 
people who were lost, and we have in fact been able to bring home to 
families news about their loved ones as a consequence of those kinds of 
documents. I would like to share with my colleagues an example of the 
kind of documents that we are receiving as recently as last week.
  We have been able to secure some of the documents that we thought, 
through our intelligence sources, were the most important documents in 
helping us to resolve some of the cases. Let me give you an example of 
the kind of assistance we have.
  Last summer or somewhere in that vicinity, we received photographs 
that showed an American pilot dead on the ground. So we now had 
evidence of a soldier, an airman, who was shot down and who had died. 
But we did not have remains. We did not know the circumstances of the 
death. So we have begun a process of trying to track that down.
  The Vietnamese delivered to me, and they delivered it to Secretary 
Lord a few days earlier also, a document that has the names of people 
who died in captivity, where they died, the date they died, where they 
were buried, and now we are going out to the sites of those burials. We 
are person for person able to try to corroborate whether or not the 
death was in circumstances we believed it to be or have subsequently 
learned it to be or now know it to be.
  This will enable us ultimately to do what these people are doing 
here, which is do the final corroboration. It will not happen next 
month or 10 months from now. This could take us 5 years or 10 years. We 
cannot sit frozen in a time warp with respect to Vietnam believing that 
somehow, not engaged, not having Americans there, we are going to 
empower this process more than we will in our current status.
  Let me give you another example. We are now interviewing soldiers. I 
would like to share with you a rather remarkable moment. I went back to 
Vietnam last year with Senator John McCain and with Congressman Pete 
Peterson. Both of them spent about 6 years-plus in Hanoi in prison. It 
was a remarkable thing to walk back into this prison where they had 
spent this time of agony and pain.
  We were able to witness Senator John McCain and Congressman Pete 
Peterson being able to publicly, in front of the press, interrogate the 
people who had interrogated them 20 years ago. That is a remarkable 
turn of events for any proud country to allow there senior military 
people and others to be subjected to public interrogation.
  We are now receiving documents from military people. This is an 
example of one. It is a battalion commander's war diaries. It talks of 
specific shootdowns and specific incidents. His personal diaries have 
now given us information with respect to several cases that we needed 
information on. As a consequence of these diaries, our teams are able 
to go out, talk to more people, gather more information, and, 
hopefully, find some resolution with respect to a family's questions.
  Madam President, we can sit here and we can play sort of a strong-arm 
tactic that says, until you--as the American Legion says--turn over the 
live prisoners, we are not doing anything, despite the fact that 
unanimously the Senate select committee signed off on the fact that 
there is no compelling evidence that anybody is alive. Not one of our 
people in Vietnam has found any evidence that they are alive.
  I might add that we met with 14 ambassadors of our allied nations--
France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, Australia. They have 
been in Vietnam since 1975. And not one of those embassies has ever had 
one bit of information come to them that an American was alive in 
Vietnam. They have been there even in the dark days of 1975, 1976, and 
1977 when we could not get anything into Vietnam. They have told us 
they have never received any information. That is, after all, how Bobby 
Garwood came out of Vietnam. He came out by going up to a foreign 
person. If Bobby Garwood can get out by going up to a foreign person, 
then the more people you have in the country, the more opportunity 
there would be for some potentially live persons to go up to somebody 
and get out.
  Just the other day an American businessman who was in Hanoi under the 
current legal structure where you are allowed to be there but you 
cannot do business, hung an American flag out his window. People came 
in off the street because there was an American flag. And they told him 
information about someone they knew had been killed. He turned the 
information over to our team, and our team is now following up on it 
and believes it is valuable information. That is because you had an 
American flag and an American in the country.
  So you know, we can sit here and say no, no, no, no.
  You have to give us this, even though we do not know for sure they 
have it; we think they might, but we do not know. Until you give us 
what we do not know you have, we are not going to do anything. Well, 
that is now an invitation to disaster, because we made a deal with the 
Vietnamese. The deal was: If you cooperate, we will cooperate. And we 
are running out of gas. We have asked them to extend that cooperation. 
I think we are reaching a point where we can see this shut down and we 
can see less people able to travel and we can see less answers coming 
back to our people.
  Madam President, for people to say ``why do we not pay a lot of money 
and cut a deal and get them all back,'' we have tried it. I personally 
walked around with the foreign minister in the garden talking to him 
and said, ``Suppose we would pay you $1 billion.'' And I said, ``If we 
offered money and if you have live people, and we get them back, can we 
cut a deal?'' General Vessey tried it. Assistant Secretary of State 
Solomon tried it. Winston Lord tried it. The Vietnamese look you in the 
face and say, ``We do not have anybody. We would love to do it, but we 
cannot give you somebody we do not have.''
  So, Madam President, even at the point where George Bush was about to 
leave office, a deal was offered to them that if they could give x 
number of remains, we would lift the embargo. Do you not think they 
would have given the remains and had the embargo lifted? But they could 
not do it. When our Senate committee was there, we said, ``This report 
we are going to put out is a very important report, and it will help 
condition how Americans view this issue. If you can get more remains or 
documents, you have a better chance that this report is going to be a 
stronger one.'' Notwithstanding that reality and their good knowledge 
of the American media structure and our politics, they were not able to 
ante up anything dramatic to change the dynamic.
  You tell me, if George Bush could not get it when he was leaving 
office and he could have lifted the embargo if they produced 25 
remains, how you wait until 20 years and push them to do something they 
have not done in the last 19 years? It is beyond me. Do you think the 
Vietnamese are going to walk up with some smoking gun document and say: 
By the way, we are happy to tell you that we had 50 people alive for 20 
years and we used them as slave labor, and then we shot them. Now we 
are giving you the evidence, and we want you to give us normal 
relations and, by the way, help us a lot.
  It is not going to work that way. It is going to work this way--
painstakingly. The way we are going to get answers is the way we have 
received the documents we have received so far--by working 
cooperatively with them and getting people who can point to where the 
documents are, by holding them up in their face in a way that shows the 
evidence as we find it and by confronting them.
  I want to make it very clear to my colleagues that there is nothing 
in this amendment that is based on trusting the Vietnamese or anyone 
else. This is a verification process, not trust. But the way we are 
going to verify is to get Americans into their country, is to have 
access to their records, is to interview their people and proceed 
painstakingly down this road. We are not going to get those answers by 
stonewalling and setting up a barrier between us and them that merely 
continues the difficult years we had when we did not get any answers.
  I can only say to my colleagues that one of the great mistakes we 
made in the war was not listening to the people who were in the field 
fighting the war. So the politicians back home gave in to whatever 
impulses and made a lot of decisions and even called bombing raids from 
the White House. Well, let us practice that lesson in 1994. We have 
soldiers in the field who are telling us today that they will be helped 
by lifting the embargo. Our commanding admiral was just there. He 
thinks we will be helped. General Christmas, a war hero from the U.S. 
Marines, a Navy Cross winner, wounded at Hue, believes we ought to move 
forward in ways that will open up the process so that we can begin to 
really get the answers. General Needham, Tom Needham, wounded at 
Kontum, fought in Vietnam, two tours, volunteered, went back, and now 
is back there commanding this effort. He says, ``Help us open up the 
process,'' and the way you open up the process is by reciprocating.
  Madam President, I think our colleagues ought to understand the 
significance of what is happening in Vietnam. On that plateau, which I 
described a moment ago--and I did not quite finish the story--in that 
hole of that C-130, they just took out 100- pound bombs, 18 of them, 
and they had to be defused so these guys could do the digging they are 
doing. We have people walking in high jungle area, a 4\1/2\ hour walk 
up a mountain between red flags, in order not to set off unexploded 
ordnance, in an effort to try to do this. They are telling us that it 
will help them if you lift this embargo, if you get more Americans in 
there, if you facilitate their access to these places.
  So I hope colleagues are going to think hard about what the reality 
is. Sixty percent of Vietnam is under the age of 24 years. The vast 
majority of this 77 million population does not know anything about the 
war, except for the craters that they walk in and the digs that they 
see us doing. When they saw me, an American, they were delighted I was 
not a Russian and they were thrilled to see us.
  We ought to start to wake up to reality here, Madam President. Some 
Senators may talk about conspiracy theories and other things. Our 
Senate report found unanimously that there has been no conspiracy to 
hide here. We have had sloppiness and inadvertence and some negligence, 
but we have not had people willfully try to hide something. We have had 
some tragedies in this effort. But the bottom line is that we are 
getting answers. We are down to 73 tough cases. In some of those cases 
we may never find the remains. We may never find the answers. But we 
have to understand that the best shot of doing so is to guarantee that 
we have access and that we have Americans moving around the country.
  There are many other reasons, Madam President--and I could offer 
them--as to why this is important. But it is not really what this issue 
is about. We could talk about China and the importance of being 
involved in the region. We could talk about the efforts to try to 
sustain some of those kids and others who still look to us and who wish 
we were there in some way or another. We could talk more about the 
people that we supported and who fought with us. We could talk more, I 
suppose, about the larger economic interests and other things.
  In fact, this embargo is, candidly, not an embargo against the 
Vietnamese anymore. It is truly an embargo against ourselves, because 
Vietnam is growing at 7 percent a year, and the French, Germans, 
Taiwanese, Japanese, and others are not hesitating to invest. They have 
invested something like $10 billion--$2.9 billion in the last couple of 
years. The country is growing. They will do fine without us. They would 
like to deal with us, but they will be OK without us.
  Boeing, the other day, on the other hand, lost eight airplanes to 
Airbus, and Digital lost a huge contract to one of the Japanese 
companies. We will never see those again. That is OK, because this is 
not about economics, and that is why I am not dwelling on it. The issue 
before the U.S. Senate is how do you guarantee that we are going to get 
the best accounting possible, and based on the experience of General 
Vessey, based on the plea of Admiral Larson and the people who are in 
the field, based on the reality of what we are seeing and the documents 
being produced and the access to people and the whole capacity we have 
to criss-cross their country, it is clear to me that if we do not move 
forward, we could be jeopardized and lose the opportunity to get 
answers.
  I will have more to say on this at a later time, Madam President; but 
I happily turn to my colleague, the Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Madam President, go ahead. I yield to the Senator from 
South Dakota.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. HELMS. Excuse me.
  Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota has the floor.
  Mr. HELMS. Pardon me.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota has the floor.
  Mr. PRESSLER. I yield to the Senator.
  Mr. HELMS. Suggest the absence of a quorum.
  Mr. PRESSLER. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The absence of a quorum has been suggested. 
The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCAIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Arizona has the floor.
  Mr. McCAIN. I thank the Chair.
  Madam President, I rise with Senator Kerry today in the hope that the 
Senate may join with us in recognizing that the time has arrived to 
begin a new chapter in our troubled history with Vietnam.
  Let me say at the outset, Madam President, that whenever I consider 
our relationship with Vietnam, I try very hard to do so without 
succumbing to the sentimentality that so often clouds our judgments 
about our former adversary. The grievances I hold against Vietnam are 
not personal, nor are they premised primarily on the Vietnamese 
leadership's past offenses to the United States, to their neighbors, to 
their own people and to mankind. They are, in large part, objections to 
Hanoi's current failings.
  Similarly, my hope for a better relationship with Vietnam is not 
intended to fulfill a personal need to reach closure on the Vietnam 
War. Such a goal may still be important to some, but I made my peace 
with that the day I returned to the United States. My support for 
better relations with Vietnam is based on my judgment that improved 
relations would best serve the national interests and values of the 
United States--period.
  Today, we are calling for an end to the United States trade embargo 
against Vietnam. We do so not out of guilt, not out of sentimentality, 
not because of pressure from any special interest groups. We do so 
because we believe such a move is in the best interests of the United 
States, as well as the people of Vietnam.
  The issue involved in our relations with Vietnam of greatest 
importance to the American people is the accounting for our POW/MIA's. 
Contrary, to what Members may hear from some opponents to this 
amendment, Vietnam has been cooperating and cooperating substantially 
in our efforts to account for our missing. Senator Kerry has made that 
case clear in his remarks.
  Support for that view comes from every single person involved in our 
accounting efforts, most of whom wear the uniform of the United 
States--beginning with Gen. John Vessey, former Chairman of the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan, and appointed by President 
Reagan to serve as his emissary to Vietnam for POW/MIA affairs, a man 
who has served this country with singular distinction for half a 
century.
  Adm. Charles Larson, commander-in-chief of United States forces in 
the Pacific, has recently traveled to Vietnam and proclaimed that 
cooperation from Vietnam ``across all fronts has been excellent.'' He 
is joined in that view by Gen. Tom Needham, the commander of the joint 
task force for a full accounting, as well as all U.S. personnel who 
labor under very difficult conditions to resolve the fate of America's 
missing.
  Madam President, I ask unanimous consent at this time to print in the 
Record an article from the Washington Times entitled ``Admiral Is 
Latest U.S. Official To Laud Vietnam's Cooperation.''
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

 Admiral Is Latest United States Official To Laud Vietnam's Cooperation

                       (From Combined Dispatches)

       The highest-ranking U.S. officer to visit Hanoi since the 
     Vietnam War said this week he will report that its 
     ``cooperation across all fronts has been excellent'' in the 
     effort to account for missing Americans.
       The assessment by Adm. Charles R. Larson is expected to 
     weigh heavily in President Clinton's decision on whether to 
     lift a 19-year trade embargo against Vietnam. Mr. Clinton has 
     said the decision is contingent on Hanoi's cooperation in the 
     search for U.S. servicemen and on progress in the accounting 
     for MIAs.
       I don't think they're holding anything back,'' Adm. Larson, 
     commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, said in 
     Pleiku Tuesday.
       On his last day, he visited American and Vietnamese teams 
     working in the field as part of the largest investigative and 
     excavation operation since the war ended in 1975.
       Adm. Larson is the latest in a series of U.S. official to 
     come to Vietnam, including State Department and congressional 
     delegations.
       His visit was seen as another signal by the United States 
     to Vietnam that it is moving toward the restoration of 
     economic and diplomatic ties broken in 1975, when Communist 
     North Vietnam overthrew a U.S.-sponsored regime in South 
     Vietnam.
       Subsequently, Vietnam repulsed China in a brief but violent 
     1979 border war. Beijing launched the crossborder attacks to 
     ``punish'' Hanoi for ousting the Khmer Rouge regime in 
     Cambodia.
       Sen John Kerry, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations 
     Committee, whose views may also influence Mr. Clinton, was in 
     Vietnam Sunday when Adm. Larson arrived and indicated he 
     would support an easing or end to the U.S. embargo.
       Mr. Kerry, who is a Vietnam combat veteran and was also 
     chairman of the defunct Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA 
     Affairs, said American businesses are suffering from the 
     embargo.
       ``The embargo is not an embargo against Vietnam,'' said the 
     Massachusetts Democrat. ``It's an embargo against ourselves, 
     against U.S. business. Vietnam is not being hurt by it 
     practically.''
       Premier Vo Van Kiet, who met with Mr. Kerry Saturday, urged 
     Mr. Clinton to normalize relations soon, saying this would 
     lead to cooperation in other fields.
       Many families of the MIAs and some veterans organizations 
     strongly oppose lifting the trade embargo. They say there is 
     no substantial progress and claim Vietnam has withheld 
     information and some remains.
       The United States lists, 2,238 Americans unaccounted for in 
     Southeast Asia, including 1,647 in Vietnam, 505 in Laos, 78 
     in Cambodia and eight in China.
       ``I think the fact that I'm here shows that there's been a 
     level of cooperation that has been very good,'' Adm. Larson 
     told reporters. ``Certainly if the cooperation level was not 
     good, I would not be here. I feel a heavy responsibility 
     coming as the first senior American officer.''
       Deputy Foreign Minister Le Mai told Adm. Larson the 
     Vietnamese had seen a number of American delegations 
     recently, ``but I think your visit is of particular 
     significance.''
       The U.S. group responsible for accounting for the missing 
     falls under Adm. Larson's command in Hawaii.
       Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, Democrat of Louisiana, chairman 
     of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and 
     four members of the committee who wound up a three-day visit 
     to Vietnam earlier this month urged Mr. Clinton to quickly 
     lift the embargo and restore diplomatic relations.
       After Adm. Larson and Mr. Kerry departed, there was 
     speculation in Hanoi that decisions on Vietnam may be delayed 
     by Mr. Clinton's problems in naming a defense secretary to 
     succeed Les Aspin, after retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman backed 
     out on Tuesday.

  Mr. McCAIN. Madam President, I quote from it, Madam President. It 
states:

       The highest-ranking U.S. officer to visit Hanoi since the 
     Vietnam War said this week he will report that its 
     ``cooperation across all fronts has been excellent'' in the 
     effort to account for missing Americans.
       ``I don't think they're holding anything back,'' Adm. 
     Larson, commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, 
     said in Pleiku Tuesday.

  Joint Task Force personnel have, often at great risk to their own 
welfare, crawled through some of the worst and most remote terrain in 
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, searching for any clue as to the fate of 
our missing. Their efforts have been dismissed as a charade by many 
POW/MIA activists who--unlike my friend, Senator Smith, whose 
opposition is honorable--cloak their opposition in character 
assassination. In truth, JTF personnel are responsible for locating 
more information, for resolving more of the mystery surrounding this 
question than all the professional malcontents, conspiracy mongers, con 
artists, and dime store rambos who attend this issue have ever or will 
ever contribute collectively. They are truly unsung heroes.
  Everyone involved in our efforts in Vietnam will testify to the 
greatly increased cooperation from Vietnam. It is their word, not mine, 
nor Senator Kerry's that Senators should listen to as they consider our 
amendment. Everyone of these fine individuals believes that the time 
has come to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam. They recognize that 
the accounting process has not and should not end, and that there is 
more cooperation we will require from Vietnam before our efforts can 
conclude. But they feel, as do I, that lifting the embargo will 
facilitate and accelerate that cooperation.
  There are other valid reasons to lift the embargo which I will 
briefly enumerate.
  First, I have always felt that America's word ought to stand for 
something. The roadmap policy for normalization established by the Bush 
administration was intended to answer the charge that the United States 
was always moving the goalposts for normalization. It would be unfair, 
and beneath the dignity of the United States to do so again. Under the 
provisions of the roadmap, Vietnam has complied to the point where 
further actions on our part are warranted.
  Second, there are, of course, business advantages which we ought to 
be in a position to compete for. It won't dwell on these because 
American businesses interested in Vietnam are quite able to make their 
own case for going forward.
  Third, the balance of power in Vietnam. The longer the United States 
refrains from further progress toward normalization the stronger 
becomes the influence of anti-Western Vietnamese hardliners in the 
Defense and Interior Ministry over Western-oriented reformers in the 
Foreign Ministry and elsewhere.
  Fourth, the balance of power in the region. It is not in our security 
interests to have China achieve economic and military dominance in the 
region. It is in our interest to have an economically viable Vietnam 
able to resist the heavy handed tactics of their colossus to the north.
  In a conversation I had with him 2 years ago, Nguyen Co Thach, the 
former Foreign Minister of Vietnam, grasped a truth that eluded his 
politburo comrades when they fired him 3 months later. ``Vietnam,'' he 
told me, ``must accept the destiny of a small country.''
  I sincerely believe that Vietnam has come a long way toward accepting 
that destiny. They are seeking to live within the margins of balanced 
relations with the superpowers while simultaneously pursuing close and 
compatible relations with ASEAN nations. We should do whatever 
necessary to encourage them on this sensible course.
  There is another issue that separates us that was not really 
addressed in the roadmap beyond its references to re-education camps--
human rights. Vietnam's record on human rights is not the worst in the 
world. But its in great need of improvement. Even in this era of 
reform, their preferred course would be to follow either a China or 
Singapore model--a vibrant, decentralized economy in a one party state. 
The United States has an obligation to help Vietnam reach for something 
greater than this.
  Good people disagree honestly and honorably over whether we are 
better able to promote civic freedoms in Vietnam from within or from 
without. In all candor, I have had a hard time deciding which course is 
preferable. But I know that the United States doesn't have the power to 
keep Vietnam isolated. They are already developing complex relations 
with much of the world. So, perhaps our prospects for moving Vietnam 
toward political as well as economic liberalization are better if we 
have a relationship with that country that exposes it to our values.
  We should, however, do a much better job in highlighting the 
importance of human rights to our relationship than we have done 
heretofore. And I note with approval the recent United States Vietnam 
agreement to begin a dialogue on human rights questions. Those of us 
who believe that there is room in that corner of the world for 
democracy should soon have an opportunity to test the proposition that 
greater exposure to Americans will render Vietnam more susceptible to 
the influence of our values.
  In closing, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, to not be 
intimidated by political pressure from quarters that may never support 
better relations with our former adversary. I can speak with some 
authority to that question since I have suffered the full brunt of 
their opposition and survived. On this question, that has so long 
divided our country, the right course may not be the most politically 
expedient, but it is the right course nonetheless. Let us do the right 
thing. Let us take such steps that will best honor our commitments, 
protect our interests and advance our values. There is no dishonor in 
that.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  I ask unanimous consent that Senator McConnell be added as an 
original cosponsor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. PRESSLER addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. PRESSLER. Madam President, I thank you very much for recognizing 
me.
  I am going to summarize my statement because many people want to 
speak. I am going to speak about 3 minutes and let others take the 
floor, because I think John McCain and John Kerry have said it all.
  I also am a Vietnam veteran, having served two tours of duty in 
Vietnam. I have been back to Vietnam since then--in 1988. I visited 
both as a soldier and a Senator. Indeed, I was present when 27 sets of 
possible American remains were received by U.S. military authorities in 
Hanoi.
  I have attended an Aspen Institute seminar on Vietnam and met with 
Vietnamese officials in Hawaii over the years. So I have been involved 
in the Vietnam question for a long time.
  I think it is time to get Americans into Vietnam. If there are any 
prisoners, our people will be able to find them. There is nothing like 
an American businessman with a U.S. flag hanging outside as a place to 
bring information. If we have American tourists over there, they will 
be able to find any prisoners who may remain.
  I listened with some degree of interest to my colleague, Senator 
McCain, who is a true hero. He mentioned the term ``dime store 
Rambos.'' I remember during one of my past campaigns, I was criticized 
for my position on Vietnam. There were some people from another State 
there criticizing me. I entered into a dialog with them. I discovered 
they were not really Vietnam veterans as they had claimed. Well, I 
think we have a lot of that. I think we find a lot of the real Vietnam 
veterans, the people who really served there, are for normal relations, 
are for lifting the embargo.
  In fact, I am an advocate of sending an ambassador there. I am just 
worn out by these people, many of whom have a financial interest, 
carrying this subject on and on and on. I have been very concerned 
about POW's and MIA's. I was present when 27 caskets were loaded up in 
Hanoi.
  It is time for those of us who are Vietnam veterans to stand up and 
say that enough is enough from this very small group. Those of us who 
have served in Vietnam find our patriotism questioned sometimes when we 
say we should recognize Vietnam; we should enter into relations; we 
should lift the trade embargo.
  We should not stand for that. Different people can have different 
points of view. I respect very much other people who reach a different 
conclusion on this subject. But it is time for us to get Americans into 
Vietnam, get our business people over there.
  I have frequently said that one businessman does as much as many 
visiting Senators or many visiting diplomats, one businessman who 
creates jobs and sells American products. What is happening now in 
Vietnam, the times I have been there, is the French and Japanese are 
getting business. Their standards, their machine tool standards, are 
being established, and we are losing out.
  But, more importantly, I think this country will always have a 
special relationship with Vietnam, or at least will in the near future. 
I have talked to many Vietnam veterans who would love to go back to 
Vietnam as tourists and take their families. I have talked to many 
American small businessmen. In fact, I just had a meeting in Rapid City 
the other day and it was brought up to me that they would like to 
export some products to Vietnam.
  This is not just a commercial thing. We also want to find the 
prisoners, if there are any. I doubt there are any prisoners.
  But the argument that we must go on and on and on under current 
policy to prove all these things that cannot be proved before we 
recognize Vietnam has just exhausted me. I have gone along with this 
approach for years. It is time just to get this behind us. It is time 
for us to lift the trade embargo. It is time for us to send an 
ambassador to Vietnam. I know the latter is not what this resolution 
says.
  We should lift the economic embargo, and we should have an ambassador 
in Vietnam.
  I applaud Secretary Bentsen for his recent Asian trip and ask 
unanimous consent that a January 19, 1994, Washington Post article 
regarding his position on this matter be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                     End Hinted To Vietnam Embargo

                           (By Clay Chandler)

       Bangkok, Jan. 18--Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen said 
     today that the U.S. government has moved nearer a decision to 
     lift its trade and investment embargo on Vietnam.
       Bentsen, speaking at a meeting of Thai business leaders 
     here, praised the Vietnamese government for assisting in the 
     effort to determine the fate of more than 2,200 American 
     servicemen still unaccounted for after the Vietnam War.
       ``The progress is there, and I'm optimistic we'll get that 
     finally behind us,'' he said at a news conference later in 
     the day. ``Some of us older fellows think you ought to move 
     these things and get it done. We've seen a lot of cooperation 
     coming out of Vietnam.''
       Bentsen declined to speculate on a timetable for lifting 
     the ban, but in Jakarta on Monday he suggested this might be 
     imminent. ``That decision has not been made,'' he said, ``but 
     I think you'll see something forthcoming quite soon.''
       Bentsen, who is on a three-nation Asian tour to demonstrate 
     the Clinton administration's commitment to building stronger 
     relations in the region, is the latest of several U.S. 
     officials and members of Congress to urge lifting trade 
     restrictions on Vietnam. Clinton's chief foreign policy 
     advisers have agreed to recommend that he do so, according to 
     senior officials.
       Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate 
     Foreign Relations subcommittee on Asian affairs, declared at 
     the close of a visit to Vietnam last week that the embargo no 
     longer serves a meaningful purpose and is only 
     hurting American firms denied business opportunities in 
     the region.
       Firms in many nations--including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, 
     Singapore and France--already are investing heavily in 
     Vietnam, and some governments are extending financial aid as 
     well. Last November, for example, Japan resumed providing 
     official development assistance to Vietnam with a $370 
     million loan.
       In his speech today, Bentsen argued that the United States 
     could do more to promote the search for information about 
     missing Americans by lifting the embargo than by continuing 
     to insist on greater Vietnamese cooperation as a prerequisite 
     to normal commerce. ``As with other countries on other 
     issues,'' he said, ``a strategy of engagement with Vietnam 
     may be the most effective way to promote our goal of 
     accounting for our POWs and MIAs.''
       In September, President Clinton gave a big boost to 
     economic development in Vietnam by restoring its eligibility 
     for loans from such international institutions as the World 
     Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Clinton also 
     permitted U.S. firms to bid on projects funded by such 
     institutions.
       The move to liberalize trade relations with Vietnam has 
     drawn stiff opposition from U.S. veterans' groups and is a 
     politically sensitive issue for Clinton, whose Vietnam War-
     era draft record was criticized during the 1992 political 
     campaign.
       Vietnam, where average annual income is about $200, remains 
     one of Asia's poorest nations, even though its prospects have 
     improved dramatically since its Communist leaders set the 
     nation on a path toward free-market economic policies in 
     1986.
       Vietnam's economy grew at a rate of about 7 percent last 
     year. Still, without greater help from the United States and 
     other nations, economists say it could take two decades for 
     Vietnamese living standards to approach those of Thailand.

  Mr. PRESSLER. I was asked to yield 1 minute to Senator Helms for a 
special request.
  Does the Senator want to get the floor in his own right?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are you yielding to the Senator?
  Mr. PRESSLER. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who seeks recognition?
  Mr. KERRY addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. KERRY. Madam President, I am just going to take one moment. I 
know we wanted to allow the Senator from New Hampshire an opportunity 
to speak. I just wanted to make a couple of quick comments.
  No. 1, probably it does not need to be said, but I will say it 
anyway, Senator John McCain, who was a naval aviator, combat veteran 
who spent more than 6 years of his life in Hanoi in the Hilton and in 
other prisons, really knows what is at stake in this issue, and I think 
understands better than anybody how difficult it is to come to this 
understanding.
  I might also point out that the Senator from South Dakota is a combat 
veteran himself. He ``humped the boonies,'' as the expression goes.
  Mr. PRESSLER. I should correct that. I carried two weapons, but I 
never claimed to be in combat. In fact, I had a Jeep. As a matter of 
fact, they said the most dangerous thing was a second lieutenant in a 
Jeep. I have three medals, but I am not a hero.
  Mr. KERRY. The final comment I wanted to make was a tribute to my 
colleague, Senator Smith. At least from my point of view, and I believe 
truly from his, we have worked at this together and sometimes 
separately over the course of the last years. We have disagreed on some 
aspects of it.
  But I want to pay tribute to his personal involvement and commitment 
to this. I never doubted how much he personally cares about it. We may 
have a difference in approach on strategy, but I do not believe that 
either of us disagree about the goal or what we are trying to achieve. 
I pay tribute to the depth of his commitment, the number of trips he 
has taken, the risks he has taken, and the extent of time he has put 
into it. I think it has helped enormously to serve this country to 
understand the dynamics. I do not agree with all of his judgments, as 
we shall see and understand but, nevertheless, he deserves that credit 
and that respect.
  Mr. HELMS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. HELMS. I thank the Chair.
  Madam President, as a manager of the bill, I find it necessary to 
leave the floor temporarily to attend a meeting. But before I go, I 
desire to ask for the yeas and nays on this amendment. I do ask for the 
yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there sufficient second? There appears to 
be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.
  Mr. HELMS. I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.
  Mr. SIMPSON addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
  Mr. SIMPSON. Madam President, I also appreciate the courtesies of the 
Senator from North Carolina. I know that he wishes to see a good, full 
debate on this issue and there surely will be.
  I want to say a word about Senator Smith. I have come to know this 
man very well. He is one fine Senator, one fine friend. I was with him 
in his State in December and enjoyed it so very much. The remarkable 
admiration and respect they have for him in New Hampshire is evident. 
They know that he is fully in this tough issue. And this is a tough, 
tough issue. This is one of the most sensitive issues of our times, and 
now it is here before us today.
  I have heard the remarks of Senator McCain from Arizona. They were 
measured and powerful. I have heard the remarks of Senator Kerry from 
Massachusetts. They were extraordinarily sincere and genuine. My friend 
Senator Pressler from South Dakota spoke with great clarity and 
earnestness about the frustration of this terrible situation which has 
captured our national interest. We did not know when it would be 
addressed by the Senate, and today it is here before us.
  I commend those Senators, all of them--Senator Smith, Senator McCain; 
Senator Helms who will be on the other side of the issue from me, 
Senator Kerry, and Senator Pressler.
  My remarks will not be long and then I will yield to Senator Smith 
who will indeed present what I know will be a powerful statement and 
one that should be heard by all.
  But I think we should carefully listen to the veterans of Vietnam. I 
think we should pay close attention to Senator Kerry, Senator McCain, 
and Senator Pressler. I think it is very important to do that.
  I have just returned from Vietnam. I went there with Senator 
Hatfield, Senator Johnston, Senator Specter, Senator Nickles, Senator 
Mathews and Senator Bennett. It was an extraordinary experience for me 
to be in Hanoi for 2 days, and Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon--and 
for me, I think it will always be ``Saigon.'' I was there to learn, to 
pay attention, and try to grapple with the POW issue, the MIA issue, 
the trade issue--all of them.
  I was taken by several things. We investigated these issues in much 
depth, and one of the most memorable aspects of our trip was General 
Tom Needham, of Massachusetts. He is an extraordinary man. He served in 
Vietnam twice--two tours of duty, both voluntarily. He has surrounded 
himself with an extraordinary cadre of people from all branches of our 
military who are there on the ground and are allowed to do just about 
anything they want to do. They can go anywhere they want to go. I will 
not be repetitive, but suffice it to say that I was surprised at that.
  I was more surprised at the Vietnamese general, who was on the other 
side of that joint task force. He lost a brother in the war and does 
not know his whereabouts or what became of him. He claimed that 300,000 
Vietnamese are missing or prisoners of war. I do not know how they 
could be prisoners of war--but at least 300,000 of their people are 
missing from this war. To me it had a special poignancy because, as we 
traveled back to the United States, we passed the area where my first 
cousin went down. Somewhere in the North Marianas is ``Billy'' Simpson 
Brady, my first cousin. He is missing in action or a prisoner of war 
from the Second World War.
  There are 78,760 people who have never been found from the Second 
World War; 78,760 people of that war are unaccounted for. They are 
either prisoners of war or missing in action from the Second World War. 
I hear nothing about them.
  There are 7,800 people who are missing in action or prisoners of war 
from Korea. I hear nothing about them.
  There are 2,300--I do not recall the specific figure, but it is very 
close to that--who are missing in action or prisoners of war from 
Vietnam. The pain and the anguish of that, to the survivors, must be 
total. I have a constituent who lost a brother, a man in Laramie, who 
is very, very passionate about this. I believe he thinks that I am some 
lesser form of human being because I have said that we must ``move 
on.''
  I am a veteran. I was not in Vietnam. I have not been at war. I was 
in at the end of the army of occupation in Germany in 1955 and 1956. I 
saw the leftovers of war at the end of that army of occupation, even in 
those years. And I must say that I think it is time to move on.

