"Along with economic development must come political development as well as increased respect for human rights" McCain told a news conference.

The US State Department often criticises Vietnam for lack of human rights, a charge the communist country denies.

Addressing students of the Diplomatic Academy in Hanoi, McCain praised Vietnam's economic reforms initiated in the mid-1980s that have helped millions of people out of poverty.

"In reforming its economy and achieving some of the world's highest sustained growth rates, the Vietnamese economy has become a model for developing countries across the globe," McCain told the students.

Vietnam's economy has grown an average 7% per year over the past decade, one of the highest growth rates in the world.

McCain said Vietnam now has a chance to extend its progress to political and social areas.

"This change—which includes expanding social freedoms, allowing greater freedom of expression, releasing all individuals imprisoned for peacefully expressing their views, improving human rights, and widening the scope for political activity—would be of historic magnitude," he told the students.

McCain, accompanied by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, met with prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung and National Assembly Chair Nguyen Phu Trong.

The Arisona senator and former presidential candidate also visited Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi, where his A-4 plane was shot down while on a bombing run of the North Vietnamese capital in 1967.

On Wednesday he was scheduled to revisit the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison in central Hanoi where he was held captive for 5 1/2 years before being released in March 1973.

McCain arrived in Vietnam on Monday and was to travel to Beijing and Tokyo on the last leg of his Asia trip.

The Associated Press - April 9, 2009

US Senator McCain returns to wartime Vietnam jail

HANOI (AFP) — US Senator John McCain leaned over a miniature mock-up on of the Vietnamese prison where he was held for years as a wartime prisoner.

"I'm trying to figure it out," he said, studying the scale model on a return visit to the prison site that is now a museum.

Then he found the spot.

"I was in this block here... which we called the 'Thunderbird'," he told fellow Senator Amy Klobuchar. "And I lived in this block, which we called 'Desert Inn'."

McCain, who lost his bid for the White House to Democrat Barack Obama in November, made the museum his last stop before flying to Beijing, his next destination on an official Asian tour.

A navy pilot in the Vietnamese-American war, McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and jailed for five and a half years, mostly in the former French prison renamed Hoa Lo.

McCain and other captured airmen knew the prison ironically as the "Hanoi Hilton", and on his return Wednesday he said prisoners named the cell blocks after Las Vegas casinos.

A young Vietnamese woman in a traditional pink slit skirt, known as an ao dai, was McCain's official guide for the tour but her limited commentary was no match for the memories which McCain brought with him.

"Did you eat in the cell?" asked Klobuchar, a Democrat who, along with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, is on the Asian tour with McCain.

"They would bring a bowl of soup around," said the white-haired McCain, now 72.

The prison has not been used since the early 1990s, and most of the site has been turned into a highrise building.

What remains is a museum mainly devoted to alleged maltreatment of Vietnamese held in dingy cells by French colonialists, long before the first American airman, Everett Alvarez, arrived in 1964.

"That's a long time, from August '64 to January '73," McCain said, looking at a picture of Alverez in one of two rooms devoted to the "crimes" inflicted on North Vietnam by bomber pilots like McCain.

There is also a picture of Douglas Peterson, which McCain insisted on seeing. Peterson, another imprisoned airman, became the first United States ambassador to Hanoi following normalisation of diplomatic relations 20 years after the war ended in 1975.

A display case shows a green flight suit and helmet described as those worn by McCain when he was shot down.

"They used to have one with a name tag they had made," McCain told Klobuchar.

He previously visited the museum in 2000, an event chronicled by another photograph.

The Arizona Republican, his party's senior member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has made many peacetime visits to Vietnam.

In a speech on Tuesday he said Vietnam and the United States must take the "next step" in their relationship, beyond the normalisation that followed the war. He called for "a modernisation of our ties commensurate with Vietnam's rising status in the region and in the world."

The biography on McCain's website says he broke both his arms and a leg ejecting from his damaged plane, but was denied necessary medical treatment and was often beaten by the North Vietnamese. It says he spent much of his time in solitary confinement.

Vietnam has always denied abusing any of its prisoners, and the museum shows pictures of smiling US airmen celebrating Christmas.

"They took me to one of those", McCain said.

The museum shows a cot which it says prisoners slept on but McCain said beds were sometimes "built into the prison wall."

He told Klobuchar there was a dramatic shift in the treatment of prisoners around 1971, about two years before their release.

Following the tour, which lasted about 30 minutes, museum staff asked McCain to sign a guest book.

"Best wishes," he wrote in black felt pen. "John McCain US Senate Arizona".

Agence France Presse - April 9, 2009