Schools are "infrastructure"?
You can read all about your "hero" here:
vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com
McCain lost five U.S. Navy aircraft.
John Mccain June 15, 2020 0 admin
McCain lost five U.S. Navy aircraft.
Navy pilot John Sidney McCain III should have never been allowed to graduate from the U.S. Navy flight school. He was a below average student and a lousy pilot. Had his father and grandfather not been famous four star U.S. Navy admirals, McCain III would have never been allowed in the cockpit of a military aircraft.
His father John S. “Junior” McCain was commander of U.S. forces in Europe later becoming commander of American forces in Vietnam while McCain III was being held prisoner of war. McCain III’s grandfather John S. McCain, Sr. commanded naval aviation at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.
During his relative short stunt on flight status, McCain III lost five U.S. Navy aircraft, four in accidents and one in combat.
Robert Timberg, author of The Nightingale’s Song, a book about Annapolis graduates and their tours in Vietnam, wrote that McCain “learned to fly at Pensacola, though his performance was below par, at best good enough to get by. He liked flying, but didn’t love it.”
McCain III lost jet number one in 1958 when he plunged into Corpus Christi Bay while practicing landings. He was knocked unconscious by the impact coming to as the plane settled to the bottom.
McCain’s second crash occurred while he was deployed in the Mediterranean. “Flying too low over the Iberian Peninsula,” Timberg wrote, “he took out some power lines [reminiscent of the 1998 incident in which a Marine Corps jet sliced through the cables of a gondola at an Italian ski resort, killing 20] which led to a spate of newspaper stories in which he was predictably identified as the son of an admiral.”
McCain’s third crash three occurred when he was returning from flying a Navy trainer solo to Philadelphia for an Army-Navy football game.
Timberg reported that McCain radioed, “I’ve got a flameout” and went through standard relight procedures three times before ejecting at one thousand feet. McCain landed on a deserted beach moments before the plane slammed into a clump of trees.
McCain’s fourth aircraft loss occurred July 29, 1967, soon after he was assigned to the USS Forrestal as an A-4 Skyhawk pilot. While seated in the cockpit of his aircraft waiting his turn for takeoff, an accidently fired rocket slammed into McCain’s plane. He escaped from the burning aircraft, but the explosions that followed killed 134 sailors, destroyed at least 20 aircraft, and threatened to sink the ship.
McCain’s fifth loss happened during his 23rd mission over North Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967, when McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. McCain ejected from the plane breaking both arms and a leg in the process and subsequently parachuted into Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi.
After being drug from the lake, a mob gathered around McCain, spit on him, kicked him and stripped him of his clothing. He was bayoneted in his left foot and his shoulder crushed by a rifle butt. He was then transported to the Hoa Lo Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton.
After being periodically slapped around for “three or four days” by his captors who wanted military information, McCain called for an officer on his fourth day of captivity. He told the officer, “O.K., I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.” -U.S. News and World Report, May 14, 1973 article written by former POW John McCain.
“Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I [McCain] did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant.” Page 193-194, Faith of My Fathers by John McCain.
When the communist learned that McCain’s father was Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., the soon-to-be commander of all U.S. Forces in the Pacific, he was rushed to Gai Lam military hospital (U.S. government documents), a medical facility normally unavailable for U.S. POWs.
The communist Vietnamese figured, because POW McCain’s father was of such high military rank, that he was of royalty or the governing circle. Thereafter the communist bragged that they had captured “the crown prince.”
For 23 combat missions (an estimated 20 hours over enemy territory), the U.S. Navy awarded McCain a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit for Valor, a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars, two Commendation medals plus two Purple Hearts and a dozen service medals.
“McCain had roughly 20 hours in combat,” explains Bill Bell, a veteran of Vietnam and former chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs — the first official U.S. representative in Vietnam since the 1973 fall of Saigon. “Since McCain got 28 medals,” Bell continues, “that equals out to about a medal-and-a-half for each hour he spent in combat. There were infantry guys — grunts on the ground — who had more than 7,000 hours in combat and I can tell you that there were times and situations where I’m sure a prison cell would have looked pretty good to them by comparison. The question really is how many guys got that number of medals for not being shot down.”
For years, McCain has been an unchecked master at manipulating an overly friendly and biased news media. The former POW turned Congressman, turned U.S. Senator, has managed to gloss over his failures as a pilot and collaborations with the enemy by exaggerating his military service and lying about his feats of heroism.
McCain has sprouted a halo and wings to become America’s POW-hero presidential candidate.
===
ibrattleboro.com
Brattleboro, VT
Poor John McCain Bombed Women and Children and “I Was Following Orders” Is Not a Legal Defense
September 3, 2018 by jay janson | Op/Ed | 3830 Views
Majority Humanity, especially people whose 3rd World countries have suffered bombing by Americans, as did Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada should take carful note of the adulation awarded a pilot, like McCain, who dutifully bombed cities with women and children in a non-Caucasian nation, for some time soon there will be a reckoning.
