GreasyOnline.com - Senator John Kerry left false and grossly misleading statements

Danny "Greasy" Belcher, Executive Director
Task Force Omega of KY Inc.
Vietnam Infantry Sgt. 68-69
"D" Troop 7th Sqdn. 1st Air Cav

I still have people ask if any American POWs were left in SE Asia after the Vietnam War. The following may shed light on why there is even that question asked.

The following is from a document I came across recently. It is copied as written. While I sat in some of the Senate Select Committee hearings on POW/MIAs, I saw Sen. John Kerry and Sen. John McCain and many others on the committee try to close the live POW issue with lies and without looking at all of the files. Sen. Bob Smith and Sen. Charles Grassley were the only ones who seemed to care about the truth regardless of how bad it was or who was guilty in the records. One hero, Sen. Bob Smith was the only one at times in the SSC as people testified about their knowledge of POW/MIAs. Read the sworn statement below and you decide why there was such an effort to close the POW/MIA issue.

EDWIN D. PHILLIPS
347 Hickory Lane
Painesville, Ohio 34077
216-357-0125

December 6, 1992

SENATOR JOHN KERRY Chairman Senate Select Committee on POW and MIA Affairs
705 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington D.C. 20510

SENATOR ROBERT SMITH Vice-Chairman
Senate Select Committee on POW and MIA Affairs
Washington D.C. 20510

SENATORS OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE:

I have seen the comments of the Chairman John Kerry of the Committee in nationally broadcast hearings of December 3rd, 1992 in response to SSC witness David Morrissey regarding a witness the SSC deposed on June 26th, 1992, Barry A. Toll. Senator Kerry first made false assertions about Mr. Toll, then was forced to retract them 15 minutes later.

However, Senator Kerry left false and grossly misleading statements on the record of your Hearings concerning Mr. Toll, notwithstanding his later retraction. Specifically, Senator Kerry stated (from a verbatim transcript of that hearing “…Staff has just informed me that all the people he mentioned would back him, have been contacted and none of them have backed him up.”, and a moment later again, “…but Staff has followed up on the people that he recommended and none of them apparently has panned out.”

Senators, this is a flat out lie, or at best, gross negligence and perversion of the record of your Hearings because I am one of the persons on Mr. Toll’s “recommended” or “mentioned would back him up” lists, which he provided me back in July, and neither any of you, or an representative of your Committee has remotely attempted to contact me. I am also familiar with another dozen or so persons on that list personally, and many others I have knowledge of through the years. To my knowledge NONE of them has been contacted by your Committee.

Coupled with Sen. Kerry’s false statements regarding “criminal charges pending” and the manner in which this direct avoidance of Witness Morrissey’s questions were conveyed, and the less than fair retraction later, I am given pause as to exactly what sort of “Investigation” is being run by the SSC.

I am the elected President of a 3700 member group of Communications’ Workers of America (Local 4340, Cleveland, Ohio) and am Barry Toll’s brother. I not only have had direct knowledge of Barry’s testification before your Committee as far back as 1973 at the CINCLANT ABNCP assignment, but direct knowledge of related events sworn to under oath by Affiant J. Lawrence Wright, in his letters and deposed Statement to your Committee which you have had since o/a August 20, 1992.

In August 1973 in Florida, and again both on Langley AFB, Virginia and at his home nearby for four days in November, 1973, Barry Toll told me and several others, in great detail of the messages, analyses he has testified to in front of your Committee. In fact, over the years since then, I have been present on well over 50 occasions when he has subsequently told dozens of persons of what he saw and how he reacted to what he saw in the those years 1973 through 1975 in regard to American POWs and MIAs believed held in Laos after the war and the believed transfer of some of those men to the USSR.

His statements on these matters have never changed an iota or on one detail since he told me and others of the issue since 1973, and as the message traffic flowed up into 1974. Further, I am aware of some of them high officers of the Justice Department, and a number of federal employees. I see them listed on his “mentioned” list provided to your Committee and fully recognize the names, some of whom I’ve met myself, and many I’ve met or been witness to Barry telling as the years went on. There simply is no doubt that his statements regarding these highly classified matters have been totally and thoroughly consistent all these years right up to his testimony under oath to your SSC. That is why Senator Kerry must correct the perverted record of your hearing, and in my mind, issue an appropriate public retraction, or your record’s integrity is simply not true, Senators.