  I must say that I am puzzled. Why we do not spend this same interest 
or time thinking about those many thousands of people from our country, 
missing in action and simply gone from our lives, that we did not pay 
too much attention to before? Because the war ended and here we are, 21 
years after the Treaty of Paris accord.
  Tomorrow, I would like to remind this Chamber, marks the 21st 
anniversary of the signing of the Paris accord that arranged the end of 
the Vietnam conflict. That was signed on January 27, 1973; 21 years 
have now passed since we entered into a peace agreement with Vietnam.
  Do you know what we were doing 21 years after the last day of World 
War II, September 2, 1945? That was 1966. We were in a full range of 
normalized activity with Germany and Japan. That is what we were doing. 
It is, I think, important to remember where we were 21 years after the 
Second World War. Had we fully normalized relations with Germany and 
Japan? We certainly had. And that was not the half of it. Not only had 
we restored friendly relations with those two countries but the 
American taxpayer was asked to provide a great deal of the resources to 
do it. That is how we dealt with our adversaries after the conclusion 
of the Second World War. That is what we did. Now we have come 21 years 
since the end of this war, and what is the difference between this war 
and World War II? I am puzzled at it.
  Maybe I was tainted in this matter when Senator Alan Cranston, my 
friend from California--and we worked closely together--had a hearing 
years ago on this issue. We were trying to find the answers because he 
was chairman and I was chairman, at different times, of the Veterans' 
Affairs Committee. We held a hearing and we said, ``Bring in the 
information. Show us the material. We are ready to listen.''
  I shall never forget the total sense of offense that I experienced 
when I listened to a group of people telling us about ``live 
sightings.'' And they said they had a film. They said, ``We have a 
film, it is 287 minutes long and it is the most devastating thing. It 
shows just exactly where these people are, even today.'' And then they 
brought in other photos.
  We did not have a resource staff, but we had enough resources to find 
that the photos of the persons standing in uniform were taken in 
Hawaii, and that there never was a film. But this man had a reel with 
him and said, ``Here it is and I will give it to you for 2 million 
bucks.''
  I said, ``You testified under oath that you were an American. I don't 
believe that. You are nothing. To say that you would provide a film and 
then not have it, and further that you would give it up to help your 
country for $2 million.''
  Well, if I had been 20 years old--and when I was 20, I weighed 260 
pounds, had hair, and thought beer was food--I would love to have 
pitched this guy through the window like a javelin. However, being 
rather frail, but not quite as frail as my colleague from California, 
the two of us just sat there in mutual disgust. Finally this fellow 
said, ``I'll meet you two guys in the parking lot.'' Senator Cranston 
and I felt that neither one of us could probably cut the mustard 
anymore, because he looked like he had taken training from Charles 
Atlas. But I was offended by that exchange, and I remain offended by 
it, and I will leave it to those who have been doing all this work to 
review it.
  But the Paris accord was signed and now 21 years have passed. The 
world is not at war. We took ``the long view'' after the Second World 
War. The Japanese attacked us in the Second World War to start it. Ho 
Chi Minh, at the time of leading his country to independence, was 
trying to get America to congratulate him for his revolution. And he 
wrote Harry Truman eight times, saying: We are starting a new and 
independent country. And he quoted Lincoln and he quoted Jefferson.
  There was no response to that communique, or those several 
communiques. Senator Hatfield will perhaps involve himself in this 
debate because he was there the day of independence in Vietnam, as our 
history was being recited to their people by their leader.
  Well, the war came. We were involved. And I admire so much those who 
served there with such honor. And I think the wounds are healing.
  But I think if we can all put to rest the idea that those of us who 
favor normalization, and I certainly do, are somehow less committed, 
less passionate, or maybe less patriotic. No one here in this Chamber 
is making that distinction, or even postulating that, but there are 
groups in America that are thriving on this chaos. They bear our close 
attention and they bear our criticism.
  I think we must listen to these decorated veterans, these prisoners, 
these men among us who suffered the most at the hands of the 
Vietnamese. They are the ones calling for us to move forward sensibly, 
to begin to establish a relationship with Vietnam. What do you get when 
you establish a relationship or a diplomatic or trade presence? You get 
an embassy, as Senator Pressler so aptly says. I would vote for that 
right now.
  It would make a large difference when we have a physical presence in 
that country, a focal point for all our inquiries on the ground with 
respect to these leads. We would get American private interests there 
on the ground throughout the country making it ever more difficult to 
hide the truth from the outside world. Just as importantly, we would 
get leverage. We could establish financial and trade ties with Vietnam, 
which would be the beginnings of an interdependency that gives the 
Vietnamese far more incentive to cooperate with us.
  People say, ``Don't do it. Keep the leverage of the embargo on now.'' 
What have we gotten for the embargo? We got stiffed--stiffed--for 19 
years, 18 years, nothing more. What did it prove? Nothing. When we 
opened the door a crack, we began to get action, action like now, 
today. If some of the groups that came to me 4 years ago came back, I 
would say, ``Why don't you go to Vietnam, point out a coordinate on the 
map and say, `I want to go there and find out who is there,''' and you 
could do that today. Now, what remarkable progress. I do think the 
clock is running. I think the bargain was made, as Senator McCain has 
said. There is no question about it.
  And then, finally, people in my town meetings have said, ``What are 
you going to do about the North Koreans, Simpson? We have a country 
there that does not understand anything. They are Neanderthal, they are 
backward, they are frightening. What are you going to do about North 
Korea?'' I say, ``I have an idea for you.'' Now do not throw anything. 
I will get mail from home on this one. I say, ``The best thing you can 
do for North Korea, or to handle North Korea, is to give MFN status to 
China and give it permanently. We give MFN to Syria, Libya, and Iran, 
who are not exactly some of the finest of our compatriots in world 
government, and we do that with them. Then you can also normalize 
relationships with Vietnam. The North Koreans will say, ``Wait a 
minute, what happened here?'' They would see the United States 
relationship with China, and the United States with a relationship with 
Vietnam, and the North Koreans will see they will be isolated from the 
world unless they begin to listen to what the world is telling them. 
The backwater channels are already working from Vietnam and China to 
North Korea right now, right today as we speak.

  So we could remove a potential ally for North Korea in the current 
climate of tension between ourselves and that country. Ask anyone who 
has dealt with the North Koreans--they will tell you how indispensable 
it is that we have the cooperation of the Chinese, Japanese, and 
Russians in bringing North Korea to the bargaining table. If Vietnam, 
too, has an economic and diplomatic relationship with the West, North 
Korea's diplomatic isolation would be virtually complete. This should 
remind us that it is true with Vietnam as with every other country, 
enemies are more expensive than friends.
  I see my fine friend, Senator Johnston, is here, and he was the 
splendid leader of our delegation. I shall yield to him.
  But in the end, it is going to come down to whether it serves the 
interests of America to keep Vietnam closed off. I think it is so 
important to open these relations, to listen to those who were there, 
which will bring the North Koreans to the table when the Japanese, the 
Chinese, the Russians, the Vietnamese who were all involved in that war 
are engaged with us in trade and economic activity.
  Sure, there is the economic relationship and Americans are waiting to 
get involved. But there is another aspect no one has thought of. We 
have resettled over 800,000 Vietnamese in this country as refugees, and 
I would venture to say that maybe half of them might be ready to go 
back. Many of them are residing in the State of the occupant of the 
chair. They are waiting for this act--to be able to say, ``I have some 
capital. I'm ready to go. I'm headed back to Vietnam. That's my 
homeland. I came out as a refugee. The government has changed. We have 
positive relations. I am taking the capital and I'm headed back, headed 
home.'' That is one I have not heard talked about. That is very real. 
That would relieve some of the pressures on us with regard to a lot of 
things that are issues today in America about asylum and immigration 
refugees.
  So I have yet to be convinced that any of the efforts that we are 
trying to do are aided in any way by isolating Vietnam. Now we are 
seeing the beginnings of greater cooperation. I know it is tough for 
all Senators, a tough emotional issue for all of us, but I think we 
need to take a sober and comprehensive view that guided our policies 
after the Second World War.

  We did not undertake those policies out of a spirit of giddy self-
sacrifice. We did not undertake those policies out of any lack of 
horror at the excesses of Japan and Nazi Germany. And we certainly did 
not undertake them out of a lack of interest in the 78,750 soldiers who 
remained missing at the end of that war. We did it because we retained 
fresh memories of the follies of a punitive peace--which was how we 
ended the First World War. After World War I, we did nothing to 
integrate and unify the aims of the warring parties, with the result 
that the world was again plunged into war just one generation later. 
But after World War II, we learned our lesson, and so we took the long 
view. One result is that Germany and Japan are peaceful members of the 
international community today.
  Not only will our foreign policy and trade status be better for it, 
but our POW/MIA efforts will benefit from it as well.
  I thank my colleagues and thank Senator Kerry. I look forward to the 
remarks of Senator Johnston and Senator Smith. I shall be listening 
intently. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. JOHNSTON addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
  Mr. JOHNSTON. Madam President, I want to congratulate the 
distinguished Senator from Wyoming for a very thoughtful statement. I 
agree with every word he said. I might say, it was a delight and a very 
constructive thing to be on the trip with him--which we just got back 
from--including Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
  Like most Americans, I have read and been concerned about Vietnam and 
about our relationship with Vietnam. I have been principally concerned 
about MIA's and POW's. All Americans have tremendous sympathy and 
compassion for the families who have lost loved ones in Vietnam. I go 
to the Vietnam Memorial fairly regularly because, frankly, I bicycle on 
The Mall. Every time I see those 50,000-odd names there, I am reminded 
of the tremendous tragedy that Vietnam represented for this country. It 
brings to mind the continued suffering of the families of our MIA's and 
POW's.
  Madam President, I stand here today to ask for dropping of the 
embargo not because I care less about the MIA's or the POW's or their 
families, but because the best way to get further information for MIA's 
and POW's is to drop the embargo. We have all kinds of controversial 
decisions which come to the floor of this Senate, but few of those 
controversial decisions are, in my judgment, as clear as this question. 
There is no doubt in my mind that we ought to drop that embargo. Let me 
tell you why.
  The question is not whether we have gotten 100 percent cooperation or 
whether it is 90 percent or whether there remain some few additional 
documents that they are withholding that we can get, but this much is 
absolutely clear: We have gotten what Gen. Tom Needham, our man in 
charge--a tough major general in the United States Army, who has been 
in charge for 2 years--says we have gotten complete cooperation from 
the Vietnamese Government in not only giving documents but in allowing 
access to sites and also with respect to Cambodia.
  If we reward that kind of cooperation with a continuation of the 
embargo, then I think that is one way to really risk the cutting off of 
further information. The way to encourage the continued flow of 
information is to reward that with a dropping of the embargo.
  A couple of years ago, the Bush administration undertook an 
initiative with the Vietnamese on what they called the pathway to 
normalization. They told the Do Muoi government that they had to do 
three things in order to qualify for normalization of relationships and 
dropping the embargoes. Two of those things had to do with POW's and 
MIA's. One was to allow access to sites, and the other was to allow 
access to the documents. General Needham and all of his staff--he has 
archeologists, he has linguists, he has different specialists in a 
whole complex there which they call the Ranch. We visited the ranch and 
had briefings in depth. To a man and to a woman in that group, they 
said the cooperation is complete. We have 12 teams around Vietnam in 
all parts from the north to the south to the highlands to the lowlands 
that are in there digging in crash sites now, full access to those 
crash sites.
  So on the two scores of allowing access to the sites and allowing 
access to the documents, the cooperation has been complete.
  The third element on the pathway to normalization had to do with 
Cambodia. We wanted them out of Cambodia and to secure their 
cooperation with respect to access to Cambodia. We have gotten that 
cooperation. General Needham says so.
  Where should we get the evidence and who should be the primary judges 
of cooperation? I submit it ought to be our man who has been there for 
2 years, our man and our group who are directly charged by this 
country, not some bleeding heart liberals who are always wanting to 
make friends with former enemies, but a tough-minded general who in 
turn followed up on the former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General 
Vessey, who also thinks we ought to normalize relations. That is where 
our information ought to come from, from the people in charge.
  If, having gotten that kind of cooperation, we now continue the 
embargo, then what is the Do Muoi government to say but--I do not know 
what they would say, but I can tell you we risk the cutoff of the flow 
of information.
  General Needham told us there were about 2,000 cases that they 
thought were solvable, where they could determine one way or the other 
what had happened. There are a lot more cases than that that are still 
open, but many of those cases would never be solved because they 
involve a crash at sea, or whatever, and there is no way to get that 
information. But of the 2,000 solvable cases, General Needham tells us, 
they think they have solved 70 percent of them. There are still some 30 
percent, something over 700, as I recall, that are still solvable. The 
progress is going very well.
  The cooperation is complete. Senator Kerry, to whom I think this 
Senate and this country owes a great debt of gratitude, has been to 
Vietnam, I do not know how many times, been out on the crash sites, 
seen the actual cooperation, and fully endorses what General Needham 
told us.
  Senator McCain, we saw the lake where he crashed outside of Hanoi and 
where his parachute came down and where, by the way, they have a 
monument depicting the fact that Air Force Major ``McCann" was shot 
down and captured. We had our pictures taken--I do not see Senator 
McCain in the Chamber. We had our pictures taken in front of his 
monument. He has been over there. He feels the same way.
  Now, where is the evidence to the contrary? There are just little 
bits and pieces and snippets of evidence, suspicions. But, Madam 
President, whether there is evidence that can be delivered or not, if 
we reward cooperation with further intransigence on our part, that is 
really the way to shut off the information.
  What I am saying, Madam President, is we should drop the embargo not 
based on trust in the Vietnamese, not based on their rhetoric, not 
based on trade. And indeed there are great opportunities for trade, but 
that should not figure in the formula here. It ought to be based on 
MIA's and POW's and the continued flow of information. In that respect, 
Madam President, it is a very clear question.
  (Mr. WOFFORD assumed the chair.)
  Mr. JOHNSTON. A final point. Is this the last bit of ``leverage'' we 
have? In the first place, I think a continuation of the embargo is 
reverse leverage. It is not actual leverage because it would operate in 
reverse against us. But beyond that, Mr. President, we have plenty of 
continued leverage against the Vietnamese.
  We participate in the international banks from whom Vietnam wants and 
needs credits to rebuild their country. They need American companies. 
They need a lot from us and, if we drop that embargo, we will still 
have that leverage.
  Mr. President, it is absolutely clear the time to drop the embargo 
against Vietnam is now; reward their cooperation and thereby secure 
continued cooperation.
  I congratulate the Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Kerry, for his 
leadership, and the other coauthors, mostly Vietnam veterans, who have 
been so strong in their leadership in this regard.
  Mr. SMITH addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Mr. SMITH. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. President, the amendment that is being offered by my colleagues 
from Massachusetts and Arizona is really the defining moment on the 
issue of the trade embargo with Vietnam. I wish to say at the outset 
that the kind remarks made by Senator McCain and Senator Kerry and 
Senator Simpson about me are very much appreciated. This is not a 
personal argument. I have no personal vendettas against any Members of 
the Senate on this issue. Many of them served in Vietnam, as I have 
done, and many had more things happen to them than I did: Senator 
Kerrey wounded; Senator McCain, who is a POW.
  I rise in opposition to this amendment on the basis of principle 
after 10 years, 10 long years in the Congress working on this issue. I 
have been to Vietnam five times myself, in addition to the time I spent 
there in the war. It is something that is controversial, and I hope 
those of my colleagues who are truly undecided--sometimes I wonder how 
many there are of us in that position--would focus on this debate and 
some of the things I have to say.
  Just so my colleagues will know, at some point after the vote is 
taken on the Kerry-McCain amendment, I will offer another amendment--
whether it would be in the form of a substitute or freestanding 
amendment remains to be seen at this point, but it will be an amendment 
that I think is much more realistic. In general, it will say that the 
amendment, my own amendment, which I will talk about in a few minutes, 
makes lifting of the trade embargo against Vietnam contingent upon POW/
MIA progress as determined by the President of the United States, 
whoever that President may be.
  That is a reasonable solution. Specifically, my amendment will say to 
lift the embargo the President must make a determination to Congress 
that Vietnam has resolved as fully as possible--not fully, as fully as 
possible--POW/MIA cases in reports where Vietnam can be reasonably 
expected to have additional information or remains based on U.S. 
investigations to date. And thirdly, by sense of the Senate, that the 
President is urged to consult with Congress, the national veterans 
organizations, and the POW/MIA families before making the determination 
on lifting the embargo.
  That amendment I will offer possibly this evening if we go on into 
the evening, so I would just alert my colleagues to that.
  So those of you who feel you want to be recorded in some reasonable 
way on this issue, if you feel strongly that the embargo should be 
lifted, then the Kerry-McCain amendment is the amendment for which you 
should vote. However, I have this alternative which I will discuss in 
full detail very shortly which will give I think valid reasons, many 
reasons--the Senator from Louisiana just said he would like to hear 
some evidence. I have plenty of evidence that I will offer in the form 
of why we should not believe that the Vietnamese have totally provided 
all information they unilaterally can provide.
  I might also say, Mr. President, because how you frame these debates 
sometimes influences votes, this is not a debate; no matter how many of 
us may feel about it, it is not a debate about live POW's. It is about 
whether Vietnam has been fully forthcoming on the POW issue.
  Some of us have feelings one way or the other on the issue of live 
POW's, whether it is compelling evidence or weak evidence or strong 
evidence. We all agree there is evidence. It is how compelling it is. 
So it is not about that. It is about whether or not the Vietnamese have 
been forthcoming in providing unilaterally all information they can 
provide.
  Now, having worked with Senator Kerry for over a year on the POW 
committee--we had a good working relationship. We disagreed from time 
to time. We agreed many times--I wish to say with respect to assessing 
this amendment that I believe to pull the embargo now, given the 
information we still have outstanding, is an insult to the families of 
those who have served, and I think it is an insult to the men 
themselves who are missing.
  If you do not believe what I say, then ask. Ask the American Legion. 
I am sure you are hearing from them. My colleagues, read your mail, 
answer your telephones from the veterans organizations: The American 
Legion, the VFW, VVA, DAV, League of Families. All oppose this 
amendment. Whether every member does remains to be seen, but the 
organizations have formally expressed opposition to this amendment.
  They are opposed to what the Senator from Massachusetts claims he is 
doing on behalf of resolving the issue. Why? I am not sure. But I 
suspect that there is some knowledge that before we even had increased 
access to Vietnam--and we have had increased access to Vietnam, a lot 
of it, and I have seen that myself firsthand. But before we even had 
any increased access really in the last 2 to 3 years, before we had a 
joint task force in Vietnam, before we had a select committee on the 
POW issue, the Senator from Massachusetts, with respect, was advocating 
lifting the trade embargo against Vietnam.
  I think that is his foremost objective. He believes that we should 
lift the embargo, and he has a right to believe that. He said so on 
occasions long before this debate.
  I have here a New York Times story on October 29, 1990. This is a 
letter that the Senator from Massachusetts and some of his colleagues 
here today who are supporting his amendment sent to then President 
Bush. I would like to read briefly a quote from that letter. This is a 
letter to President Bush. It was signed by Alan Cranston, Joseph Biden, 
John Kerry, Christopher Dodd, Frank Murkowski, Mark Hatfield, among 
others.
  An excerpt from that letter very simply says this: ``The time has 
come for putting the Vietnam war behind us and opening a new chapter in 
U.S.-Vietnam relations,'' said the letter of October 29. ``We urge you 
to act promptly to lift the U.S. trade embargo on Vietnam, and we 
pledge our full support.''
  There is not any wiggle room in that statement, my colleagues. This 
was October 29, 1990. That was the view of the Senator, many of the 
Senators, Senator Kerry and others, in 1990. If we are talking about 
using the last 2\1/2\ years or 3 years or 4 years of cooperation as a 
reason, then I have some trouble understanding what the point of the 
Senator from Massachusetts is.
  The point is, if you are for lifting the embargo, then you are for 
lifting the embargo. But to say that there has been this magnanimous 
progress over the past 3 years, that we did not have prior to that, and 
that is the reason, is simply incorrect.
  Since May 1991 the Senator from Massachusetts, as I, has made 
numerous trips to Hanoi. He has made eight. I think I have made five. 
Each time there are claims where he is quoted as saying the Vietnamese 
are giving us great cooperation, and each time he is recommending 
further relaxing or doing something with the embargo. I have 
statements. I do not want to go into them all. I could but I will not. 
He has made those recommendations. He made them when he was chairman of 
the select committee, sometimes in consultation with colleagues, 
sometimes not.
  But I just want to make the point that it is not something that 
suddenly we have come to that it is time now to lift the embargo 
because of what has happened in the past few years.
  We ought to lift the embargo when the President has determined that 
Hanoi has been fully forthcoming with us on the issue. That is when we 
should lift it--President Clinton, some President in the future, 
whoever.
  Mr. SPECTER. Will the Senator be willing to yield for a question, Mr. 
President?
  Mr. SMITH. Yes. I yield to the Senator from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. SPECTER. I thank my distinguished colleague from New Hampshire. I 
have discussed this matter before my colleague started to speak, and it 
relates to the evidence which my colleague from New Hampshire feels 
that he has that there has not been a full accounting as to the MIA's. 
He relates to questions which my colleague has as to the thoroughness 
of the investigation which has been conducted by United States military 
personnel in Vietnam.
  I think it would be useful to have on the record the evidence 
indicators which the Senator from New Hampshire has.
  My question relates to why the Senator is willing on his alternative 
amendment which I have reviewed to have the President have the 
authority to lift the embargo if in fact he is not satisfied on the 
basis of the evidence indicators which the Senator from New Hampshire 
has that the Vietnamese government has been entirely forthcoming.
  As I read the amendment submitted by the distinguished Senator from 
Arizona, Senator McCain, and the amendment in the second degree offered 
by the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts, Senator Kerry, they 
are identical except for the seventh paragraph in Senator Kerry's 
amendment. The first five paragraphs are recitations which I think no 
one will disagree with. Paragraph 7 of Senator Kerry's amendment is one 
which I think no one would have a disagreement. But the critical 
paragraph is paragraph 6 which reads as follows:

       Therefore, in order to maintain and expand further United 
     States and Vietnamese efforts to obtain the fullest possible 
     accounting, the President shall lift the United States trade 
     embargo against Vietnam immediately.

  I was a part of the delegation with Senator Bennett on the Energy 
Committee, and was present with Senator Simpson and heard what General 
Needham had to say and the others.
  Mr. KERRY. Will the Senator yield for a clarification in point?
  Mr. SPECTER. Yes.
  Mr. KERRY. I want to make the point that in my amendment, it is not 
``immediately.'' It is ``expeditiously.'' So it is really subject to 
the President's decision. It is ``expeditiously,'' not ``immediately.''
  Mr. SPECTER. I thank the Senator for that clarification. The 
materials which I saw were not inclusive.
  Coincidentally, we have seen the Senator from New Hampshire on 
television on CNN when our delegation was at an Air Force base in Japan 
and heard the concerns. And therefore, I have discussed the matter with 
the Senator from New Hampshire to try to understand the factual 
questions which he has and in fact his disagreement that the Vietnamese 
Government has done everything which is possible.
  I have grave reservations about the paragraph 6, which is the 
operative paragraph in both the McCain and Kerry amendments, which says 
that we should lift the embargo in order to obtain the fullest possible 
accounting. I have doubts about that because I have doubts that there 
will be further disclosure by lifting of the embargo.
  The question on my mind--and I have an open mind. I do not know how I 
am going to vote on this. The question in my mind is whether the 
Vietnamese Government has made a full accounting. If we are sure that 
there are no more prisoners of war, and I believe that is accepted on 
all sides, that there are no more prisoners of war which are being 
held, then the question is whether there has been a fullest possible 
disclosure of the facts on the MIA's, and if that is true, I am 
prepared to vote to lift the embargo.
  If it is not true that there has been the fullest disclosure as to 
the remains of the MIA's, then my instinct is not to vote to lift the 
embargo. But I am not prepared to vote to lift the embargo to induce 
them to give us a fuller accounting if in fact they have not given us 
an honest accounting. And that is the question which I pose to my 
colleague from New Hampshire. Perhaps also a parliamentary procedure 
would be accorded to my colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Kerry.
  Mr. SMITH. I thank the Senator from Pennsylvania for his question. I 
would like to respond to it. The answer to your question as to whether 
or not the Vietnamese are fully cooperating is no.
  The thrust of the amendment in question is basically an admission of 
that fact. And the idea is that if we lift the trade embargo, by doing 
that, we will encourage further cooperation and get more answers. I 
respect that as a position and I understand that that very well may be 
the case, but there is no leverage, once we lift the embargo, to get 
that information. That information could be destroyed, or whatever, 
because it could be an embarrassment.
  For example--and only for example--if there were some very nasty 
records that had been kept about what may have happened to POW's during 
the war or after the war, whatever the case may be, and they are 
particularly embarrassing to the Vietnamese, there would be no 
incentive to put that information out.
  We have two issues. One, have they been fully forthcoming? By that I 
mean, have they provided us all information that they could put their 
hands on now and provide to the U.S. side? The answer to that is no. I 
will document that in my later remarks, but that is the first point.
  The other side of it is, should we go ahead and lift the embargo and 
hope that we get it? That is a fair argument. I do not buy it, because 
there is no incentive for them to do it once we lift the embargo.
  You could use the same argument in North Korea. Maybe we should lift 
that embargo and they will give us access to their nuclear facilities. 
I do not buy it.
  Have the Vietnamese been cooperative? Yes, their cooperation has 
increased. I had access to Vietnam that no investigator had ever had 
the last time I was there in July. They were cooperative. But fully 
cooperative in terms of what is in the archives and in the records in 
Hanoi, not what Senator Kerry is referring to here. This photo is a 
nice crash site excavation.
  I support that, even though the Vietnamese are charging us tens of 
millions of dollars to do this. It is a built-in foreign aid; it is not 
free. They charge us for helicopters, planes, jeeps, trucks, personnel, 
manpower, shovels, you name it. They are not cheap; they are Cadillac 
items that we are paying for. So we are doing that and I support that. 
That will account for people, but that is only one part of it. What 
about what is in Hanoi that they unilaterally could provide from the 
documents and records? The answer to the question you ask is no, they 
are not and have not fully provided those answers.
  The thrust of the Senators' amendment, Senators Kerry and McCain, is 
if we lift the embargo we will get more cooperation and get more 
information. They may be correct. I happen to disagree. I think the 
risk is too great. I am not willing to take that risk. We have no 
leverage at all if we do it, and that is why I oppose it.
  Mr. SPECTER. If I may pursue the question a little more--
  Mr. McCAIN. I would like to try to respond to the question that you 
already asked.
  Mr. SPECTER. All right
  Mr. McCAIN. Thank you. I will be brief. I think the Senator from 
Pennsylvania has a very important and crucial question. I think it 
would be important to recognize that neither Senators Smith or Kerry, 
nor Senator McCain have all of the information; nor do we, because of 
perhaps our long involvement in this issue, have a totally objective 
view of the issue.
  In response to the question of the Senator from Pennsylvania, that is 
why I think it is important that we look to the views of others who 
would be respected and in positions of responsibility. The Commander in 
Chief of the forces in the Pacific is Admiral Larson, under whose 
direct command they are carrying out these operations over in Vietnam. 
On January 21, Admiral Larson, the Hawaii-based commander of the U.S. 
forces in the Pacific, said that ending the 19-year-old embargo would 
give him ``an operational advantage'' in searching for Americans listed 
as missing in action in Vietnam. ``If we get more Americans investing, 
traveling, and participating in Vietnam, that will give me a network of 
information that will obviously help me to learn about the past, 
present, and perhaps the future,'' he said in an interview here after a 
3-day visit to Vietnam this week. His comments rejected the argument by 
some veterans groups and families of missing servicemen that the United 
States should maintain its embargo to keep up pressure on Hanoi to 
resolve the MIA issue.
  We get the same opinion from General Needham, who is the general on 
the ground, who has been conducting our efforts to track down the MIA/
POW issue.
  These individuals may not be the last word, I say to my friend from 
Pennsylvania, but I think they should be given serious weight and 
consideration as career military people, who are every day immersed in 
this issue, who believe it is to our advantage in resolving the POW/MIA 
issue to lift the embargo. I recognize fully that the Senator from New 
Hampshire, in a very articulate fashion, disagrees with that view, and 
I respect the view of the Senator from Massachusetts, as I always have. 
But I have a tendency to give great reliance to the people in whose 
hands we place the responsibility for trying to resolve this very 
difficult, many-decade-old issue.
  I thank my friend from New Hampshire for allowing me to respond to my 
side of the question. I think it shows great courtesy on his part.
  Mr. SPECTER. If I may pursue the question at this point, I ask this 
of my colleague, because I know the parliamentary line is somewhat 
complicated. The issue for me turns on the good faith of the Vietnamese 
in providing all of the information. I have enormous respect for what 
our colleague from Arizona, Senator McCain said, because of his 
tremendous sacrifice as a Vietnam veteran. I was there with Senator 
Simpson when we saw the monument in the lake where Senator McCain 
crashed. I appreciate what Admiral Larson said; I have seen that, and I 
appreciate what General Needham said, and I heard personally about 
their view that there would be additional leverage.
  I do not know whether there would be greater leverage if we lift the 
embargo or if we do not lift the embargo. But my inclination--and this 
is not final--is not based on where we have the greater leverage. My 
instinct is to base a decision on whether there has been total good 
faith by the Vietnamese in disclosing the information as to the MIA's 
and their remains. That is why I come back to the essential question as 
to whether there is evidence or indicators--maybe not evidence in a 
technical, legal sense--but indicators, if not evidence, that there has 
not been a good-faith compliance by the Vietnamese in giving us all of 
the information about the MIA's.
  Mr. SMITH. I respond to the Senator from Pennsylvania by saying this: 
In the amendment that I intend to offer in one form or another before 
the debate is concluded, I will go into great detail about evidence 
that is in our possession and the Intelligence Committee's possession 
that the Vietnamese have not been fully cooperative in terms of 
providing to us what they can provide--not the fact that they may dig 
up remains in 10 years that they do not know about; I do not hold them 
to that. That is an unreasonable criteria to apply.
  What I am referring to is what they could unilaterally turn over to 
us today if they wanted to. The answer to the question is that they 
have not done that. They can do it, and I do not think there are very 
many people in the U.S. Government who work on this issue in the 
Intelligence Committee that would deny that. I do not think General 
Needham and Admiral Larson would deny that.
  There has been a great focus, as the Senator from Massachusetts 
pointed out, on digging up crash sites and going to various locations 
and getting access to those crash sites, which we have never had access 
to before, correct.
  What I want to get into are some of the other areas we have not even 
asked to go to yet. For example, there are many prisons in Vietnam that 
our people have never gone to, where we have had live sighting reports; 
indeed we have had reports that people died in those prisons, were 
buried in those prisons as prisoners, and the remains were never 
recovered. Not only were they not recovered --and I am getting ahead of 
myself in my prepared remarks--we never asked for them.
  I repeat that. We have never asked to go to those prisons to look at 
those grave sites.
  Now, the purpose here is not to come out with some big critique or 
being very, very critical of the whole operation here. That is not the 
purpose.
  The purpose is to point out to you and to my colleagues that what 
this amendment is about is a direct departure from policy of Democratic 
and Republican Presidents, including this President today. It is a 
dramatic departure from that.
  I would like to just continue with my remarks. I can point that out.
  I would just hope that the Senator from Pennsylvania could listen to 
some of the remarks that I have and some of the information that I have 
and make up his mind.
  I respect the fact he is open minded about it. But you know, there 
are plenty of examples, plenty of them throughout the files where we 
based on very, very good intelligence from our own prisoners who have 
returned, including Senator McCain, that would indicate that there was 
information available.
  I will just give you one example of what happened to a pilot who was 
shot down, captured alive, his capture witnessed and imprisonment 
witnessed by other prisoners, filmed on Communist propaganda films, 
sent around the world in Communist propaganda and first, he never came 
back alive, second, his remains never returned, and third, no 
information one way or other what happened to him ever came to our 
attention.
  We agree they kept very meticulous records, and we know they could 
answer what happened to an individual like that. We know that. And they 
have not.
  There are numerous questions like that, just to give one category of 
cases, and that is why I cannot support this amendment. It gets down to 
basic decency and we have always confronted the Vietnamese, the 
families, the interagency groups under Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, 
and Bush and now President Clinton, and that was no longer in the 
group, but they always went after Vietnamese on a humanitarian basis, 
provided it to us on a humanitarian basis what you can provide. But we 
kept on the road.
  Every time we go over there, whether Kerry, me or someone else, they 
provide some more information. They sent out Senator Kerry. I heard him 
say on the floor the 1,000 documents and photographs. One percent of 
those documents and photographs returned pertained to American POW's or 
MIA's missing. The rest of them pertained to people who returned.
  So I think we really need to look through this and make up our own 
minds in terms of saying what is it, have they really fully cooperated? 
And if you believe that they have not, then you have to decide on that 
basis whether or not you think that they will cooperate more if we lift 
the embargo.
  My feeling is that they will not because they have no incentive to do 
it. It is a risk. If you feel the risk is worth taking, then you would 
support the Kerry-McCain amendment.
  I do not. I believe it is a terrible mistake as it would be in 
lifting an embargo on Libya or North Korea or some other country where 
we have differences.
  Personally, because of the trips I have taken I like the Vietnamese 
people. They have been very courteous to me, even though I disagreed 
with them. Senator Kerry knows that they provided me a great deal of 
access to their country. They were polite and very kind to me, and I 
appreciate that. And they know though that I know that they still can 
provide more information, and I feel they should before we lift the 
embargo.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask my colleague if I could have a chance 
to answer the two questions he propounded?
  Mr. SMITH. I would be happy to yield for the purpose of responding to 
a question. I have kind of started into some prepared remarks and have 
been interrupted a number of times. I will yield to the Senator from 
Massachusetts to respond to the Senator from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. KERRY. I think it is an important line of questions.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, the Senator from 
Massachusetts is recognized for that purpose.
  Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. President, I want to address the Senator from Pennsylvania. He 
asked a good question. I want to answer that.
  The Senator from New Hampshire said you take a risk if you lift this. 
I would answer him by saying it is exactly the opposite. It is no risk 
to lift it. You take a risk to keep it.
  The risk to keep it is that whatever cooperation we can get stops 
because we made an arrangement with the Vietnamese. The policy of two 
Presidents has been if you cooperate on this, this is the way you lift 
the embargo. That is the policy of the United States.
  The Vietnamese have done everything. I will say to the Senator that 
they have done every single thing that I asked or our committee asked 
the entire time we were there. They did not refuse to go one place. 
They did not refuse access to one person. Nor has the team that is 
there said they refused anything.
  The Senator from New Hampshire is correct. Have we been everywhere? 
No, it will take 10 years or more for us to get everywhere. Have we 
been in every prison? No. Have we excavated every site? No.
  But the Senator from New Hampshire, I know, cannot apply the same 
standard that he is applying to Vietnam that they be fully forthcoming, 
to our own DIA, CIA, or Defense Department. He would not say they have 
been fully forthcoming.
  Certainly as the Senator knows as a lawyer and former prosecutor, you 
cannot put the case together if you are not talking to witnesses and 
you do not have access to the evidence.
  They control the evidence. We will only gather whatever evidence the 
Vietnamese ultimately either give us or we discover. We will only 
discover it if we are there.
  The Senator keeps saying you lose your leverage. You do not lose your 
leverage. You gain leverage. You gain leverage because you are not 
normalizing. You hold out the normalization. You hold out GATT. You 
hold out loans. You hold out membership in the world community. You 
hold out MFN you hold out a whole sequence of things.
  And you can always put the embargo back in one month or in 3 weeks or 
2 days if they stop doing what they say they are going to do.
  So what is the risk? The risk is that you take some nebulous standard 
of fully forthcoming when they have done everything we asked them to 
do. We do not know. Some will assert our intelligence says they have 
some document. Well, intelligence is intelligence. Sometimes it is 
right, sometimes not. We do not know exactly where the document is. We 
cannot walk into the building and say, ``Give us the document; it is 
here.'' We just do not know. They will look you in the eye and say to 
you, ``We do not have the document, Senator.''
  So how are you going to find the document? You are going to find the 
document when some Vietnamese sneaks into the American office and says, 
``I know where the American document is.''
  That, I might add, is exactly what General Vessey and our Secretary 
confronted them with on some documents previously.
  My colleague says the issue is whether or not they have been fully 
forthcoming. That is not the issue. There is no way to prove whether 
they have been fully forthcoming or not.
  The issue is, what is the best way to get the evidence out of them?
  I do not know if you can find a person with greater credentials on 
this than Gen. John Vessey. General Vessey, you know, has 46 years of 
military service, Vietnam service, decorated with the distinguished 
service cross, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Defense distinguished 
service medals, the purple heart, medals from 19 friendly nations, the 
civilian highest award, the medal of freedom from President Bush for 
his work on this. Let me read you what General Vessey just said, and he 
sent this to us today.
  This is what General Vessey said today:

       In the past 6 years, Vietnam has made huge leaps in the 
     direction we wanted them to go, many of them moves that we in 
     Washington thought would never be made. Among them:
       Agreed to Joint Field Investigations of ``discrepancy 
     cases.'' We are in the 6th year of those investigations.
       Agreed to joint live sighting investigations.
       Returned several hundred sets of remains of missing 
     Americans.
       Got out of Cambodia and supported U.N. sponsored elections.
       Released all reeducation camp inmates.
       Helped reunite about 300,000 separated Vietnamese families.
       Let us get Amerasian children out of Vietnam.
       Let the United States set up a POW/MIA office in Hanoi.
       Agreed to State Department officers in Hanoi with no 
     reciprocal move.
       Accommodated a variety of intrusive requests--such as going 
     through prisons--by the USG and members of Congress.
       Have allowed U.S. researchers unlimited access to the 
     Defense Ministry Library.
       I cite these Vietnam Government steps not to urge rewarding 
     them, but as a reminder that cooperation depends on 
     confidence building steps. Lifting the trade embargo and 
     moving forward in relations is not rewarding a heinous 
     communist regime for past crimes! It is a move that will open 
     Vietnam and move it toward democracy and free enterprise as 
     well as help us reach our goal of fullest possible 
     accounting.
       This is the overriding reason for lifting the trade 
     embargo. We now have the best cooperation we've ever had from 
     the Vietnamese Government in searching for evidence about the 
     fates of our people. Maintaining the embargo will not improve 
     that level of cooperation, but rather will probably lessen 
     it. To achieve fullest possible accounting, we will need the 
     help of local authorities, the Vietnamese veterans, and the 
     Vietnamese people. Let me point out that lifting the trade 
     embargo is not granting a favor to American business at the 
     expense of the families of the missing and the Veterans. It 
     is, rather, the surest way to further the cooperation we need 
     to get fullest accounting.

