Shredding Documents
Summary. The MIA "activist" cult has a truckload of
wacky stories that they tell and retell. The problem is that people who hear only
those stories and nothing else, tend to believe this crap. One of their wacko
stories concerns the first commander of the Joint Task Force -- Full Accounting, General
Tom Needham, and a claim that he shredded valuable MIA documents in the US Embassy in
Bangkok. The story misrepresents and blows out of proportion an actual
incident.
Background
JCRC
In 1992, the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC) was absorbed by the Joint Task
Force -- Full Accounting (JTF-FA).
JCRC was the successor to the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, formed in Vietnam during
the war. JCRC was headquartered in Hawaii and had an operational element in Bangkok.
The JCRC covered the refugee camps, interviewed refugees and legal travelers,
conducted negotiations with the Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodians, and carried out
repatriations of remains. JCRC wrote up reports of all their activities and sent
these reports back to their HQ in Hawaii and to DIA; these looked for all the world
like intell information reports but, because JCRC was a humanitarian agency, we called
them simply "reports." Thus, every report that JCRC made was in their
files in Bangkok with duplicates in Hawaii and at DIA.
Joint Task Force -- Full Accounting (JTF-FA)
In the late 1980s, it became clear that we would soon have people stationed in Hanoi
and that we would need a unit capable of staying in the field in Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia to search for crash and grave sites and to conduct excavations, under the
supervision of CILHI
scientists. Thus was formed the Joint Task Force -- Full Accounting (JTF-FA),
commanded by a US Army brigadier, headquartered in Hawaii, with operational elements in
Hanoi, Vientiane, and Phnom Phen. Essentially, the JTF-FA absorbed the JCRC and
added a lot of people.
The JCRC office in Bangkok -- now the JTF-FA office -- was located in the US Embassy.
As the US presence in Thailand grew, demands for space in the Embassy grew.
General Tom Needham, first commander of JTF-FA, consulted with the ambassador, looked at
what JTF-FA would be doing, and decided to move the JTF-FA analytic files and analysts
from Bangkok to Hawaii to free up space in the embassy.
The JCRC/JTF-FA Files in Bangkok
Over the years the JCRC had produced lots of files and the question was how much of
this stuff should be moved back to Hawaii.
JCRC personnel conducted an inventory of everything in their files in Bangkok.
This inventory was sent to Hawaii and to DIA where inventories were conducted. We
determined that almost every document that was in Bangkok also had copies in DIA and in
Hawaii. There were a few files that were unique but not many. Needham told the
folks in Bangkok to destroy the duplicate files, send the files that were not duplicates
to Hawaii and to DIA, and keep only the bare minimum of files in Bangkok.
It was this action that has generated a lot of phony stories. Bill Bell started this
whole nonsense. Bell was upset that he was being shunted aside -- which was
happening because he insisted on communicating back channel with his friends in the
activist world. Bell claimed that there were many documents with irreplaceable notes
written in the margins. What he did not tell anyone was that Needham told the troops
doing the shredding to look at each document and, if any document had notes written on it,
to save that document and ship it back to Hawaii, with copies to DIA. Bell has also
manufactured several other parts of this story, none of which are true but all of which
show up in the "activist" claims.
The Wacky Story
The MIA cult makes a number of absolutely loony claims, including:
- A claim that Needham ordered the JCRC/JTF-FA guys to start shredding documents and that
some of them refused only to have him threaten them with court-martial.
- A claim that Needham was not happy with the slow shredding so he jumped in himself and
started shoving documents into the shredder.
- A claim that the Ambassador came down and ordered Needham to stop shredding and
that Needham pulled a pistol on him and continued to shred.
- A claim that Needham burned up the Embassy shredder and sent for a bigger one.
Overall, they claim that Needham destroyed irreplaceable documents that prove the
presence of US POWs. Bullshit. The only documents that were shredded were
documents that were known to be duplicated in Hawaii and in DIA.
To this day, Bell and the MIA cult tell this story for the truth and unsuspecting people
fall for it -- even the part about pulling a pistol on the Ambassador -- it's all crap.
|