On John McCain-WHAT Exactly is a War Hero?
salon.glenrose.net
Is it a man who, after coming back to his faithful, crippled wife who waited for him while he was in POW prison, immediately started cheating on her with other women and then dumped her for a rich, much younger bimbo?
Is it a man who even now refuses to give the public open access to POW/MIA records? As "You are Being Lied to" says on p 88
Since McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for five and a half years,his staunch resistance to laying open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed his career. ... Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy. ..All the Pentagon debriefings of the prisoners who returned from Vietnam are now classified and closed to the public under a statute enacted in the 1990s with McCain's backing. He says this is to protect the privacy of former POWs and gives it as his reason for not making public his own debriefing. But the law allows a returned prisoner to view his own file or to designate another person to view it.
In the book "Faith of My Fathers" "
...the Arizona senator repeatedly expresses guilt and disgrace at having broken under torture and given the North Vietnamese a taped confession, broadcast over the loudspeakers, saying eh was a war criminal who had, among other acts, bombed a school....
But how would McCain's forced confession alone explain his endless campaign against releasing MIA/POW information?
Even some misguided *liberals* seem to fall for that war hero baloney. From Dennis Perrin. Asked on Colmes talk show if McCain was a war hero...
Well," I said, hesitating a moment, for I knew my answer would elicit some hostility, "I'm not sure how heroic it is to incinerate Vietnamese children."
"OHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" was the collective reply.
Colmes told me I was tasteless. Barrymore said I should be ashamed of myself. Bales puffed out his chest yet again (he did this a lot during the three-hour show) and demanded to know whether I considered McCain a war criminal.
"No. Not personally. McCain didn't create the policy. The war criminals were in Washington."
Still, I added, that doesn't exonerate McCain for dropping bombs on the Vietnamese.
"Oh!" squeaked Barrymore. "What should he have dropped instead -- birthday presents?"
The slagging went on for a little while longer. Here I was, in the middle of three Clinton liberals, reminding them why McCain ended up in a POW cell. Not that I supported torture or reprisal beatings, but some context was in order. The Vietnamese didn't sneak into the States and kidnap McCain from his snug bed. The three couldn't care less. What's more, they defended the U.S. bombing of Vietnam, at least so long as McCain was doing the killing. It was a handy reminder of how crazed liberals become when they taste a little blood.
And why would Vietnam Vets Spit on McCain? A trip down memory lane.
Not the least of the issues that have military groups spitting mad is the Arizona senator's voting record on veterans' issues. Thomas Burch is a Washington attorney and chairman of the National Vietnam and Gulf War Veterans Coalition, a federation of 102 veterans' groups. Burch tells Insight, "McCain forgot the veterans, and you don't have to search too hard to see where he's dropped the ball." For instance, "McCain would not cosponsor the 1984 Agent Orange Bill, the 1992 Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, the 1996 Missing Persons Personnel Act, the 1998 Persian Gulf Health Care Act or the 1999 Bring Them Home Alive Bill. He did cosponsor the 1991 Omnibus Agent Orange Bill, but at that point there was no struggle, it was a done deal. Back in the 1980s when we really needed him he wasn't ...
Charles Bates, director of Veterans for Government Accountability, a government watchdog group, tells Insight that "during a three-day seminar on the Vietnam War at the Center for Vietnam War Studies at Texas Tech University, I and another POW activist, Joe Jordan, spoke to Bui Tin about McCain's treatment in Hanoi. Tin said, `No, McCain was never tortured. He was too important. We called him the prince. He received special treatment.'"
The passion is strong among these veterans, and Bates gives no quarter: "When Tin testified at the 1992 hearings," he says, "McCain ran down to the floor and threw his arms around this guy. Everyone knew that this was the guy that had reportedly tortured him. Try and imagine someone from the Bataan death march throwing his arms around his captor. You can't. So this is why there is concern among veterans that he really may have collaborated with the enemy. I And there appears to be evidence that he did, including his own admissions in the May 14, 1973, U.S. News & World Report":
But Burch says it was McCain's conduct during 1992 hearings of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs that turned many Vietnam War veterans against him. "When they held the hearings, it was McCain who handled the family members in a very rough manner, reducing one woman to tears. There are a lot of folks who compared him to Jane Fonda after he hugged Bui Tin, a former North Vietnamese army officer and interrogator/torturer of American prisoners of war, or POWs, who testified at the hearings. Symbolically, it's like seeing Fonda sitting on the antiaircraft gun. If you think that these people are still holding some of our men, as many of these families do, that's not the kind of photo that's going to endear you to him. I don't care what his reason was for doing it. It was an outrage."
McGrath suggests McCain could put all this ugliness to rest by requesting that the transcripts of his postcaptivity debriefing be released. Those transcripts long have been classified, but in 1996 Republican Sen. Robert Smith of New Hampshire moved legislation through Congress effectively making the portions of the debriefings that dealt with other military personnel still unaccounted for available for review. In 1999 Smith managed further to modify the legislation to make it retroactive for the Cold War, Korean and Vietnam debriefings concerning men left behind. The legislation sailed through despite attempts by those no one would name to prevent declassification. The McCain campaign has not returned Insight's calls to ask about these matters.
According to one Capitol Hill insider, "The chances of anyone actually seeing these records is a million-to-one, but if John McCain requested his records I'm sure they'd release them to him." To date that request has not been made. There also appears to be no chance of releasing any records held by the Vietnamese. According to Bill Bell, former chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs, "In May of 1993 I attended a meeting in Hanoi with John McCain, Pete Peterson, U.S. ambassador to Vietnam and ex-POW. McCain and Peterson were very interested in getting an agreement from the Vietnamese that the records of the former POWs would never be made public." |