  My colleague at the beginning of this debate said this issue was not 
about MIA's, prisoners, sites. The American Legion and others--let me 
read you from the American Legion to the President of the United States 
of America saying here to the commander-in-chief that the issue before 
us is to force Vietnam to return live American POW's.
  That is why they are opposed. They believe there are live American 
POW's.
  So I say to you, you want to measure good faith, I will put General 
Vessey and General Needham and General Christmas and Admiral Larson up 
against the American Legion or any of these other folks any day of the 
week.
  I thank my colleague.
  Mr. SMITH. Mr. President, I would like to reclaim my time. I think I 
have been very patient. It was supposed to be a question and response.
  Mr. SPECTER. I thank my colleague.
  Mr. SMITH. I am glad to do that.
  I want to point out, there have been a lot of people with a lot of 
credentials who have worked on this issue over the years, including 
General Vessey. But I do not know how anyone, any reasonable person, 
could draw the conclusion that you have received the best cooperation 
from the Vietnamese people on this type of an example.
  Let us say you are a family member, and you have a loved one missing. 
You see a Vietnamese propaganda film with your loved one in perfectly 
good health speaking on that film. He has been captured alive. He was 
uninjured. He is being used for propaganda all over the Chinese world 
during the war. And you have not heard one single word from the 
Vietnamese.
  Best cooperation? Give me a break. They know what happened to that 
man. They know what happened to that man. And they ought to tell us 
before we let somebody go drill for oil in Vietnam.
  That is what is driving this issue. And I do not accuse Senator Kerry 
or Senator McCain of that motive. But to some, that is the motive. That 
is the objective here: To get business in there to drill for oil, 
because the French are in there and maybe the Canadians are in there, 
the Japanese are in there. Do you know what? They do not have 2,238 
people missing, with all due respect. That is what the issue is here, 
not best cooperation.
  Has there been some improved cooperation? Yes. Why did we get it? Why 
did we get improved cooperation from the Vietnamese? Because five 
Presidents from both political parties held firm on a humanitarian 
basis and said, ``You give us the answers you can provide us on our 
missing and then we will forgive you and the war will be over and it 
will be behind us.'' That is why we are getting cooperation, and we 
will get more of it if we stand up and be firm.
  So the talk about nebulous information, that is not nebulous. If you 
are the father or the mother or the wife of a person who has been seen 
on that tape on that film, they knew enough about him to tape him and 
film him and send him all over the propaganda world, did they not? And 
they were meticulous record keepers. They took photographs of dead 
people. They took records of everything--how they fed prisoners during 
the war and what they did to them during the war and what happened to 
them, how they died. They kept meticulous journals. We have them in the 
DIA. Go ask for them. Look at them. They know what happened to these 
people.
  But they hold that out. They hold that out, because they want us to 
know that they defeated us in that war.
  So, if you want to take the position that you are going to get what 
happened to that pilot on that film if you lift the embargo, that is 
fine, then vote for the amendment. But if you think you are going to 
get it just because they want to give it to you and you are going to 
have leverage, you are mistaken, seriously mistaken. Because you have 
zero leverage. Zero leverage.
  And, frankly, with the utmost respect for the two officers over 
there, Admiral Larson and General Needham, they are wrong, dead wrong, 
on this issue.
  When it is over, 6 months after you vote for this, how are you going 
to explain to the families in your State when the Vietnamese suddenly 
say, ``Oh, here is the information on colonel so and so.'' Where did 
they get it? Did they just find it somewhere? How are you going to 
explain that to the families?
  It is time we stand up for principle. That is just what is wrong with 
this country. It is just why people look on those of us in politics in 
a derogatory way. We all hear it. And this is a good example of it.
  Stand up for principle. The principle is these people have been 
deceitful. They have committed perfidy. They have put these families on 
a roller coaster ride for years and years and years and they are still 
doing it.
  We can get that information because it is the right thing to do; not 
the business thing to do, the right thing to do. It is the right thing 
to do.
  Now, what we have not heard here is that this amendment that the 
Senators have offered is at odds with everything the President of the 
United States today, Bill Clinton, has said concerning his policy 
toward resolving the MIA issue. The President has said--he said it--
``Lifting the embargo in Vietnam will be contingent upon Vietnam being 
fully forthcoming on the POW issue.''
  So if you support your President and the previous Presidents and your 
position is they have to be fully forthcoming before you lift the 
embargo, then stick with your President and his predecessors and do it. 
If you do not think that is right and you disagree with your President 
and you disagree with his last four predecessors, then you vote for the 
amendment and you hope and you pray. You lift the embargo and you get 
down on your knees and you pray that the Vietnamese will give us all 
this information now because we have suddenly lifted the trade embargo.
  Well, I am not going to take that chance. It is unfair to the 
families of these people who served--many died, many wounded, captured. 
It is wrong. It is morally wrong.
  Now, if they came in here as a group, the Legion, the VFW, the League 
of Families, those who have a stake in this--not Senator Smith, not 
Senator Kerry, the people who have the missing--if they came in and 
they said this is what we want, maybe we have a point. But they are not 
saying that. They are saying the opposite. They do not want this 
amendment. Ask them before you vote if you are undecided.
  The amendment also says if we lift the embargo, in effect, we improve 
our leverage on Hanoi. We are going to convince Hanoi to be suddenly 
forthcoming. If they are not, what do we do then? That is what we have 
been talking about.
  Does anybody really believe there would be a movement to reimpose the 
embargo at that point? Are you prepared to do that, those of you who 
want to lift this embargo? Are you prepared to put it back on again 
when information begins to dribble out that you knew they had before? 
Does anyone really believe that we would reimpose the embargo? Come on.
  It is business interests driving this thing. That is what is driving 
it--profit. And there is not a Senator in here that has a better 
business voting record than I do--big business, small business, any 
business, whatever business; 100 percent rating from the NFIB; 100 
percent rating from the U.S. Chamber. I do not take a back seat to 
anybody, with all due respect. So do not tell me that I am 
antibusiness. But profits should not come ahead of principle. And of 
all countries, this one it should not. The risks are too high to make a 
concession like this.
  Mr. President, when we know the Vietnamese still have information in 
their possession--and we do know it and I will prove it in my later 
remarks--about Americans who were never returned at the end of the war, 
we ought not to lift the embargo. It is a phony argument to allege that 
if we allowed more American businessmen to go into Vietnam they would 
stumble upon some information from the Ministry of National Defense. 
How many American businessmen stumble around the Pentagon and get top 
secret information? Come on. They are not going to let you into the 
Ministry of Defense if you are over there drilling for oil. That is 
ridiculous to even insinuate that.
  If we lift the trade embargo against North Korea, maybe the North 
Koreans will let us go in and look at all their nuclear plants. Maybe 
we could have some American businessmen go over and do it for us.
  The families, Mr. President, of 2,238 people, Americans unaccounted 
for, still unaccounted for from the Vietnam war, are scared, to put it 
bluntly. They are scared to death that Senator Kerry is going to 
prevail on this amendment; that he is going to convince his colleagues 
to vote for this amendment, as he has been working hard to do over the 
past several days.
  I know he was at the White House recently, Monday night, I believe, 
trying to make his case. It is pretty convenient. There is a nice 
little, convenient setup here. Go to Vietnam, talk to Needham, talk to 
Larson, come back to the White House, talk to the President: Everything 
is fine, we are getting total cooperation, everything is just rosy. Let 
us lift the embargo.
  That is what is going on. The families, those of you out there, need 
to understand that because that is what is happening. It is a nice 
little tidy setup here. We are digging around over here, looking for 
these remains. But we are not bothering to go into Hanoi, into the 
ministry of defense. We are not investigating live sighting reports. 
The Vietnamese told me they are not even looking at them anymore. They 
are not asking us. We are not going to the prisons where we have double 
polygraphed people who say they saw people buried, prisoners. We are 
not going there. We have not asked to go there. We have not even asked. 
And the Vietnamese are not going to let us go there--they are not going 
to let us go there unless we ask. Admiral Larson and General Needham, 
why do you not ask to go to those prisons? And I will be pointing some 
of them out to you, as if you need to know.
  The President has said that lifting of the embargo is contingent upon 
POW/MIA progress. So you are going to go against the policy of this 
President, and his predecessors ever since the war, if you vote for 
this amendment. In my judgment, and in the judgment of those affected 
by this amendment, the families, it is premature for the Senate to do 
this.
  I am not opposed to lifting the embargo. I said I liked the 
Vietnamese people, and I do. There are some fine people in Vietnam, and 
I have met a lot of them in five trips. I went all over the country the 
last time there. I would like to get the war behind me too, and the 
best way to do it is to say: With all due respect, Mr. Do Muoi and 
those of you in the Vietnamese Government, give us the information you 
have. It is the humanitarian thing to do. It is the right thing to do. 
And after you do that we will lift the embargo. That is what we ought 
to do, and that has been the policy of Republicans and Democrats for 
the past 20 years.
  When you cast your vote on this amendment I believe you should reject 
it because it is premature, and you should be doing so on behalf of the 
families. They are the ones who have the stake, the families. Let us 
stop thinking about our own selfish interests, stop thinking about some 
businessman from some oil company who wants to go into Vietnam and 
drill for oil. That is great. I would like to see them go in there and 
do that. I have seen the country. It is oil rich. It is a beautiful 
country. I have seen the beaches. I would like to go as a tourist--I 
have told the Vietnamese that--but after you give us the information on 
our men. That is the decent thing to do.
  And my colleagues should be doing this because they support the 
President's efforts and his current approach to resolving this issue. 
If you do not support it, and you want to break from it, then you vote 
for the amendment.
  In the strongest possible terms, and with some emotion I admit, I 
urge the rejection of this amendment. It is the wrong time. There are 
many, many times in foreign policy that we tend to micromanage in this 
place. I am guilty of it. We are all guilty of it, depending on which 
side of the issue we are on. But if this amendment is agreed to, the 
President, who I believe is leaning to lifting the embargo anyway--that 
is no secret, many in his administration want it lifted; many in the 
Bush administration wanted it lifted but there was more of a debate 
there than is in this one--if we vote to lift it we give the President 
the excuse to do it because he believes that the American people, 
through the Senate, have then so indicated that that is what the 
American people want.
  I urge the rejection of this amendment. The right course of action is 
to have the President first make a determination that Vietnam has been 
fully forthcoming on the POW/MIA issue. Then and only then should the 
embargo be lifted.
  I believe that is the right way to go. I believe that is what the 
families want. They have certainly indicated it and they are the ones 
who should be listened to. No one--no one including me or anyone else--
could possibly understand the pain that these people have suffered over 
the past 25 years, waiting every time somebody goes on a trip to 
Vietnam, for some shred of information. Imagine the feeling of those 
who saw their loved one.
  I have a tape, a film, in my office that I just got that the 
Vietnamese just released--in this great period of cooperation--which 
showed Bobby Garwood. Everybody knows Bobby Garwood came home. But do 
you know what? In the same film was another man, another POW. Perfectly 
healthy. Just as healthy as you are or I am. Looking right into the 
camera. And the Vietnamese were using him for propaganda purposes.
  They said he died. Period. No other information. He died; died in 
captivity. They know what happened to him. And they gave us the film. 
Why can they not give us the rest of the information? They have it. 
That is not full cooperation. And it is--even if it is full 
cooperation, and it is not, it does not justify taking the action of 
this amendment with that kind of perfidy.
  I do have some other remarks. Let me just ask, on a final point on 
that particular case in that film: If he died, where are his remains? 
If his remains were destroyed, where did they bury them? Who buried 
him? What happened to him? They kept notes on it. They know what 
happened to him. And there are many cases like that; not just one, 
many.
  I would be prepared to yield the floor but before yielding I would 
say I am going to speak to my own amendment. There might be some 
question as to whether we would do that, whether I would speak to the 
amendment before I offer it in the course of this debate, or whether 
there will be a vote first on the Kerry amendment. But I would just say 
to my colleagues my preference would be, and I believe what I will do, 
is speak to my amendment because I believe that my colleagues need to 
hear why I believe we should stick to the policy that we now have, in 
great detail, with many examples and cases of where the Vietnamese have 
not been forthcoming and we know they have not been forthcoming.
  Senator Specter said he would like to hear some evidence. Senator 
Johnston said he would like to hear some evidence. I have it. I will 
temporary yield the floor and allow some of my colleagues who have been 
waiting to speak to speak and then reclaim the floor at some point and 
discuss the content of my amendment, which will either be in the form 
of a substitute or another amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, there are other colleagues waiting to 
speak, so I am not going to go on at length to rebut most of what my 
colleague has said, although it is rebuttable.
  There is one thing that is important. My colleague said the President 
ought to make the decision. He has some amendment that purports to give 
the President the chance to make the decision. Please understand that 
our amendment, the amendment of Senator McCain and I and others, 
permits the President to make the decision. It totally leaves the 
choice to the President. It says we believe he ought to do it 
expeditiously. When the President deems expeditious is up to the 
President. So we leave this in the President's hands. There is no 
difference there.
  As to these films that have been alluded to, it is precisely through 
the Vietnamese we got the films. I was over there and negotiated with 
them to get them to turn over 319 films that we have now reviewed. We 
have been able to look through the films. It is precisely because of 
that that we now have questions about the whereabouts of this person 
being buried. Now we now have the list--I showed it a few moments ago--
of where people who died in captivity were buried. They also gave us 
that. So we are going about the task of tracking each of these people.
  So, the point to be addressed here is how we are best going to 
continue this process of accountability, whether we see it shut off or 
whether we continue.
  Mr. SMITH. Will the Senator yield for one point for 30 seconds?
  Mr. KERRY. I yield for one point for 30 seconds.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Campbell). The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Mr. SMITH. In response to what the Senator said regarding the film, 
it is correct the Vietnamese did provide the film on POWs and Garwood, 
where we got the film on David Garwood 25 years ago when he was alive 
and in prison for a number of years. But they have not told us what has 
happened to David Hrdlickq. So it is not a case of them providing films 
today or previously, but we have had films for years and they never 
chose to tell us what happened to the people.
  Mr. KERRY. I agree. We do not have a disagreement on that. But the 
point is, unless they tell you--which they have obviously not chosen to 
do for 25 years--you have to find out. Now, if they are not cooperating 
with you, you are not going to find out.
  This is all very simple. This is not half as complicated as some 
people want to make it. The choice for us is whether we encourage them 
to shut down the level of cooperation we have gotten to by ignoring the 
cooperation we have received, or whether we are going to keep going 
down this road. I think General Vessey said it about as strongly as you 
can say it. This is a way of opening up that cooperation. It is a 
judgment people have to make. I believe you keep better faith with the 
families by guaranteeing we have a process in place that will allow us 
to get them answers than pushing us back into the dark ages of 1975 to 
1988, when the families got no answers and lived in total exclusion of 
what the truth might be.
  Mr. McCAIN. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. KERRY. If you care about the families, let us keep the process 
open.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I ask the Senator if he would elaborate a 
little bit on General Vessey. He mentioned his name. I wonder if the 
Senator would think it appropriate to review the fact that General 
Vessey got a battlefield commission in World War II at age 17, I 
believe, served in three wars, became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, retired with honor and dignity, and was called back by President 
Reagan and asked to be his special envoy to Vietnam on this issue.
  The man clearly had deserved his retirement. He clearly was not eager 
for this assignment. I think the Senator from Massachusetts knows how 
many years he has spent traveling back and forth to Vietnam on this 
issue, examining it in depth to the point of being totally 
knowledgeable on every single MIA case and rendering his best judgment 
and advice and counsel to the President and the American people and 
those of us in Congress.
  Is it not clear, I ask the Senator from Massachusetts, that General 
Vessey has said that it is in the interest of the United States of 
America, it is in the interest of addressing the MIA/POW issue for us 
to move forward in our relations with the Vietnamese Government? And is 
it not true that General Vessey greatly fears that at some point the 
Vietnamese will say, ``Look, we have complied, we have done what you 
have asked us to do and yet you still refuse to honor the roadmap that 
was laid out by the Bush administration''? Is it not also true that he 
fears that this may cause us to receive much less cooperation and 
impair our ability to get this issue resolved?
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, the Senator from Arizona is absolutely 
correct in summarizing General Vessey's view. I would like to 
underscore it for a moment. General Vessey not only received a 
battlefield commission and served for 46 years, but I think people 
ought to focus that this is a man who fought in Vietnam and in Laos. He 
is a commander. He lives by the rule that you do not leave people 
behind. He came out of retirement dedicated to live by that rule. He 
went back to Vietnam again and again and again, a long and tough 
journey.
  I ask unanimous consent that a history of movement with the 
Vietnamese be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the history was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   POW/MIA History Re the Vietnam War

       1973:
       A total of 591 American POWs return to the United States. 
     Most returned during Operation Homecoming from February to 
     April 1973.
       1974:
       The Vietnamese repatriate the remains of 24 POWs who died 
     in captivity.
       1975:
       Saigon falls and American forces are withdrawn from 
     Vietnam.
       1976-1978:
       After the end of the war, Vietnam's objective was to be 
     accepted into the international community. For example, in 
     1977 when the U.S. opted not to veto their United Nations 
     membership, the Vietnamese responded by suddenly repatriating 
     the remains of more than 20 Americans. At the same time, 
     U.S.-Vietnamese negotiations explored the possibility of 
     normalizing relations; however, this was later scuttled by 
     Vietnamese demands for war reparations and their invasion of 
     Cambodia. U.S. policy at the time was accounting for missing 
     Americans as ``a hoped for by-product'' of the normalization 
     process.
       1978-1982:
       Following the breakdown of normalization talks, contact 
     with Vietnamese officials virtually halted, as did the return 
     of remains and any form of cooperation of the POW/MIA issue.
       1982-1987:
       The U.S. made clear that resolution of the POW/MIA issue 
     was a humanitarian matter that rested on international 
     standards and that it was in Vietnam's interest to treat it 
     that way, regardless of the state of U.S.-SRV diplomatic 
     relations. It was also made clear that the U.S. domestic 
     environment, absent such treatment, would dictate that the 
     pace and scope of U.S.-SRV relations would be directly 
     affected by cooperation on this issue.
       U.S. policy-level delegations visit Vietnam and the 
     Vietnamese pledge to resolve the POW/MIA issue.
       1987:
       January--U.S. proposals for technical discussions in Hanoi 
     were rejected by the Vietnamese, as was a similar proposal 
     the following month. President Reagan named a former Chairman 
     of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, Jr. USA 
     (Ret.), as Special Presidential Emissary to Hanoi for POW/MIA 
     Affairs.
       August--General Vessey led an Interagency Delegation to 
     Vietnam. General Vessey obtained agreement to resume and 
     expand cooperation on POW/MIA and other humanitarian issues 
     of mutual concern to the United States and Vietnam.
       Vietnamese were provided some representative case files.
       Vietnamese repatriate 8 remains.
       1988:
       Vietnam agreed to initiate joint field investigations aimed 
     at resolving ``compelling'' cases that General Vessey had 
     previously provided and to expand their unilateral efforts.
       Vietnamese present proposals for the joint activities and 
     agreed to begin joint field investigations This resulted in 
     three 10 day periods of joint investigations along with a 
     visit by U.S. forensic specialists to examine remains 
     unilaterally provided by Vietnamese.
       Vietnamese repatriate 62 remains.
       1989:
       Vietnamese pledge continued cooperation during Vessey-led 
     Interagency delegation visit to Hanoi and agree to measures 
     that would expedite resolution of the issue.
       A total of five field activities and four technical 
     meetings are held during the year--results are disappointing.
       Vietnamese repatriate 34 remains.
       1990:
       General Vessey and the POW/MIA Interagency Group meet with 
     FM Thach in Washington, DC. Vietnamese agree to all USG 
     requests including: improved cooperative planning for joint 
     investigations, increased unilateral remains repatriations 
     and serious cooperation to locate and make available wartime 
     documents and records. Thach also agreed to assist in 
     allowing access to witnesses of incidents where U.S. 
     personnel were captured or casualties occurred, and to 
     additional military participation during joint field 
     activities.
       Joint field activities and technical meetings continue--
     results continue to disappoint.
       Vietnamese repatriate 17 remains.
       1991:
       April--U.S. policy concerning normalization of relations 
     with Vietnam, the ``roadmap,'' is presented to Vietnamese 
     officials in New York. The ``roadmap'' outlined a series of 
     quid pro quo steps the U.S. was prepared to take to improve 
     U.S.--SRV relations and eventually lead to normalization.
       The Vietnamese agreed to allow a temporary POW/MIA office 
     in Hanoi during visit by General Vessey.
       Five person office opened in Hanoi in July.
       Vietnamese repatriate 27 remains (11 joint operations, 16 
     unilaterally).
       1992:
       January--The 150 member Joint Task Force-Full Accounting 
     (JTF-FA) was established. The JTF-FA was designed to combine 
     all the specialties necessary to obtain the fullest possible 
     accounting of our POW/MIAs. The JTF-FA was placed under 
     CINCPAC to allow the full resources of the theater commander 
     to be brought to bear on this effort.
       February-General Vessey returns to Hanoi to assess progress 
     on POW/MIA matters. During the visit, the Vietnamese 
     presented the Military region IV shootdown records.
       March--Assistant Secretary of State Solomon led a 
     delegation to Southeast Asia during which the Vietnamese 
     agreed to five steps: implementation of a short notice live-
     sighting investigation mechanism, access to records, archives 
     and museums, repatriation of remains, trilateral cooperation, 
     and expanded joint field operations.
       October--Cheney and Eagleburger meet with the Vietnamese FM 
     Cam in Washington and confront him with materials obtained 
     from Vietnamese archives. General Vessey returns to Vietnam 
     and the Vietnamese agree to aggressively collect and present 
     to the USG POW/MIA related materials from all sources and 
     consolidate it in military museums, thereby providing access 
     to joint U.S. Vietnamese research teams.
       December--Vietnam announces a formal amnesty program for 
     private citizens holding remains.
       Joint field operations continue to expand in scope and team 
     number and size is increased.
       Vietnamese repatriate 32 remains (24 joint operations, 8 
     unilaterally).
       1993:
       January--All requested live-sighting investigations and the 
     initial investigation of all 135 remaining discrepancy cases 
     are completed.
       April--General Vessey leads a delegation to Hanoi during 
     which the Vietnamese provide new documents and access to 
     several key witnesses for interview including Lt. Gen, Tran 
     Van Quang, reputed source of the Russian 1205 document. 
     Vietnamese pledge continued cooperation, offer information 
     refuting the Russian document and agree to all U.S. requests 
     including continued support of joint field operations, 
     increased archival access, repatriation of remains, and 
     continued investigation of the remaining 92 discrepancy 
     cases.
       May--Senator Kerry leads delegation to Vietnam requesting 
     continued cooperation and the Vietnamese agreed to his 
     requests including the formation of a joint POW/MIA 
     information center in Hanoi.
       July--President Clinton decides to drop U.S. objections to 
     Vietnam clearing its arrears with the International Monetary 
     Fund. High-level delegation visits Vietnam and conveys 
     President Clinton's requirement for tangible results from the 
     Vietnamese in four key areas. The delegation was led by the 
     Deputy Secretary for Veterans Affairs, Heschel Gober, and 
     included Assistant Secretary Winston Lord and Lt. General 
     Michael Ryan of the Joint Staff. The President's four areas 
     of concern become the bench mark for cooperation and include 
     the repatriation of remains, access to documents, trilateral 
     cooperation, and continued investigation of live sightings 
     and priority discrepancy cases.
       September--President Clinton renews the trade embargo with 
     Vietnam, but allows some modifications.
       December--Assistant Secretary of State, Winston Lord, led 
     an interagency delegation to Vietnam to assess results in the 
     four areas of concern. He reported cooperation was excellent 
     and results have been achieved.
       Joint file operations continue on the largest scale ever, 
     cooperation by the Vietnamese receives high marks from JTF-
     FA.
       Vietnamese repatriate 67 remains making 1993 the third 
     largest year for remains since the end of the war.
       General Information:
       The remains of 281 Americans previously missing in Vietnam 
     have been identified. Several hundred other remains have been 
     repatriated, but not yet identified (many never will). The 
     identification process is often time consuming and laborious. 
     The delay in the positive identification of some remains is a 
     function of the high standards of proof we require before 
     making an identification, rather than a lack of Vietnamese 
     cooperation.
       Of the 1715 first hand live-sighting report received since 
     1975, 1,694 (99 percent) are resolved. No reports require 
     further field investigation in Vietnam. Vietnamese 
     cooperation in this area has been excellent.
       One thousand one hundred and ninety-five (70 percent) 
     relate to Americans who are accounted for (POW returnees, 
     missionaries, jailed civilians, etc.)
       Forty-five (3 percent) relate to wartime sightings of 
     military personnel or pre-1975 sightings of civilians who 
     remain unaccounted for.
       Four hundred and fifty-four (26 percent) are fabrications.
       The remaining 21 reports are under current investigation, 
     but these do not require field investigation in Vietnam. Not 
     all of these reports are Vietnam cases.
       Archival research teams started work in November 1992 when 
     the Vietnamese began making their military museum holdings 
     available for review.
       At the height of archival activity there were three teams 
     located in Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City have shut 
     down because they have completed the review of materials in 
     those locations.
       Nearly 24,000 documents, photographs, and artifacts have 
     been reviewed with more than 600 items correlating to an 
     unaccounted for American.
       Joint Document Center has been established in Vietnam's 
     Central Army Museum in Hanoi.
       Oral History Program is designed to gain information from 
     the memories of Vietnamese participants of operations during 
     the war involving U.S. POWs or casualties.
       More than 120 individuals have been identified for an 
     interview, and over half of the interviews have already been 
     conducted.
       Priority Discrepancy Cases or ``last known alive cases'' 
     are those cases where there is some indication that the 
     servicemen was ``last known alive'' subsequent to their loss 
     incident or was listed by their military service as POW at 
     Homecoming but did not return during Homecoming.
       A total of 196 individuals in this category were presented 
     to the Vietnamese by General Vessey.
       Total reduced to 135 by January 1992. The JTF-FA completed 
     an initial investigation of all cases by January 1993.
       We established a Priority Case Investigation Team in June 
     1993 to focus solely on the remaining priority discrepancy 
     cases. This team has completed 34 follow-up investigations.
       Policy review of additional information has resulted in a 
     fate determined status for 123 individuals of the original 
     196, as of January 1994. This leaves 73 priority discrepancy 
     cases requiring further investigation.
       Twenty-four individuals have been accounted for through 
     remains identification and have been removed from the list of 
     POW/MIAs.
       Although the other 99 individuals members have been removed 
     from the priority discrepancy list, they are still considered 
     unaccounted for and remain on the overall list of 2,238. We 
     will continue to search for their remains.
       A Special Remains Team was formed in the fall of 1993 to 
     focus on those cases where the possibility of remains 
     recovery appears best. The team works continuously, 
     independently of JFAs, in Vietnam and has thus far focused on 
     those who died in captivity. This team has recommended seven 
     reported burial sites for excavation.
       Americans accounted for through remains identification: 
     Vietnam--281 (including 1 recovered from indigenous 
     personnel); China--2; Laos--59 (including 3 recovered from 
     indigenous personnel); Cambodia--3; total=345.
       Americans unaccounted for in Southeast in Asia: Vietnam--
     1,647; Laos--505; Cambodia--78; China--8; total=2,238.
       Totals from WW II: 78,000; Korea: 8,140 (KIA/BNR).
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, this is a history of movement with the 
Vietnamese. You can go back to 1973 and there were 591 American POW's 
returned. In 1974, they repatriated 24 remains, people who died in 
captivity. In 1975, Saigon fell; our forces gone. From 1976 to 1978, 
there were very few things that went on. From 1978 to 1982, total 
breakdown, nothing happened. From 1982 to 1987, some engagement but no 
real progress. And, finally, General John Vessey goes over there. The 
whole task force is put together, and then in October 1992, just to 
give an example, Secretary Cheney and Secretary Eagleburger met with 
the Vietnamese and they confronted the Vietnamese with documents that 
we had obtained from Vietnamese archives. How did we get the documents 
from the archives? They let us into the archives. We got the documents. 
The documents showed us things, so the Secretaries meet with them and 
General Vessey then returned to Vietnam.
  As a result, the Vietnamese agreed to collect and present to us 
related materials consolidated in the military museums and pull it 
together. I could go through here step for step, page for page, because 
that is where the pages are filled with the things that General Vessey 
was able to negotiate and get out of the Vietnamese which have given 
answers to families.
  Despite all the Rambos running around this country who raise money 
and have spent incredible amounts of citizens' money claiming they are 
going to bring back live prisoners, they are going to get 
accountability, they have not provided one answer to one family. Not 
one. And in 20 years, the Rambos have not brought out one live 
prisoner. General Vessey has provided answers. From 196 cases, we are 
now down to 73. For those 116 or 120 families, they know what happened. 
General Vessey is telling us today: Lift this embargo so you do not 
jeopardize further the process, so you can enhance it.
  I think the Senator from Arizona made an important point in 
underscoring that. I know other colleagues want to speak, so I will 
yield the floor.
  Mr. CHAFEE addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island, Senator Chafee, 
is recognized.
  Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, first, I want to say obviously this is an 
issue that stirs deep emotions, and I can understand fully the 
viewpoints of the major proponents of this legislation, the Senator 
from New Hampshire and the Senator from Massachusetts and the Senator 
from Arizona.
  Next, I would like to say that I think it is important to know who 
the sponsors are of this amendment. I do not think there are two more 
distinguished veterans of the Vietnam war than the two Senators, 
Senator Kerry from Massachusetts and Senator McCain from Arizona. We 
are familiar with their records. Not that what they say should be the 
total gospel but, nonetheless, the fact is that those two Senators--one 
a prisoner of war for a good number of years over there, the other with 
a very distinguished war record in the Navy in Vietnam--are the key 
sponsors of this resolution.
  It seems to me the key question we are facing up to tonight is how do 
we get more information, the best possible information, on those 
missing in action, the MIA's. It seems to me that is the central 
question to the debate that we are engaged in. I would like to make 
several points, if I might.
  First, I do not think we can discount the fact that nearly every 
codel, congressional delegation, Representatives and Senators, that 
have visited Vietnam, I know of none that have come back saying other 
than the fact that they believe the Vietnamese are cooperating fully. 
If there are others, if there are some delegations that have come back 
with a contrary view, I do not know who they are. Nor, Mr. President, 
do I think we can set aside the judgment of those distinguished 
officers, some retired, who have spent months and years on this problem 
and have come to the conclusion that the Vietnamese are cooperating 
fully.
  General Needham's name has been mentioned several times, and Admiral 
Larson and General Vessey. I, like many of the Senators, have not been 
to Vietnam recently. So who do we depend upon? We depend upon those who 
have been there and those who have spent a lot of time on this. This is 
not just some flash visit by General Vessey: Go in, get the rapid tour, 
leave after 2 days, and that is it. General Vessey has been there I do 
not know how many times.
  I must say, I have been impressed with the number of visits that 
Senator Kerry has made and, indeed, Senator Smith likewise. During the 
summertime when the rest of us are off on some vacation, when you turn 
on the television, there is Senator Kerry making his sixth or seventh 
trip--I believe is it eight trips--eight trips Senator Kerry has made. 
So this is a deep passion of his to do everything he can to find what 
has happened to the MIA's there. This is very influential on the rest 
of us. So we have respect for their judgment, and their judgment has 
been the time has come now to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam.
  The second point I think is a very important one. Do we not wish to 
reward in some small way the Government of Vietnam that has been 
cooperative? We have said to them: If you cooperate, meet these 
conditions, then we will lift the trade embargo.
  They have done that. So what do we say? ``No, no, there is another 
hurdle out there for you?'' Or do we say, ``yes, we respect what you 
have done and we will lift that trade embargo.'' But the next point, it 
seems to me, is very important. It has been made, but I would like to 
stress it again. Lifting the trade embargo is not a total lift of all 
the restrictions against Vietnam. We still do not diplomatically 
recognize that country. Vietnam is extremely anxious to achieve 
diplomatic recognition. That is something different from lifting the 
trade embargo.
  The lifting of the trade embargo means we will trade with Vietnam, 
but it does not mean we will have full diplomatic relations. That is 
another reward, if you would, that we can grant to the Vietnamese later 
if they are even more forthcoming than has been stated to date by those 
who have been involved much deeper in this than I have.
  Fourth, will this amendment diminish the chances for more information 
on the MIA's? Not in my judgment, for two reasons. First, it seems to 
me by rewarding in this modest way, lifting of the trade embargo, we 
are encouraging even greater cooperation. There are those who are in 
the Vietnamese Government who just find it too much effort, too lazy to 
do it or do not want to cooperate. There is a bureaucratic struggle, I 
am sure, within Vietnam: Yes, do something and cooperate further with 
those Americans. You could get something out of it. And there are those 
undoubtedly within the Vietnamese Government who are saying do not do 
anything more; they will not reward you in any fashion anyway.
  So we are saying to those who are for the fullest cooperation, this 
is what we will give you. We will give you this lifting of the trade 
embargo and maybe later restoration of diplomatic relations. That is 
the first point.
  But the second point--and I know Senator Smith is entirely sincere in 
everything he says, but he just brushed aside this fact--is that more 
information will be found in that country when there are more Americans 
around there. I strongly believe that. I think the best way to get more 
information about MIA's in Vietnam is to have Americans across the 
countryside, even if it is trying to sell pumps in some small village. 
All the Americans that will come there for further trade are not going 
to be off shore drilling oil wells. They are going to be trying to sell 
automobiles. They are going to be trying to sell tractors. They are 
going to be trying to sell backhoes. They are going to be trying to 
sell telecommunications equipment. In my judgment, the best way to get 
more information is to have these Americans spread across the country.
  Now, fifth, Mr. President, regrettably, there cannot ever be a full 
accounting of every MIA. Just think of it. From World War II, there are 
still 78,000 Americans who are missing. I would just like to give a 
tiny illustration, if I might, of an incident that struck home with me.
  When World War II came, I left college along with another college 
classmate. We were acquaintances. We were not close friends. We both 
went into the Marine Corps together--not together, but we both went 
into the Marine Corps. We both joined the First Marine Division, both 
landed in Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942. He, Russ Whittlesey, was 
killed in September of 1942 on Guadalcanal. Because of the fluid 
situation, his body was found and was buried very quickly because of 
the situation that then existed.
  Three months later we conquered Guadalcanal. We had driven away or 
killed all the Japanese that were there. We had control of the island. 
Our lines and the place where Russ Whittlesey was buried were fairly 
well known--not exactly; we did not find his body, not that I was 
personally searching for it, but the graves registration unit of our 
division was. So he was carried as missing. They knew he had been 
killed, but they never found his body.
  In 1989, 47 years after Russ Whittlesey was killed, a farmer was 
plowing and struck and found his remains.
  Now, the point I am making, Mr. President, sad though it is, we will 
not find the remains of every single American soldier who is missing in 
action in Vietnam. Regrettably, that is true.
  Now, the sixth point. What do we gain in the United States from the 
lifting of this trade embargo? It in my judgment improves our 
opportunity to learn more about the MIA's that are there. That, of 
course, is the essential point of the discussion we are having this 
evening. Senator Smith's credentials as being probusiness he set forth. 
But it seems to me that it is important to remember that this is a 
tremendous market that exists. We will not lose out on that market by 
moving forward to lifting this trade embargo. We are not going to 
diminish our chances for finding out more about the MIA's there, and it 
will give us a chance to get across the countryside at the same time to 
sell our goods.
  This is a tremendous country. If I asked those on the Senate floor 
today what is the population of Vietnam--if I would have asked that of 
myself several months ago, I would have come up with the answer ``32 
million,'' just trying to figure roughly.
  The population of Vietnam is 72 million. It is a very big nation. I 
think it is a nation with which it behooves us to have better relations 
for a whole series of reasons. Our relationship with China, our 
relationships with all the nations of Southeast Asia, it seems to me, 
are affected to a great degree by what our relations are with Vietnam.
  So for these reasons, because most of all and principally it is going 
to give us a better chance to find out more about the missing in action 
and, second, that there are markets there which provide jobs for 
Americans, I think we should take this first step--not a total step, 
not diplomatic recognition, but the lifting of the trade embargo, which 
I think is in the best interests of the United States of America and 
those families who still have that pain and sorrow for some loved one 
within their family who is an MIA.
  I thank the Chair.
  Several Senators addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa [Mr. Grassley], is 
recognized.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the amendment 
put before us by Senator Kerry.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
  Mr. GRASSLEY. If I do not lose my right to the floor.
  Mr. KERRY. Simply for a point here.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Does the Senator yield?
  Mr. GRASSLEY. How long is the Senator going to take?
  Mr. KERRY. I am not going to take very much time at all. I simply 
want to inquire whether or not it might be possible now--Senator 
Mitchell, the majority leader, has informed me he intends for us to 
stay and vote on this this evening. The issue is, therefore, whether or 
not we could reach a time agreement, which we are perfectly happy to 
enter into over here. I wanted to inquire how long the Senator from 
Iowa wished to speak, and perhaps we can just make an allowance here 
and get everybody in and create an agreement, and then we can tell 
colleagues when it is we would vote.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. At the outside, I would say roughly 15, maybe 12 to 15 
minutes.
  Mr. KERRY. How much time does the Senator from New Hampshire think he 
needs in total?
  Mr. SMITH. Probably a half an hour, but I would want to confer with 
the minority leader before entering into an agreement, because he is a 
cosponsor with me. He is one of the original cosponsors of my 
amendment.
  Mr. KERRY. This would not be a time agreement on the Senator's 
amendment. This would simply be a time agreement on the current and 
pending amendment. Therefore, the Senator's rights with respect to his 
amendment, of which Senator Dole is a cosponsor, would be totally 
protected. The question simply is whether or not we could arrange a 
time which we could enter into now so we could have a vote on this. 
Then we could inform our colleagues so they can plan accordingly. If 
the Senator needs half an hour, say, and the Senator from Iowa needs 15 
minutes, if we were to say an hour on that side and an hour on this 
side----
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. This Senator is going to need a half hour.
  Mr. KERRY. The Senator from Alaska needs a half hour?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. The Senator from Alaska would ask a half hour.
  Mr. KERRY. A half hour, and I know 5 minutes for the Senator from 
Rhode Island, and the Senator from Maryland?
  Ms. MIKULSKI. No more than 10 minutes, probably less.
  Mr. KERRY. So again on this side, if you wanted to agree on a time 
limit of 2 hours equally divided, we would be agreeable to enter into 
that.
  Mr. SMITH. I will attempt to confer with the minority leader on that 
request while Senator Grassley is speaking.
  Mr. KERRY. I thank the Senator from Iowa.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa has the floor.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, the debate on this amendment is not 
about whether there is evidence that U.S. servicemen were left behind 
in Indochina. That question was the one that the POW-MIA Select 
Committee grappled with in 1991-1992. We tried to answer that question. 
We left a very extensive record to deal with on that question.
  We had disagreements on certain issues. And we found consensus on a 
lot of other issues.
  Rather, I think the debate on this Kerry amendment is about whether 
we can truthfully say that the families of our missing have received 
the fullest possible accounting of their loved ones. I think the answer 
is, obviously, no.
  There are some who say that the Vietnamese have shown somehow 
incredible rare openness and a rare amount of cooperation to provide us 
with information.
  As a matter of fact, you can say Vietnam has provided us with some 
information, helmets, photographs, artifacts and the like. But my 
colleagues and the public cannot fully understand what it is that the 
Vietnamese gave us unless they also know what the Vietnamese did not 
give us. So let me explain.
  To say that the Vietnamese are cooperating is a relative assertion. 
Compared to what, I ask? Certainly photos and helmets are an enormous 
breakthrough compared to nothing, which is what we were getting prior 
to that unseemly exhibition last October. Those who fell all over 
themselves to assign a great significance to the Vietnamese gesture 
must certainly recognize its hollowness now. For sure, the rest of the 
world recognizes it is a hollow gesture.
  How many cases were resolved as a result of 700 photos? Just a 
handful--just a handful out of 2,200-plus cases.
  For the benefit of my colleagues, for the benefit of families, and 
for the benefit of the public, I would like to describe the categories 
of information that Vietnam has. We learned of the existence of these 
categories through interviews during the select committee's 
investigation.
  The first level of information is archival, related to military 
history. This is information in museums and such like that. Even 
Vietnamese citizens have access to much of this information. It would 
include photos and it would include helmets of pilots such as we saw 
trotted out last fall by the Vietnamese. This is the first level of 
information, and I might say it is the least useful.
  Next, there are the provincial wartime records of shoot-downs. This 
information is an accounting of the date, the time, and the location of 
each shoot-down of an American plane out somewhere in the countryside 
of Vietnam. It also provides data on the type of aircraft and the 
status of the pilot and the crew.
  These are official unit records of the antiaircraft corps of Vietnam. 
The utility of this information is, among other things, to crosscheck 
the status of our MIA's with our own records of the U.S. Government.
  Finally, there is the national security information. Here I refer to 
central committee-level documents. These contain in essence the Vietnam 
national secrets on U.S. prisoner activity and information thereto. 
This information is what would tell us what happened to our prisoners 
and to our missing.
  It is important to know first off that Vietnam denied the existence 
of any information whatsoever of this data. So did our crack 
investigative outfit on this issue, the Defense Intelligence Agency or 
DIA. Yet, as I will show, somehow the information started to appear.
  In April 1992, a delegation from the select committee went to 
Indochina seeking answers and documentation. I was one of them. We were 
told politely that there was no information available, not even photos, 
and helmets, and all that stuff that they produced just 6 months later. 
Obviously, it was a bald-faced lie. It took creating an international 
scandal before the Vietnamese would eventually part with even this low 
level category of data. And they did not provide this information 
government to government. They somehow, accidentally, let me say, let 
us find it through some person who was described as a researcher.
  This, I remind my colleagues, was information that the Defense 
Intelligence Agency insisted did not exist.
  Throughout the rest of 1992 and 1993, the Vietnamese still claimed to 
have no new information. Meanwhile, there were high expectations on the 
part of Vietnam that the embargo would be lifted in September of 1993 
on the 20th anniversary. But the Clinton administration, although 
softening the embargo somewhat, however, wisely rejected a push by the 
bureaucracy and these business interests to lift that embargo.
  The President's rationale was that the Vietnamese had failed to be 
fully forthcoming. But now a very funny thing happened thereafter, Mr. 
President. Subsequent to September 1993 with President Clinton playing 
hardball, let me emphasize--with the President playing hardball--lo and 
behold, a second level data on our MIA's and the provincial unit 
records began to surface. Like the earlier channel, the channel used to 
pass this information was not the usual government to government one. 
But this time instead of them allowing us to accidentally find the 
data, they channeled it through a humanitarian effort; that is to the 
same joint task force that has been digging up their countryside 
looking for remains. This data has been streaming in steadily since 
last fall. It shows date and location of incidents, time of aircraft, 
and status of pilot and crew. Some of it conflicts with information the 
U.S. Government had on specific MIA's, and the extent of that conflict 
I think is useful information for us.
  How did this information just happen to show up, Mr. President?
  The answer is because the administration, meaning the Clinton 
administration, played hardball and caused them to cough up the data. 
Yet, this is the very same data that both the Vietnamese and the DIA 
said did not exist. Now we know that it does exist.
  So in summary, the only information that we have received so far from 
Vietnam about our MIA's is museum pieces and military historical 
records.
  Now, Mr. President, let me outline the information that we do not 
have. I am sure that this will be of immense interest to the families, 
to the public, to the intelligence community and to my colleagues. We 
have no provincial prison records, no national prison records, no 
national leadership records, no list of prisons and who was kept where 
and what was done with them during the war.
  No dossiers on prisoners; nothing from the Ministry of Interior which 
is their security department; no decision papers; no position papers; 
no ministerial directives. In short, then, we have nothing from 
Vietnam's files. All we have is what we know from our files. We provide 
the Vietnamese with what we know and they comment on it. To me, that is 
not cooperation; it is not the type of cooperation that I have heard 
described here on the floor of this body by the sponsors of this 
amendment.
  The Vietnamese have not even given us their list of prisoners. We 
merely gave them our list and asked them to comment. We presented them 
with the last-known-alive list, and they commented on it. That is like 
trying to piece together a very difficult puzzle. That is a far cry 
from providing us records and documents and letting records and 
documents tell us what happened. What is so sensitive now about a 
twenty-year-old wartime record and their handling of prisoners 20 years 
ago? What should be so sensitive about that? The bottom line is that we 
are operating over there almost exclusively on our own data and, 
taxpayers, get this: We are paying the Vietnamese for the privilege of 
digging up their countryside for remains. Some of the prices we are 
paying would make $1,800 toilet seats that the DOD buys seem very 
reasonable.
  Mr. President, they have denied us all of this information, despite 
the fact that the United States recently turned over to them--our 
Government turned over to the Vietnamese--3 million pages of the same 
type of data that we had on their prisoners. Is it not reasonable to 
expect the same thing in return before we go about proclaiming the 
Vietnamese's total cooperation to our efforts?
  In light of all this, Mr. President, I wonder how many among us can 
face their constituents and families of MIA's and say, yes, the 
Vietnamese have reasonably been fully forthcoming. The immediate 
question is: If pressure on Vietnam made them disclose the first and 
second levels of information, why would we lift the embargo now, before 
we get their national security data, the data similar to what we gave 
them recently, and the kind of data reflected in the Russian document 
that our DIA--that crack investigative unit that we rely on probably 
more than we should--predictably claimed that it has been debunked. 
There is a document that with everything else in it, they do not have 
any question; but anything that refers to our POW's in Vietnam, 
somehow, it just is not factual. They find fault with it. But 
everything else in the document was OK.
  That ought to tell you something about our people, whose major 
responsibility is to see that we carry out our obligation to get this 
information out to satisfy the families yearning for this information.
  Because Vietnam has not been forthcoming with information, we should 
continue to hold out, just as President Clinton did in September, until 
that third level of information, accidentally received or otherwise, 
finds its way into our hands. If we do not continue to press for full 
disclosure, what incentive does Vietnam have to fully cooperate and 
fully disclose? We owe it to the families and to those who will fight 
for America in the future, to those whom we told we will neither 
forsake nor forget.
  Furthermore, Mr. President, if we move ahead with lifting the 
embargo, without full disclosure by Vietnam, we will be rewarding 
Vietnam, while ignoring their human rights abuses. I have heard the 
distinguished Senator from Nebraska, Senator Kerrey, State this point 
over and over again, and we should listen to what he says about this. 
We have stress over human rights issues in China. In fact, our 
Secretary of State, just 2 days ago, was talking to the Chinese in 
Paris about improving their record if they want this body to keep most-
favored-nation status going. Why that concern about China? Why not the 
concern about human rights in Vietnam? I do not know.
  Vietnamese citizens are unable to express their discontent. You may 
remember that, recently, Senator Robb was unable to gain access to a 
political prisoner that he sought to meet with in Vietnam.
  There continues to be a tight public security operation in Vietnam. 
The Vietnamese people continue to suffer hardships and abuses. 
Meanwhile, information is abundant that more liberal political factions 
in Vietnam are increasingly threatening to replace the old Communist 
guard. If we lift the embargo, we reward that old guard. Human rights 
abuses will continue, Mr. President. Surely, this is not in America's 
interest. It is not in the world's interest, and it does not speak very 
well of the consistency of our moral leadership in the world community 
of nations when we keep stressing freedom.
  Last night, that was a strong point that President Clinton made in 
his State of the Union message. It was a strong point that I think we 
all believe. It is a strong point that ought to be considered in this 
debate. These are all legitimate reasons, Mr. President, why we must 
support the Dole-Smith amendment, which I hope we will get a chance to 
vote on and defeat. Lifting the embargo is not right, not for the 
families, not for the missing, not for tomorrow's servicemen, and not 
for our country. We have a moral obligation to deliver on our promise 
of the fullest possible accounting. Let me get one thing straight, Mr. 
President, those who are pushing the embargo to be lifted are doing so 
because they want it lifted, not because the problem has been solved.
  The problem of the fullest possible disclosure by Vietnam is 
unresolved because Vietnam has failed to cooperate as fully as they 
have the capability of doing. They have responded to our economic 
leverage. They have done it on level one and level two. Let us keep 
that economic leverage there for level three information that we want. 
We can force their hand and force them to deliver just as the President 
did in September. Let us not take away the President's leverage to do 
so again.
  The strategy supported by the Dole-Smith amendment is empirical. Both 
times we got information. We got it because we played hard ball. We can 
do what works, or we can roll the dice. I think that it is a roll of 
the dice if we follow the direction of the amendment now before the 
Senate.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. KERRY. I want to take a moment before my two colleagues, 
particularly the chairman, speak. I listened carefully to the Senator 
from Iowa. I think one of the most important things here is to have 
accuracy in the representations. In point of fact, the Senator has not 
accurately represented documents that we have received. He said that we 
ought to listen to Senator Bob Kerrey on the subject of human rights. I 
agree. Bob Kerrey is an original cosponsor of this amendment. He is a 
Medal of Honor winner, Vietnam veteran, and he believes we ought to 
proceed forward here. Bob Kerrey has advocated human rights in Vietnam. 
He believes we will do more for human rights by going in there and 
being able to assert ourselves and press the issue of democratization 
and freedom, which we do not do very effectively now. He will speak for 
himself.
  Let me point to corrections in the Record. I was on the trip where he 
relates the Vietnamese said no information is available and they 
somehow lied. They said they did not have the information available at 
that time to get their hands on while we were there, but they were 
going to begin a process of reaching out to their tradition houses, 
archives, and their military personnel and get that information in. 
That is precisely what has been happening. I think the Senator from 
Iowa has made a marvelous argument for why we ought to lift the 
embargo, because, in point of fact, he traced the history of how 
documents came to surface. They came to surface because we had a person 
working in their archive process. They knew it, and we knew it. They 
chose to surface some of these materials through that person. Why? 
Because this is still an authoritarian government. We all understand 
that. They have their own tensions within their own government. There 
are some people who do not want to deal with us. There are some people 
who do. There are some people who do not want to put things out. There 
are some who do.

