You don’t have to trust me. Hell, I was born in the 1960s. But people who know this topic, and have spent years as career military officers say that Sampley and his cohort are lying crooks.

Hey, trust Ronald Reagan:
8 July 2007. More about Hendon’s MIA claims. Check out this item — it’s quite relevant in view of Hendon’s new book claiming that hundreds of US POWs were abandoned in SEAsia. Ronald Reagan’s comment on Hendon: “. . . off his rocker.”

29 May 2007. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this — but here goes. Former Congressman Billy Hendon and his long-time girl-friend Beth Stewart have produced a book titled something like An Enormous Lie — the book is supposed to be a collection of US government documents proving that American POWs were abandoned in Southeast Asia and that there has been and still is a wide-spread conspiracy within the US government to cover up this fact. Hendon’s claims are nonsense. I have no intention of reading his book — because I have heard it all before. If anyone cares, this is what I recommend: If you must, read Hendon’s book. Then, come back to the MIA Facts Site and compare Hendon’s claims to the articles on this site. I’m betting that every single incident that Hendon uses to support his claim is covered by an article here.

Here’s the link again:
http://www.miafacts.org/index.htm

The website is full of exhaustive research done over many years by Joe Schlatter, Colonel, U. S. Army, Retired. He retired on 1 April 1995. His involvement in the MIA issue came during two assignments:

February 1986 – July 1990
Feb 86 – Dec 88: Chief, Analysis Branch, Defense Intelligence Agency Special Office for POW-MIA Affairs
Dec 88 – Jul 90: Chief, Defense Intelligence Agency Special Office for POW-MIA Affairs
July 1993 – March 1995: Deputy Director, Defense POW-MIA Office
Vietnam Veteran
2/13 Field Artillery
February 1969 – February 1970

funky chicken on February 9, 2008 at 4:59 PM

I bring you Mr. Ted Sampley in his own words, 1997:

G

eorge Bush Parachutes Again to Exorcise Demons of Past Betrayal

By Ted Sampley
March/April/May 1997

Former President George Bush, who bailed out of a crippled Navy Avenger bomber 53 years ago, jumped again in March of this year. His World War II jump is historic. It made Bush the only president to ever bail out of an airplane and the only president whose crew mates were sent careening into the ocean because their pilot had abandoned the aircraft.

Accompanied by eight Golden Knights from the Army Precision Parachuting Team and a civilian from the U.S. Parachute Association, Bush’s second jump was less eventful and historic. After leaping from a civilian twin-engine airplane at 12,500 feet with two jump masters holding onto his harness, Bush fell until he deployed his parachute at 4,500 feet.

A half a dozen people–including his wife Barbara–rushed to help cushion his landing. Medical emergency personnel were also standing by on the ground. Bush landed about 40 yards from his target at the Army’s Yuma Proving Ground, the sprawling base where the Golden Knights train eight weeks a year.

When the 72-year-old former chief executive was asked how he felt, he gave a thumbs up. “It was wonderful. I’m a new man–and I go home exhilarated,” he said. “There’s a lot of things about my previous incarnation that I do not miss, but I do miss the military,” Bush later told base employees.

Prior to the jump, Jim McGrath, Bush’s assistant, had said “The reasons behind this [the jump] are strictly personal, . . . It has to do with World War II.”

Those cryptic remarks give rise to speculation that Bush may have been, as The London Times put it, “Trying to exorcise demons from his earlier jump, the circumstances of which flared up into controversy during Bush’s presidential campaign.

In a 1987 account of the World War II incident, which differed from his earlier versions, Bush told about the incident on television. He claimed that during a bombing run against a Japanese radio installation on ChiChi Island, his plane was hit and engulfed in flames and that he ordered his crew to bail out. He said one did, but his parachute failed. Bush claimed the other crewman did not answer the intercom, so he assumed that the crewman was critically wounded or dead.

Bush, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for action prior to the crash, said that even though the plane was in flames, he managed to fly it on to the target and drop his bombs before he bailed out. Bush admitted, however, that in his rush to get out of the Avenger, he pulled the parachute rip cord too quickly and was gashed on his forehead when he hit the tail of the plane.

snip

“Shut Up and Sit Down”

For 12 years, the “read my lips” president had promised (eight years as vice president and four as president) that the POW/MIA issue was “the highest national priority” and that there would be no dealings with Vietnam until the POW/MIA issue was properly resolved.

At the 1992 annual convention of The National League of POW/MIA Families, the questions POW/MIA families and veterans had harbored for years about the honesty of Bush’s promises exploded into a nationally reported incident.

Bush, who was the guest speaker at that convention, became the subject of a demonstration when the elderly mother of a MIA stood up and yelled at Bush, “No more lies! Tell us the truth!”

Dozens more of the family members quickly joined in the protest, many holding up pictures of their missing brothers, fathers and sons and chanting, “No more lies!” and “Release all the files!” Bush snapped at the jeering MIA relatives, telling them to “shut up and sit down.”

The protest and uproar continued for over five minutes until the crowd finally let Bush speak again. Bush told them, abandoning his original text, “To suggest that the commander-in-chief that led this country into its most successful recent effort [the Gulf War] would condone for one single day the personal knowledge of a person held against his will . . . is simply, totally unfair.”

Later that year, despite his promise to “never” abandon the POW/MIA issue, Bush bailed out and initiated the beginning process of normalizing trade relations with communist Vietnam.

Another Bush Betrayal

Bush angered the MIA families again in April 1995, when McGrath made public a planned September 1995 trip to Vietnam by Bush. McGrath explained to outraged MIA families that Bush and his wife, Barbara, had been invited to Hanoi by Citibank and that Bush “doesn’t really have a political agenda in going there.”

The MIA families disagreed. They said Citibank was paying Bush hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the trip and that the real agenda was to speed up normalized relations between Vietnam and the United States so that U.S. business interests could more easily take advantage of Vietnam’s slave labor market.

Accompanied by Vietnam veterans and former South Vietnamese political prisoners who had been held in concentration camps for years by the communist Vietnamese, the MIA family members staged a protest outside of a building in Houston in which Bush has an office.

Despite the protest, Bush went to Vietnam and embraced its communist leaders. For money, he shook the blood stained hands of some of the same communist leaders who had murdered U.S. POWs and orchestrated hundreds, if not thousands, of terrorist bomb attacks against the civilian population of South Vietnam during the war.

Bush’s trip to Vietnam was a betrayal and a slap in the face to the veterans who fought against the communists and the activists working to establish human rights and democracy in Vietnam.

As for the suggestion that “the commander-in-chief” that led this country in the Gulf War “would condone for one single day the personal knowledge of a person held against his will,” there were two men who knew Bush very well and could have spoken about his loyalty to the men and women in uniform.

Unfortunately, very few people have ever heard of them and neither Radioman 2nd Class John Delaney or Gunner Lt. Junior Grade William White are able to speak. They are on the bottom of the Pacific off the coast of a tiny island where their pilot, Navy Lt. George Bush, sent them when he made his first parachute jump.

You really want to associate with this bastard?
Google Ted Sampley and George Bush. Investigate this scumbag before you swallow his smears of McCain.

funky chicken on February 9, 2008 at 5:08 PM

heh, I was just making fun of my typo LOL I’m plenty calm.

But the Ted Sampley fuckheads really piss me off. They dupe poor traumatized military families with gut-wrenching stories of guys who were “left behind” and betrayed by our government, and these families give them tons of money.

They are scum.

funky chicken on February 9, 2008 at 5:16 PM

Hollowpoint LOL er, yeah.

funky chicken on February 10, 2008 at 11:01 AM