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Let's Sell The Bones :
The Marketing of America's Missing In Action
by Sedgwick Tourison
Copyright © Sedgwick Tourison, 1996, Crofton, MD.
This document may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the author's written
permission.
Today, in 1996, some Americans believe deep down
in their hearts that American servicemen are being held captive by the Communist regimes
in Southeast Asia. However, most Americans seem to have come to accept that if any
American servicemen are still in Southeast Asia, they must be there of their own free
will.
The Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton
administrations each left their individual imprint on the search for our wartime
unaccounted-for comrades in arms, an effort that often led a skeptical American public to
ask pointed questions that evidenced the level of continuing lack of confidence in
Washington officialdom:
-Who was still alive in captivity after the end
of Operation Homecoming in April 1973 and what happened to all the missing servicemen?
-Did one or more administrations deliberately
abandon its servicemen to death in a Communist prison and who was responsible?
-How can this nation normalize relations with a
Communist country such as Viet Nam that has failed consistently to provide adequate
answers about the fate of America's unaccounted-for?
These questions, I might add, are the more
printable questions raised by critics of Washington's seemingly unproductive efforts that
cost millions of dollars per year and with little to show for the expense and effort but
almost unrecognizable bone fragments, most of which can not be correlated to a specific
missing American.
Why does this search go on? The answer is simply
that the POW/MIA issue has become part of our national psyche. How it became so ingrained
in our national psyche in ways not experienced in the aftermath of other wars is what I
want to share with you today.
In July 1991 I appeared on CNN's Newsmaker
Sunday. With me at CNN's Washington studio was former prisoner of war U.S. Navy Captain
Eugene "Red" McDaniel while the daughter of a missing airman participated
through a CNN link from California. The reason for the program was national interest in a
photograph of three Caucasians that Capt. McDaniel and others argued was compelling
evidence that Americans were still alive in captivity. The woman on the CNN link from
California believed that one of the three men in the photograph was her long missing
father. To compound the pain, several families each claimed one of the same men in the
photograph as their missing loved one.
I told the daughter quite matter of factly that I
could not sit there and tell her that her father was dead; I did not have the right to do
that. It was equally true that I saw no evidence that he was alive. We met in 1992 at the
annual convention of the National League of POW/MIA Families. The daughter asked me to
keep an open mind. I responded that the need for an open mind went both ways.
Subsequent to our meeting, certain facts emerged
about the photograph depicting three Caucasians. It was a photograph that had captured the
news media's attention for most of 1991 and well into 1992. The facts that emerged, and
received scant media notice, revealed that the photograph was apparently crafted, and
altered, from a nearly 60 year old Soviet magazine depicting three Russian bakers. By the
fall of 1992, the photograph, now dubbed by some "the three amigos," was not
newsworthy.
The families of those missing airmen, even if
they accepted that the photograph was a fraud, still pressed for answers. For some, the
answers have not yet arrived and the pain of not knowing the precise fate of their
unaccounted-for loved ones is as real today as it was nearly 30 years ago when the airmen
disappeared in separate incidents.
Here, today, I will not attempt to argue for, or
against, the position that every missing serviceman and civilian is dead. I will not argue
for, or against, the position that Americans remain in captivity in Southeast Asia, or in
some other corner of the world. Everyone who has dealt with the POW/MIA issue, and I have
dealt with it from one perspective or another for 35 years, comes to recognize that views
about continued life are often based on an underlying faith and belief that life
continues. It is a belief that is very personal and can not be proved or disproved, save
for the return alive of the missing serviceman or the recovery of sufficient human remains
to satisfy the family that the individual is indeed deceased. In all too many cases, there
are compelling reasons to believe that neither condition will be met.
Instead of addressing the seemingly unanswerable,
I want to place before you two conclusions based on some facts, some evidence, some
thoughts, and even some opinion, about the events of the 1980s that help explain why the
POW/MIA issue was revitalized:
First, officials at the National Security
Council, the National League of POW/MIA Families, and even the Defense Intelligence
Agency, deliberately manipulated POW/MIA intelligence and public awareness. The effect of
this manipulation was that Americans came to believe POW/MIA disinformation more than the
oftentimes elusive truth.