  We have that in our own departments. The Senator remembers how tough 
it was to get the CIA to give us information. Remember how tough it was 
to get the DIA to give us some information. This is not unique. We 
understand the process of tug-of-war to get information.
  The fact is all the information we have been able to get we get 
because we have been able to be there. We have been able to discover 
things. We have been able to confront them. And that is the process.
  The Senator says we do not have prison records. That is not true. We 
do have prison records. The Senator said we have no dossier on our 
prisoners. I personally had certain medical records on our prisoners 
turned over to us, and we hope those are going to help lead us to 
further records on our prisoners.
  In addition, he said we have no interior department records and no 
records of some of the political records and shoot-downs.
  I personally negotiated and pressed for what are called the group 559 
documents that dealt with operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 
addition to that, there is a group of documents called the 875 
documents which are documents of the general political directorate 
which come through the interior department and refer to our prisoners. 
We are now receiving those documents. We have some of them in hand.
  We think there may be more, but nobody knows to a certainty where or 
how many more. We are going to continue to press that process.
  So I come back. I think the Senator frankly has made an excellent 
argument for how we have been able to produce these documents which is 
exactly what we are saying. You get the document by getting access and 
moving down the road through the cooperative effort.
  I promised to yield to the Senator from Rhode Island who has been 
waiting.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, will you let me engage the Senator for 
60 seconds?
  Mr. KERRY. I am delighted to. I do not want to put the Senator off. I 
do not want to yield the floor. I am happy to respond.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I make clear that I cannot contest some 
of these documents that he refers to, but we happen to know what 
documents exist from our investigation. I want to make clear that I was 
talking about a full and complete set.
  We have some specific pieces here and there that we have gotten from 
the department the Senator stated and dossiers and some prisons. But I 
am talking about a full and complete as we know those records full and 
complete exist. We do not have that sort of cooperation from them.
  Then my last point is simply the Senator made an argument when he 
states about it being an authoritarian government. It is for that 
reason that I think we have to use the economic leverage or we will 
never get any answers, and it is because they are authoritarian they 
can get away with lying to us.
  Mr. KERRY. Let me say to my colleague, I do not contest that we at 
times have been lied to. I never asserted otherwise.
  I am trying to create a structure where we can create an 
accountability where there is not a lie.
  As I said at the outset of my comments, there is nothing in the 
approach of myself, Senator McCain, Senator Murkowski, and others, that 
is based on trust. We would be fools if this was based on trust. This 
is based on a process of how you verify.
  But let me say to my colleague--he says, you know, we know what they 
have or do not have. We know that they had certain records. We do not 
know that they have them today. We cannot prove them today. No one can 
prove they have them today.
  The only way we are going to prove they have them today is by getting 
into the process and discovering them and finding someone who is going 
to give us a smoking gun. We can make all the conjecture we want about 
what they do and do not have. The truth is we are not going to know 
unless we are there, and that is the bottom line.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island [Mr. Pell], is 
recognized.
  Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I urge support for Senator Kerry and Senator 
McCain's amendment stating it is the sense of the Congress that the 
trade embargo with Vietnam should be lifted.
  I have long endorsed lifting the trade embargo. Indeed, I would be 
pleased to see the administration take even more dramatic steps. Early 
last year Senator Lugar and I wrote to President Clinton recommending 
that the trade embargo be lifted and appropriate steps taken toward the 
normalization of relations with Vietnam, for many of the same reasons 
just enumerated by Senators Kerry and McCain. I ask unanimous consent 
that a copy of our letter and a letter from the chamber of commerce be 
printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I think it is interesting to note that every 
Vietnam combat veteran among our body supports this amendment. It is 
time to write an end to the Vietnam war. Continuation of the trade 
embargo with Vietnam in this day and age in which American officials 
negotiate with North Koreans and trade with the People's Republic of 
China is measured in tens of billions of dollars is an anachronism.
  Ending the trade embargo does not mean and end to the search for 
those listed as missing in action or prisoners of war. In fact, it 
means an intensified search as more Americans visit Vietnam. To the 
team of American investigators now operating in Vietnam will be added 
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American businessmen and tourists. Any 
shred of evidence of a live prisoner or the remains of someone missing 
in action, I am certain, will surface more quickly than if we continue 
to try to limit contact with Vietnam. I believe that lifting the trade 
embargo will bring the best accounting possible of our MIA/POW's.
  The United States alone maintains trade sanctions on Vietnam. As 
others have noted, lifting the trade embargo would enable American 
businesses to compete more effectively for the promising Vietnamese 
market. Business is important. We all recognize that America must 
export more if we are to grow as a Nation.
  But equally important is the impact of American business on the 
Vietnamese political and economic system. American business will 
transform the landscape of Vietnamese society just as it is changing 
China today. While both Chinese and Vietnamese officials may believe 
that they can resist political changes even while pursuing economic 
reform, I do not believe that they will be able to stem the tide of 
political liberalization that comes with economic change. By lifting 
the trade embargo, we have the opportunity eventually to see democracy 
brought to all of Vietnam. Where once we fought for half a country, we 
now have a chance to win all a country. We cannot afford to lose this 
opportunity again.
  Improving the human rights of the Vietnamese people, many of whom 
fought beside our soldiers in the war, and resolving the remaining 
cases of those missing-in-action should be the goal of our foreign 
policy in Vietnam.
  I urge my colleagues to support this amendment. At the same time I 
urge President Clinton to lift the trade embargo and take steps toward 
restoring full diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Let us seize the 
future, not dwell in the past.
  Particularly I bring to our attention focusing again on the fact that 
all the Vietnam combat veterans in our body support this amendment. I 
yield the floor.

                               Exhibit 1

                                             United States Senate,


                               Committee on Foreign Relations,

                                   Washington, DC, March 18, 1993.
       Dear Mr. President: We are writing to urge you to lift the 
     United States trade embargo on Vietnam and to not oppose 
     loans to Vietnam by international financial institutions. In 
     addition, we believe the United States should take 
     appropriate steps towards the normalization of relations with 
     Vietnam, including the establishment of a diplomatic liaison 
     office in Hanoi.
       In our view such steps are warranted as well within the 
     policy parameters established by President Bush in the so-
     called road map proposal for the normalization of relations 
     between the United States and Vietnam. In particular we note 
     that the Paris Peace Accords for the settlement of the 
     Cambodian conflict have been in effect for over a year and in 
     fact the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia 
     (UNTAC) is now contemplating the completion of its mission. 
     In addition, we believe a process has been established for 
     the resolution of the POW/MIA issue with Vietnam that has 
     already produced substantial results and promises to produce 
     even more progress over the coming years.
       Further resolution of the POW/MIA issue would be aided by a 
     closer relationship with Vietnam. In this regard we would 
     support efforts to devote more American assets to the Joint 
     Recovery Task Force now operating in Vietnam. We certainly 
     believe that it is within Vietnam's capability to do much 
     more in assisting the resolution of this issue but we believe 
     the prospects for success will be enhanced through 
     intensified American and international contact with Vietnam.
       In addition although we remain deeply concerned about 
     Vietnam's human rights situation, once again we believe that 
     we will have greater influence on Vietnam's human rights 
     situation with normalization than we would without such 
     relations. A similar situation prevails in China where 
     because of our extensive political and economic relationship 
     with China we maintain a dialogue on human rights and other 
     issues which has resulted in internal improvements.
       The United States alone maintains trade sanctions on 
     Vietnam. Lifting the trade embargo would enable American 
     business to compete more effectively with other countries and 
     other international businesses for the promising Vietnamese 
     market.
       We believe that an aggressive and enlightened bilateral and 
     multilateral dialogue with Vietnam will eventually result in 
     democratic change in Vietnam and achieve a more complete 
     resolution of the POW/MIA issue. For those Americans deeply 
     concerned about those issues we believe that there is only 
     one policy course. Therefore, we encourage you to take 
     immediate steps to end Vietnam's economic and political 
     isolation from the world community.
       With every good wish.
           Every sincerely,
     Claiborne Pell,
                                                         Chairman.
     Richard G. Lugar,
                                                     U.S. Senator.
                                  ____



                                     U.S. Chamber of Commerce,

                                 Washington, DC, January 25, 1994.
     Hon. Claiborne Pell,
     U.S. Senate, Washington, DC.
       Dear Senator Pell: During consideration of H.R. 1281, the 
     State Department Authorization Bill, amendments will be 
     raised dealing with the current U.S. economic sanctions 
     against Vietnam. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce urges your 
     support for the amendment proposed by Senators Kerry, McCain, 
     Murkowski, Robb and others which requests that the President 
     lift all sanctions prohibiting non-strategic trade and 
     investment with Vietnam.
       Given the ongoing liberalization of Vietnam's economy and 
     its cooperation with the United States regarding POWs/MIAs 
     and the situation in Cambodia, the U.S. foreign policy 
     rationale for continuing sanctions against Vietnam is no 
     longer persuasive. In fact, of 200 POW/MIA discrepancy cases, 
     more than 120 have been resolved to the satisfaction of the 
     U.S. government and the families involved. Lifting the 
     embargo would speed resolution of the remaining bilateral 
     issues more effectively than maintaining sanctions that only 
     serve to damage the economic position of the United States.
       A continuation of the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam 
     will only serve to restrict U.S. business from competing in 
     the region now and in the future. Most of our major trading 
     partners have been trading in Vietnam for some time, 
     positioning themselves to take advantage of a potentially 
     lucrative and dynamic export market, while U.S. companies 
     with competitive products are forced to sit on the sidelines.
       The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Federation of 215,000 
     businesses, 3,000 local and state chambers of commerce, 1,200 
     trade and professional associations, and 68 American Chambers 
     of Commerce abroad urges your support for this amendment 
     requesting an immediate lifting of the U.S. trade embargo 
     with Vietnam.
           Sincerely,
                                                William T. Archey.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland, [Ms. Mikulski].
  Ms. MIKULSKI. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
  Mr. President, for many years I have supported the efforts to get a 
full and complete accounting of our missing in action from the Vietnam 
war. As a woman in both the House and the Senate, my heart went out to 
the families of the MIA's whose wives, mothers, and daughters never 
knew what happened to their loved ones, also particularly to the sons 
and daughters who never even knew their dad because he was missing in 
action when they were either a child or before they were born.
  These gallant, brave families have faced at every step over the last 
2\1/2\ decades resistance, rejection, and even stonewalling of their 
efforts by the Vietnamese Government and often they got little help or 
little support from their own United States Government. They feel hurt. 
They always feel abandonment.
  At the same time, I have always supported our Vietnam veterans, those 
who vote, those who died, and many who bear the permanent wounds of 
war. My support has not been by words but I have tried to do it by 
deeds.
  I chaired the subcommittee that funds the Appropriations Committee 
for the veterans programs. I have tried to fund the benefit package 
that was promised to them and to really move health care to a world-
class status.
  I have voted to create the POW/MIA committee within the Senate and 
voted to sustain that committee.
  For me, the men and women who served in Vietnam are special. So many 
were working class families, and in my own neighborhood, I have been to 
their funerals, and I have been to their parades. My mother's very best 
friend's son, a graduate of West Point, was killed in Vietnam. His name 
is Frankie Schap. Right now he would be in his late forties, and what 
we have of Frankie, or I should say Captain Schap, is his name engraved 
on the Vietnam memorial and engraved in the families of a Polish 
American neighborhood who were so proud the day he went to West Point, 
the day he graduated from West Point, and we then remember the day he 
came home from Vietnam in a casket.
  So I have been on the side of the men and women who were there, 
whether it was the women at China Beach or the men at the Mekong Delta.
  So now we are faced with what should we do about this vote on lifting 
the embargo. My first impulse is to vote no, absolutely no. Then I had 
to examine what will get us to the accounting of what we want.
  For 25 years we followed the policy of no communication, no 
cooperation, and the pursuit of isolation with Vietnam, with economic 
sanctions, punishments and embargoes. We got nowhere. But then, under 
President Reagan and then amplified by President Bush, there was the 
policy of small steps, of communication and confidence building, led 
primarily by General Vessey. And there have been openings. There has 
been more accounting. There has been more information during the last 5 
years.
  We have the information that was brought to us by General Vessey, a 
decorated hero who himself served gallantly in Vietnam, who outlined 
the steps that he thought were achieved during his leadership in 
heading the Bush effort on confidence building and small steps. Senator 
Kerry, John Kerry, has shared with us the facts about many of those; 
that from 1975 to 1988, very little happened; that under the then 
Vessey effort, the MIA task force was able to go out into the community 
to dig for remains; that Vessey presented 196 cases, and now, of those, 
we have 120 whose fates have been determined.
  We now have our own U.S. military on the ground and the MIA task 
force that is going into villages actually able to dig into the grounds 
where there have been the last sightings to pursue remains. I have been 
told that we have in the U.S. military one who has an unlimited pass to 
go into the archival information.
  These have been important steps. Are they the only steps? Oh, no, no. 
Has what has happened in the last 5 years been enough? The answer is 
no. We want a full and complete accounting.
  But the Vietnamese tell us if you give in the economic area, you will 
get even more cooperation, information, access, and accounting.
  Well, should we trust the Vietnamese, I ask? Well, I do not think 
this is about trust. I think it is about a testing, a testing of the 
Vietnamese. If they say they will give more, then I believe we should 
test it.
  Let us not kid ourselves. Vietnam is a very, very nasty place. It is 
still a totalitarian regime. It still has considerable human rights 
abuses. I think we all know that there has been a crackdown on freedom 
of speech, that there has been an imprisonment of nonviolent dissenters 
and religious dissenters. We know there have been other abuses relating 
to children and women. So we know that Vietnam is no garden of 
paradise.
  As to our MIA's, I really do not know if any MIA's are alive. But I 
do believe that the Vietnamese know more than they are telling and I do 
believe that the Vietnamese could do more than they are doing now.
  Are any alive? Well, I do not know. But I do know and I do believe 
that there is more information in the field. I believe that there is 
more information in the files. I do believe that there is more 
information in the archives. And I also do not want to abandon those 
MIA's who are missing or their families.
  I was mesmerized by a book by Mary Stevens called ``Kiss the Boys 
Good-bye'' in which she delineated the possibilities of even more 
findings in Vietnam.
  I know the work, the hard work, of the POW-MIA Committee--Chairman 
Kerry, John McCain, Chuck Grassley, Bob Smith, Tom Daschle, Nancy 
Kassebaum. It is a rollcall of honor in the way they did such due 
diligence on that committee.
  But now I think we are not talking about goals. We all agree on the 
goals. There needs to be an ongoing, continued, unrelenting pursuit for 
a full and complete accounting.
  But what we are debating here is about means and about means to be 
achieved in a timely way. So I have come to the conclusion that it is 
time to roll the dice, to test the Vietnamese, to challenge them to 
step up, but at the same time as we challenge them, that we let them 
know we are not capitulating to them.
  Why am I willing to lift the embargo? I am willing to lift it because 
this is not the final step in our relationship with Vietnam. It is only 
a tool right now. Right now, the Vietnamese want normalization. They 
want a full diplomatic relationship. They will probably want MFN. I am 
sure they are going to want to be in GATT.
  By lifting the embargo, we give this a chance. We give this a test, 
even though we do not have trust. We can issue a challenge to put up, 
even though we do not capitulate, nor do we abandon our MIA's.
  And if they fail to do more, to tell more, to cooperate more, we in 
Congress can block any further steps towards normalization, diplomatic 
relationships, MFN or membership in the GATT, all those things that 
they want.
  There is a struggle going on in Vietnam between the old guard and the 
new guard, and 60 percent of the population in Vietnam is under the age 
of 24. They were born after the Vietnam war came to a close.
  The time now, I think, is not to punish this new generation for the 
sins of their fathers. We need to see if this new guard will cooperate 
with us in a way that the old guard has not.
  So let us give it a try. Yes, let us gamble. I will always continue 
to stand with those MIA families, with our Vietnam vets. But let me say 
I want to stand with the Vietnam vets and the U.S. Congress who call 
for the lifting of the embargo. I believe we could lift the bamboo 
curtain to find out that which has been hidden and held secret for more 
than 25 years.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I wonder, Mr. President, if the chairman of the 
Foreign Relations Committee is waiting to speak?
  Mr. PELL. I have spoken. Thank you.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I must have stepped out.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Akaka). The Senator from Alaska is 
recognized.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I want to join with my distinguished 
colleagues on both sides of this issue who have a genuine commitment to 
the highest obligation of government, and that is the issue of full 
accountability for American servicemen who are unaccounted for from the 
Vietnam war.
  I would also like to advise my colleagues, some of whom have come 
into the Senate in the last few years, that I am no stranger to this 
particular issue. Back in 1986, as chairman of the Veterans' Affairs 
Committee, I held extensive hearings on the matter of MIA/POW full 
accountability and encouraged extended testimony, which the record in 
the Veterans Affairs Committee supports. As part of those hearings, I 
worked with the League of Missing Families and other veterans' 
organizations in an effort to collect as much information as possible 
on the issue of POWs/MIAs from the Vietnam war.
  Mr. President, I cannot tell you the anguish that Senator Cranston 
and I had--at that time, we were in the majority and Senator Cranston 
was the ranking member of that committee--as day by day we hoped that 
we would receive some firsthand information on charges that American 
soldiers were left behind at the end of the war and were being held 
against their will in Vietnamese prisons.
  At the hearings, we had situations where witnesses would come in and 
testify that they had access to films showing Americans in prison 
camps, chained together in gold mines, even. They also testified that 
there was some kind of subterfuge, some type of CIA plot to withhold 
this information from the American people. It was agonizing.
  The reason I go into this is to suggest to you that many of those who 
have spoken today on this subject have been thinking about this issue 
for quite some time. Of course, those who served as prisoners of war in 
Vietnam such as my colleague Senator McCain have a very special 
message. And my friend from New Hampshire also has a point of view 
based on his service in Vietnam and his examination of the record, and 
I think his viewpoint deserves consideration.
  But I ask all of my colleagues, as we discuss this issue today, to 
recognize that we are also discussing the conscience of America with 
regard to the Vietnam war. It was a time that was very unpleasant in 
the memories of Americans who were of that era. It is also, if you 
will, a debate on the outcome of that war, which is not a very pleasant 
matter to reflect upon.
  But this is also a debate about the future. I also ask my colleagues 
to recognize that there is a new generation both in America and in 
Vietnam who were not even born when this war was fought. It is a new 
era. It is a new generation. I was particularly moved by the comments 
of the Senator from Maryland, who reminded us that the average age of 
the 72 million people in Vietnam is 24 years old.
  I also think that we have to face reality in this discussion. The 
reality that while 2,238 American soldiers remain unaccounted for today 
in Vietnam, we have made substantial progress because in 1973 that 
figure was 2,583. To put this figure in further perspective, in the 
Korean war those unaccounted for total 8,177; in World War II, 78,794; 
in World War I, 1,648.
  The fullest possible accounting for our POW's/MIA's is the Nation's 
highest obligation. I think this is one aspect of U.S. policy that all 
of my colleagues would agree with. But the embargo, the sanctions, have 
proven to be counterproductive to that goal. The American presence 
which we have had in Vietnam, with the presence of the MIA task force, 
as well--and this is not generally known, Mr. President--as well as the 
presence of three State Department personnel in Hanoi who are assisting 
the visits of Americans to Vietnam--have given us the ability to 
communicate in ways that were not possible when we completely isolated 
Vietnam. And with this communication has come additional information 
related to resolving POW/MIA cases.
  I am not satisfied with our progress in obtaining the fullest 
possible accounting. But I believe that further progress is now 
inhibited by the continued isolationist policies of the past. Is it not 
ironic as we debate here in this Chamber on the merits of most-favored-
nation status for China that we talk of continuing an isolationist 
policy against Vietnam? The logic of most-favored-nation status for 
China is that we want to maintain communications with the Chinese so 
that we can bring about change, so that we can bring about advancements 
in human rights. But for some reason or another, we do not apply this 
same logic to Vietnam even though we do want to bring about change in 
Vietnam. We want to bring about human rights improvements. We want to 
bring about democracy. And we want to bring about the fullest possible 
accounting for servicemen still unaccounted for in Vietnam.
  United States ability to exert leverage on Vietnamese leaders to meet 
our demands, in my opinion, has diminished because other countries are 
not standing still. They are moving into Vietnam. They have established 
diplomatic and trading relations. As a matter of fact, 120 countries 
have normal relations with Vietnam, including all our former allies 
during the war.
  The question we have to ask is, will we make more progress if there 
is more access? And the answer is clearly yes. The evidence proves that 
point. We had an isolationist policy for 19 years. Then, 3 years ago, 
we began to take small steps to end that isolation. Now we are talking 
about finally changing that isolationist approach. I would venture to 
say we have been on that tack long enough. As we have established a 
presence, we have made more progress in what our obligation is, and 
that is full accountability.
  I was in the military between 1955 and 1957, between the Korean and 
Vietnamese wars. I was in the U.S. Coast Guard, so I do not speak as a 
prisoner of war or one who fought during that war. But again, my 
commitment as chairman of the Veterans' Committee in holding hearings 
on this issue in 1986 has given me a unique sensitivity of the 
obligation that we have the families whose loved ones were lost during 
the war. We have a responsibility to ease the suffering of these 
families by obtaining the fullest possible accounting, and not losing 
sight of that goal.
  I was in Vietnam in 1986. I was fortunate enough to bring back with 
me two children who had not seen their mother for approximately 6 
years. It was a very moving experience. I was in Vietnam again in 
December of this year. I cannot tell you the change that has occurred 
in that country. The contrast between the circumstances at the time 
that I held hearings in 1986 and what has happened today is remarkable. 
In 1986, we had no firsthand information because we had no access, no 
communication, no presence in Vietnam. The situation was of grave 
concern to me and Senator Cranston and to the League of Families and 
others who participated.
  Then, in 1991, General Vessey was sent to Vietnam by George Bush to 
begin a formal process with the Vietnamese to resolve the fates of 
American servicemen. My colleagues have articulated the progress that 
has occurred since the Vessey mission.
  You will also recall that during the Bush administration we had the 
roadmap toward normalization of relations with Vietnam. We laid down 
certain terms and conditions that the Vietnamese had to meet before the 
President would improve relations. The conditions included withdrawal 
from Cambodia, recognition of human rights, of course full 
accountability for the fates of American servicemen.
  Then, somewhere along the way we changed the goal post. On Cambodia, 
for example, we said first, that they must withdraw from Cambodia. Then 
we said, no, no, Vietnamese, we want you to use your influence in 
Cambodia. But even with changed goal posts, the Vietnamese met, for the 
most part, the requirements that we set down. And we make no apologies 
for that.
  At the time the roadmap was initiated, we had a policy of no 
communication, no presence. We could not travel to crash sites. We 
could not interview Vietnamese citizens and officials. Americans could 
not spend over $100 in Vietnam. It was against the law.
  But that situation changed as we increased contacts with the 
Vietnamese. United States personnel now have access to the Vietnamese 
Government's military archives and to its prisons. U.S. personnel in 
Hanoi now travel freely to the crash sites and interview Vietnamese 
citizens and officials.
  So we have had positive progress and positive cooperation in the last 
3 years and that is a direct result of increased access in Vietnam: 
General Vessey's mission, the Joint Task Force Full Accounting Office 
in Hanoi, the unofficial presence of our State Department, and the 
presence of U.S. business personnel and tourists traveling in the 
country.
  The more access Americans have in Vietnam, be it diplomatic, 
commercial, journalistic, academic, or humanitarian, the stronger the 
links between America and Vietnam will become, the more open the 
Vietnamese society will become, and the more likely we are to finally 
address the issue of full accountability.
  Full accountability is something that is a bit in the eyes of the 
beholder because we will never be able to fully account for all the 
2,238 that we list as unaccounted for. Obviously, some were lost at 
sea, some were lost in fires. That does not relieve us of the 
obligation of fullest possible accounting, it simple means reality 
dictates that we may not account for every single POW/MIA case.
  That leads me to reflect on where we are today in this discussion. If 
now is not the time to lift the embargo, when is? When are we going to 
be able to stand here objectively and say that we have achieved full 
accountability? Does that mean that we will not relax the sanctions 
against Vietnam until we have been able to account for every one of the 
2,238? I would like to stand here and say yes, that is correct, Mr. 
President, but reality dictates that we will never be able to fully 
account for every serviceman classified as POW/MIA.
  But we do have a process going on to resolve every case possible, and 
it is a process that I think more Americans should appreciate and 
understand.
  I know Senator McCain, Senator Kerry, Senator Smith and others have 
seen the accounting process. The point that I want to communicate is 
that this interaction that we have established with the Vietnamese is 
resulting in uncovering additional information. And as the Vietnamese 
society opens up to a U.S. presence, there is no point, there is no 
rationale, to conceal information.
  The last trip I made to Vietnam convinced me that the time has come 
to use engagement, if you will, and not isolation, to fully resolve the 
fates of missing Americans. Two impressions stuck in my mind from that 
trip: One is the tremendous dedication of the Joint Task Force Full 
Accounting that is in Hanoi. The progress that I was referring to 
earlier is the result of the hard work of the task force. They have 
reduced the number of incidents to be investigated from 1,116 to 119. 
This systematic process involves following up on information, for 
example, that someone was seen shot down parachuting 20 years ago. A 
task force goes out in the field, they go to the villages, they 
interview witnesses. They take that case and continue to work on it 
until they either have identified remains or other evidence of the fate 
of the serviceman, or until they have exhausted leads. It is such an 
impressive process that I urge all my colleagues to read the reports of 
the joint task force.
  The Joint Task Force also has resolved a number of the high priority, 
discrepancy cases. The number of discrepancy cases has decreased from 
196 to less than 80.
  I note also Mr. President, most of these people, that make up these 
teams are Vietnam veterans. If there is any group that has a greater 
motivation, I do not know who it is.
  The joint task force also has reviewed a tremendous number of 
archival documents: 23,000 pieces have been examined. Further, the 
joint task force has presented findings to the families of the POW/
MIA's: 5,614 notifications to approximately 900 families.
  I was particularly moved by the statement of Lieutenant Colonel 
Flanagan, the deputy commander of the joint task force, who told me: 
``More Americans need to come over here and see how it really is and 
then go back and tell other Americans about the progress and the 
cooperation that is occurring here.''
  I agree with the Colonel. Therefore, I plan to propose to this body 
that we take the families of our MIA's, at the Government's expense and 
using Government transportation, to Hanoi to meet with this team so 
that they can see for themselves what is being done to obtain the 
fullest possible accounting for their loved ones. It will truly be, I 
think, a worthwhile experience. I know that there have been efforts 
made in this regard. Perhaps those efforts should be formalized. I hope 
that I can count on my colleagues in that regard.
  The second impression that sticks in my mind from my recent visit to 
Vietnam is the increased cooperation from the Vietnamese. Every 
Vietnamese I talked to, from high-ranking Government officials in the 
country to reporters on the streets, were committed to fully 
cooperating with the Americans to resolve the fates of American 
servicemen still unaccounted for.
  I think that many of my colleagues who visited Vietnam over the last 
several months would agree that they witnessed a true sense of 
cooperation. That does not mean that we have to be satisfied with 
whether the Vietnamese cooperated in the past. They did not. The 
question is, are they cooperating now? I think that the cooperation is 
real and that it will continue. I truly believe that cooperation and 
progress would be increased if the sanctions were lifted and the 
relationship could grow.
  The cooperation that I witnessed, as I said, has produced results. 
According to the joint task force briefing, 67 sets of remains were 
returned from Vietnam in 1993. That is double the number in the 
previous year and overall the third highest level returned since the 
war ended. In addition, recently completed trilateral investigations on 
the Laos border were the first of their kind, and it was the Vietnamese 
who pushed Laos to cooperate with the Americans.
  My recent trip also confirmed reports of Vietnam's changing society. 
In my meetings with various officials in the Vietnamese Government, I 
was struck by their strong commitment to an open-market economy. They 
have looked at what happened to Russia and to North Korea, and they 
have turned towards an open-market economy. This is an extraordinary 
thing. In addition, the Vietnamese are a very energetic and well-
educated people. Many of them speak English and they are able to feed 
themselves. They have made significant progress.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask if I can interrupt for a moment?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I defer without losing my right to the floor.