TEXT:
So as to refrain from denouncing someone who has just passed away while his family is in mourning, let’s figure, given all the information we have, that John McCain, rest his soul, was probably to his misfortune a very mentally challenged guy, who like so many others, was taken advantage of by the elite of the genocidal Financial-Military-Industrial-Complex and its criminal CIA-controlled media, and used to falsely justify and at times participate in, America’s murderous taking of many millions of innocent lives of men, women and children, as Martin Luther King said, in atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 in order to maintain unjust predatory investments. [1] John McCain’s sorry story began with a young navy pilot’s receiving and obeying illegal criminal orders to bomb the Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. We can imagine young McCain just might have not been conversant with the new and stronger international laws first used to prosecute the Nazis after the Second World War. However, ignorance of the law has never been an excuse for murder.
Principle I of the Nuremberg Principles of International Law
Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.
Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him. This principle could be paraphrased as follows: “It is not an acceptable excuse to say ‘I was just following my superior’s orders'”.
U.S. Nuremberg Trials Prosecutor Would Have Proudly Prosecuted McCain As a War Criminal , History News Network, George Washington U., 10/19/2008 historynewsnetwork.org
A chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told CBS Editor Richter that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals. U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain, who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute, and by the courts decision, military personnel cannot claim that they were simply following orders.
Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968 wrote in Bomber Pilot McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? published by Institute for Public Accuracy, October 15, 2008:
“I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.”
Richter notes that
“McCain has repeatedly invoked his record in the Vietnam War during the campaign, but that the effect of bomber pilots like McCain and of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign has not been sufficiently scrutinized.
An ardent opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News, where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any pilot’s name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain, who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute. …
Taylor’s argument was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they were simply following orders.”
The charge that U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian targets, turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New York Times’ chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury.
“In late 1966 Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs: ‘Bomb damage … extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway … small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated’.
“In one of his autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in ‘a heavily populated part of Hanoi’ when he was shot down. …
This author was assistant conductor of the Ho Chi Minh founded Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra during many concerts between 1993 and 1999. Don’t expect the Vietnam government to release any records of how many men, women and children were killed or maimed during the twenty-three bombing sorties of pilot John McCain. The Vietnamese have long put the generations of war behind them now and look to the future and the enjoyment of their lives after suffering for years under punishing economic sanctions by a vengeful U.S. government and its allies.
Yours truly, who has an adopted Vietnamese son and whose near one hundred Vietnamese students in Hanoi all lost family – “killed by the Americans,” they would admit with unaccusing Buddhist equanimity – finds it difficult to stomach criminal conglomerate media’s incessant hailing deceased Senator John McCain as a outstanding hero among any and every politician hero, who ‘served’ in perpetrating what Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned as a crimes against humanity.[1]
In 2008, your author wrote:
Shot Down by Heroic Vietnamese Defenders in Shameful US War & Defeat OpEdNews, 3/22/2008
Years before Airman McCain began his 23 bombing runs, former President Eisenhower in his Mandate for Change had admitted Ho Chi Minh was a hero to his countrymen and would have won an all-Vietnam election with 80%+ had he (Ike) not blocked it. Well before McCain’s 1st bombing mission, Rev. King Jr. had angrily condemned U.S. genocide, and Muhammad Ali had refused to go. Was McCain taken in then, and now as well, by war propaganda? Is poor McCain, an heartless anti-hero or dumbbell?
Presidential candidate McCain comes across as a sincere, if not intelligent, politician, as he speaks of his country maybe continuing its occupation of Iraq for a hundred years! Would McCain have preferred America to have gone on killing in Vietnam rather than enjoy today’s profitable commerce, even the recommending of Vietnam for World Trade Membership? Probably not. In congress he has helped restore good relations with the Vietnam communist government. Did McCain’s bombings serve any purpose? Did McCain ever try to find out how many Vietnamese were killed, maimed or orphaned by his bombs, express feeling sorry, want to apologize, help out survivors? If he did, the public remains ignorant of such regret.
McCain had a good college education, which must have included a history of colonialism, and the special brutal injustices of the French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. He would have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by the American OSS as a dedicated ally against the Japanese and Vichy French, and that Truman, against Roosevelt’s promise, had brought the French army back in US ships to fight an bloody 9-year war against its former allies, the Vietnamese.
Senator McCain’s countenance on TV as he campaigns for the presidency is one of kindness, neighborly and respectful. Viewers notice his crippled hand and other injuries suffered when he was first rescued, pulled from the lake he had parachuted into, but then beaten by an angry mob. Everyone feels sympathy for McCain – at the same time one can figure that the bombs he dropped must have taken their human toll of innocents and one is curious to know if his plane crashed without causing further casualties. The whole story awakens sadness, but also some understanding, if one imagines how the reaction on the ground would be in New York City upon the capture of a bombing pilot – especially if the bomber happened to parachute down into one of the city’s tougher neighborhoods.