Second, officials of the Vietnamese and Lao
intelligence and security services, both military and nonmilitary, are the sources of most
POW/MIA disinformation that reached Washington throughout the 1980s. The affect of their
efforts was to create a mirage that reflected what the Southeast Asian Communist
governments wanted Americans to believe.
In order to appreciate the events that led to
this environment, I must turn back the clock 15 years, to the spring of 1981. It was at
that time that a series of near simultaneous events began a process that changed
dramatically American public perception about the fate of Americans who were
unaccounted-for. The change I refer to was a rapid swing from a position that everyone who
was unaccounted-for from the Viet Nam War was dead, to an opposite view that some
Americans remained alive and in captivity in one or more of the three countries of Viet
Nam, Laos and Cambodia.
First, a series of highly sensational stories in
Soldier of Fortune magazine described efforts to rescue Americans reportedly alive and
held captive inside Communist prisons within Laos. These articles, and stories through
other media outlets, hammered the notion that Americans remained alive and in captivity.
The effect of all this information was to plant and spread the seed of doubt about the
administration's claim that there was no evidence that wartime unaccounted-for Americans
remained alive in Southeast Asia. The seeds of doubt germinated and were broadcast around
the world. An increasing percentage of Americans came to believe that where there was
smoke there was fire, that the sheer volume of stories surfacing in the news media, even
if some were not true, just had to mean that someone had to be alive, somewhere. America's
wartime unaccounted-for became the stuff of movies, books and telemarketing to raise funds
ostensibly to support private POW recovery raids.
Next, the executive director of the National
League of POW/MIA Families secured a position on the administration's newly formed POW/MIA
policy formulation body, the Inter-Agency Group. This offered the National League a
vantage point from which to influence national POW/MIA policy formulation. This also
permitted a private nonprofit body with its own private agenda, an organization that had
been critical of, and excluded from, the previous administration, to gain direct and
frequent access to working level analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency. This
situation permitted the National League to have a direct influence on intelligence
collection and indirectly, intelligence analysis, as it related to national POW/MIA
intelligence.
With a National Security Council staff officer
demanding cooperation with the League and the Defense Intelligence Agency unwilling to
challenge external meddling, the focus of national POW/MIA intelligence efforts was almost
immediately transformed into a mechanism that supported the administration's domestic
political agenda at the expense of the need for accurate intelligence. It also transformed
DIA's intelligence data base into an archive of hostile-originated information our
national policy formulators were unwilling to accept and appreciate for what it was,
disinformation.
Bowing to external political pressure, the
Defense Department changed its operative assumption from a position that all unaccounted-
for Americans were dead to a position that someone, no one knew whom, might be alive
somewhere, but no one knew where.
At the same time, an inactive POW/MIA private
non-profit corporation in southern California was surreptitiously reactivated at the
private urging of the National Security Council staff member responsible for the POW/MIA
effort and two executives of the National League of Families. The private group agreed to
serve as a conduit for funds that were to support private remains recovery efforts.
Through this channel, administration political supporters agreed to contribute private
funds that would pay for skeletal remains of Americans recovered by self-proclaimed
anti-Communist resistance forces ostensibly operating inside the Lao People's Democratic
Republic. A subsequent investigation revealed that the funds went primarily to support
anti-Communist resistance groups in Thailand whose activities had little to nothing to do
with the POW/MIA issue. There was internal pressure to avoid trying to understand the
dynamics of the flow of information about the purported recovery of remains. Thus, it was
not until 1987 that the Defense Intelligence Agency was able to develop fairly hard
evidence that the money for bones effort was essentially the byproduct of a hostile
intelligence disinformation effort aimed at subverting the administration's POW/MIA
strategy, not enhancing it. As these events were taking place, reports about the reported
recovery in Viet Nam and Laos of skeletal remains of missing Americans, usually associated
with the rubbing of a dog tag supposedly recovered with the remains, emerged from the
shadows of insignificant intelligence reporting and experienced in 1981 a 20-fold meteoric
rise in the number of reports reaching Washington. This occurred as other categories of
raw intelligence reports, particularly live sighting reports, declined in volume and
currency. As DIA would later confirm, the reports DIA soon termed "dog tag
reports" had, by 1981, accounted for over half the raw POW/MIA information reaching
Washington.