                      Unanimous Consent Agreement

  Mr. KERRY. I thank the distinguished Senator. I merely do so because 
I would like to propound a unanimous consent request which will help 
colleagues to make considerably better choices for the evening.
  I ask unanimous consent that there be 2 hours remaining for debate on 
the Vietnam issue for tonight, to be equally divided between Senators 
Kerry and Smith; and that immediately following the entering of the 
agreement, the two pending amendments numbered 1262 and 1263 be laid 
aside in order for Senator Smith to be recognized to offer his 
amendment dealing with the same subject; and that no amendments be in 
order to the Smith amendment or further amendments be in order to the 
McCain amendment.
  I also ask unanimous consent that at 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, January 
27, the Senate resume S. 1281 and proceed to 45 minutes of debate 
equally divided between Senators Kerry and Smith; and that at 10 a.m., 
a vote occur first on the Kerry amendment No. 1263, to be followed 
immediately by a vote on the Smith amendment, to be followed by a vote 
on the McCain amendment, as amended, if amended, all without any 
intervening action or debate.
  Finally, I ask unanimous consent that the first vote be limited to 15 
minutes in length, the second vote limited to 10 minutes in length.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there any objection to the unanimous 
consent request of the Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Kerry?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. KERRY. On behalf of the majority leader, I am able to announce 
that there will be no further rollcall votes tonight.
  I thank the distinguished Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I thank the Senator.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. MURKOWSKI addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I believe the Senator from Alaska has the floor and I 
intend to continue to speak for about 10 minutes more.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator 
complete his remarks and the unanimous consent agreement take effect at 
the conclusion of the remarks of the Senator from Alaska.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The 
Senator from Alaska is recognized for 10 minutes.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, lifting the embargo clearly does not 
take away the leverage tools we have. Restrictions on military items 
and other high-technical items remain in place. Most-favored-nation 
status is not granted. Normal diplomatic relations are not resumed. 
Moreover, the President has the flexibility to reimpose restrictions. 
But it does do what we want it to do and that is to give us an 
increased American presence. Leverage comes from engagement, not 
isolation.
  Further, lifting the embargo will serve mutually compatible goals.
  As I said in the beginning of my statement, the goal of this 
amendment is to help the families obtain the fullest possible 
accountability. The amendment strives to move relations with Vietnam in 
a positive direction so that we can resolve the accountability issue 
for the families' benefit, for their loved ones, for their children. 
And we need to speed up the process, Mr. President, because we have 
been on this track for 20 years. How do we get beyond it? The progress 
that we have achieved through limited access speaks for itself.
  This amendment also serves the goal of promoting free markets, 
democracy, and human rights through communication, access, and 
presence.
  Lastly, this amendment serves the goal of increasing U.S. 
competitiveness through trade and commerce. Some have mentioned a 
rather delicate issue, that some supporters of this amendment want the 
amendment so that we can go drill oil. That is a ridiculous remark, 
with absolutely no foundation and, very frankly, I resent the 
implications associated with that, because it is not factual.
  What is factual is that from a trade standpoint, the sanctions that 
we have imposed now simply hurt the United States rather than Vietnam 
because other countries are doing business in Vietnam.
  Our embargo no longer deprives the Vietnamese of goods and services. 
It only deprives Vietnam of American goods and services. When our 
President is talking about creating new jobs, it makes little sense to 
keep America out of promising markets when our isolationist policy does 
not move us closer to full accountability. Allowing Americans to have a 
presence there will increase the process and the timeframe on the issue 
of accountability.
  So I think we have to keep this issue in focus: It is a humanitarian 
obligation of this body to address the lifting of the sanctions.
  Last year, I introduced legislation to lift the most restrictive 
aspects of this trade embargo. I have asked the Banking Committee to 
hold hearings on my bill. I have also communicated with Senator Robb, 
chairman of the East Asian Subcommittee of the Foreign Relations 
Committee, asking him to hold oversight hearings on United States 
policy towards Vietnam. He has indicated he will do so.
  So, Mr. President, I urge our colleagues to pass this resolution 
today so that we can send a clear signal to the President that the time 
has come to lift the trade embargo. I commend the previous 
administration, President Bush, for initiating the first opening by 
saying American firms could open offices in Vietnam, but not do 
business. I also commend President Clinton for allowing United States 
firms to participate in development projects in Vietnam that are 
financed by international financial institutions.
  Mr. President, in conclusion, I ask each of my colleagues to reflect 
on the question I asked earlier in my statement: If not now, when? When 
are we going to be satisfied as to what constitutes full 
accountability? It is a subjective argument because, as I have 
indicated, 2,238 are currently unaccounted for in Vietnam vis-a-vis 
8,177 in Korea, 78,794 in World War II and 1,648 in World War I. We 
have to recognize the harsh reality and the unfortunate fact that we 
will never be able to account for all of our missing. But, we must 
continue to try by the best method. The isolationist approach we took 
for 19 years did not result in what we all want to have happen, and 
that is full accountability. The changes over the last 3 years have 
resulted in a small U.S. presence. The presence of the Joint Task Force 
in Hanoi has accelerated the process. The Vietnamese are now working in 
concert with us, maybe not to our full satisfaction, but substantially 
better than we had before.
  So again, Mr. President, I think this is the time. If we are back 
here in 6 months or back here in a year debating the same issue of 
whether we are satisfied with the cooperation or whether we are 
satisfied with the status of accountability, we are still going to have 
to address the same issues. In the meantime, we run the risk of the 
Vietnamese deciding that they will no longer cooperate to the degree 
that they have been if the message that they take from this debate is 
that we do not feel they are cooperating. A loss of cooperation will 
only hurt the process of accountability.
  So I would implore my colleagues to reflect on the reality of what 
this debate means for further progress. I have the utmost respect for 
the opinion of my colleagues who served in Vietnam, who were prisoners 
of war in Vietnam. They know better than any one of us the anguish that 
goes into a decision to support the pending resolution to initiate a 
relationship with and a presence in Vietnam. But I have made up my mind 
that the amendment, which urges the President to eliminate the trade 
sanctions against Vietnam, does not lose sight of the highest 
obligation of Government, and that is the full accountability of those 
who have made the supreme sacrifice for their country.
  I really believe that this is the appropriate time and the 
appropriate method for meeting our humanitarian obligation to follow 
the best possible course for lessening the anguish of those families 
who have not received answers about the fate of their loved ones.
  I encourage my colleagues to support the amendment and I yield the 
floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska yields the floor. Who 
yields time?
  Mr. SMITH addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire [Mr. Smith] is 
recognized.


                           amendment no. 1266

  Mr. SMITH. Mr. President, under the terms of the unanimous consent 
agreement, I send an amendment to the desk on behalf of myself, Senator 
Dole, Senator Grassley, Senator D'Amato, Senator Campbell, and Senator 
Helms and ask for its immediate consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from New Hampshire [Mr. Smith], for himself, 
     Mr. Dole, Mr. Grassley, Mr. D'Amato, Mr. Campbell, and Mr. 
     Helms, proposes an amendment numbered 1266:

                           Amendment No. 1266

       On page 179, after line 6, insert the following new 
     section:

     SEC. 174. LIFTING OF SANCTIONS ON SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF 
                   VIETNAM CONTINGENT UPON POW/MIA PROGRESS.

       (a) Lifting of Sanctions.--The prohibitions, restrictions, 
     conditions, and limitations on transactions involving 
     commercial sale of any good or technology to the Socialist 
     Republic of Vietnam, or involving the importation into the 
     United States of goods or services of Vietnamese origin, in 
     effect as of January 25, 1994 under the Act of October 6, 
     1917 (40 Stat. 411 et seq.) as amended shall remain in effect 
     until thirty days after the President determines and reports 
     in writing to the Senate and the House of Representatives 
     that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has provided the 
     United States with the fullest possible unilateral resolution 
     of all cases or reports of unaccounted for U.S. personnel 
     lost or captured in Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia for which 
     officials of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam can be 
     reasonably expected to have in their possession additional 
     information or remains that could lead to the fullest 
     possible accounting of said U.S. personnel based on U.S. 
     intelligence and investigative reports, analyses, and 
     assessments obtained or conducted prior to January 26, 1994;
       (b) Consultation.--It is the sense of the Senate that the 
     President should consult with Congress, POW/MIA family 
     representatives and national veterans organizations to the 
     maximum extent possible prior to making determinations under 
     subsection (a).
       (c) Nondelegation.--The authority of the President to make 
     the determinations and report to which subsection (a) refers 
     may not be delegated.
       (d) Definitions.--For purposes of subsection (a)--
       (1) the phrase ``cases of unaccounted for U.S. personnel'' 
     means cases involving United States personnel originally 
     listed by the United States as prisoners of war, missing in 
     action, or killed in action/body not recovered following 
     their wartime loss incidents in Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia; 
     and
       (2) the phrase ``accounting'' means the return of 
     unaccounted for U.S. personnel alive, repatriation of their 
     remains, or convincing evidence as to why neither is 
     possible.''
  Mr. SMITH. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There is a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.
  Mr. SMITH. Mr. President, thank you.
  Mr. President, just a couple of quick points in response to a couple 
of speakers before going into the remarks on my amendment.
  Some are making the debate that it seems as if the person with the 
most medals from the Vietnam war--for example, General Vessey or 
Admiral Larson or others--are the best qualified people to tell us what 
our policy in Vietnam should be.
  I reject that argument. Although all of those people have great 
credibility, we have thousands of members of the DAV, and their 
organization, which I shall point out very shortly in my remarks, is 
opposed to this amendment to the Kerry amendment, and they have their 
medals. Also, many of them lost limbs in the war and obviously have 
been injured.
  So I do not think having a medal or having a great, illustrious 
military career which is fantastic is the criteria we ought to use to 
judge as to whether or not the Vietnamese are making the full 
accounting that we are asking for.
  So with all due respect to those gentlemen named, I think there are 
many, many people who have worked the issue for a number of years, some 
of whom have military backgrounds, some of whom have not, some of whom 
worked in our intelligence community for 25 years on this issue who 
have not served in the military. Although that is very impressive, that 
is not the only necessary criteria to judge as to whether or not we are 
receiving the full cost accounting.
  I also want to respond briefly to something Senator Mikulski 
mentioned. I am sorry she is not here on the floor at this time. But 
she brought up a very good point. It is something I want to respond to.
  I have spent the past several months in debate on this. I spent a lot 
of time during the select committee hearings. Apparently I just did not 
seem to get the message out in a clear manner to try to have the 
American people and many who discuss this issue understand why it is 
that we have not narrowed down this list of so-called discrepancy cases 
in a complete fashion.
  There are 2,238 MIA's. Approximately half of those people are listed 
as killed in action according to our records, and the other half are 
listed as missing in action or POW's.
  The interesting thing is that the discrepancy cases were referred to 
as if somehow we have taken 160 or 170 of these cases and narrowed them 
down to 35 or 40 based on the best information that we have at our 
disposal. But on the 1,100 people out there who are listed as missing 
in action, in some cases we have no information at all, in some cases 
we have a lot of information. We have some information that they 
survived their crash, and in other cases we do not have any information 
at all. So there are all kinds. In some cases we even have them listed 
as killed in action.
  But let me make a point here. The last time I was in Vietnam, the 
Vietnamese presented to me the name of an individual whom we had listed 
as killed in action. They said to me, ``We had this man as a 
prisoner.'' I said, ``Where are his remains, or do you have him 
alive?'' They offered neither. They also offered no reason, no 
explanation as to why they could provide neither. So here is a man we 
have listed as killed in action based on the best information we have. 
He probably disappeared on the battlefield and we did not have any more 
specific information. The Vietnamese tell me in their own words that 
they captured him, but they do not tell me what happened to him.
  You see, when you use discrepancy cases and you narrow this down on 
the basis of discrepancy cases, that is simply inaccurate. It is not 
the valid justification for saying that we have this total cooperation. 
Is it part of it? Yes. It is a very important part of it. Discrepancy 
cases are very important. They are the best cases we have. They are the 
kind of people I talked about who were filmed and used in propaganda. 
They are people where we had good solid clues that they survived their 
incident and they were captured. They are good cases. They are some of 
the best cases. But they are not the only cases.
  You cannot take the 1,100 people--indeed the whole 2,200, especially 
the 1,100 we do not have any information on--you cannot simply say 
because we do not have information that the Vietnamese do not have any 
information. That is a terrible conclusion. It is an irresponsible 
conclusion today.
  That is exactly the fault of the policy that we have gone through for 
months and years with the Vietnamese. When we come in and say to the 
Vietnamese, we have 100 discrepancy cases or 110, what we have told 
them is the other 1,000 people in the category of MIA, we are not 
interested in them. We are not interested in those people. We are 
interested here. Here is what we have discrepancies on. If they have 
someone missing or they have knowledge of somebody on the other list, 
what is the incentive?
  So I would like to just make those points because they have been made 
erroneously in the debate. I think it is important that everyone 
understand that there are 2,238 people missing. Approximately half of 
those, 1,100, are listed as killed in action by our information, and 
1,100 of them are listed as POW/MIA by our information, or we have no 
information as to what happened to them. Some of those people in that 
1,100 are the discrepancy cases. But you cannot say that, because the 
Vietnamese resolved a number of the discrepancy cases, they do not have 
information on the others in that 1,100 category.
  I have said this until I am blue in the face, I do not know how many 
times in the debates, public and private. And it still seems to be out 
there that somehow all of the cases are resolved except these 
discrepancy cases. That is nonsense. It is a fault in our policy. It is 
a vehement disagreement that I have with General Vessey in the way that 
he has addressed this issue. It is simply inaccurate, and you basically 
have done the job for the Vietnamese by saying, OK, the other 1,000 
people, we do not care about them. Here is what we are interested in, 
these discrepancy cases, because we have information that they 
survived. I am interested in the information that the Vietnamese have 
on whether they survived.
  If you will recall, when the men came home in 1973--the homecoming--
one man came home who was listed as killed in action. He came back as a 
prisoner. So our reporting and our information is not 100 percent 
accurate.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I am curious to know why the Senator from New 
Hampshire would have reason to believe that the process of full 
accountability and the resolution of discrepancies in evidence--which 
the Senator from Alaska admits exist--would necessarily cease.
  Is there any reason to believe that progress would not continue and, 
in fact, lead to a greater degree of satisfaction to the questions the 
Senator is legitimately bringing up?
  Mr. SMITH. Mr. President, I addressed it previously, and I will also 
in my upcoming remarks. But the issue is that we have no assurance. If 
we do not hold the Vietnamese to accounting--the policy in the past 20 
years has been, on a humanitarian basis, that the Vietnamese should 
provide us unilaterally this information, which we believe they have. 
If we do not, we should not lift the embargo. That has been our policy.
  My point is that this amendment is a departure from that policy. If 
they suddenly open up the archives and provide us the answers, I would 
be the first to congratulate them. We certainly would not have any 
leverage; that is my point. If we do it, we will have no leverage.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. The reality is, Mr. President, what presence do we 
have there now? We would have an increased presence, and we have seen 
an increase in our own satisfaction with regard to advancements that 
have been made because of increased cooperation. So one can make the 
conclusion that indeed increased presence would very likely lead to 
increased cooperation.
  I think the Senator from New Hampshire is entitled to his opinion, 
and the Senator from Alaska maintains, on the basis of his experience, 
that the best way to get this issue behind us is through access. That 
is why I am part of the group supporting the formulation of the Kerry, 
McCain amendment.
  Mr. SMITH. If that were the case, we probably should have done it in 
1973. Maybe we should have done it to North Korea, lift that embargo.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. We could argue the merits of most-favored-nation 
status for China if you want to argue a parallel thing.
  Mr. SMITH. I respectfully disagree with the Senator on that. No 
President to date has taken that position, and the League of Families 
and other family members, and the veterans organizations disagree with 
that assessment. I think we have some type of a moral obligation to 
listen to them ahead of business interests and at least give it more 
time to work.
  I think that the progress we have made over the past 20 years--and 
there has not been much of it--has been because we have held firm. But 
that is another issue.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I differ with my colleague. Advancement has been made 
as a consequence of the U.S. presence there, and the record will 
support that.
  Mr. SMITH. Mr. President, I am pleased to join with the distinguished 
Republican leader and my colleagues, Senators Grassley, D'Amato, Helms, 
and Campbell in offering this amendment.
  This amendment, as you know, concerns the status of our relationship 
with Vietnam and the impact the POW issue should have on how that 
relationship will develop in the coming months. The amendment makes it 
clear that the lifting of the trade embargo against Vietnam should be 
contingent upon the President being confident that Vietnam has made the 
maximum unilateral effort to provide information already in their 
possession on missing U.S. personnel from Southeast Asia.
  That is not an unreasonable amendment. That is a very reasonable 
amendment. Certainly, upon that certification by the President, who has 
access to the records of our intelligence community, I think that is a 
reasonable amendment, which is why I am pleased to offer it.
  I point out on a parliamentary basis here that to vote for the Kerry 
amendment or the McCain amendment, whichever it happens to be, 
basically says to the President: Lift the embargo. We trust the 
Vietnamese to come forth and come clean with the rest of the 
information, which most of us admit that they have.
  My amendment says let the President certify that, and if he does 
certify that with his intelligence community, after consultation with 
the veterans groups and the League of Families and other family 
members, if they feel that time has come, then move on and let us go. 
But the key phrase is ``fully forthcoming''; not every bit of 
information they can give, but what is fully forthcoming.
  There has been a lot of talk in Washington that the administration is 
now on the fast track to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam; that 
is no secret, and I think that is true. I have had conversations with 
the White House. They have never denied that there is interest and 
debate going on in the White House to lift the embargo. The White House 
told me as recently as January 7 that no decision has been made on the 
matter and no decision is expected anytime soon.
  It is obvious, though, based on comments by senior administration 
officials, both named and unnamed, that this matter is currently being 
considered by the President's national security team and his economic 
advisers. I have been around this town long enough to know what the 
signals are, from meetings taking place in the White House and the 
comments that have been coming out of there, that obviously this is on 
the fast track. I know many of the same players, ironically, in the 
Bush administration, who pushed for lifting the embargo, are still 
there in the Clinton administration. It is amazing how other people can 
lose their jobs when one administration changes to another, but all the 
people working this issue seemed to have stayed the same.
  Every one of my colleagues knows by now that I have one overriding 
concern on the matter of our relationship with Vietnam; that is, the 
issue of the POW's and MIA's never accounted for following the end of 
that very divisive conflict 20 years ago. I will state up front that I 
join many in this body in looking forward to the day when the United 
States and Vietnam have fully normalized relations, diplomatically and 
economically. I wish it were today, but it should not be today. I know 
a few veterans in this country who do not feel likewise.
  I served during the Vietnam conflict, not with the distinction of 
many of my distinguished colleagues here on both sides of this debate 
who have served in Vietnam, such as Senators Robb; Bob Kerrey; John 
Kerry; Pressler; and McCain, of course, a POW; and Hank Brown. And 
there are others. I am certain that all of us want to heal those wounds 
of war. This is not a personal matter with any of those Senators. I 
respect them all, but I believe all of us want to do it in an honorable 
way.
  The question is: What is the honorable way to do this? What is the 
honorable route? That is the purpose of the amendment that I am 
offering today, to make clear that our intent is to ensure that the 
United States is indeed receiving all relevant POW/MIA information that 
Vietnam has the capacity to provide.
  Some on this debate will try to say I am asking for a full 
accounting. That is impossible. I am not. I do not expect the 
Vietnamese to provide the remains from the bottom of the South China 
Sea, but what they can fully provide now, unilaterally. This is the 
overriding concern, not just of the Senator from New Hampshire and many 
others in this body, but it is the concern of every single family 
member of the servicemen still unaccounted for. It is a concern of 
every national veterans organization in this country.
  I think they ought to have a spokesman here tonight, and they do. I 
am going to let you hear from them in my words. The last few weeks 
while we were on break, each of these national veterans organizations, 
in addition to the POW/MIA families, expressed their concerns directly 
to the President on this issue--directly.
  I will take a moment now to enter into the Record the statements and 
positions of our Nation's veterans and family members, for they are 
worried that some in this Chamber have not been made aware of their 
positions.
  The American Legion comprises 3.1 million members. They told the 
President that they are opposed to lifting the trade embargo against 
Vietnam until the POW/MIA issue has been addressed to their 
satisfaction. They have passed resolutions to that effect. As a matter 
of fact, they contacted every single Legion post in America in every 
State. The national commander of the American Legion sent a personal 
letter to every single Senator on January 6 explaining in detail why 
they believe more progress can and should be made on the POW/MIA issue 
before we remove our trade embargo. Every Senator, I believe, has this 
letter.
  The last sentence of that letter reads as follows:

       The time is not right for such action (to lift the trade 
     embargo)--Hanoi's illusory cooperation must be replaced by 
     real, verifiable, tangible progress. In the strongest 
     possible terms, Legionnaires from throughout the Nation join 
     with me in asking you to keep faith with POW's and MIA's, 
     their families and members of the active military services.

  Those are the words of the American Legion. In a related press 
release, the national commander stated:

       America's veterans aren't going to forgive, or forget 
     about, the businesses that put their profit margins ahead of 
     the interests of our POW's or their families.

  I might add, Mr. President, that I am told that the American Legion 
has contacted, as I said, all 50 States, every post.
  The Disabled American Veterans, comprised of 1.3 million members, has 
told the President:

       We do not feel that the recent spate of cooperation (on the 
     POW/MIA issue) justifies lifting the embargo or taking steps 
     toward normalizing relations between our nations. As such, we 
     stand firmly by our most recent convention resolution.

  That is the DAV.
  The Veterans of Foreign Wars, comprised of over 2.2 million members, 
has told the President, in a letter from their national commander dated 
January 7:

       The level of cooperation necessary to warrant lifting the 
     trade embargo is one that produces more than minimal results. 
     We are not convinced that the results obtained to date 
     warrant lifting the embargo. We, therefore, urge you to keep 
     the embargo in place.

  That is the VFW.
  AMVETS, the Nation's fourth largest veterans organization, reiterated 
their position on January 11 stating:

       Our primary concern is for the MIA families for whom every 
     consideration must be made. We oppose normalizing relations 
     with Vietnam until a full accounting is achieved. We 
     recognize that the Vietnamese are cooperating, but progress 
     must be measured by the degree of cooperation. To suddenly 
     drop the embargo sends a signal that we've given up on ever 
     achieving a full accounting of our people. This still should 
     remain the highest national priority.

  Finally, the president of Vietnam Veterans of America, the Nation's 
largest veterans organization comprised solely of veterans from the 
Vietnam war, has told the President in a letter dated January 7, 1994:

       We recognize the seriousness of efforts such as the massive 
     search that was launched yesterday, but these measures have 
     produced far too little information to justify any 
     conclusions. Your commitment to resolving the fate of the 
     missing prior to opening diplomatic relations with Vietnam is 
     much appreciated. We see lifting the trade embargo now, 
     however, as a movement toward full recognition. Accounting 
     for America's POW/MIA's and the whole question of steps 
     toward normalization of relations with Vietnam is a painful 
     issue for many war-time veterans. Some will never agree to 
     reconciliation, and others hunger for it. In between are a 
     great number of veterans who want to resolve both issues--the 
     fate of our POW/MIA's and our relationship with Vietnam. For 
     most Vietnam vets it is not a question of retribution but of 
     resolution. We share a deep concern that lifting the trade 
     embargo--and giving up whatever leverage is still left in 
     it--will result in the abandonment of American POW/MIA's. 
     Healing from war takes time, and the fullest possible 
     accounting is part of that healing, and it is not complete. 
     Until it is resolved, the embargo should stand and 
     normalization should wait.

  That is the stated position of the Vietnam Veterans of America.
  Let me just take another organization that has a stake in this, 
perhaps more than the others I have mentioned.
  The Nation's largest family organization of U.S. personnel missing 
from the Vietnam war expressed their view, most recently on January 7. 
Sue Scott, chairman of the board of the National League of POW/MIA 
Families, stated in a press release:

       If the Vietnamese want the embargo lifted now, U.S. 
     evidence shows they can easily meet the President's criteria 
     by providing remains and records being withheld. Vietnam's 
     dismal record (on POW/MIA's) does not meet the President's 
     criteria, pledges to the families, commitments to our 
     nation's veterans or obligations to those who serve our 
     country. We, the families, expect the President will adhere 
     to principles and honor his word to the families that he will 
     not move forward without POW/MIA criteria being met. The 
     President would be well-served to ignore the wishful 
     thinking, distortions of reality and omissions of fact being 
     promoted by his bureaucracy. The families are tiring of being 
     labeled as unrealistic or re-fighting the Vietnam war because 
     we seek an end to our uncertainty which Hanoi can readily 
     provide.

  The National Alliance of Families, another organization with family 
members of POW's and MIA's, has also asked the President not to move 
forward with relaxing or lifting the embargo until Hanoi has taken 
additional steps to resolve the POW/MIA issue.
  Mr. President, I presented the views of our Nation's veterans and the 
POW/MIA families. They are not my words. And I did not ask for them. 
They came to me.
  Every one of these organizations are united in their belief that now 
is not the time to lift our embargo against Vietnam. And every one of 
them is united in their belief that Vietnam can and should be able to 
provide additional information on those still missing from the war, to 
include the fate of POW/MIA's who were lost or captured in Laos.
  Now I know there are Senators in this body who disagree with the 
position of the Nation's veterans groups and the POW/MIA families. But 
I would be surprised if there was any Senator who would support warming 
our relations with Vietnam at this point if President Clinton, our 
Commander in Chief, felt that officials in Vietnam still had additional 
information in their possession that could lead to an accounting for 
United States personnel missing from the war. I know of no Senator who 
is prepared to answer that question here on the Senate floor today, and 
that is what brings us to this amendment.
  These are the people that you just heard from who had the most at 
stake, and their feelings are more important than mine or any other 
Senator on this floor. They are more important than the President, and 
they are more important than the Vietnamese. They ought to be listened 
to. They ought to be adhered to.
  They have spoken and have very clearly. I can tell you I have spoken 
to some of these people and the families and in the veterans 
communities. Many of them have traveled to Vietnam. There is not rancor 
toward the Vietnamese people. They just want an honest resolution. You 
cannot get one for certain if you lift the embargo now. You might get 
it lifted and hope you might, and I will be the first one to 
congratulate those proponents if it happens.
  It is a gamble. It is a roll of the dice, as Senator Murkowski said. 
``I am willing to roll the dice.''
  I am not, and neither are the veterans groups or the families, and 
they are the ones who have the most at stake.
  This amendment does not prejudge how the President may feel on 
whether Vietnam has been fully forthcoming on POW/MIA issues or what he 
may determine at some point in the future, or whether his view may be 
at odds with the Nation's veterans or the POW/MIA families, or indeed 
some Senators. Instead, the amendment before us simply states that if 
and when he may decide to move on the embargo question, we, in this 
body, will expect him to tell us that Vietnam has been fully 
forthcoming on outstanding POW/MIA issues. It is certainly reasonable, 
Mr. President, for the Congress, and indeed, the country to expect the 
President to make such a determination before taking further steps in 
our relationship with our former adversaries in Hanoi. That is not 
unreasonable. That is not a political positions. There is nothing 
partisan about this.
  There can be no confusion as to what this amendment states. I want to 
go through the amendment--it is simple and straightforward--and read by 
the clerk, and that is why I wanted it read.
  And I would again stress that this amendment does not tell the 
President to lift the embargo against Vietnam, and it does not tell him 
to keep it in place. It simply tells him that the Congress wants to 
be assured that Vietnam has been fully forthcoming on POW/MIA issues 
before we move forward. And if the President feels he can make such a 
determination in the next month or so--this amendment lets him do it.