I know personally as I was intimately involved, that Barry left the Army, after a brilliant, numerously valor decorated 8 years of Army service because of his knowledge of the abandonment of POWs and MIAs believed held in Laos after Operation Homecoming. Further, the fact that the intelligence community believed men were being transferred to the USSR, and nothing was said or firm action taken by the highest government officials whom he said the messages went to, infuriated, devastated and so demoralized him that as Committee Exhibit No. 7 of his deposition clearly shows, he would break down and become tearful over the subject when describing what he saw.

Our entire family has known of every bit of this hidden history for over 19 years Senators, and quite a few others from wide and disparate places he has told of the dark days in his duties. For instance, former Army Captain J. Lawrence Wright has told your Committee in a sworn Affidavit of Barry’s and his own dealings with the Intelligence community, whom usually represented themselves as the DIA, although Barry has misgivings about their actual body of assignment. The occasion the Wright describes in August, 1975 where Barry is furious at a team of agents surveilling and surrounding him in an airport, is one I was physically present at, along with our uncle, then Deputy Chief of Police Charles A. Andonian of University Heights, Ohio.

What Captain Wright describes is accurate. Barry clearly exposed to us that day in 1975 what was literally a team of over one dozen agents that had been tracking his movement from Newport, News Virginian, through Baltimore, to Cleveland, Ohio where he was attending a family reunion and our sister’s birthday. The day was August, 8th 1975. As Wright says, Barry deliberately went into a phone as I stood a few feet away in the airport he’d arrived in with agents swarming around him, following him every step, even into the bathrooms. Telling me and Mr. Andonian to watch and “I am sick and tired of these DIA assholes…I am going to be rid of them or go to the press.”, he purposefully chose a booth with two vacant booths on either side of it. He called Mr. Wright, his military attorney, while two of the agents in the group he had pointed out to us standing all around the area, quickly clambered into the open booths beside him.

In a loud voice, as Wright has told you in his letters and Affidavit, Barry said “I am sick and tired of them following me…I cannot even go visit my family….I want you to call the DIA people we’ve been dealing with Larry and tell them that if these agents aren’t pulled off their surveillance of me in 10 minutes….10 minutes…I am going to call Jack Anderson and take what I know to the media. “I know from personal knowledge that what Barry was referring to in “what I know” is that which he clearly refers to in his unclassified Statement of 4 July 75, which is Committee Exhibit No. 6, wherein on page 3 he clearly and unequivocally states under oath of sworn statement that Mr. Wright was well familiar with “My attitude is not directed at the Army. It is predicated on assumptions, knowledge, and information that I alone have experienced, perceived and conceived. No one, no matter what rank or status position, can judge my beliefs. YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION UPON WHICH MY DECISIONS AND ATTITUDES ARE BASED. FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS I HAVE BEEN, SUFFICE SAY, HIGHLY INFORMED. What happens to that information once it is in an individual’s mind is totally that individual’s. It would not only be SUPERFLOUS TO ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN, IT WOULD BE CRIMINAL, AND SUBJECT ME TO PROSECUTION. I CANNOT AND WILL NOT EXPLAIN MYSELF TO ANYONE. I HAVE NO DESIRE TO INFLUENCE ANY OTHER PERSON ABOUT SUCH BELIEFS OR ATTITUDES.” (emphasis added). I know Lawyer Wright made him add the last sentence of that paragraph to satisfy the Army, and that Barry argued about its inclusion in his otherwise original Statement. This is described in the deposition on Page 75, Lines 10 thru 25, regarding Affiant Wright and Page 149 Line 1 onward regarding my presence at this scene.

I would state to you that within 10 minutes of that call to Mr. Wright, and the agents in the booths next to him having heard it and their hurried retreat from the booths a very clear event occurred. While continuing to follow us across the airport terminal, and then the long walk across the airport parking lot, suddenly, walkie-talkie radios the agents were conspicuously carrying for their bulk starting going off all over the surrounding area in the parking lot. The unusual squelch-breaking and raspy radio sounds farily peppered the surrounding envirionment on all sides of us and the words were clear to us from a dozen locations “Back off!…Back off!!”. And they did, the entire team, quite conspicuously, beat a hasty retreat immediately, even joining up as they retreated and abandoning any pretense of covertness.