Approximately 10 percent of the "dog
tag" reports claimed the recovery of skeletal remains of Americans who were still
unaccounted- for; the remainder related to Americans who had served in Southeast Asia and
had returned alive. Nevertheless, the "dog tag reports" both generated
tremendous anxiety among next of kin and helped support the charges of POW/MIA activists
who argued the administration was not doing enough to address the POW/MIA issue. Some
private groups urged, and claimed they were conducting, unconventional warfare to recover
live American POWs. As time went on, activists demanded the National League of Families
share power and access to administration officials and classified documents that were
accessed by the executive director of the National League of Families who, it was alleged,
failed to share her knowledge with the POW/MIA families.
By 1982, the American public was being deluged
with media reports charging the Defense Intelligence Agency had hard evidence of hundreds
of live sightings of "POWs". Activists pointed to the numbers of classified
intelligence reports cited in DIA's periodic reports to the Congress as evidence of the
sheer volume of live sighting reports of "POWs" that the administration was
trying to cover up. DIA did not rebut such criticism, even when it was inaccurate,
deliberately distorted or outright false. By 1984, a very small number of vocal Republican
members of Congress became the most publicly critical of DIA and the administration.
It is with this background that I want to turn to
the first of my two conclusions. The first conclusion is that officials at the National
Security Council, the National League of POW/MIA Families, and even officials of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, deliberately manipulated POW/MIA intelligence and public
awareness to the point that Americans came to believe that Communist POW/MIA
disinformation was both believable and more credible than reality.
Just what were the resources that Washington
applied fifteen years ago in what the administration termed this nations "number one
national priority?" In Asia, there were no more than three language qualified
interviewers. In Washington, as of December 1983, the Defense Intelligence Agency employed
no more than six full time intelligence analysts, each analyst responsible for over 150
unresolved cases and only three of them qualified in the languages of Southeast Asia. By
the fall of 1988, the agency had approximately 14 permanent analysts, each responsible for
well over the same approximate number of cases, half of them language qualified. Standing
intelligence priorities aside, the cases that were handled first were those that received
the attention of the White House. The overwhelming majority of these cases were bogus.
Let me cite several examples.
Beginning in 1980, a Eurasian who went by the
name of Johny King surfaced in South Viet Nam. To those who would listen, he claimed he
was an American pilot shot down over North Viet Nam, that he was not repatriated with
other POWs in 1973 and that he had now been released from prison to live in Viet Nam of
his own free will.
Johny King first appeared on the coast near Vung
Tau in 1979, then went to Ho Chi Minh City and eventually reached a semipermanent home in
the Mekong Delta. Many Vietnamese saw him and spoke with him as he carried his guitar from
place to place. To give credence to his claims, Johny even provided the name and address
of his parents. Of course, there was no missing American named Johny King, his parents
were bogus, and the address did not exist.
To make a long story short, Johny King was a
member of a hilltribe ethnic minority who had come to the attention of a very influential
American who headed an internationally-recognized private organization. His group received
strong administration backing, including financial support for his group's private
humanitarian Christian endeavors. As scores of reports flooded into DIA, it became
increasingly apparent that the private citizen had been targeted by Viet Nam to act as a
conduit for disinformation.
The private citizen to whom I refer needed merely
to ask that someone at the National Security Council staff look into a new hearsay report
about Johny King and everything in DIA's POW/MIA office almost came to a grinding halt.
Within several years, reports about Johny King filled an entire safe drawer. There were
compelling reasons to believe that Johny King was not a POW and the entire affair was
either concocted or fed by Viet Nam's state security professionals.
Approximately nine years after the stories first
surfaced, Johny King conveniently left Viet Nam as a boat escapee, admitting after he
arrived safely in an Asian refugee camp that he was not an American POW. Who had
encouraged him to concoct the lies? DIA POW/MIA management avoided trying to write a
bottom line to the story.
In another case, an American woman of Vietnamese
origin working with the National League of Families arranged access to a number of
Vietnamese refugees who offered report after report of live American prisoners in Viet Nam
and Laos. Once again, DIA's POW/MIA office was nearly immobilized by the continued influx
of her associates with sensational reports.
