[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 28 (Tuesday, March 14, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H958-H959]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        POWS AND MIAS IN VIETNAM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, back in 1993 I met a gentleman 
named Binh Ly. And Mr. Ly told me and other Congressmen that he had a 
business partner, Mr. Nguyen Van Hao, who met with former Secretary of 
Commerce Ron Brown to seek his help in normalizing relations with 
Vietnam.
  Mr. Ly said that Mr. Hao who met with Ron Brown three or four times 
told him that Ron Brown wanted $700,000 in up-front money to start the 
normalization process with Vietnam. Mr. Brown said initially that he 
never met with Mr. Hoa, but later, it was found out that he did indeed 
meet with him three times.
  The FBI, on October 2 of 1992, was reported in the New York Times to 
have discovered evidence that the Vietnamese government was preparing 
to establish a special bank account in Singapore, and the evidence was 
in the form of a large transfer of an undisclosed sum of money or a 
transfer of undisclosed sum of money between the East Asian banks.
  The interesting thing about this is that Mr. Ly told us before we 
found out about that that there was going to be $700,000 transferred to 
the Banque Indosuez in Singapore for Mr. Brown from the Vietnamese 
government.
  Now, the reason I bring this up is we had hearing on this, and Mr. 
Brown was investigated. Unfortunately, Mr. Brown died in a plane crash 
over in the former Yugoslav a few years ago, but the fact of the matter 
is, Mr. Ly made this statement, and the normalization process then did 
go forward.
  The administration said that the reason the normalization process was 
going forward was we wanted to heal old wounds and that the Vietnamese 
government had agreed that they would give us a full accounting of the 
2,300 POW-MIAs that were still missing and unaccounted for in Vietnam 
while we normalize relations with Vietnam. And we have received a few 
reports on the POW-MIAs that were unreported up until the normalization 
took place, but the process went forward. And we normalized relations.
  Mr. Speaker, now, here we are 7 years later in the year 2000, and we 
still have 2,023 POW-MIAs unaccounted for. Every President up until 
this administration had said that we would never start the 
normalization process until we had a full accounting of our POW-MIAs.
  There is a lot of families in this country that still wonder what 
happened to their husbands, their fathers, their sons that do not know 
and may never know what happened to them because the Vietnamese 
government has not lived up to the commitment that they made.
  Many people believe to this day that the reason the normalization 
process took place was because of the potential money being given to 
Ron Brown and others in the government as a payoff to start the 
process.
  Others believed that the administration really did want to get a 
complete accounting of the POW-MIAs and they believed the Vietnamese 
government when they said they would give us a complete accounting.
  Here we are 7 years later, and we have had an accounting of maybe 200 
out of the 2,300 that were missing and are still missing and 
unaccounted for.
  The reason I come to the floor tonight is because I am very concerned 
about something that is taking place as we speak. The Secretary of 
Defense of the United States, Mr. Cohen, has gone to Vietnam. And he is 
meeting with Vietnamese leaders to talk about the POW-MIA issue and to 
show good faith on the part of the United States Government in the 
peaceful agreements that have been made by this administration with the 
Vietnamese government.
  The thing that concerns me is that our Secretary of Defense has gone 
over

[[Page H959]]

there at almost exactly 25 years to the day that we have seen our 
troops pull out of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. That really bothers 
me.
  They are celebrating in Vietnam. They are taking our Secretary of 
Defense around to war memorials showing where their valiant airmen shot 
down our young Americans who were killed, and they are celebrating 
their victory over the United States 25 years after the fall of Saigon.
  Our Secretary of Defense is over there during this celebration. To 
me, as an American, it seems unseemly. And I think a lot of Americans, 
especially those who served in Vietnam or who had loved ones that died 
and are still unaccounted for in Vietnam, would feel the same way.
  Mr. Speaker, I just say to this administration and to the Secretary 
of Defense, if he wanted to go to Vietnam to talk to them about the 
POW-MIA issue, if he wanted to go to Vietnam to tell them how important 
their relationship with us is, then why in the world did he do it 
during their celebrations of the defeat of the United States and 
Vietnam? It makes no sense to me. It rubs me the wrong way.
  I hope that the Secretary of Defense and others in the administration 
hear what we had to say. He should have done it at a different time.

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