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Originally Posted by estranged4life
did she go into detail how when she was visiting that artillery unit she was showed US soldiers who were POW's, These POW's saw her as a God-send and gave her small pieces of paper with messages to give to the US military officials and/or family members stating their location/well being and that they were being extremely mistreated...Yet instead of helping some of these POW's by showing sympathy and passing on the messages she in turn gave the small pieces of paper to the their captors, Who in turn tortured the POW's after her visit ended...Did she mention anything aboout why she did this to those POW's? I would like to know her explanation for that...As would alot of the Vietnam Vets who have hatred towards her.
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Actually that isn't true. There is one former POW by the name of Lieutenant Commander David Hoffman who was among the POW's that Jane met when she was in Hanoi who went on national television saying that his meeting with Jane and subsequent meeting with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark had caused him to be tortured.
In 1973, Hoffman appeared six times at meetings with antiwar visitors, more than almost any other POW. Film footage taken by U.S. delegations at several of these shows Hoffman appearing helathy and unusually verbal in his opposition to the war. He also signed antiwar statements. He has never claimed he was tortured to attend those other meetings or to sign those statements. But the visits with Ramsey Clark and with Jane were widely publicized and according to Jand "I suppose he needed the allegation of torture to explain his attendance at them. Perhaps more important, the government needed a way to amlign Ramsey Clark and me."*(A handwritten note from President Nixon to H.R. Haldeman syas that the POW's need to have the worst quotes of R. Clark and Fonda to use in their TV appearances but this information shouldn't come form the White House).
According to books written by some POW's, conditions in the camps improved in the four years preceding their release-that is from 1969 until 1973. They describe how the food got better, how they were given roomates and allowed time in the game room, how there was volleyball, Ping-Pon and exercise. This explains why, upon their release, Newsweek magazine wrote"The [torture] stories seemed incongruent with the men telling them-a tim, trig lot who, given a few pounds more flesh, might have stepped right out of a recruiting poster."
Leietenant Colonel (ret.) Edison Miller, who was also among the POW's Jane met in Hanoi, was in the same camp in Hoffman. He says that about 80-100 POW's were being held there.
"The visits with delegations were strictly volunteer" Miller told Fonda recently. "I only know of two or three guys out of one hundred who didn't want to meet with you. At the least, it was a way to break up the boredom of the day." Hoffman's co-pilot and prison roomate, Norris Charles, agrees that there were more than enough POW's in the compound who wanted to meet with Jane and with Clark, and that he never saw or heard any torture in his camp. Navy Commander Walter Wilbur, who was also in the Zoo, has said the same thing. In the spring of 1973, before Hoffman made his claims of torture, Commander Wilbur was released and told the LA Times about Jane's visit with the POW's saying "She could see that we were healthy and had not been tortured."
Hoffman's roommate said there was no torture; according to the POW's thenselves, torture stopped in 1969.
Not that any torture is justified or that anyone who had been tortured should have been prevented from telling about it. But the White House presented a distorted picture of what actually occured.
Fonda: "In my anger at how the entire POW situation was being manipulated and how they were treated as opposed to the ground troops, I made a mistake I deeply regret. I said that the POW's claiming torture were, liars, hypocrites, and pawns. I said "I'm quite sure that there were incidents of torture...But the pilots who are saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that's a lie."
"I frimly believe that the POW's I met with had not been tortured. But what I didn't know at the time was that prior to 1969 there had in fact been systematic torture of POW's. I found it difficult to believe, based on the Vietnamese I met during my visit, that torture would be approved-any more than I could have believed prior to the Winter Soldier Investigation or the Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prison scandals, that GI's could commit atrocities. I was wrong and I am sorry."
"My heart had always been with the soldiers, and I should have been clear that my anger was at the Nixon administration. It was the administration, in its cynical determination to keep hostilites alive, that tried to use the POW's. It was the deceitful blaming of me for torture, together with the Nixon administrations's manipulation of the entire POW story and my unfortunate reaction to it, that was responsible for a dramatic upsurge of attacks against me. These, as well as a wave of inflammatory stories about my trip to Hanoi, are what launched the myth of "Hanoi Jane."
"I became a lightening rod. People who defended the war saw me as antisoldier-something I am not and never have been, as I believe this book shows. Even though the attack on me were base on lies, my heart ached from them, because I never blamed the soldeirs for the war or any atrocities that were committed."
"The attacks didn't let up. By the end of the nineties, truly grotesque lies were again circulated about me over the internet (and continue as of this writing), although even former POW Captain Mike McGrath (USN ret.) president of Nam-POW, says that the story circulated on the internet is a hoax."
Source: Jane Fonda
My Life So Far pages 326, 327 & 328.
I am typing these pages by hand and will add more later. I am going to bed now. :)
