American Died in Chinese Custody

This is a quick diary that I posted at Vote Vets, and it speaks to an issue which many people raised all kinds of hell about in the 1980s and early 1990s--and nowadays you don't hear about it all that much.

The Korean War was the forgotten war in more ways than one.

Another damned good reason not to trust the people in power to do what's right. And why the hell didn't the DoD say or do anythign in 2003 when they first received this notification from the Chinese?

After decades of denials, the Chinese have acknowledged burying an American prisoner of war in China, telling the U.S. that a teenage soldier captured in the Korean War died a week after he "became mentally ill," according to documents provided to The Associated Press.

China had long insisted that all POW questions were answered at the conclusion of the war in 1953 and that no Americans were moved to Chinese territory from North Korea. The little-known case of Army Sgt. Richard G. Desautels opens another chapter in this story and raises the possibility that new details concerning the fate of other POWs may eventually surface.

Chinese authorities gave Pentagon officials intriguing new details about Desautels in a March 2003 meeting in Beijing, saying they had found "a complete record of 9-10 pages" in classified archives.

Until now, this new information had been kept quiet; a Pentagon spokesman said it was intended only for Desautels family members. The details were provided to Desautels' brother, Rolland, who passed them to a POW-MIA advocacy group, the National Alliance of Families...

How many more? Will we ever know? And who in their right mind would trust our government to tell us the truth after this incident?

-WS