The League benefitted from its arrangement with
their new found supporter because their supporter arranged for a newspaper publisher
friend to publish for the League free advertisements in his magazine asking for POW/MIA
information, a magazine devoted primarily to the publisher's strident publicity for
anti-Communist activities against Viet Nam's government. By 1984 the woman had introduced
a core group of refugees whose reports nearly immobilized DIA's intelligence efforts by
diverting scant intelligence resources into time-consuming and totally unproductive
avenues of inquiry.
One DIA senior POW/MIA analyst had reason to
suspect that the stories were crafted either by Viet Nam's Interior Ministry or by a group
of Vietnamese claiming to represent a self-claimed anti-Communist resistance group. The
woman's efforts eventually led to attacks against the analyst when he began to sound the
alarm that the woman's sources were engaged in disinformation. The analyst was attacked by
activists, isolated by DIA's own POW/MIA senior management, his work was ignored or
discredited, and by 1987 he had been driven out of the DIA's POW/MIA office.
In December 1984, Viet Nam's public trial of a
number of members of the self-styled resistance group, allied with the League's former
supporter and newspaper publisher friend, confirmed that the organization had been
penetrated years earlier by Viet Nam's Interior Ministry. This raised the likelihood that
the so-called resistance group was controlled by, or at a minimum influenced by, Viet
Nam's foreign intelligence service. In the fall of 1992, DIA reported to the Senate Select
Committee on POW/MIA Affairs that the woman and her newspaper publisher colleague in
California were apparently responsible for more demonstrably fabricated reports than any
other reporting individuals.
As DIA developed indirect evidence of hostile
manipulation of the POW/MIA issue, critics responded with one recurring question: If there
were no live POWs, what did Viet Nam and Laos stand to gain by disseminating false
information?
In the mid-1980s, I drafted a report of an
interview of a South Vietnamese former lieutenant colonel, one of many of our wartime
allies who offered significant details about Viet Nam's prison system. His remarks
included his views on why Viet Nam might be behind such disinformation. The deputy
director of DIA's POW/MIA office struck the information from my report, citing the NSC
staff officer as insisting that no such speculation be contained in DIA's reports. That
embargo had been in place prior to my joining DIA's Special Office for POW/MIA Affairs in
December 1983 and continued through the end of my service in DIA on September 15, 1988.
As live sightings received in 1984 dwindled to a
measurably predictable handful, overzealous information collectors began forwarding
reports about American looking individuals wandering about Viet Nam, not imprisoned, and
with little to no evidence that they might be an American. Although this information added
to DIA's POW/MIA data base, it is a fair judgement that analyzing this category of
information occupied 20 percent of analyst time and available manpower. When grouped with
chasing ghosts, even having to analyze one report about American POWs in a flying saucer,
DIA stopped producing POW/MIA intelligence and became a convenient lighting rod for
administration critics, further denigrating the agency's POW/MIA intelligence
responsibilities.
In point of fact, the much ballyhooed live
sightings that some portrayed as sightings of American POWs almost never related to an
American prisoner. Nearly all related to one of the following: sightings of an American
collaborator, Robert Garwood; American civilians stranded in Viet Nam on or after April
30, 1975; American boaters arrested during or after 1977 for violating Viet Nam's
territorial boundaries, of whom several were drug dealers; Europeans; Amerasians;
Eurasians; and several Asians who did not seem to look Asian and therefore had to be
American.
For example, a hapless Chinese named Hsu Hsu Bin
was imprisoned for perhaps two years in one of southern Viet Nam's coastal prisons. He was
very fair skinned and, based solely on the lightness of his skin, some Vietnamese at or
near the prison thought that Hsu Hsu Bin could be an American. It took nearly five years
of patient investigation to confirm his identity. Hsu Hsu Bin was not an American and
never claimed to be an American. But, cases similar to that of Hsu Hsu Bin were an
important percentage of POW/MIA reports reaching DIA, each of which had to be analyzed and
the individual identified by name. Reports in this vein were correlated to Eurasian
pedicab drivers in Ho Chi Minh, Eurasian bus and logging truck drivers in Dong Nai
Province, Amerasians at labor camps in Song Be Province, Afroasian residents of northern
Viet Nam, just to mention a few.