  I hope my colleagues will agree that this determination should, in 
fact, be made by the President, after consultation with the U.S. 
intelligence community and others. He is the one in the final analysis 
that will be best positioned to make this determination. And I would 
hope and expect that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would agree 
on this point, judging by the discussion and vote which took place on 
this matter at the committee level last September. I have the 
transcript of that discussion, and I would be happy to read from it if 
necessary--I think it is suffice to say that the Foreign Relations 
Committee rejected an attempt in the committee to lift the embargo in 
September because it did not want to tie the President's hands on the 
POW/MIA issue. Both Democrats and Republicans agreed by a majority vote 
in the committee to, and I quote from comments made by the ranking 
member at the time, to ``let the President come to a decision, and then 
make our judgement if we are inclined to do so.''
  The Kerry amendment or the McCain amendment basically gives him 
direction. It says lift it and we will support you. That is the message 
that you are giving.
  The language of the amendment now before us is consistent with the 
vote of the Foreign Relations Committee last September.
  The most important part of this amendment is as follows--for the 
President to move forward in further relaxing or lifting our embargo 
against Vietnam, he must first tell the Congress, and I am paraphrasing 
here, that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has provided the United 
States with the fullest possible unilateral resolution of all cases of 
unaccounted for United States personnel lost or captured in Vietnam, 
Laos, or Cambodia, for which officials of Vietnam can be reasonably 
expected to have in their possession additional information or remains 
that could lead to the fullest possible accounting of these missing 
United States personnel based on United States intelligence and 
investigative reports and analyses which have been gathered to date, 
including that gathered by Admiral Larson and General Needham.

  And that should include, in my opinion, the President making a 
determination to Congress that Vietnam has satisfactorily addressed 
information such as that which came to light from the GRU intelligence 
archives of the former Soviet Union. Just this week, a year later, the 
Pentagon put out a very brief analysis of these documents from Moscow, 
but at least conceded that, and I quote, ``We believe there is probably 
more information in Vietnamese party and military archives that could 
shed light on these documents.''
  Where is it? Why would we not insist on it?
  The Pentagon said that Monday, Mr. President, and we obviously do not 
have that information from Vietnam yet. In fact, I do not even think we 
have asked for it in the last few months--so it is a bit premature to 
cast those documents aside--but again, it is up to the President to 
make that determination. And with all the problems our committee found 
last year with the handling of this issue by certain officials at the 
Pentagon over the years--not everyone, but many--it is incumbent upon 
us to ask the President to come to his own conclusion--under this 
amendment, that authority cannot be delegated down to the bureaucracy. 
The President will come to his own conclusion.
  I want to, just as an aside, say here what a dramatic document that 
Russian document was. It alleged that 1,205 American prisoners where 
held when, in fact, only 600, roughly, were returned.
  Finally, I hope that the President will make a determination before 
lifting the embargo that intelligence reports of alleged POW's kept 
back in Southeast Asia after the war now in the possession of our 
intelligence community have, in fact, been fully investigated. 
Furthermore, he should make a determination that reports of remains and 
pertinent POW/MIA records being withheld by Vietnam and Laos have been 
fully investigated.
  All of this is quite reasonable, Mr. President, and it is what the 
American people, particularly the Nation's veterans and the POW/MIA 
families would expect before we move forward with Vietnam. I would 
therefore hope that this amendment would receive strong bipartisan 
support from both sides of the aisle.
  We are hearing that another amendment may be offered dealing with 
these issues, Mr. President, but let me be clear in stating my belief 
that the vote on this amendment will be seen across the country as the 
vote by which every Senator's commitment to the families of our 
Nation's veterans and POW's will be judged. That is what it will be. 
This is a judgment vote. This is a defining moment. It is a responsible 
amendment and it is consistent with everything the President has said 
to date on this issue and everything his predecessors have said and it 
is consistent with the position of our Nation's veterans and the 
families.
  I did not come to the Senate floor today to propose an amendment to 
maintain the trade embargo against Vietnam until the United States 
obtained the fullest possible accounting for every last serviceman that 
is missing. Some have said that and will probably say it in the future. 
That is not why I am here. If you listen carefully, this amendment does 
not say that every unaccounted for American has to be accounted for 
before we lift the embargo against Vietnam. The Vietnamese cannot do 
that. It would have been wrong for me to propose such an amendment--
obviously, obtaining the fullest possible accounting could take years, 
and there are some that will never be located.
  Some of the missing were involved in overwater losses--some crashed 
in remote jungles or mountainsides where there were no enemy forcers to 
observe the loss and help us account for these individuals. I know 
that, and we do not hold the Vietnamese to account for those people. 
However, I would point out, as I have said several times before, that 
just because we do not have a clue as to the ultimate fate of the 
individual, does not mean the Vietnamese do not know what happened. In 
point of fact, on seven different occasions since the end of the war, 
the Vietnamese have actually repatriated the remains of servicemen 
involved in overwater losses--so they have certainly shown their 
capacity to have hard information on cases where one might logically 
think they would not have any information at all.

  Again, our information; their information.
  So just as I am not proposing keeping the embargo in place until 
every last person is accounted for, it would likewise be wrong for 
other Senators to come to the floor to propose lifting the trade 
embargo against Vietnam right now because they have somehow determined 
that Vietnam has been fully forthcoming on all the POW/MIA cases for 
which Vietnam should have information. That would be a remarkable 
judgment for a Senator to stand up here and make. And it is one that I 
would certainly challenge on a case by case basis, and I am prepared to 
do it if necessary. In fact, I can assure my colleagues that I would 
protect my rights under the Senate rules and take as much time as I 
deemed necessary to counter any such claims. But the bottom line is, we 
can debate it all week long. Indeed we debated it all last year in the 
Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. And for every quote someone might 
read from our committee's report last year saying how great things are, 
I can find a sentence in the same report that will say just the 
opposite. That is the way committee reports are around here.
  Mr. President, this amendment has been thought through carefully, and 
I hope my colleagues will appreciate that I am not here to try to block 
the United States from moving forward with Vietnam. I would hope we 
would, at some point soon, move forward with Vietnam. In fact, this 
amendment allows President Clinton to move forward with Vietnam, but it 
also gives him the flexibility to determine at what point and to what 
degree Vietnam has been fully forthcoming on POW/MIA matters before 
moving forward.
  So let us not rush to judgment here on the Senate floor based on some 
recent codel trip to Vietnam. Let us wait until the information 
gathered by the intelligence community to date in Southeast Asia and 
Moscow has been presented to the President, and let us wait to see the 
President's response.
  I have been to Vietnam five times to discuss this issue and every 
time, I come away with the impression that more information could be 
unilaterally provided by the Vietnamese if they made the political 
decision to do so.
  Others get a different view. But all of it is immaterial unless we 
are willing to take the time here on the Senate floor to go through 
every single one of the remaining 2,238 cases of unaccounted for 
Americans to see in which instances Vietnam could be reasonably 
expected to have additional information based on investigations to 
date.
  Every one of those numbers has a family behind it. Every one of those 
numbers has a family behind it, Mr. President. These are not just 
statistics. I do not want to tell those families that we are now the 
best experts on their loved ones. I believe the President should make 
that decision. Although I consider myself an expert on a lot of them, I 
am not an expert on all of them. I do not think anybody, with all due 
respect, in this Senate has spent more time than I have going through 
those cases one by one.
  So I will close by reminding my colleagues of many of the things 
President Clinton and White House officials have stated to date on the 
POW/MIA issue and our relationship with Vietnam. And I am more 
attentive to comments from the White House on these matters, than I am 
with comments by low-level bureaucrats in the Departments of State and 
Defense or U.S. teams in the field in Southeast Asia who are often only 
knowledgeable on one piece of this complex issue where the President 
has the knowledge and the overview on all of it.
  Most recently, on January 3, the White House press secretary was 
asked if the President was ready to move further in our relationship 
with Vietnam and the response was, and I quote, ``As you know, the 
President has maintained that is contingent on progress on POW and MIA 
issues.'' And indeed, I remind my colleagues that the title of the 
pending amendment is ``Lifting of Sanctions Against the Socialist 
Republic of Vietnam Contingent on POW/MIA Progress.'' So you cannot 
have an amendment that's more in sync with the position of the White 
House. And indeed, while our committee unanimously determined last year 
that this issue was not a priority during the last Democratic 
administration, it has been a consistent measure of whether our 
relationship improves with Vietnam since President Reagan took office, 
and it's been that way for the last 13 years, up to and including 
President Clinton.
  Mr. President, how much time is remaining on our side?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 23\1/2\ minutes remaining.
  Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Mr. President.
  On December 10, President Clinton stated in a letter to me that ``I 
am deeply committed to resolving the cases of all personnel missing 
since the Vietnam war. For this reason, I have made achieving the 
fullest possible accounting for our POW/MIA's the test of our 
relationship with Vietnam. Like you, I seek an honorable resolution to 
this issue. I will not accept mere activity by Vietnam on POW/MIA 
issues as progress.'' Again, the President could not make it more 
clear, and I commend him for it. The test of whether or not we move 
forward with Vietnam depends on real and complete answers on the POW/
MIA issue--not on how many crash site excavators Vietnam allows into 
their country and not on whether it would be profitable for American 
businesses to go to drill for oil.
  On November 19, while at the APEC summit, the President stated that 
he, ``could see Vietnam more integrated into the region's economic and 
political life after providing the fullest possible accounting of those 
Americans who did not return from the war there.''
  So can I. So can I, Mr. President.
  On July 16, White House Deputy National Security Advisor Samuel 
Berger stated, ``The President understands that while the processes 
underway in Vietnam on the POW/MIA issue are important--and I remind my 
colleagues not to be confused by the word process as some people in 
this body like to use it to measure POW/MIA progress, which is a little 
disingenuous:

       The litmus tests here are concrete results and solid 
     answers * * * the President has specifically rejected 
     suggestions that he lift the trade embargo, partially or 
     fully, even though that position disadvantages American 
     business. This is not a commercial or diplomatic issue for 
     the President; it is a moral one. . . Vietnamese efforts 
     to date, while welcome, are not sufficient to warrant 
     changes in our trade embargo or further steps in U.S.-
     Vietnam relations. That is a very powerful and appropriate 
     statement--

  ``This is not a commercial or diplomatic issue for the President--it 
is a moral one.'' And it is. Ask those families. Ask those veterans 
groups. It is a moral issue and we do not have the right to make that 
moral decision.
  On July 2, the White House stated:

       Our policy toward Vietnam must be driven not by commercial 
     interests but by the overriding purpose of achieving further 
     progress toward the fullest possible accounting of our POW/
     MIAs. . . Progress to date is simply not sufficient to 
     warrant any change in our trade embargo or any further steps 
     toward normalization.

  And last April, at a White House news conference, the President 
stated that he was:

       Much more heavily influenced by the families of the people 
     whose lives were lost or whose lives remain in question than 
     by the commercial interests and the other things which seem 
     so compelling in this moment. I am just very interested by 
     how the families feel.

  Finally, just days after his election, then President-elect Clinton 
stated the following at a Veterans Day ceremony in Little Rock:

       As I have pledged throughout my campaign, I will do my very 
     best to make sure we have a final resolution of the POW/MIA 
     issue. . . I have sent a clear message that there will be no 
     normalization of relations with any nation that is at all 
     suspected of withholding any information. We must have as 
     full an accounting as is humanly possible.

  That is the President. That is the policy. That is what this 
President believes and we ought to support it.
  Now, Mr. President, I know during the break, a few of my colleagues 
went to Vietnam, as part of CODELS that were traveling in Asia. And 
while there, you received the standard briefings and you caught a 
glimpse of the process underway by which we are slowly obtaining 
relevant information that could lead to an accounting for some U.S. 
personnel, although we are mostly talking, in terms of the ongoing 
crash site excavations, about people we know died during the war, and 
indeed they were listed as killed in action/body not recovered. I am 
sure the Senators who went to Vietnam were also allowed to view another 
expensive sideshow in which United States investigators are stationed 
at Vietnam's central museums--I have been there four times--where they 
are given information to review bit by bit, only a small percentage of 
which actually pertains to active POW/MIA cases. Most of it refers to 
people who already came home or are dead.

  But, I would hope my colleagues who went to Vietnam would be able to 
separate in their minds, terms like ``process'' from ``accounting,'' 
and ``fate determined'' from ``tangible results,'' and ``cooperation'' 
from ``fully forthcoming.'' And I hope they would not forget that more 
than 80 percent of the missing cases from Laos, where there has been 
extremely limited results, actually involve areas that were under North 
Vietnamese control during the war. And while we are slowly getting 
records, after years of requesting them, it is a slow process, and 
probably a painful, difficult, or embarrassing one for the Vietnamese.
  Nonetheless, the Vietnamese should know that this is a process that 
they must go through for relations to improve with the United States. 
And I take strong exception to those who would hold up every document 
as it is now slowly turned over by Vietnam, 20 years later, and say, 
``look, here is the proof--Vietnamese officials are now fully 
cooperating and they have now told us everything they know about our 
POW's and MIA's.'' I recall one Senator a few months ago actually 
praised Vietnam for turning over a bag of letters addressed to missing 
servicemen from their families during the war which were never 
delivered to these guys sitting in their cells. Never even delivered. 
And they turned them over. That is progress? Vietnam gave these letters 
back to the United States in September and issued a press release 
saying ``New MIA Documents Found.'' Are you telling me they did not 
know where those letters were? Give me a break. And then a Senator back 
here praised this step--as if it was going to somehow account for 
missing servicemen. I would say that the Vietnamese have definitely 
shown that their propaganda machine from the war is still in full 
throttle.
  Mr. President, let me repeat, Vietnam has to be encouraged to go 
through the process of telling us everything they know--and this 
process is really only in the beginning stages. It has improved. It is 
only when we know they have gone through that process and coughed up 
everything we can reasonably expect they know about our POW's and 
MIA's, that we will be able to say to the families and our Nation's 
veterans that the Vietnamese have truly been fully forthcoming.
  Then the wounds of war are healed. Then it is behind us. The 
Vietnamese should understand this and we should tell them that in no 
uncertain terms, as I have on many occasions.
  I would also add that the process of getting the Vietnamese to open 
up their Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior records at the 
state, provincial, and local levels will hardly be assisted by the 
Kodak Co. or Mobil Oil being allowed to do business in Hanoi or Ho Chi 
Minh City. Nonetheless, I have heard suggestions in the past from some 
in this body that by having Americans do business in Vietnam, they are 
somehow going to stumble into the top secret records, archives, and 
find additional information that could lead to an accounting for 
missing individuals. Just as if the Vietnamese send a person here, a 
businessman--say from Taiwan--he could just stumble into the Pentagon 
and find out our National secrets. Come on.
  Let me take just a moment to remind my colleagues of some of these 
cases which remain open with the Vietnamese--and some of these are 
cases from both Laos and Vietnam--and this is only a representative 
sampling that I doubt Senators who just visited Vietnam were briefed 
on. I doubt Senators who just visited Vietnam were briefed on this. I 
would like to hear if they were briefed on this.
  U.S. Air Force pilot Wallace Hynds was lost over North Vietnam on 
August 2, 1967. At the time of the incident, which involved an FR4C in 
Hay Tinh Province, he was presumed to be dead from the crash. In fact, 
he was declared ``killed in action/body not recovered'' and was listed 
that way at the end of the war in 1973. Today, Air Force pilot Hynds is 
still unaccounted for. Enter the next piece of the puzzle. In 1991, 
just 2 weeks before our Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was formed 
in the Senate, a United States investigator was allowed to make a visit 
to a Vietnamese military museum in Vinh, northern Vietnam. While at the 
museum, he located the military ID card and the blood chit which 
belonged to Wallace Hynds. Next to these items, in Vietnamese writing, 
it stated--``Military Identification Card and Blood Chit of Air Force 
Pilot Wallace G. Hynds, captured alive in Hay Tinh Province.'' That was 
the Vietnamese reference to this pilot--that he was captured alive.
  We have him listed as killed in action/body not recovered. Vietnamese 
officials obviously know what happened to Wallace Hynds. How would they 
not know? They have his ID card in the museum. Of course they know what 
happened to him. Do you know where the ID card is? In your pocket in 
the uniform. They either had to kill him and take it out of there or 
they captured him alive and took it out. They know where he is. And our 
own Defense Department has acknowledged in a letter to me from June 
1993, that, because of this discovery, this is now a priority case. 
Well, the Vietnamese did not know it was a priority case for the United 
States when I was there in July, because I had to bring it to their 
attention, after they gave me the list of names General Vessey had 
asked them to work on, and Wallace Hynds' name was not on it. The point 
here is that we still have not received any further information on this 
case from the Vietnamese, although they clearly know what happened. He 
was captured alive. So, if the Vietnamese were giving us excellent 
cooperation, bending over backwards, and being forthcoming with us, as 
some have claimed, why is not Admiral Larson and General Needham, 
instead of out here with shovels, why are they not in Hanoi asking 
where Wallace Hynds is?

  That is what they ought to be doing.
  That is what they ought to be doing. That is my problem with the 
joint task force. They have their focus wrong and they have their 
priorities wrong.
  Let me give you another example. Navy Commander Donald Richard Hubbs 
was listed as an over-water loss while flying aircraft over the North 
Vietnamese coast on March 17, 1968. I have been in touch with the 
family of Commander Hubbs. His daughter went to Vietnam last month 
seeking answers. Why does she have to go to seek answers? For 20 years 
they heard nothing--nothing. Then the daughter went to Vietnam. Now 
listen carefully to what I am saying.
  She arrives in Hanoi and is told by U.S. investigators for the first 
time in 26 years that some of the aircraft's radar equipment had been 
recovered at the time of the incident by the United States. More 
importantly, she was given a copy of the Vietnamese graves registration 
list of U.S. personnel lost in Quanh Binh Province which has her 
father's name on it. It turns out that while the U.S. Government had 
this information for over a year, it was never given to the family, 
even though the law said you have to give it to the family. She had to 
go to Vietnam herself.
  When Commander Hubbs' daughter met with the Vietnamese experts on 
this issue at their foreign ministry last month, she was told Vietnam 
has no further information. If Commander Hubbs' name is on a Vietnamese 
graves registration list, they know where he was buried. General 
Needham, why do you not find Commander Hubbs? They obviously can 
account for Donald Hubbs. Yet, to date, they have not chosen to do so. 
And when the head of Vietnam's Communist Party, Mr. Do Muoi, sits there 
and tells me and other Senators, as he has in the past, that the POW/
MIA families should come to Vietnam to witness the excellent 
cooperation first hand, I doubt he is referring to Donald Hubbs.
  Frederick John Burns was a marine captured in South Vietnam on 
Christmas Day 1967. For 26 years, the family of this marine has waited 
for a final accounting of Fred Burns. Why? Because he was listed as 
``died in captivity'' by the North Vietnamese on their own lists on 
January 27, 1973, the day the accords were signed.
  General Vessey asked for an accounting of Fred Burns and was given a 
document which the Vietnamese say shows he died in captivity. It is 
signed by his prison commander. His remains, however, were never 
returned, and he was in their prison.
  Now we have a Vietnamese propaganda film showing Fred Burns and Bobby 
Garwood. He looked healthy. He was used for propaganda. No remains, 
nothing; no information.
  The narration on the 1970 Communist film says:

       Here is a recently captured American GI. His name is 
     Frederick, and he's from New York. He says something which 
     makes even our children laugh--``We Americans can't 
     understand how you get the better of our forces''--sure he 
     can't understand and he has read the slogan without catching 
     the meaning--don't destroy children's school--he and his like 
     have destroyed many schools.''

  That was in the film. That is the propaganda, Mr. President. There 
was propaganda on both sides during the war; I know that. I am willing 
to put the war behind me, but that does not mean we should forget this 
marine was in a Vietnamese prison and what happened to him. If he died 
in prison, give us his remains. If you do not have his remains, tell us 
how he died and give the family some peace.
  We have been told this stuff for 20 years. The Vietnamese can be 
expected, therefore, to have the capacity to repatriate his remains for 
proper burial by his family. Worried about drilling around for oil? How 
about digging up his remains and giving them back to the family? At the 
very least, they should be able to tell us how his remains were 
disposed of and where they are buried. You will never convince me 
otherwise--not General Needham, Admiral Larson, Senator Kerry, nobody 
else--will ever convince me they do not know where he is, because they 
do.
  Last month, just before Christmas Day, his family was given a copy of 
the propaganda film I just referred to. They sent the film knowing the 
family was going to get it and hurt them more. And then they say we do 
not know what happened to him. Come on. They were the most meticulous 
recordkeepers we ever heard of. We had testimony from everybody on 
that, including defectors.
  Here is a fourth and final example for those who claim the embargo 
should be lifted, even though the President has not yet made a decision 
on this. Yesterday, out of the clear blue sky, unsolicited, comes a fax 
into my office. It is from the daughter of Air Force Col. Michael O. 
Elhanon. He was flying an F-100A on a forward reconnaissance mission 
over North Vietnam August 16, 1968. He was reported missing in action. 
Search and rescue efforts were initiated with negative results. We did 
not know whether he was dead or alive. We still do not know.
  There are several hundred MIA cases where we just do not know what 
happened. They are not discrepancy cases. General Vessey is not taking 
up the cause for this individual. Because we do not know what happened 
does not mean the Vietnamese do not know what happened, and we should 
not forget it.
  Colonel Elhanon's name should be put on the discrepancy list and 
given to the Vietnamese. Why? Because a reference to his actual 
shootdown by North Vietnamese units and a reference to his military ID 
card being in the possession of Vietnam officials was located in 1991. 
The ID card was carried by Colonel Elhanon in a zipped upper breast 
pocket on his flight suit. If the Vietnamese officials have Colonel 
Elhanon's military ID card, they can produce Colonel Elhanon or 
information about what happened to him. They have not done it. No one 
has pushed them on this case because it is not a discrepancy case.
  In July 1992, the Vietnamese were requested by the United States side 
to turn over the ID card, and as of today, a year and a half later, 
after the last request, the family has yet to receive the ID card. 
Again, that is specific information. How many Senators were briefed on 
this case when they received their briefings in Hanoi on the excellent 
cooperation being provided by the Vietnamese? Are you interested in oil 
or are you interested in men? It is reasonable for President Clinton to 
make determinations on these cases because he has the information.
  Here is another example of those who are still not convinced, in case 
there are any, that we should wait for the President. This one pertains 
to a loss in Laos where North Vietnamese units were involved. I remind 
my colleagues, more than 80 percent of those still unaccounted for in 
Laos, including 53 Americans who were known to be out of their aircraft 
at the time of impact, involved areas under North Vietnamese control 
during the war.
  First Lieutenant Henry Mundt, United States Air Force, and Lieutenant 
Col. William Brashear, United States Air Force, were piloting an F-4C 
aircraft on an operational mission over Laos on May 8, 1969, 25 years 
ago. The aircraft was disabled by hostile ground fire. We knew at the 
time that at least one crew member ejected because at least one 
parachute was observed and radio contact was established with the 
individual on the ground, although identification was not made and 
rescue efforts failed to locate him. It was not known whether the crew 
member ejected.
  In January 1974, 1 year after the war, Mundt and Brashear were 
declared ``killed in action/body not recovered,'' even though we know 
at least one made it to the ground safely and established radio 
contact.
  Enter another piece of the puzzle. Exactly 1 year ago this week, on 
January 25, 1993, Lao villagers unexpectedly gave us additional 
information on this case. During a crash site excavation of this case 
in southern Laos, the villagers came up to our team and told us that 
the crash site excavation would not do much because Lieutenant Mundt 
and Lieutenant Colonel Brashear parachuted from their aircraft and were 
captured by Vietnamese and taken away.
  You cannot take the information that we believe on our best 
information are discrepancy cases and ignore everybody else; you cannot 
do it. One witness said he thought they were taken to a North 
Vietnamese military hospital in Attapeu Province. The Lao denied our 
teams the opportunity to investigate the case further saying they 
wanted to investigate it first. And requests to the Vietnamese for 
further information on Lieutenant Mundt and Lieutenant Colonel Brashear 
have gone unanswered, even though we know they were captured by 
Vietnamese forces because they said so. And we have them listed as KIA. 
They are not discrepancy cases. How do you answer to the families of 
those men? Do you want to drill for oil before we find out what 
happened to those guys? Give me a break.
  When the families of Lieutenant Mundt and Lieutenant Colonel Brashear 
heard Senators holding a news conference in Hanoi a few weeks ago were 
saying ``It is time to close the book on the past. It is in the 
interest of the United States, in the interest of the MIA's and their 
families, and in the interest of stability in the region,'' I suggest 
the families of Lieutenant Mundt and Lieutenant Colonel Brashear, and 
the others I have now mentioned, would get a knot in their stomach, as 
well they should. The knot probably got tighter when they heard another 
Senator report in Hanoi last week that United States teams were, and I 
quote, ``getting very good cooperation . . . getting cooperation as 
good as they could expect, and there's nothing they've been denied.'' 
Senator Johnston, you asked for evidence. How much more do you need?
  Marine Corps Maj. Norman Karl Billipp was listed as missing in action 
in South Vietnam on May 6, 1969 during a forward air controller 
mission. His family resides in New Hampshire. They are constituents of 
mine. We did not know what happened to Major Billipp at the time of his 
incident. It is now clear the Vietnamese must, in fact, know the 
disposition of Major Billipp. They have the flight route map from the 
aircraft in their possession at their army museum. This is an example 
of where the Vietnamese have turned over one piece of information which 
shows they can be more forthcoming. They do it to tease us. To date, 
they have shed no additional light on this case. You are not going to 
get information on it by digging around in the ground somewhere. You 
are going to get it in Hanoi.
  Joseph Morrison and San DeWayne Francisco were flying an F-4D over 
North Vietnam on November 25, 1968. We lost track of them. They never 
returned from their mission, and search and rescue missions were 
unsuccessful. They were listed as missing in action. The Vietnamese 
know what happened.
  Some of my colleagues may recall in October 1992, then President Bush 
held a Rose Garden news conference to herald a significant breakthrough 
on the POW/MIA issue. I attended that news conference, along with 
Senator Kerry. A private United States investigator under contract by 
DOD was given access by the Vietnamese to official photographs from 
wartime incidents involving U.S. personnel. This led to the formation 
of an archival research team with United States investigators in Hanoi. 
Of the 4,000 photographs turned over at the time, I am not aware of any 
photograph which led to an actual accounting of anybody.
  In fact, only a handful of photographs actually pertained to the POW 
issue and provided new information not already known. One of them was a 
photograph of Joseph Morrison, one of the Air Force pilots I just 
mentioned. Sadly, Morrison was dead in the photograph taken by the 
Vietnamese and we did account for Morrison because of that.
  But where is Morrison? We have a photograph of the body, yet the 
Vietnamese have yet to give us any information about the incident and 
they have yet to return the remains. They showed us his photograph and 
I saw the photograph. If they have an official Vietnamese News Agency 
photograph of Joe Morrison, we could reasonably expect they can account 
for him and Mr. Francisco. Yet they have been silent.
  That is disappointing. That is wrong.
  All of these examples are probably enough to illustrate my point, and 
I know I am running out of time. So I do not want to rehash it anymore. 
But if Senators would contact the MIA families in their States--and I 
hope they will--they will learn more about the examples. It behooves 
us; we have a responsibility; maybe we ought to read these cases before 
we vote.
  This example, the last one that I would like to give, involved a wide 
variety of reports of American POW's at prison locations in North 
Vietnam and Laos during the war, from which no American POW's ever 
returned, even though they were reported to have been there. They never 
came back. I will not go into detail because of time, but one prison is 
called Tan Lap. It is in a remote area of northern Vietnam. I visited 
there last summer to determine the accuracy of some of the intelligence 
reports the United States has received. No one from our Government has 
ever asked to go there, even though it was a camp which was suspected 
by the DIA during the war of holding American POW's. It was a camp 
which, according to a recently declassified CIA study in 1982, is now 
believed to have contained American POW's during the war.
  CIA, everybody will deny it: There is nothing to it.
  That is not what the report said. Read the report. This report was 
not declassified under the orders of President Bush and Clinton. It was 
only declassified a couple weeks ago at my insistence. No one came back 
from that prison, and the CIA has reported that American POW's were 
held there during the war. I am talking about during the war. It is now 
1994. Have the Vietnamese been confronted with this evidence? No. I 
just found the study a couple of weeks ago.
  Has General Needham taken that up with the Vietnamese? No. And in 
yesterday's paper the Pentagon has reiterated their contention that no 
information has emerged that would substantiate the inference that a 
separate prison system ever existed in Vietnam.
  Mr. President, that is disingenuous, and I am being kind.
  I have now another CIA study that was conducted in 1976. It has been 
classified for 18 years. It was released at my request after the 
President said all POW/MIA documents from Vietnam have been 
declassified.
  The CIA states, and this is 1976,

       In response to recent human source reporting on American 
     POWs still in North Vietnam, we conducted a photographic 
     study of selected prison/detention facilities in the northern 
     portion of the country . . . An analysis of 19 camps not 
     known to have contained Americans revealed inconsistencies in 
     the various camps reaction to the Son Tay Raid. (That was our 
     attempt to rescue POWs during the war).
       Some camps reacted defensively to the raid, other camps did 
     not react initially but constructed weapons positions later 
     in the year and some camps never received weapons positions 
     during the time frame of our study, November 1970 to January 
     1973. The reason for this inconsistency in the various camps 
     reaction to the raid is not known. It does show that the 
     North Vietnamese did not provide blanket precautionary 
     measures and that only selected camps reacted initially to 
     the raid. Because of this inconsistency and the fact that 
     several reports have been received recently stating that 
     Americans are still being held in North Vietnam, the 
     possibility of a second prison system for the detention of 
     American POWs cannot be disregarded.

  Mr. President, that is the first time the American people have heard 
those words written by CIA 3 years after the war. It has been 
classified all these years--it was never reviewed by our committee last 
year--and the only reason it is now public is because I demanded that 
it be declassified. And this is after the President said everything has 
been declassified. The CIA in its own words was saying that the 
possibility of a second prison system existed. And if you look at their 
subsequent study on the Tan Lap prison in 1982, a camp which did react 
to the raid, a picture starts to emerge about what camps comprised the 
second system. The CIA had one report in 1986 concerning an American 
POW in this camp in 1978, and their CIA debriefer in Bangkok said, 
``CIA is very high on this source. The debriefer involved states source 
was very forthcoming, open, and seemed completely candid. In fact, 
although the debriefer has interviewed scores of refugees who claimed 
first hand live sightings, this is the first, in his subjective view, 
whom debriefer believes is being completely honest.'' And my colleagues 
should read the subsequent message traffic on this between CIA and DIA. 
You can draw your own conclusion on whether this report was ever 
properly followed up. I think it is obvious that it was not. CIA could 
not even get DIA to agree to do a polygraph of this source. But 
regardless of whether members feel it was properly pursued, I implore 
you to at least give President Clinton the opportunity to come to 
Congress and tell us that these reports have been fully investigated 
with the Vietnamese being fully forthcoming to his satisfaction. There 
is too much at stake to just lift the embargo without the President 
making such a determination. And that is all that is required under 
this amendment.
  We also know that in Laos, there were areas, such as the caves in Sam 
Neua Province, where American POW's were known to be held, and this was 
the CIA's position, and yet no one was ever returned. The nine that 
returned at homecoming never even transited through Sam Neua Province. 
And we know from intelligence reports that North Vietnamese units were 
stationed in this area of Laos, and we even know the name of the North 
Vietnamese general who commanded this area. Yet we have made no 
discernible progress in learning the fate of the American POW's who 
were held in northern Laos. The Washington Post had a front page story 
on this on January 2--I would refer my colleagues to the story if they 
have not already seen it. In point of fact, neither the Vietnamese nor 
the Lao have accounted for a single POW held in Sam Neua Province since 
the war, even though that is where the CIA determined we had the 
strongest evidence, including aerial photography. The Vietnamese and 
Lao had their headquarters up there, so it is not like they just do not 
know what happened. They certainly can account for Air Force pilot 
David Hrdlicka. He was held in that area. The Communists put his 
picture in Pravda. He is alive and well in the picture. We have the 
transcript of a propaganda confession he was forced to make on the 
radio. There is no doubt he was a POW being held at their headquarters. 
But he is still unaccounted for.
  Finally, some of my colleagues may have seen in the papers in recent 
days that there are new reports now coming to light through the 
declassification process concerning alleged American POW's having 
expired at some prison camps in northern Vietnam long after the war. 
They are reportedly buried in marked cemeteries adjacent to the 
prisons. As far as I know, U.S. investigators have not even visited 
these prisons, even though they have had these reports for several 
years, and in some cases, they have actual diagrams of the prisons and 
the cemeteries. And I have talked to the people who interviewed some of 
these sources. One of them was Bill Bell, who used to head our office 
in Hanoi. He believes some of the reports were very credible. That is 
another reason why I am asking the President, under this amendment, to 
assure me that the Vietnamese have been fully forthcoming with the 
United States before we move forward.
  These are the kind of things on which we need the Vietnamese to be 
fully forthcoming. I have listed samples of POW/MIA cases and 
intelligence reports that require answers and cooperation from the 
Vietnamese. In my opinion, these are the areas that are the real test 
of the depth of Vietnamese cooperation for they directly implicate the 
Vietnamese on the POW issue. If the Vietnamese want to drag this 
process out some more and play the waiting game on the embargo with us, 
I, for one, am prepared to wait until they make the decision to be 
fully forthcoming.
  For those who say lifting the embargo is the only way to get the POW/
MIA information we seek, I would suggest that is no different than 
saying lifting the embargo against North Korea is the way to resolve 
the nuclear issue there. I find it ironic that some who want the 
embargo lifted on Vietnam were proposing earlier this afternoon keeping 
the embargo on North Korea until they have met their full obligation on 
the nuclear issue. I would think we should expect Vietnam to likewise 
meet their full obligation on the POW/MIA issue before we lift the 
embargo there.