I have talked to six people spread around the country in the last few days who are on the “list” Mr. Erickson of your counsel asked Barry to provide under oath of his deposition (pg 74, lines 11-15, Toll Deposition). NONE of them has been contacted by your Committee, further putting the lie to Senator Kerry’s assertions of December 3rd, 1992 in open public hearing. Barry discusses in the deposition at Pages 72 through 75 dozens of people he told of these things, under probing questioning of your Counsel. I have seen the lists he provided later and there are over 20 persons he forwarded to your Committee in accordance with that testimony referenced to fulfill his oath to do so with Mr. Erickson.

Then in 1987 Barry was debriefed again by federal intelligence agencies regarding Special Prosecutor McDonnell’s investigation of John Walker, He told the agent then, in front of two witnesses from our family of the POW and MIA messages. This is detailed in his deposition and on Page 145 Lines 24 and 25 and from the top of page 146 he talks of the tape recording he made of that debriefing. I have heard that tape and he clearly tells them again of the POW and MIA abandonment and transfers in response to a question probing why he decided to abandon such a top-flight career so suddenly and so emotionally as detailed in Exhibit 6 and 7 before your Committee, in 1975.

Senator Kerry’s statement cannot stand, Gentlemen. It is false. I am proof of that and so are others I understand are providing sworn Statements to your Committee. I am providing this Statement to you for the purpose of correcting that erroneous and false record of 3 December. I will be looking in your report and the Hearing record for this Statement and the Statement of others not contacted either, but listed by Barry as he promised, and provided you. You may be surprised to hear this Senators, but several other Senators and Congressmen have the documents that are now Committee Exhibits to Barry’s deposition, as far back as 1980. As Legislative Liason for my union, I often have come meet with such officials in Washington and elsewhere and several have known of Barry’s unusual departure from the service and been interested in matters pertaining to him as a result of it being brought to their attention by me, and others on my behalf. I shall expect to see this Statement of mine in the record, and I know Barry intends and has my permission to append it to his response For the Record under the Rules of your committee to respond to negative or derogatory information raised about him or his testimonies. I, for one, intend to do my utmost that this falsity of December 3rd, is corrected and will seek to bring it to others in Congress attention if is not.

You simply cannot (illegible in original document) the consistency of Barry’s statements on the matter under the rug. It is a long and thoroughly consistent history. I am part of it, and I know many others that are part of it, since 1973 as it happened, and onward.

I certainly understand that prior consistent statements are not proof of what Barry says he saw in those messages and analyses. But the facts are Senators, that in light of your own Exhibits on the record of his deposition from 1975, the many people who he’s told since then, that you must show that he made the whole thing up in 1973 to impeach my bother’s testimony and that is the reality. Smears and lack of disclosure to the public might buy you time, but the reality is what I just stated. Since I understand the Executive won’t give you the extensive files that must exist from the surveillance Mr. Wright and I and others were direct witnesses to in 1975 and 1976 in Florida, we can assume they are hiding something. Since I was seeing Barry frequently during that debriefing period, I know he told the Agents sent to debrief him.

As he has told you from the very beginning, and all of us I have seen him speak of this to for years, until the CIA and NSC archives are subpoenaed and the specious claims of Executive Privilege for a 20 year old corrupt administration brought to the light of day to the American People, you will not have gotten to the bottom of this issue or been able to refute Barry’s testimony.

In Closing, should Senator Kerry not correct his smear and false statements on Barry of December 3rd, I am certain that many of us who know, and the thousands who have seen and read his deposition, exhibits, and numerous Statements and addendum’s to the Committee, can have no faith in your Investigation’s report.

I am a veteran of the U.S. Navy, four years service, Honorably Discharges, where I served in classified duties as a Naval Aviation crew-member on aircraft linking the Distant Early Warning network across the Pacific.

Please forgive any small errors remaining herein. I am providing this Statement under a limiting time constraint to your Committee and to Barry in Florida under the pressure of what he believes is December 10th deadline.

Respectfully,

SIGNED BY EDWIN D. PHILLIPS

WITNESS BY (ILLEGIBLE SIGNATURE)

SUBSCRIBED TO AND SWORN BEFORE ME, THE 7TH DAY OF DECEMBER, 1992

SIGNED:

MARVIN SORIN; EXQ
NOTARY PUBLIC
County of Cuyahoga
State of Ohio
COMMISION EXPIRES: No Expiration Date

Special thanks to Suzie Stewart to typing from a copy of the original sworn statement.