The reason for such reports having led to
confusion and misrepresentation by those attacking the administration can be traced to the
way in which DIA defined the reports it received. For example, DIA categorized firsthand
or hearsay sighting reports as sightings of Americans. This category included wartime
sightings, often reports about bonafide accounted-for prisoners, and postwar sightings,
routinely individuals who were not Americans unaccounted-for at the end of the war. A
small number of activists deliberately misrepresented the context of these reports,
claiming the postwar sightings were of unaccounted-for POWs. DIA was too fearful to change
this internal reports categorization, lest its action be portrayed in the press and on
Capitol Hill as a cover-up.
DIA largely remained silent throughout most of
the 1980s as criticism mounted and political critics gained media attention with each new
story. Thus, DIA's silence and internal politicking were partially responsible for many
Americans concluding that where there was smoke, there had to be fire.
My second conclusion was that officials of the
Vietnamese and Lao intelligence and security services, both military and nonmilitary, were
responsible for most POW/MIA information that reached Washington throughout the 1980s.
This conclusion is based on the fact that between 1982 and 1987, "dog tag
reports" totalled nearly 70 percent of all raw POW/MIA information reaching
Washington. Allied with these "dog tag reports" were spinoff stories about a
blind American living in the South Vietnamese Central Highlands, Americans serving with
one or more so-called antiCommunist resistance groups in Viet Nam, and groups of so-called
deserters in a colony at one location or another. By 1987, some citizens in Viet Nam
claimed having custody of over 100 sets of skeletal remains of unaccounted-for servicemen.
In one gruesome incident, a member of Congress from California received small plastic bags
of powdery material said to have been ground bone fragments. Anecdotal evidence indicated
a sizeable number of citizens of Viet Nam were purchasing such bone fragments in the
mistaken belief that their chances for emigration would be helped if they recovered and
turned over the remains of unaccounted-for Americans. Other anecdotal evidence suggested
that overseas Vietnamese were being pressured by relatives in Viet Nam to provide the
money to purchase these bone fragments. The principal targets of this extortion were
Vietnamese applying to depart Viet Nam through the Orderly Departure Program.
News media accounts of the dog tag phenomenon and
alleged market in skeletal remains, soon led many private citizens to become involved in
bartering for human remains to the point that the selling of bones became both an epidemic
and no longer under the tight control of the central governments.
An unexpected telephone call to the Defense
Intelligence Agency in December 1986 led to a Vietnamese couple who had just immigrated
from Vietnam under the ODP program. The couple claimed to have been involved with
individuals ostensibly associated with Viet Nam's Interior Ministry office for southern
Viet Nam, an office called MOI B, located in Ho Chi Minh City. One of MOI B's endeavors,
they claimed, was manipulating ODP beneficiaries to be receptive to receiving and
transmitting dog tag information. In the early spring of 1987, the couple's information
was collated with other information at DIA and analysts were able to link 15 percent of
the over 1,000 dog tag reports from across the length of South Viet Nam to a common point
of origin. DIA then suspended any further investigation into the phenomenon because of a
lack of resources.
DIA's intelligence efforts challenged the
National Security Council and National League of Families direct support for a position
put forth by Viet Nam's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nguyen Co Thach. Foreign Minister
Thach argued that Viet Nam was unable to account for many missing Americans because their
skeletal remains were being salvaged by southern Vietnamese outside Viet Nam's central
government control. Viet Nam had been dragging its feet in responding to U.S. efforts to
recover the remains of Americans who were believed to be deceased and Thach's argument was
a tactical position that permitted Viet Nam to continue this foot dragging.
The couple interviewed beginning in 1987,
together with other refugees, provided detailed and highly credible information that the
dog tag reporting phenomenon was part of a multilevel disinformation effort. DIA's
persuasive evidence failed to sway the NSC staff officer who kept insisting that the dog
tag reports were merely an effort by southern Vietnamese civilians who were able to thwart
Vietnamese efforts to cooperate.
With an understanding about the mechanics of the
dog tag reporting, other refugees described similar POW/MIA disinformation conducted by
the Lao state security apparatus that fed bogus POW/MIA information to targeted
antigovernment resistance groups in Thailand. The Lao objective was to induce such groups
to recruit followers to be sent across the Mekong River into Laos where they would walk
into an ambush and be captured or killed. Intelligence analysts later concluded this same
practice had been employed by Viet Nam. It was evident that both Laos and Viet Nam had
been responsible for helping to create many antigovernment dissident groups through
"sting" operations. These operations manufactured mythical threats to the State
and Communist party that the state security professionals easily neutralized, using the
threats that the Interior Ministry forces had created to justify the need for heightened
vigilance against external antigovernment forces that Viet Nam and Lao state security
professionals had themselves created.