  It is also no different from saying that lifting the embargo on Libya 
is the only viable way to get Kadafi to turn over those responsible for 
the Pan Am 103 bombing. Or lifting the embargo on Cuba is the only way 
to get Castro to respect human rights. That is outrageous.
  Granted, these are my opinions, and in some respects, that is 
different from the amendment now before us. The amendment before us 
simply calls on the President to make determinations on POW/MIA 
cooperation, consistent with his pledges to date, before we remove the 
embargo. That assessment is called for under this amendment. That is 
why Senators, at the very least, should be patient and allow the 
President to make his determinations based on the evidence gathered to 
date, and not on public pronouncements by some Members of Congress who, 
the record will show, wanted the embargo lifted before we even had the 
ongoing process in place and before they had even studied the facts 
pertaining to the POW/MIA issue.
  This straightforward and simple amendment is the responsible course 
of action for the Senate, and I therefore urge my colleagues to vote 
yes so that these assessments can be made by the President.
  In closing I point out to my colleagues that this amendment urges the 
President to consult with Congress as he starts to make further 
determinations on POW/MIA progress, so we will all have ample 
opportunity to express our views to him, and we should give him the 
opportunity to weigh our views before we mandate, in some sort of 
legislative way, either a lifting or a maintaining of the embargo.
  Mr. President, I urge the adoption of this amendment; it keeps faith 
with the commitments made to date by President Clinton; it keeps faith 
with the search for our POW/MIA's; and it keeps faith with our Nations 
veterans and the POW/MIA families. The President has stated that the 
POW/MIA issue is our highest priority with Vietnam. He has stated it is 
a moral issue for him. After all, we are talking about people who wore 
the Nation's uniform into combat and who did not come home.
  There is not business more important right now than the business of 
ensuring that the Vietnamese have been fully forthcoming in telling us 
what they know about our unaccounted for POW's and missing personnel 
from the war. I await that determination from the President and I urge 
my colleagues to do likewise.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that excerpts from the 
transcript of the Foreign Relations Committee be printed in the Record 
so that that can be interpreted verbatim. There have been some 
differences of opinion as to what was intended or what was said. I 
would like the record to speak for itself. So I ask unanimous consent 
that that be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

     Say, ``It is the sense of the Senate that.''
       Senator Dodd. Would it require certification?
       Senator Kerry. That does not work. You still have a legal 
     requirement before point (5).
       Senator Dodd. Paul, why don't you offer what you have in 
     mind?
       Senator Coverdell. Larry, would you be willing to set it 
     aside until the next amendment?
       Senator Pressler. Yes, why don't we do that. Let us set it 
     aside. And why don't our staffs work on this for a few 
     minutes here.
       And let me offer now Senator Murkowski's amendment.
       Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment to offer on behalf of the 
     Senator from Alaska.
       The Chairman. Execuse me.
       I would say that we plan to break at about 12:30, and 
     resume here at 2:30, so members can make their plans.
       Senator Pressler. All right. I shall go very rapidly here.
       I have an amendment to offer on behalf of the Senator from 
     Alaska, Senator Murkowski and myself stating that it is the 
     sense of the Senate that the President shall remove the trade 
     embargo against Vietnam. As my colleagues know, next week the 
     President must decide whether or not to review the economic 
     sanctions against Vietnam under the Trading with the Enemy 
     Act of 1917.
       By passing this amendment, this committee can go on record 
     in support of increased economic access to Vietnam as a means 
     to achieve the fullest possible accounting of POW's and MIA's 
     I recognize that Vietnam is an issue of great personal 
     significance for many members of this committee, myself 
     included, and so forth. And I know that Senator Kerry has 
     done an immense amount of tireless work and has a tireless 
     commitment to Vietnam's POW's and MIA's, and I commend him 
     for that fine work.
       Mr. Chairman, I have a lengthy statement on this, which is 
     several pages long.
       The Chairman. Without objection, it will be placed in the 
     record.
       Senator Pressler. I wish to put them in the record. And I 
     move the adoption of the amendment.
       [The prepared statement of Senator Pressler follows:]
       The Chairman. Is there any comment on the amendment?
       Senator Helms. Mr. Chairman.
       The Chairman. Senator Helms.
       Senator Helms. Now, the committee may very well support 
     this amendment. But I have got to say I think it is a 
     mistake. There are very strong feelings on this issue in both 
     the House and the Senate. And I predict that some members of 
     the House and some members of the Senate will strenuously 
     oppose the entire bill because of this single provision.
       Now, President Clinton has this issue under consideration, 
     and I think we ought to give the President some time to 
     consider it. Let him come to a decision, and then make our 
     judgment if we are inclined to do so.
       I am very concerned that the passage of this amendment will 
     make Vietnam less cooperative on the POW/MIA issue. And I 
     think it will be sending the wrong signal to our allies, 
     which have supported efforts to isolate Vietnam.
       If it goes to vote, I, with all apologies to my friend, I 
     must vote in the negative.
       Senator Dodd. If my colleague would yield. I just want to 
     associate myself with your remarks. I think you are correct. 
     First of all, you are consistent. Because I would like 
     someone also to put a definition of what is different between 
     this form of Marxism that exists in Cuba or other places, 
     where we spend so much time and energy. But I think you are 
     absolutely correct, the President is trying to move in this 
     area, and I think for us to jump ahead without having 
     considered thought be applied here as to how it affects other 
     issues is the appropriate way to proceed.
       And so while my inclination is to want to lift that 
     embargo, I think the Senator from North Carolina is correct 
     in his analysis.
       Senator Helms. Thank you.
       Senator Simon. Mr. Chairman.
       The Chairman. Senator Simon.
       Senator Simon. I support the amendment. I think it makes 
     sense. I think our policy is counterproductive. I have a 
     company like Caterpillar in Illinois who wants to sell to 
     Vietnam. They cannot do it now.
       Why do we say it is okay to sell to China and not to 
     Vietnam?
       Now, Vietnam is not any great threat. What we are doing in 
     our Vietnam policy is serving the national passion rather 
     than the national interest. I am old enough to remember when 
     Harry Truman said we are going to help Germany and Japan. And 
     I can remember, with all due respect, the chairman and the 
     ranking member are also old enough to remember that. I 
     remember how unpopular Harry Truman was when he did that. 
     Harry Truman was right.
       The Vietnamese War is over. They have been cooperating. And 
     Senator Kerry and Senator Brown know this much better than 
     I. But I do not see any purpose served at all by our 
     present economic boycott of Vietnam. So I am going to vote 
     for the amendment.
       The Chairman. Senator Kassebaum.
       Senator Kassebaum. Mr. Chairman, I would defer in time to 
     Senator Kerry and Senator Brown and myself. We were all 
     members of the POW/MIA special committee. But, particularly, 
     Senator Kerry and Senator Brown spend a great deal of time on 
     this issue. But I would have to vote against it. I think it 
     is premature.
       There are still some very sensitive issues that need 
     disclosure. And it seems to me that we are moving in that 
     direction. But to do it at this time really undermines the 
     ability that we have to get the disclosure that I think will 
     need to be completed, where we can really move in this 
     direction. And I agree with the remarks that Senator Helms 
     has made.
       The Chairman. Senator Brown.
       Senator Brown. Mr. Chairman, I am delighted to report I am 
     far too young to remember what Harry Truman said about Japan.
       [Laughter.]
       Senator Brown. Actually, it was pretty close.
       I do not think it should pass without noting that the 
     distinguished Senator from South Dakota is a Vietnam veteran, 
     who served two terms in country and I think has a record that 
     every American admires. And I think in terms of advocating 
     this policy he is probably the ideal one to present it, or 
     one of the ideal ones.
       There are several members of the committee who have very 
     distinguished records there. But I think the issue should not 
     be thought of without noting his background in that area.
       I am concerned about it for a reason that is a little 
     different than what we have talked about, and it may only 
     relate to a special concern I have. My perception of our 
     trade relations around the world is that following our World 
     War II experience, we largely bought off on a system where we 
     accepted other countries' restrictions on our exports to 
     them, and gave them access to our market in a very broad 
     fashion that we do with almost everyone.
       I do not mean to say that we are perfect or that we have no 
     barriers at all, but we, on a comparative basis, have an 
     extremely open market--perhaps the most remarkably open 
     market of any major economy in the world. That is a way of 
     saying that the point at which you start trade relationships 
     is very important. Because once you are started on a plane, 
     where they have a restricted market and you have an open 
     market, then it becomes very difficult to get them to make 
     unilateral concessions.
       I am concerned about this action in that my hope is that 
     the resumption of trade relations with Vietnam--which will 
     happen--my hope is that when that happens, when we resume 
     trading with Vietnam, when we end the embargo, that it only 
     happen after there has been some negotiations on the whole 
     nature of market access, market access for them in the United 
     States, and U.S. access to the Vietnamese market. And my hope 
     is that we do not end the embargo without having that 
     negotiation first and getting some decent ground rules for 
     equal access.
       If we grant that access before we have done that 
     negotiating, I fear we will have a much more difficult time 
     of getting fair and equal access.
       So that is a little different focus than I think many of 
     the members have been observing. But at least my hope is that 
     we would take care of the discussions on market access before 
     we would end the embargo.
       Senator Simon. Would my colleague yield?
       Senator Brown. Surely.
       Senator Simon. If we were to drop the word ``immediate'' 
     here, that would not preclude doing precisely what you are 
     talking about. But it seems to me it is so ridiculous that 
     Japan, Taiwan, everybody else is in, France, they are in 
     Vietnam selling away, and we cannot.
       I have two major Illinois corporations who want to sell to 
     Vietnam but they cannot do it. We are hurting Vietnam a 
     little, but we are hurting ourselves more.
       Senator Sarbanes. Could I ask a question?
       Is it your assumption that the President is now in 
     negotiations with Vietnam about removing this trade embargo 
     and getting certain things, I would assume, in response for 
     it; that his hand in those negotiations, which I take it 
     would be very quiet ones now going on I assume, would be 
     strengthened by passing this? It seems to me it would be 
     somewhat weakened by passing this.
       Because, in effect, it would say, Well, you know there is a 
     movement growing afoot to do this. In any event, it is going 
     to take presidential action to do it.
       I mean, this is a sense of the Senate. But it seems to me 
     in that in the play of policy here, let him play with a full 
     hand while he is at it right now and see what that produces. 
     It may produce some results that none of us are fully aware 
     of at the moment.
       Senator Pressler. I think the Senator from Illinois has 
     made a good suggestion, and I would be willing to change the 
     amendment and take the word immediate out.
       Senator Simon. Take out the word immediate.
       Senator Pressler. I hope the Senator has a right to change 
     his amendment, but I will do that without consulting with 
     Frank Murkowski who is not here.
       Senator Simon. All right
       Senator Kerry. Mr. Chairman?
       The Chairman. Senator Kerry?
       Senator Kerry. This is a troubling amendment in some 
     regards personally, not in terms of the policy, because the 
     moment here is kind of a critical one with respect to the 
     road travelled on Vietnam
       The President is literally going to decide in the next 
     couple of days, and I was discussing this earlier with the 
     White House today. And I think we are on a carefully thought 
     out and orchestrated road here where there is some critical 
     information that has come into our hands in the last weeks 
     and months as a result of the efforts ongoing that is not 
     fully evaluated yet and it needs to be evaluated.
       There is every indication that the Vietnamese are 
     cooperating very significantly. I just got a letter yesterday 
     from the Ambassador in New York indicating that significant 
     documents from the 559 Division and the 875 Division, which 
     handled prisoners, have been turned over in the last weeks as 
     well as large bags of letters that they found to prisoners 
     and other things. So, there is an ongoing process here.
       What the President has promised the families, and it is an 
     important promise, is that our actions are going to be 
     commensurate with the cooperation of the Vietnamese. I do not 
     think anybody wants to be abusive of that process that is in 
     place.
       Now, I personally believe that that process is greatly 
     enhanced by lifting the embargo. But I believe because I see 
     this process now so carefully engaged in, that we do not 
     really advantage the process ourselves or the ultimate goals 
     by pressing this issue today. That is not to say that in 3 
     weeks or 4 weeks we may not want to press it when the 
     evaluations are in and when we can make a judgment about the 
     results of the cooperation that has increased in the last 
     months.
       So, I want to be very careful here. I do not want my 
     opposition to this particular language at this particular 
     moment to be interpreted in any way as suggesting that we are 
     well served by keeping the embargo. We are not. But I want to 
     pay respect to the needs to have that interpretation made of 
     this current information, and also to give the President the 
     leeway in his interplay with the Vietnamese to make the 
     judgment.
       Now, we all ought to understand here, and I want the 
     Senator from North Carolina who was a member of the committee 
     and signed off on the report and others to really understand, 
     that there is an ultimate division here which we are going to 
     have to confront. There are people who do not want ever to 
     move forward and who will find any reason whatsoever, 
     including any interpretation of noncooperation, as an excuse 
     to prevent moving forward on the embargo. And there is an 
     ultimate confrontation with that. It may not be appropriate 
     at this moment today, but it really is 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 
     weeks down the road here.
       It is clear--I was just in Japan last week and met a number 
     of companies that are losing a million dollars a month or so, 
     and these are companies, one of them is Digital. $1 million 
     of profit last year. They are losing $12 million annually now 
     of a contract they cannot complete in Vietnam. And what is 
     scary is because many of the Vietnamese and other countries 
     trained on Digital, they will be replaced by NEC and by 
     others. And the result will be that they will be out of it 
     forever. And we had better understand that as we go down the 
     road here.
       This embargo will not ultimately change Vietnam's behavior 
     because Vietnam has alternative sources. There are many 
     billions of dollars that have now been invested in Vietnam, 
     and the Taiwanese are there, the Chinese, the Japanese, the 
     French, the Germans, all our competitors are laughing at us.
       When we were last over there we met with the 14 ambassadors 
     of our allies. Every one of them said, you ask us for advice 
     on the embargo. Every one of them said, you ask us for advice 
     on the embargo. If we are going to give you advice from our 
     perspective we say, keep it. But if we are going to give you 
     advice for the region and for all of us, lift it immediately.
       Now, we have got to understand that. Vietnam is growing at 
     6 to 7 percent a year right now without us. And what has 
     happened is that we have got the IMF that we have granted 
     them which means they get credit, but we do not allow our 
     companies to take advantage of the benefits that that credit 
     now gives them.
       Now, I am not putting commercial interests ahead of the 
     larger moral interests of getting this accounting. But the 
     fact is we want something from the Vietnamese. This is not 
     unilateral.
       You cannot sit here forever and say, give us information 
     and if you do not we are going to hurt ourselves. Well, that 
     is basically our policy. And unless we recognize that Vietnam 
     has the answers and if we are going to get the answers, we 
     had better have access. And if you continue to shut the door, 
     you shut the door on getting answers. So, in effect, families 
     are not helped by the continuing of the embargo.
       Now, I just got a letter yesterday from a person who put up 
     an American flag in Hanoi outside the office they are now 
     allowed to open to merely talk about doing business but not 
     to do business. As a result of that flag being there, people 
     came into his office.
       And he said to me, you know, they said we are scared to go 
     to the government. We are scared to go over here, but we 
     think we know where some American remains are. We would like 
     to show you where they are. And they talked to this person. 
     This person put them in touch with our office in Hanoi.
       Our office in Hanoi went out to the location and, indeed, 
     they are now probably going to have answers for a family. One 
     American flag provided those answers for that family 
     probably. And the question this businessman put to me, he 
     said, what would 100 American flags or 1,000 American flags 
     in Vietnam do for us?
       So, there is a confrontation in a few weeks on this issue, 
     but I strongly think that this particular day, this 
     particular moment, though I support the fundamental effort, 
     is not the moment.
       Senator Pressler: Mr. Chairman?
       The Chairman: Senator Pressler?
       Senator Pressler: Could I just conclude by saying that I 
     thank my friend very much. I think by taking Senator Simon's 
     suggestion and taking the word immediate out I think we solve 
     the President's problem because we take the pressure off. 
     This could be prospective. The President can negotiate and so 
     forth without the word immediate being in there.
       But let me say, my thinking on this whole matter is exactly 
     similar to Senator Kerry's. If there are more POW's there we 
     will be able to find them a lot better by having Americans 
     going around and there being offices there and getting 
     information.
       Also, I was with Senator Brown and Senator Cohen on a 
     recent trip to that part of the world. China and Japan are 
     getting their paws on Vietnam. And I think by our recognizing 
     Vietnam we would have a balance to China and Japan 
     economically in that part of the world.
       And I certainly agree with Senator Brown's fine point that 
     our trade imbalance is partly because of how generous we are. 
     As to the whole region, we are going to have to change that 
     not only for Vietnam but for China and Malaysia and all those 
     countries because we have been allowing their products to 
     come into our country and they have limited ours.
       So, in conclusion, I think with taking the word immediate 
     out it addresses Senator Kerry's problem. I think we need to 
     address the trade imbalance issues on a worldwide basis, but 
     if we do not move forward with this trade we are just letting 
     China, and Japan, and France, and Germany, everybody else in 
     the world get the standards set and get the business, as well 
     as establish hegemony where we really need to have our foot 
     in the door.
       So, I move the adoption of the amendment. And by the way, 
     the Baltic States amendment, staff has worked that out. So, 
     right after we vote on this if we could, by unanimous 
     consent, adopt the Baltic States amendment I would appreciate 
     it.
       The Chairman: All right. Since we have a quorum now, let us 
     adopt the Baltic States amendment.
       Senator Dodd: I would like to hear what it is and I would 
     like to see it.
       The Chairman: You have not seen it? Okay.
       Senator Pressler: Let us do the Vietnam one first.
       The Chairman: We will do the Vietnam one now.
       Senator Dodd: Is this on Vietnam?
       The Chairman: The vote is on the amendment as modified by 
     the Senator from South Dakota.
       Senator Dodd: Is this Vietnam?
       The Chairman: Yes, this is Vietnam. The clerk will call the 
     roll.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Biden?
       (No response.)
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Sarbanes?
       Senator Sarbanes: No.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Dodd?
       Senator Dodd: No.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Kerry?
       Senator Kerry: No.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Simon?
       Senator Simon: Aye.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Moynihan?
       (No response.)
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Robb?
       (No response.)
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Wofford?
       (No response.)
       The Chairman: Senator Robb votes no by proxy.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Wofford?
       (No response.)
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Feingold?
       Senator Feingold: No.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Mathews?
       Senator Mathews: Aye.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Helms?
       Senator Helms: No.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Lugar?
       (No response.)
       Ms. Allen: Mrs. Kassebaum?
       Senator Kassebaum: No.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Pressler?
       Senator Pressler: Aye.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Murkowski?
       (No response.)
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Brown?
       Senator Brown: No.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Jeffords?
       Senator Jeffords: Aye.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Coverdell?
       Senator Coverdell: Aye.
       Senator Pressler: Mr. Murkowski is aye by proxy.
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Gregg?
       (No response.)
       Ms. Allen: Mr. Chairman?
       The Chairman: Aye. And also Senator Moynihan votes aye by 
     proxy. I am sorry. He votes no by proxy.
       Senator Helms: Did you get Murkowski's proxy vote?
       Ms. Allen: Yes, I did. And Senator Moynihan is no by proxy?
       The Chairman: Senator Moynihan is no by proxy. On this vote 
     there are nine nay's and seven yea's. The amendment is not 
     agreed to.
       Senator Pressler: And the Baltic States amendment, staff 
     has agreed on that. Shall I go through what the changes have 
     been or has it been distributed? They have taken out 
     everything under B.
       The Chairman: Could we have a copy of it?
       Senator Pressler: Yes.
       The Chairman: Would you have copies for everybody?
       Senator Simon: May we have copies for everybody please? I 
     think this is important enough that we do.
       [Pause.]
       The Chairman: I would like to announce also that there * * 
     *.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator from New Hampshire has 
expired.
  Mr. SMITH. I will continue tomorrow. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. KERRY addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts, [Mr. Kerry], 
is recognized.
  Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. President, I am not going to take even half as long as my 
colleague. He has thrown out a lot of cases, and I do not know how many 
folks have been able to digest them or listen to them all, and there 
have been a lot of allegations about these cases.
  Let me just start off and try to say the accuracy in this process is 
awfully important. It is hard for people who do not know a lot about 
this to pick through it. We are obviously not going to be able to do 
that in a short span of time. But the Senator has made a number of 
representations, and I would really like to correct some of them and 
let the record be clear on them.
  No. 1, he quoted the Foreign Relations Committee actions on the 
embargo as indicating why we ought to be in sync with his particular 
amendment, and that in fact the Foreign Relations Committee in the 
action it took on the embargo was reflecting the decision let the 
President decide.
  Let me say to my friend, since I am on the Foreign Relations 
Committee and since I was the principal one opposing proceeding forward 
on the embargo at that point in time, I know what that message was and 
what we did. We did not decide on the basis of his amendment to let the 
President decide. That had nothing to do with it.
  We decided it because we wanted to keep faith with the effort in 
place to make sure that the whole JTF process in Vietnam was working. I 
felt very strongly that we had not given it enough time and that we 
owed it to the veterans to permit a number of months to go by to see if 
the Vietnamese were, indeed, cooperating further. It had nothing to do 
with ``letting the President decide.'' It had to do with the 
determination of the committee that moving forward was premature.
  Now, that is just one example of the way in which something is taken 
and thrown out here and reality is in fact very different.
  Let me give you another example, the case of this film and this 
person where he says, ``Why isn't General Needham there in Hanoi 
finding out what happened to this guy that we knew was alive?''
  Well, we are finding out. We have found out. We do not have his 
remains yet. But the point is General Needham is finding those things 
out.
  Now, I will share with my colleague a sense that a lot of things have 
been done very badly in this process over the years. There is a lot of 
blame to go around, going right back to 1973, and families were misled; 
families were not given the full truth. I think one of the great things 
that our report and our work did jointly was to prove the trail of 
negligence, inattention, bad decisions and other things that really 
have led the families through a terrible process.
  But we should not compound it now by not making clear what our group 
is doing and not doing in their efforts to provide full faith in this. 
The Senator does not like what the task force is doing. He has made 
that very clear.
  But they are getting answers. You have plenty of people around who 
have made huge pronouncements as former Congressmen, or as Congressmen 
and others who say that there are 80 live Americans and we are going to 
bring them out in a month, who tell us that there are live people there 
and who have gone to Vietnam and made announcements about live people 
and come back, people who say those are photographs of my son, my 
father, and we find out they are fake. This process has been led by a 
certain number of charlatans and exploiters, and we should not allow 
fiction to cloud what we are trying to do here.
  Now, the case that he just talked about in the film happens to be a 
person by the name of Burns. He was an American, and an American 
captain was with him in the camp. The American captain has told us he 
died of malnutrition and in fact he was buried by Americans. We now 
have certificates from Vietnam confirming his death certificate and 
hopefully the location of the grave because they gave us the grave 
registration.
  So the Senator is here screaming, ``Find him, General Needham.'' We 
have information on this fellow just as we do on every other case he 
has raised. We are getting this information. The fact is we hope we 
will find his remains now that we know he in fact died, how he died, 
where he died, and several fellow Americans observed his burial at the 
time.
  The Senator did not tell you that during his discourse. He also did 
not tell you that the pictures of Bobby Garwood in that film show him 
carrying a gun on a mission walking around with Vietcong soldiers at 
the time, and that this is the same Bobby Garwood who led people up to 
an area north of Hanoi claiming it was the area where he could identify 
buildings. He identifies the buildings. We have another press 
conference saying this confirms Americans were alive. And lo and 
behold, the satellite photography that we have proves the buildings he 
was pointing to did not even exist when he was there as a prisoner.
  That is the kind of distortion that this matter has been subject to 
for a long time.
  We have also heard about all the veterans groups that supposedly have 
strong opposition--Vietnam Veterans of America, American Legion, and 
others. I think it was Jack Kennedy who said of the American Legion 
back in the 1960's they had not had an original idea in 25 years. Well, 
now maybe it is 50.
  Do you know what the American Legion says to the President? They say 
there are live prisoners, and until we get the live prisoners back we 
cannot lift the embargo. So the Senator now wants us to set that as the 
new standard in his amendment. We have to consult with them before we 
can proceed forward.
  The amendment the Senator has put in is directly opposed to the 
amendment of Senator McCain, Senator Pressler, Senator Robb, Senator 
Bob Kerrey, myself and others. We are urging the President to take a 
step. The amendment of the Senator is geared to prevent the President 
from taking a step. It sets a new standard. It is purposely imprecise. 
It calls on the President to require Vietnam to produce for Laos and 
Cambodia.
  So we are not just going to have them responsible for Vietnam. They 
have now to produce to the fullest accountability for Laos and 
Cambodia. That on its face ought to be rejected. It is not even a 
sense-of-the-Senate. They want it to be law so that this actually ties 
the hands of the President, something most Republicans were 
extraordinary loath to do when President Reagan and President Bush were 
in office. While he suggests this is something the President ought to 
like, I suggest on its face that this administration will want this 
rejected and suggest it is not an appropriate standard.
  Mr. President, the Senator said we ought to be getting real answers; 
that we are not getting real answers. And he says that we should not be 
going to grave sites. We should be going to Hanoi to get a real answer. 
I have shown you a photograph. This is a real answer. Three bodies were 
unearthed here that we believed might have been alive, might have been 
prisoners. We did not know. And by virtue of this grave site, we will 
have answers for families, answers that not one of your Ramboesk, self-
styled saviors of POW's has ever produced, not once, not one. They 
raised expectations. They have raised hopes. And they have raised 
millions of dollars exploiting a lot of people in the process promising 
to bring back live people. But they have never brought back a live 
person.
  Mr. SMITH. Excuse me. Parliamentary inquiry. I need to understand. 
The Senator is referring to me in his remarks.
  Mr. KERRY. No. I referred to the people in the outside who have been 
raising moneys. Has the Senator been raising money?
  Mr. SMITH. The Senator knows I have not been doing that. I resent the 
implication. And you also misrepresent what I said; the statements that 
I made. You said I did not say there was a document certifying his 
death. I did say that. The Senator needs to be accurate.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, what I said was that the Senator says we do 
not know what happened to this person. I will go back into the Record. 
That is what the Senator says. He says it is unanswered. I have pointed 
out that it is not unanswered.
  The fate has been determined. This is not a handful. I heard the 
Senator from Iowa say just a handful have been answered. I do not 
consider when General Vessey gives them 196 cases that we are down to 
73, that more than 116 cases is a handful. Those are 116 American 
families that have an answer today. And I am proud to stand on this 
floor advocating a policy that will get more answers for families, not 
less.
  The Senator suggests that when the chiefs of these veterans groups 
speak they speak for all veterans. He cites the Vietnam Veterans of 
America. Mr. President, I am one of the four founders of the Vietnam 
Veterans of America. I know that at least one of the other four 
founders believes as I do. That is 50 percent. And I know that many of 
my friends are members. I am a lifetime member. Leadership does not 
speak for me on this.
  I also know that in the VFW there are thousands of members who do not 
share the opinion of some of the leaders. That is true in all of these 
organizations. And no Senator should be intimidated by the notion that 
when a President of an organization or somebody writes a letter it 
represents all of the views of all of the organizations.
  That is true for Senator McCain who is a member of them, for Senator 
Pressler, and for Senator Bob Kerrey, for Senator John Glenn who stands 
here, a war hero himself, and others. Do not tell me who speaks for me 
or for some other friends of mine who are veterans.
  Mr. President, we have been told that there are 1,100 people who 
ought to have the same treatment as all of the others. I have gone to 
look at those cases too. The Senator from New Hampshire knows that I 
made an issue about that during the time we had the committee, and I 
insisted we have people review those cases.
  We have this great number, 2,238 POW-MIA. But we know that there are 
not in fact 2,238 POW's nor even MIA's about whom we know very little. 
The Pentagon knows that more than 1,100 of those people are dead. They 
know that, and they know their bodies will never be recovered. And of 
the 1,100 others that are on that list, General Vessey went through 
them and that is the list he gave to the Vietnamese.
  He went through those cases, and they found almost 200 of them where 
you might be able to make a presumption the person lived. I suggest 
that if my colleagues read those 200 cases, they would have a hard time 
deciding that truly in 100 of them they lived. But we gave the benefit 
of the doubt, raised it up to 200 so that no issue would be left 
unexamined, so no stone would be unturned, so nobody could come in and 
say, gee, you should have done this case. Some of the cases were 
missed. I agree with my colleague. It was not as complete as it should 
have been. We added some cases as time went on. We found some others 
that we thought legitimately should have been in the first batch.
  Mr. President, I could show my colleagues in the Senate sheets that 
show that every single one of these cases is being investigated. Some 
of them have been investigated 8 separate times. People have gone out 
into the field, talked to witnesses, tried to find out what happened.
  We have this great mythology that somehow there are all these 
records. I have seen the records we get in Vietnam as our investigators 
have seen them. They are tattered, ragged, sheets of paper in many 
cases. They have no computers. They have no filing systems. Many of 
these are being pulled out of boxes. They have mildew on them, they are 
dirty, they clearly have not been stored in any significant way. And in 
a country that suffered enormous bombing, people were out in the Ho Chi 
Minh Trail with B-52 strikes. Some prisoners were bombed by ourselves. 
Some people never reached camps. Some of them we will simply never know 
the answers.
  So I simply want to say, I could go on a little bit further. Senator 
Grassley said we are not getting documents. I called over, and we have 
gotten documents from the security service on individual prisoners. The 
group 875 documents, for those who took care of the prisoners when they 
were in country; documents from the Department of Military Justice, 
group 559 documents which was the group responsible for operations in 
Laos.
  We have gotten specific shoot-down documents. We have learned things 
about people that we never knew anything about as a result of some of 
these documents. We have private diaries of wartime battles. We have 
private personnel battalion commander records of fights. We have 
learned from these documents. And all I can say to my colleagues is 
that the real issue here is whether we are going to try to set up a 
process that guarantees we continue to get information and provide this 
information to the families.
  We have a difference of opinion; not that we want to serve the 
families, not that we want to do everything we humanly can to resolve 
this issue, but a difference as to how you do that.
  I believe that we ought to trust the judgment of the people in the 
field. Some people do not trust them at all. That is their prerogative. 
But I find it very hard to believe that the young lieutenants that I 
saw out there risking their lives, or that the generals or colonels who 
have major careers ahead of them, who want to produce, who want to do 
things correctly, are somehow all of them betraying their oath to the 
Constitution and the uniform they wear.
  I mean some people seem to make a presumption that every soldier who 
ever came in touch with this, that every person in the Pentagon, that 
every single person who has ever dealt with this issue, who has not 
come up with a live person is somehow part of a conspiracy. And 
thousands of reputations are being tarnished in the process of that.
  I do not think anybody has claimed perfection in this. There 
certainly is not perfection. But I think there is better faith that 
some people have allowed for.
  So, Mr. President, I will have more to say tomorrow. The Senator from 
Ohio is waiting extremely patiently this evening. Before we close off, 
I yield to him.
  Mr. GLENN. I thank my colleague. My remarks will be brief.
  Mr. President, this is obviously a very emotional issue with a lot of 
people, and we come to this debate with a lot of people having feelings 
that go back many years and with friends left behind in Vietnam. It 
brings back recollections of other wars where people were left behind, 
also.
  The question is, at this point, how do we truly get the best answers 
for the families? How do we give them the best peace of mind, to know 
that everything is possibly being done that possibly can be done to 
account for their loved ones? How do we get answers for the families? 
How do we get answers for the veterans organization, such as AMVETS; 
VFW, Vietnam Vets, the National League of Families, and others? How do 
we guarantee the best chance of getting those answers? I will go beyond 
that. How do you get answers for me? I do not take second place to 
anybody in being interested in knowing what happened to our people and 
knowing whether we have done everything we possibly could do to make 
sure that unaccounted for becomes accounted for, whatever that 
accounting may show. How do we get it for Senator Kerry. He has no less 
interest in this than anybody else and takes second place to nobody on 
that. He was in that war. Senator McCain was in that war. How do we get 
a good accounting?
  Nobody, least of all those who have been in battle, wants to abandon 
hope for those who did not come back. We want the concrete results that 
Senator Smith talked about a little while ago. So the question to me is 
not what we have hoped for all these years, not what I stood for in 
wanting the best accounting and making sure we were tough on Vietnam. 
But we come to this time in 1994, which is now some 20 years after our 
American forces pulled out in 1973 and 1975, when finally even the 
embassy was abandoned and the last of our people were brought out. The 
question is how best to proceed at this time in the current situation 
in which we find ourselves. Do we keep the attitude we had, and I had, 
and a lot of people had, back through the early 1980's when we were 
really not getting much information? Or do we say we have a new tack we 
can take now, and perhaps we really should abandon some of the views we 
had earlier.
  I do not want to admit to anybody that we are abandoning anything. We 
are not abandoning anything. What we are trying to do, I believe, is 
take a new tack in guaranteeing that we will continue to have the best 
information coming out. That information, to me, should center on one 
thing first. I hope it is not a futile hope to center on this one 
thing: Is anybody still alive out there that could be brought back? Is 
anyone being held against their will out there? After every war we have 
had, there have been some people, for whatever their private reasons 
are, who decided they would stay where they were; they either met 
somebody and fell in love, or for whatever reasons, they decided they 
wanted to stay. That has happened after every war. Aside from those 
people, is anybody being held against their will? How do we ask for 
that and make certain we can best investigate those possible 
situations?
  It seems to me that our situation has indeed changed. Through the 
years, bit by bit by bit, there has been a cooperation, bulging at 
times, cut off at others, threats at other times. Yet, there has been 
an increased cooperation that nobody can deny out there. Has it been as 
complete and as fast as we all would like? No, certainly not. But has 
it been a real slow progress where we are getting more information than 
we used to get? Yes, I think we would all have to say that is the case.
  We have seen General Needham out there now, and we have had Admiral 
Larson and General Vessey. General Needham is on the spot with his 
team. He tells us he is absolutely free to go wherever he wants to go. 
He has not been refused on requests he made to go out and investigate 
sites or investigate the potential live sightings from that area and 
investigate all of those things. Senator Kerry has pointed out that 
General Needham has exercised those options, and in case after case and 
every time some new rumor occurs, he goes and diligently investigates 
again. I was wondering when we were out there and he was showing us 
crash sites and telling us about some crash sites, where there is still 
live ammunition and bombs around, and where they had to be careful and 
mark the entryway into some of these investigative areas they were into 
now, and they had to mark these with little flags, and people walk 
through narrow corridors and stay out of the more dangerous areas on 
each side. I was wondering then if we are not going to perhaps 
inadvertently kill more people going in to look for some of these crash 
sites, where the best they are coming out with are a few fragments of 
bones; and the relatives here are interested in those remains, 
obviously, fragmentary though they may be. You cannot equate that with 
money, obviously, and the interests of the people back here. When we 
were out there the previous year, the numbers of remains that had been 
identified and brought back, the total cost of doing that was about 
$1.7 million, as I recall. I hasten to add, again, that you cannot 
equate something like this to the families with the cost involved, nor 
would I propose that we limit it because of costs.
  It indicates that we are spending a lot and going ahead with bringing 
back those fragments, and they are making every effort they can to make 
certain that everything is returned that people want returned, if we 
have the option of doing it.
  I submit that through the years the Vietnamese have, in their efforts 
to help in our accounting, done a lot of new things in cooperation. At 
this point--and I keep coming back to this point in time--in 1994, are 
we liable to get more information? Are we liable to find out truly if 
there are any of our people still alive out there? Should we go back 
and say we are going to get tough, we will not cooperate with Vietnam? 
Or is it to our own selfish advantage in trying to find out what 
happened to the unaccounted for, if we go ahead and have a more 
cooperative view toward Vietnam, if we open up some sort of 
relationship with them that is more formal than we are exercising right 
now. I submit that, in my opinion, we would probably cut off the flow 
of information if we do not move to some newer relationship.
  It has been 20 years since Americans left there. Are we ever going to 
find out what happened to every one? No, no more so than we have for 
World War II, where we have almost 79,000 still unaccounted for. Out of 
Korea, over 8,000 are unaccounted for. In Vietnam, we can probably 
bring that down to a pretty good estimate, to about 1,200 that we 
cannot really say for sure what happened. Just to put this in 
comparison also, as we were in Vietnam, the Vietnamese asked me a 
question during one of our meetings: Could we supply records on their 
people that are missing? I asked how many they thought they had 
missing, and they said somewhere over 300,000 Vietnamese are missing, 
and they said, ``We would appreciate your help in determining what 
happened to them.''
  I took that seriously. When we came back I called the people over at 
the Pentagon who follow the aftermath of the Vietnam war and I said 
could this be that they still have 300,000 unaccounted for out of the 
Vietnam war? It is their country. Why do they not go look for them?
  Our people said no, they think that is quite plausible.
  I said can we help them get records? Their people are interested in 
loved ones that disappeared in the war just as our people are. They are 
human. They told us their people go to shrines every year, somewhere 
near the last place they heard from their loved ones, and they continue 
to this day to ask questions. And they told us about sheets that are 
put out regularly and distributed throughout Vietnam still trying to 
find, to this day, some of their people that are missing-- 300,000 they 
claim. And our people over in the Pentagon said that is probably an 
accurate figure. They did not dispute that figure.
  The question is, do we have adequate records on all those people? Did 
we keep records in the heat of combat when there was a fire fight and 
people we are going down and dying and falling? Do you get the man 's 
dogtag and get his records and take it back with you so that these 
records can be kept for some post-war analyses? No; you certainly do 
not.
  I am not taking the sides of the Vietnamese against us on this. 
Certainly not. I only bring this up to point out that war sometimes is 
not very tidy and some of your record keeping is not as good as you 
wish it was.
  So we are not abandoning these people out there. I want to get every 
single bit of information we can. If anybody says to me that I am 
trying to favor the oil conditions, or I am trying to favor those who 
want to sell consume goods out there and we are abandoning our 
prisoners in the interest of commerce, that would make my blood boil 
because certainly nothing could be further from the truth.
  I want to see us get every bit of information we can, as Senator 
Smith said, concrete results. Do we do that by having some form of 
recognition, having some form of cooperation which will keep the lines 
of communication that are now open, keep them open and expand them as 
they grudgingly, slowly expanded through the years? Or do we tighten 
down on that?
  I know that we will never have the answer to every single person that 
is unaccounted for in Vietnam. Certainly we want to have as clear a 
picture of what happened as possible and to account for everyone that 
we possibly can account for.
  But I would say to those families that still are grieving after 20 or 
25 years, or even 30 years, that we go back to the days of the 
beginnings of the Vietnam conflict, to those who are still grieving for 
to find out what happened to the loved ones back in those days and to 
the members of veterans organizations who lost buddies and friends and 
remember what that war was like all too well, I would ask them then how 
do you think we will best be able to account for the people that are 
still missing out there?
  Do not just hold a grudge and say we will never cooperate with those 
people. If we took that attitude after every war we knew what would 
happen with the Germans or Koreans or whatever war we have been in. 
Somehow we start getting over it, sometimes. Do not just say because 
Vietnam was not a popular war that we are going to forever say that we 
will never have any relationship, because I do not think that is the 
way that we really find out what happened to every single person that 
we can find out about.
  I do believe that the time is changing, the time has come to say we 
do not give full diplomatic recognition right off the bat or something 
like that. I think it is time to say we are not going to put up a lot 
of roadblocks here, and say we are not going to do a whole bunch of 
things until we get some of the accounting we truly want. That is not 
the way to get that accounting.
  Maybe not to the extent that we would like, and as soon as we would 
like, but I think that they have come a long ways toward providing what 
information they have. Maybe it is not perfect, maybe there are 
particular cases that General Needham and his team need to investigate 
more. But I keep equating some of these requests for information with 
the Vietnamese request of us for information and my request to the 
Pentagon as to what information we have on Vietnamese combat deaths 
that occurred in areas where we controlled the territory. And we have 
rather sparse records in that area. We cannot give them any answers.
  But I think we do need to keep a condition, we need to keep the 
situation out there such that they will be forthcoming with information 
they have. We have teams out there now set up to monitor that and we 
try to look into the information that we get from them.
  For all these reasons--I give these as reasons why I have gradually, 
through the last few years, changed my mind on what we should do. I 
think the best way to make certain we get information is to make 
certain that we do not clam up, do not tighten up. As I said, I do not 
do this for commercial reasons at all, whether we never have oil 
companies out there or our consumer people out there. I think the 
cooperation that we have been building slowly over a period of time, 
and that they have responded to, is the best way to go to making sure 
that we do have concrete results, that we do have as much information 
as we ever can get, to make sure that we know to the best possible 
level exactly what happened to every American that did not come back 
from Vietnam.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. FORD). The Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. 
Kerry is recognized.
  Mr. KERRY. How much time remains?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 26 minutes and 50 seconds.
  Mr. KERRY. I think, Mr. President, we are anxious to try to wrap up 
here. I would just like to point out a couple of things if we can as we 
go along that I want the Record to reflect. I ask unanimous consent 
that a history of the POW/MIA activity since the war be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   POW/MIA History re the Vietnam War

