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Everyone should read Schanberg’s investigative report on McCain, which you link in your comment. Another excerpt from that report which is worth quoting:

“The Washington press corps had gone openly soft once before on the prisoner issue, again benefiting McCain. That was in 1991-93, during the proceedings of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. McCain starred on that committee, working hand in hand with his new ally, Sen. John Kerry, the panel’s co-chairman, to play down voluminous evidence that sizeable numbers of men were still held alive after the prisoner return in 1973. One example: At the time of the committee’s hearings, the Pentagon had received more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand reports. The intelligence officers who gathered these reports from refugees and other informants in the field described a large number of them as “credible” and so marked the reports. Some of the informants had been given lie-detector tests and passed.

But the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, after reviewing all the reports, concluded that they “do not constitute evidence” that men were still alive at the time.

McCain and Kerry endorsed the Pentagon’s findings. They also treated both the Pentagon and the CIA more as the committee’s partners than as objects of its inquiry. As one committee staff investigator said, in a memo preserved from the period: “Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating.”

McCain stood out because he always showed up for the committee hearings where witnesses were going to talk about specific pieces of evidence. He would belittle and berate these witnesses, questioning their patriotism and otherwise scoffing at their credibility. All of this is on record in the National Archives.”