The combination of these two factors, meddling
and foreign disinformation, were key factors that inhibited Washington's ability to come
to grips with the Southeast Asian dynamics of the POW/MIA issue. Even when DIA's inspector
general staff noted the adverse impact of the meddling, DIA's officials refused to act and
correct the adverse impact on POW/MIA intelligence. Anecdotal evidence suggests the flood
of disinformation continues to this very day. The disinformation and external meddling
never rated a public hearing by the Senate Select Committee.
At the first public hearing conducted by the
Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, the Select Committee Chair, Senator John
Kerry, voiced his opinion that when the Select Committee's work was completed, Americans
would have to decide for themselves if Americans remained alive in captivity in Southeast
Asia.
In the fall of 1992, I completed for Senator John
Kerry an extensive analysis of hundreds of cases of unaccounted for Americans, missing
servicemen who offered the best potential for survival, cases that Senator Kerry wanted to
present to Viet Nam and press for an accounting. My inquiry was not limited to the
government's priority cases. Instead, I was asked to take my own look. In the analysis I
prepared for Senator Kerry, I noted that those cases that appeared to represent the
greatest possibility for life in terms of our knowledge in 1973, represented individuals
who we now have a strong basis for believing had died long before 1973. Senator Kerry
returned from his trip to Viet Nam in the fall of 1992. I was to meet with him and turn in
my completed study, placing at the top those cases that offered the best of the best
possibilities for survival. Soon after his return the senator called me to meet with him.
"Wait a minute, Wick," he began.
"I want to see the best cases, the very best ones." Clearly, he was agitated.
"That's what you're looking at,
Senator," I replied.
"But these guys are all dead! You don't
understand, Wick, I want to see the ones about the guys that might be still alive."
"Senator, these are the best."
Senator John Kerry just sat there and stared at
the cases I had provided, finally shaking his head.
"Thank you," he said. Our meeting was
over.
As Senator Kerry noted at that first public
hearing, each American may have to decide the truth or fiction of the notion that some
Americans may still be alive. Although the hew and cry of live POWs has largely
disappeared from the media, there are those who still hold fast to the belief that at
least one prisoner remains alive in captivity, somewhere.
At the start of 1992, several foreign service
officers from the Department of State visited with the staff of the Senate Select
Committee. The purpose of their visit was, in part, to see what they could do to help
answer any questions. My own question was roughly as follows:
United States normalization policy vis-a-vis Viet
Nam is based on a road map designed by Washington. Most of that road map has appeared in
the press. My question is quite simple:
What is Viet Nam's road map?
My question was not answered.
The POW/MIA issue has always been a part of
United States strategy in dealing with Viet Nam, just as the POW/MIA issue has always been
part of Viet Nam's strategy in dealing with the United States in the post-war era.
However, the adoption in the 1980s by the National Security Council staff of the notion
that the POW/MIA issue was an issue to be negotiated separately from other foreign policy
issues, was bad strategy and bad policy. This flaw permitted the exploitation of the grief
of the families of our unaccounted-for servicemen, thus making a mockery of the claim by
both sides that resolving the fate of the unaccounted-for was truly a humanitarian
endeavor.
Having lost the moral high ground, Washington
slumped into a defensive mode through most of the decade of the 1980s, unable to counter
effectively the disinformation crafted by Southeast Asian Communist intelligence services
on the one hand, and on the other, the bone merchants and exploiters who sought to profit
from the selling of human remains.
If there was a fundamental failure on the U.S.
side, it was in failing to address adequately Viet Nam's plans and intentions. From that
blindness, we adopted a flawed POW/MIA policy at the start of the 1980s that replicated
the fundamental ignorance that led to the Viet Nam War of two decades earlier.
There simply must be a better way to do things. I
challenge those of you who are here today to find that way.
Thank you.
Copyright
© Sedgwick Tourison, 1996, Crofton, MD.
This
document may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the author's written
permission.
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