       1973:
       A total of 591 American POWs return to the United States. 
     Most returned during Operation Homecoming from February to 
     April 1973.
       1974:
       The Vietnamese repatriate the remains of 24 POWs who died 
     in captivity.
       1975:
       Saigon falls and American forces are withdrawn from 
     Vietnam.
       1976-1978:
       After the end of the war, Vietnam's objective was to be 
     accepted into the international community. For example, in 
     1977 when the U.S. opted not to veto their United Nations 
     membership, the Vietnamese responded by suddenly repatriating 
     the remains of more than 20 Americans. At the same time, 
     U.S.-Vietnamese negotiations explored the possibility of 
     normalizing relations; however, this was later scuttled by 
     Vietnamese demands for war reparations and their invasion of 
     Cambodia. U.S. policy at the time was accounting for missing 
     Americans as ``a hoped for by-product'' of the normalization 
     process.
       1978-1982:
       Following the breakdown of normalization talks, contact 
     with Vietnamese officials virtually halted, as did the return 
     of remains and any form of cooperation on the POW/MIA issue.
       1982-1987:
       The U.S. made clear that resolution of the POW/MIA issue 
     was a humanitarian matter that rested on international 
     standards and that it was in Vietnam's interest to treat it 
     that way, regardless of the state of U.S.-SRV diplomatic 
     relations. It was also made clear that the U.S. domestic 
     environment, absent such treatment, would dictate that the 
     pace and scope of U.S.-SRV relations would be directly 
     affected by cooperation on this issue.
       U.S. policy-level delegations visit Vietnam and the 
     Vietnamese pledge to resolve the POW/MIA issue.
       1987:
       January--U.S. proposals for technical discussions in Hanoi 
     were rejected by the Vietnamese, as was a similar proposal 
     the following month. President Reagan named a former Chairman 
     of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, Jr. USA 
     (Ret.), as Special Presidential Emissary to Hanoi for POW/MIA 
     Affairs.
       August--General Vessey led an Interagency Delegation to 
     Vietnam. General Vessey obtained agreement to resume and 
     expand cooperation on POW/MIA and other humanitarian issues 
     of mutual concern to the United States and Vietnam.
       Vietnamese were provided some representative case files.
       Vietnamese repatriate 8 remains.
       1988:
       Vietnam agreed to initiate joint field investigations aimed 
     at resolving ``compelling'' cases that General Vessey had 
     previously provided and to expand their unilateral efforts.
       Vietnamese present proposals for the joint activities and 
     agreed to begin joint field investigations. This resulted in 
     three 10 day periods of joint investigations along with a 
     visit by U.S. forensic specialists to examine remains 
     unilaterally provided by Vietnamese.
       Vietnamese repatriate 62 remains.
       1989:
       Vietnamese pledge continued cooperation during Vessey-led 
     Interagency delegation visit to Hanoi and agree to measures 
     that would expedite resolution of the issue.
       A total of 5 joint field activities and four technical 
     meetings are held during the year; results are disappointing.
       Vietnamese repatriate 34 remains.
       1990:
       General Vessey and the POW/MIA Interagency Group meet with 
     FM Thach in Washington, DC. Vietnamese agree to all USG 
     requests including: improved cooperative planning for joint 
     investigations, increased unilateral remains repatriations 
     and serious cooperation to locate and make available wartime 
     documents and records. Thach also agreed to assist in 
     allowing access to witnesses of incidents where U.S. 
     personnel were captured or casualties occurred, and to 
     additional military participation during joint field 
     activities.
       Joint field activities and technical meetings continue--
     results continue to disappoint.
       Vietnamese repatriate 17 remains.
       1991:
       April--U.S. policy concerning normalization of relations 
     with Vietnam, the ``roadmap,'' is presented to Vietnamese 
     officials in New York. The ``roadmap'' outlined a series of 
     quid pro quo steps the U.S. was prepared to take to improve 
     U.S.-SRV relations and eventually lead to normalization.
       The Vietnamese agreed to allow a temporary POW/MIA office 
     in Hanoi during visit by General Vessey.
       5 person office opened in Hanoi in July.
       Vietnamese repatriate 27 remains (11 joint operations, 16 
     unilaterally)
       1992:
       Jan.--the 150 member Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-
     FA) was established. The JTF-FA was designed to combine all 
     the specialties necessary to obtain the fullest possible 
     accounting of our POW/MIAs. The JTF-FA was placed under 
     CINCPAC to allow the full resources of the theater commander 
     to be brought to bear on this effort.
       Feb.--General Vessey returns to Hanoi to assess progress on 
     POW/MIA matters. During the visit, the Vietnamese presented 
     the Military region IV shootdown records.
       March--Assistant Secretary of State Solomon led a 
     delegation to Southeast Asia during which the Vietnamese 
     agreed to five steps: implementation of a short notice live-
     sighting investigation mechanism, access to records, archives 
     and museums, repatriation of remains, trilateral cooperation, 
     and expanded joint field operations.
       October--Cheney and Eagleburger meet with the Vietnamese FM 
     Cam in Washington and confront him with materials obtained 
     from Vietnamese archives. General Vessey returns to Vietnam 
     and the Vietnamese agree to aggressively collect and present 
     to the USG POW/MIA related materials from all sources and 
     consolidate it in military museums, thereby providing access 
     to joint U.S. Vietnamese research teams.
       December--Vietnam announces a formal amnesty program for 
     private citizens holding remains.
       Joint field operations continue to expand in scope and team 
     number and size is increased.
       Vietnamese repatriate 32 remains (24 joint operations, 8 
     unilaterally)
       1993:
       January--All requested live-sighting investigations and the 
     initial investigation of all 135 remaining discrepancy cases 
     are completed.
       April--General Vessey leads a delegation to Hanoi during 
     which the Vietnamese provide new documents and access to 
     several key witnesses for interview including Lt. Gen. Tran 
     Van Quang, reputed source of the Russians 1205 document. 
     Vietnamese pledge continued cooperation, offer information 
     refuting the Russian document and agree to all U.S. requests 
     including continued support of joint field operations, 
     increased archival access, repatriation of remains, and 
     continued investigation of the remaining 92 discrepancy 
     cases.
       May--Senator Kerry leads delegation to Vietnam requesting 
     continued cooperation and the Vietnamese agreed to his 
     requests including the formation of a joint POW/MIA 
     information center in Hanoi.
       July--President Clinton decides to drop U.S. objections to 
     Vietnam clearing its arrears with the International Monetary 
     Fund. High-level delegation visits Vietnam and conveys 
     President Clinton's requirement for tangible results from the 
     Vietnamese in four key areas. The delegation was led by the 
     Deputy Secretary for Veterans Affairs, Heschel Gober, and 
     included Assistant Secretary Winston Lord and Lt. General 
     Michael Ryan of the Joint Staff. The President's four areas 
     of concern become the bench mark for cooperation and include 
     the repatriation of remains, access to documents, trilateral 
     cooperation, and continued investigation of live sightings 
     and priority discrepancy cases.
       September--President Clinton renews the trade embargo with 
     Vietnam, but allows some modifications.
       December--Assistant Secretary of State, Winston Lord, led 
     an Interagency delegation to Vietnam to assess results in the 
     four areas of concern. He reported cooperation was excellent 
     and results have been achieved.
       Joint field operations continue on the largest scale ever, 
     cooperation by the Vietnamese receives high marks from JTF-
     FA.
       Vietnamese repatriate 67 remains making 1993 the third 
     largest year for remains since the end of the war.


                          general information:

       The remains of 281 Americans previously missing in Vietnam 
     have been identified. Several hundred other remains have been 
     repatriated, but not yet identified (many never will). The 
     identification process is often time consuming and laborious. 
     The delay in the positive identification of some remains is a 
     function of the high standards of proof we require before 
     making an identification, rather than a lack of Vietnamese 
     cooperation.
       Of the 1715 first hand live-sighting report received since 
     1975, 1694 (99%) are resolved. No reports require further 
     field investigation in Vietnam. Vietnamese cooperation in 
     this area has been excellent.
       1195 (70%) relate to Americans who are accounted for (POW 
     returnees, missionaries, jailed civilians, etc.)
       45 (3%) relate to wartime sightings of military personnel 
     or pre-1975 sightings of civilians who remain unaccounted 
     for.
       454 (26%) are fabrications.
       The remaining 21 reports are under current investigation, 
     but these do not require field investigation in Vietnam, Not 
     all of these reports are Vietnam cases.
       Archival research teams started work in November 1992 when 
     the Vietnamese began making their military museum holdings 
     available for review.
       At the height of archival activity there were three teams 
     located in Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City have shut 
     down because they have completed the review of materials in 
     those locations.
       Nearly 24,000 documents, photographs, and artifacts have 
     been reviewed with more than 600 items correlating to an 
     unaccounted for Americans.
       Joint Document Center has been established in Vietnam's 
     Central Army Museum in Hanoi.
       Oral History Program is designed to gain information from 
     the memories of Vietnamese participants of operations during 
     the war involving U.S. POWs or casualties.
       More than 120 individuals have been identified for an 
     interview, and over half of the interviews have already been 
     conducted.
       Priority Discrepancy Cases of ``last known alive cases'' 
     are those cases where there is some indication that the 
     servicemen was ``last known alive'' subsequent to their loss 
     incident or was listed by their military service as POW at 
     Homecoming but did not return during Homecoming.
       A total of 196 individuals in this category were presented 
     to the Vietnamese by General Vessey.
       Total reduced to 135 by January 1992. The JTF-FA completed 
     an initial investigation of all cases by January 1993.
       We established a Priority Case Investigation Team in June 
     1993 to focus solely on the remaining priority discrepancy 
     cases. This team has completed 34 follow-up investigations.
       Policy review of additional information has resulted in a 
     fate determined status for 123 individuals of the original 
     196, as of January 1994. This leaves 73 priority discrepancy 
     cases requiring further investigation.
       24 individuals have been accounted for through remains 
     identification and have been removed from the last of POW/
     MIAs.
       Although the other 99 individual members have been removed 
     from the priority discrepancy list, they are still considered 
     unaccounted for and remain on the overall list of 2,238. We 
     will continue to search for their remains.
       A Special Remains Team was formed in the fall of 1993 to 
     focus on those cases where the possibility of remains 
     recovery appears best. The team works continuously, 
     independently of JFAs, in Vietnam and has thus far focused on 
     those who died in captivity. This team has recommended seven 
     reported burial sites for excavation.
       Americans accounted for through remains identification: 
     Vietnam--281 (including 1 recovered from indigenous 
     personnel); China--2; Laos--59 (including 3 recovered from 
     indigenous personnel); Cambodia--3; Total--345.
       Americans unaccounted for in Southeast in Asia: Vietnam--
     1,647; Laos--505; Cambodia--78; China--8; Total--2,238.
  Mr. KERRY. I also ask unanimous consent that Progress on POW/MIA 
During 1993 be printed in the Record.
  There being on objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  Re: Progress on POW/MIA During 1993


                                remains

       As of the end of the year, Joint Field Activities and the 
     unilateral turnover of remains by Vietnam had resulted in 
     nearly 67 remains, thus making 1993 the third largest year 
     for repatriations since the end the year.
       Hanoi stepped up its publicity program for its remains 
     amnesty program, offering reimbursement to its citizens for 
     expenses incurred. Increasing numbers of Vietnamese are 
     coming forward with information that may help locate American 
     remains.


                           Discrepancy Cases

       Since July 2, the work of the Special Priority Case 
     Investigation Team has enabled us to confirm the death of 12 
     more individuals from the last-known-alive discrepancy list. 
     With the help of the Vietnamese, we have now unofficially 
     confirmed the death of 116 of the original 196 high-priority 
     discrepancy case individuals.
       DoD has conducted five live-sighting investigations since 
     July 2. As of September 10, there were no live sighting 
     reports that required filed investigation. A total of over 
     200 investigations, including some in prisons and military 
     facilities, have produced no evidence that Vietnam is holding 
     an American POW.
       DoD has completed twenty-six joint US-SRV field operations.


                         documents and archives

       Since July 2, the JTF-FA has received documents from two 
     important wartime North Vietnamese military units--``Group 
     559,'' that deal with operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, 
     and ``Group 875,'' the General Political Directorate unit 
     responsible for American POWs.
       Of particular interest is the Group 559, Ho Chi Minh Trail 
     shootdown record. It provides information on many cases that 
     will assist in their investigation. These documents are 
     important in that they help confirm information we already 
     have concerning North Vietnamese knowledge of aircraft losses 
     along the Ho Chi Minh Trail areas as well as information we 
     already have relative to prisoners known to have been 
     captured. In the case of the 559 records, some of the 
     information is new. In many cases the new information will 
     provide important leads for future investigation. In some 
     cases, it will help answer questions about the fate of 
     missing Americans.


                         trilateral cooperation

       In August, at the U.S.-SRV-LDPR Trilateral Cooperation 
     Meeting in Hawaii, the Vietnamese and the Lao agreed to 
     conduct coordinated simultaneous border-area operations with 
     the U.S. in December, when the rainy season ends.
       New Group 559 documents provided by Vietnam appear to be 
     useful in the investigation of losses in the People's Army of 
     Vietnam controlled areas of Laos.
       In December, the first trilateral field activity was 
     completed. While it is too early to access the results, 
     Vietnamese cooperation was considered excellent.


                                 jtf-fa

       JTF-FA's mission is to provide the fullest possible 
     accounting for the 2,239 individuals still listed as missing 
     or otherwise unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. Of that 
     number, 1,648 are unaccounted for in Vietnam, 505 in Laos, 
     and 86 in Cambodia.
       JTF-FA has completed five joint field activities (JFAs) in 
     recent months. Two of the JFAs were in Vietnam, one was in 
     Laos, one was in Cambodia and one was trilateral. Since June, 
     JTF-FA teams in Vietnam and Laos have conducted operations in 
     16 separate Vietnamese and Lao provinces, investigated more 
     than 300 cases, and excavated more than a dozen sites.


                                24th jfa

       The 24th JFA in Vietnam was conducted from June 24 through 
     July 20. During this operation, team members investigated a 
     total of 128 cases and interviewed 269 witnesses. Information 
     provided by these Vietnamese citizens may be essential in 
     determining the fate of missing servicemen.
       The team also excavated five sites, resulting in the 
     recovery of some human remains. Remains recovered during this 
     operation were repatriated to the United States on August 4, 
     and are undergoing analysis at CIL-HI.
       Team members also recovered some material evidence 
     including aircraft parts and aircrew equipment. That evidence 
     is being analyzed to determine if it correlates to any of the 
     task force's outstanding cases of unaccounted for Americans.


                                25th jfa

       JTF-FA conducted the 25th JFA in Vietnam from August 17 to 
     September 20. During this operation, team members conducted 
     179 investigations and excavated eight sites. Again, some 
     material evidence, along with some remains were recovered 
     during the excavations. Other remains alleged to be those of 
     American servicemen killed during the war were turned over to 
     investigators by Vietnamese. These remains will be analyzed 
     by CIL-HI experts to determine if they are potentially those 
     of Americans before they are repatriated to the United 
     States.


                                  laos

       JTF-FA conducted a Lao operation from July 16 to August 16. 
     This was the fourth operation conducted in Laos in 1993, and 
     the tenth since JTF-FA was established. During this 
     operation, team members investigated 28 cases and excavated 
     three sites. Some remains and material evidence were 
     recovered during the operation and are being analyzed.
       Ninety-seven activities involving investigations, 
     excavations, and surveys have been completed in Laos in 1993. 
     Compared to previous years, the number of activities in 1993 
     has increased substantially. Fifty-one activities were 
     completed in 1992, 20 in 1991, and 12 in 1990. Two additional 
     operations are planned for October and December 1993.


                                cambodia

       In Cambodia, JTF-FA competed two operations in 1993 with 21 
     activities in the January and February period. However, only 
     7 were completed in March and April when operations were 
     temporarily suspended after the team received incoming mortar 
     and small arms fire from unidentified hostile forces. Two 
     operations are planned for the remainder of 1993. A total of 
     19 additional activities are scheduled to be conducted during 
     these two operations.


                                26th jfa

       The 26th JFA in Vietnam was the Vietnamese portion of the 
     first trilateral field activity conducted from December 3-20, 
     1993. The team investigated 12 cases during the JFA and 
     characterized Vietnamese cooperation as excellent.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent that the 
Biographical Summary and the letter of support from General Vessey be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

            Biographical Summary for General John W. Vessey

       General John W. Vessey began his 46 years of military 
     service in 1939 as a private in the Minnesota National Guard; 
     he ended it in 1985 in his second term as the Chairman of the 
     Joint Chief of Staff of the United States.
       He fought in North Africa and Italy in World War II and was 
     commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant on the battlefield at the Anzio 
     Beachhead in May 1944. President Reagan appointed him the 
     tenth Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1982.
       He had a long association with our North Atlantic Treaty 
     Forces, serving a total of nine years in combat divisions in 
     Germany, commanding a NATO-committed mechanized division 
     stationed in the United States, and serving three years on 
     the NATO Military Committee. He also had extensive experience 
     in East Asia with combat service in Vietnam and Laos, and 
     additional service in Thailand, the Philippines, and Korea 
     where his last service was as Commander of the United Nations 
     Command, Commander U.S. Forces Korea, and the first Commander 
     of the Republic of Korea/United States Combined Forces 
     Command.
       His other senior positions included service as the Army's 
     Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans and as the 
     Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.
       His military decorations include the Distinguished Service 
     Cross, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Defense Distinguished 
     Service Medals, the Purple Heart, and medals from 19 friendly 
     and allied nations. In 1992, he was awarded the Nation's 
     highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by 
     President Bush. He is an Army Aviator.
       He earned a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University 
     of Maryland and a Master of Science Degree from the George 
     Washington University. He is a member of the Honor Society of 
     Phi Kappa Phi.
       After retirement from active military service, he served on 
     the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy and the 
     Moscow Assessment Review Panel. He serves on the Defense 
     Science Board and on the Defense Policy Board. In 1987, he 
     was appointed by President Reagan to serve as Presidential 
     Emissary to Hanoi on Prisoner of War/Missing in Action 
     Matters. President Bush renewed his appointment in 1989, and 
     he continues to serve in that post.
       He serves on the Board of Directors of several industrial 
     firms and on the boards of the National Flag Day Foundation 
     and Youth Services, USA. He is a member of the Board for 
     Mission Services of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod.
       Subject: Gen Vessey Statement Regarding Vietnam
       1. General Vessey has OK'd the following statement:
       In the past six years, Vietnam has made huge leaps in the 
     direction we wanted them to go, many of them moves that we in 
     Washington though would never be made. Among them:
       Agreed to Joint Field Investigations of ``discrepancy 
     cases.'' We are in the sixth year of those investigations.
       Agreed to joint live sighting investigations.
       Returned several hundred sets of remains of missing 
     Americans.
       Got out of Cambodia and supported UN sponsored elections.
       Released all re-education camp inmates.
       Helped re-unite about 300,000 separated Vietnamese 
     families.
       Let us get Amerasian children out of Vietnam.
       Let the U.S. set up a POW/MIA office in Hanoi.
       Agreed to State Department officers in Hanoi with no 
     reciprocal move.
       Accommodated a variety of intrusive requests (such as going 
     through prisons) by the USG and members of Congress.
       Have allowed U.S. researchers unlimited access to the 
     Defense Ministry Library.
       I cite these Vietnam government steps not to urge rewarding 
     them, but as a reminder that cooperation depends on 
     confidence building steps. Lifting the trade embargo and 
     moving forward in relations is not rewarding a heinous 
     communist regime for past crimes! It is a move that will open 
     Vietnam and move it toward democracy and free enterprise as 
     well as help us reach our goal of fullest possible 
     accounting.
       This is the overriding reason for lifting the trade 
     embargo. We now have the best cooperation we've ever had from 
     the Vietnamese Government in searching for evidence about the 
     fates of our people. Maintaining the embargo will not improve 
     that level of cooperation, but rather will probably lessen 
     it. To achieve fullest possible accounting, we will need the 
     help of local authorities, the Vietnamese Veterans, and the 
     Vietnamese people. Let me point out that lifting the trade 
     embargo is not granting a favor to American business at the 
     expense of the families of the missing and the Veterans. It 
     is, rather, the surest way to further the cooperation we need 
     to get fullest accounting.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I want to underscore one of the important 
ways in which the current system is working and why this cooperative 
effort is so important. My colleague has consistently raised some 
question of the sufficiency of digging and how we are going at this and 
what we do.
  A couple years ago some of the most disgruntled people in this 
effort, either in families or in some of the POW activist groups, were 
saying we are not getting at these cases. We do not have a way of 
determining what happened to people. We are not following up on the 
live-sighting report, and so forth.
  We went over and started negotiating that, and we began to try to 
deal with those concerns. We got helicopters capable of taking us out 
in the field so we could follow up on a live-sighting report. Lo and 
behold, after the live-sighting report started to show we could not 
find Americans or they never have been there or they went there. All of 
sudden that process became irrelevant and it was not important. Step by 
step, every time there have been sort of barriers set up and we have 
been able to deal with the barrier and remove it. Then there is a new 
issue. Now the new issue is the Vietnamese are not turning over 
everything. That is a new issue. Intelligence reports or some old 
reports taken out of context or something, and people say here is the 
effort but it is not real evidence.
  The truth is we do not know specifically whether or not they have a 
document today or do not have a document today. We can surmise. We can 
think they may. We can conjecture. But we do not know. We will not know 
ever, unless we get it from the Vietnamese or from someone in this 
country who happens to truly know about it or be able to show it by 
virtue of having been there or can take us right to it.
  So what we are talking about here, how are we going to prove these 
cases. Let me give you another example. A few days ago in Military 
Region 9, the southern portion of Vietnam, an area called you Phu Vinh 
Forest, an area where I was fighting, down in the delta--this forest 
was particularly an impenetrable forest area. During the time I was 
there an NVA regiment was working and operating there. We lost some 
people there.
  Recently, the Vietnamese themselves came up with nine people that 
they presented to us who had been in this Phu Vinh Forest area during 
the war at the very time we had lost these people. And these were 
people who were part of the cadre there who said, oh yes, we remember 
that incident. They were buried. This is the kind of place where they 
are buried and we will take you there.
  So, a bunch of people came down. They went in. They searched around. 
They found three sites that they think may be the sites. They also 
learned that a doctor had treated one of these people and apparently 
this doctor is in Cambodia, so they are now helping us find the doctor 
in Cambodia.
  Now, hopefully that effort is going to produce results. I cannot tell 
you it will today. Nobody can. It is in the past. The Vietnamese have 
returned more than 600 remains; 269 of those remains have been 
confirmed as United States remains, United States soldiers, and another 
100 are determined that they could be United States, we do not know for 
certain yet. Now, we hopefully will discover these other people.

  But the point I make, Mr. President, is very simple. If the 
Vietnamese did not find nine people, if they did not cooperate in 
finding the doctor, if they were not part of this process, we would not 
be able to get answers. And that is true of every aspect of this.
  My colleague complains that we are having to pay a lot of money for 
this. We are paying a lot of money. But I am not too sure what people 
expect. Do they expect us to make the demand that we have to go in 
there for the most expensive and extensive effort to find answers in 
history and the Vietnamese are going to pay for it?
  It seems to me the key question before us is whether or not we have 
the ability to get ultimately the fullest accounting process possible, 
recognizing what Senator Chafee said, that his friend from World War II 
who died while he was at Guadalcanal was only found a year and a half 
ago, 50 years later.
  I am confident that we are going to be struggling with aspects of 
this issue years from now. My prayer and hope is that we will have kept 
faith with veterans, with families, and that we will have done what is 
necessary to find the answers, not to shut the door in our own faces.
  I will have more to say on that tomorrow morning.
  Mr. President, I am prepared to yield back the remainder of our time 
and I believe we will abide by the previous order.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, it has been more than 30 years since the 
first American soldier arrived in Vietnam, and almost two decades since 
the last American soldier came home. Over 43 million Americans, and 
over half the population of Vietnam, were not yet born when the war 
ended.
  The Vietnam war was a monumental tragedy for both our countries. More 
bombs were dropped on Vietnam than in World War II and the Korean war 
combined. Over 58,000 American soldiers, and over 2 million Vietnamese, 
so many of them civilians, died. For Vietnam, the American war was only 
the last chapter in a long history of violent conflict, beginning with 
the Chinese, the Japanese, and the French. Today, Vietnam remains among 
the poorest countries in the world, with an average per capita income 
of a few hundred dollars a year.
  We went to Vietnam believing we were invincible, only to see our 
country torn apart over the war. We came home stunned that our enormous 
firepower could not defeat such a tiny foe. Yet, despite that 
experience, we are today the world's only superpower.
  In the 18 years since the Vietnam war, each of us who was alive then 
has dealt with the legacy of Vietnam in our own way. When I came to the 
Senate in 1974, I promised myself that I would do everything possible 
to prevent our country from making such a terrible mistake again. I 
became the only Vermonter serving in the Congress to vote to end the 
war.
  I have also found ways to help our Vietnam veterans, for whom I have 
the greatest respect, and I have supported efforts to locate the 
remains of our POW/MIA's. For example, we provide assistance through 
the foreign aid bill to help locate remains of POW/MIA's.
  I started a fund in the foreign aid program that has been used to aid 
Vietnamese who were disabled from war injuries. Those funds have been 
used to make artificial limbs for some of the more than 60,000 amputees 
in Vietnam, regardless of which side they supported in the war. We have 
also given aid to orphans in Vietnam.
  Throughout this period, United States-Vietnamese relations have 
stayed essentially in limbo. Diplomatic relations have remained 
severed. The United States has kept its trade embargo against Vietnam, 
and Vietnamese assets are still frozen. In a very real sense, although 
the last shot was fired long ago, the Vietnam war has not yet ended.
  This is so despite the end of the cold war which got us into Vietnam 
in the first place, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and even as 
we give billions of dollars in aid to Russia and most-favored-nation 
status for China.

  Mr. President, I support this amendment. The embargo is an 
anachronism, and it is self-defeating. It has been maintained primarily 
because of the POW/MIA issue, but I am convinced that by maintaining 
the embargo we only prolong the ordeal of finding out what happened to 
our remaining POW/MIA's.
  We also impede many other United States interests in Vietman--
interests in the stability of Southeast Asia, in promoting democracy 
and human rights, and in expanding economic markets for American 
business.
  In a world dramatically different from when we left Vietnam, our 
challenge today is to devise a policy towards Vietnam that has the best 
chance of furthering these interests, and to finally put the tragedy of 
the war behind us.
  None of us will be completely satisfied until every thread of 
evidence that might contain a clue about what happened to our POW/MIA's 
has been pursued. There is no doubt that the Vietnamese Government has 
not always been forthcoming or consistent about the information in its 
possession about our POW/MIA's. It has withheld information in an 
effort to gain advantage or to obtain concessions from us.
  But this thorny issue is not black and white. Only this year did our 
Government turn over several million pages of United States-held 
documents that will help the Vietnamese solve some of their own 300,000 
MIA cases.
  After 18 years, are continued diplomatic isolation and economic 
sanctions likely to cause Vietnam to do what it has not done during all 
that time? Or is the Vietnamese Government more likely to change 
through greater political, diplomatic, economic, and social contacts 
with the United States?
  The truth is that the past policy of denying Vietnam the benefits of 
diplomatic relations and trade produced little results. Yet in the past 
2 years, progress on the POW/MIA issue has been dramatic. Why? Because 
of the efforts by President Bush, General Vessey, and President Clinton 
to encourage cooperation.
  We now have a permanent POW/MIA office in Hanoi. Our people have 
access to all military museums, and have been to the prisons. They have 
looked into every live sighting report. Americans are working closely 
with Vietnamese to resolve remaining questions about these cases. Our 
people are in the jungles of Vietnam today searching for remains. Over 
the past year, 60 sets of remains have been repatriated. We have 
received thousands of documents and artifacts, and the number of 
discrepancy cases has been reduced from 196 to 80. Those remaining 80 
cases are being investigated.

  All of this has happened in the past 2 years, because we gave the 
Vietnamese incentives to cooperate. According to the deputy commander 
of the United States task force in Hanoi, ``When we started there was 
suspicion and mistrust. We've worked long and hard to develop a sense 
of mutual trust * * *. It's mind-boggling how much cooperation we now 
have * * * [The Vietnamese] are doing their best to cooperate with 
us.''
  Mr. President, we cannot keep punishing Vietnam forever. We will only 
jeopardize the very process we want to encourage as we continue to 
inflict hardship on a society that has suffered terribly for 
generations.
  There is much that needs to change in Vietnam. Gross human rights 
abuses, including arrests of political dissidents, arbitrary detention, 
unfair political trials, torture and abuse of prisoners in forced labor 
camps continue. Until there is substantial improvement in human rights, 
relations between our countries will suffer.
  There is abundant evidence that Vietnam is involved in the thriving 
Asian black-market trade in endangered species. Vietnam is a wholesale 
supplier for tigers, leopards, and other rare species. Many of these 
animals are protected under Vietnamese law and international treaty, 
but enforcement is almost nonexistent.
  But I believe that even in human rights and other areas in which we 
differ, Vietnam will change more through increased contact with the 
west than from further isolation. If the Vietnamese Government wants 
the benefits of trade, it will have to accept the influx of foreign 
business and all the changes it inevitably brings. The Vietnamese 
Government cannot on the one hand participate in the global economy, 
and at the same time censor every conversation, magazine, or radio 
broadcast it disagrees with.
  If Vietnam wants to be treated as an equal, it cannot continue to 
engage in activities that are abhorrent to the international community.
  Mr. President, during the Vietnam war America's leaders said time and 
again that we were fighting to protect democracy, but our actions often 
belied those words, and in the end we failed. When the fighting 
stopped, Vietnam was no closer to being a democracy.
  Today, as we strive to make democracy and human rights a central goal 
of our foreign policy, we need to recognize that the policy of 
isolating and punishing Vietnam has failed. But just as on the POW/MIA 
issue, we can make progress in other areas by giving Vietnam incentives 
to change. Lifting the embargo is one incentive. Diplomatic recognition 
is another. We have many ways of using leverage through our foreign aid 
program, and our position in the multilateral development banks.
  So, Mr. President, there are many ways that we can encourage Vietnam 
to deal with the POW/MIA issue and many other differences. But the 
embargo is a vestige of a war that should never have happened, and of a 
policy based on ignorance, lies, confusion, and weakness. We owe it to 
ourselves, and to the Vietnamese people who never wanted a war with us, 
to finally show that for us, like them, the war is finally over.

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