He reported having been tortured during years as a POW. No one would like to have gone through such years of imprisonment. At the same time, the bereavements of families of those slain during his bombings is more heartbreakingly permanent, final and absolute.
On 60 Minutes in 1997, there was an uncomfortable, sorrowful and somewhat disturbing moment: (from the text transcript)
Sen. McCain: “I m–made serious, serious mistakes and did things wrong when I was in prison, OK?”
Mike Wallace: “What did you do wrong in prison?”
Sen. McCain: “I wrote a confession. I was guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people. I intentionally bombed women and children.”
Wallace: “And you did it because you were being tortured…”
Sen. McCain: “I…”
Wallace: …”and you’d reached the end of the line.”
Sen. McCain: “Yes. But I should have gone further. I should have–I–I never believed that I would–that I would break, and I did.”
This article went on, but we leave it here in order to go quote a CBS report later in 2008
Jul 15, 2008,
McCain: “I Know How To Win Wars” – CBS News
cbsnews.com
Jul 15, 2008, Republican Candidate for President, Sen. John McCain told a town hall meeting, ”I know how to win wars. And if I’m elected president, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq.”
Your author wrote:
“I KnowHowToWinWars!” Says McCain Who Bombed Cities in a Lost War OpEdNews, 7/16/2008
Huh? Which war did McCain know how to win? His 23 bombing runs over North Vietnam did not win anything but shame and disgust at home in streets filled with war protests. America LOST THE WAR. Surely CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX anchors and CNN celebrities Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper REMEMBER that America LOST THE VIETNAM WAR, though their paid to forget it. In reality McCain is to pitied.
And still later in 2008:
Media Suppression of MLKjr’s Condemnation of Vietnam War as an Atrocity Helps McCain OpEdNews, 10/21/2008
Martin Luther King’s blistering condemnation of the Vietnam War as a crime against humanity, which made bold type headlines on the front pages of newspapers all over the world BEFORE McCain’s 1st bombing mission, has been intentionally suppressed in commercial media and school books. If voters knew King’s sermon on the true history of the heroic Vietnamese fighting invasions of three powerful nations, the Japanese, US backed France and finally the great USA, McCain’s ‘hero status’ would evaporate
It serves McCain’s presidential campaign well that all mention of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s blistering condemnation of the war on Vietnam as a crime against humanity has been intentionally suppressed in media and school books.
War mongering conglomerate-owned media are always very busy deceiving the public on present wars and future possible wars, presenting them, and all past wars, as necessary and just. The New York Times, The Washington Post and most major media slammed King as unpatriotic after his truthful 1967 Riverside Church speech denouncing his country’s government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”[1]
For years now, ‘big brother’ media has re-painted that Vietnam War as good, and as having been a heroic adventure for all politicians who took part in it as military personnel. Whew, talk about brain washing!
But before voters accept Senator McCain’s credentials as having served his country well, they might better look at some of what Rev. King Jr. said forty-one years ago in his Beyond Vietnam speech, as, within it, King gave clear historical context of US crimes:
“They move sadly and apathetically as we herd into concentration camps. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops, destroy the precious trees.
We test out our latest weapons on them. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.” [1]
Your author had asked:
So How Many Poor Vietnamese Did McCain’s Bombs Kill in 23 Runs? OpEdNews, 9/5/2008
Given all the praise heaped upon McCain, the bomber of Hanoi, this is a natural question – especially for millions of us who remember the inexpressible shamefulness of this genocidal war on the agrarian Asian population of a brutal French colony that suffered Japanese occupation and fought both the Japanese and Vichy French as a U.S. ally;
How many Vietnamese citizens, men, women and children, did McCain’s bombs kill or maim during his twenty-three runs?
In his acceptance speech as Republican candidate for the presidency McCain, referring to his participation in the U.S. war on Vietnam bragged,
“I have that record and the scars to prove it, and Obama doesn’t.” McCain told the rapt convention audience and went on to confesses that he broke under interrogation – but did not bother to give the detail of his famous “I am a war criminal,” admission.
But hold on. Wait just a decent moment. What of the Vietnamese McCain was bombing? How good did they have it? Do not the Vietnamese victims and their grieving families deserve honorable mention at least?
Is it that the “The Greatest country on earth,” as McCain cried out, has no compassion for the people bombed in their very own beautiful home city of Hanoi, so humble be it by comparison to great and powerful America?
Okay skip any body count, just give us a round number of the Vietnamese who the possible future president can be credited with assisting into the next world earlier than they expected while hoping to survived alive – as did their executioner.
And why doesn’t the Republican Party thank the family of the Vietnamese man who saved McCain from drowning and then protected him from the wrath of the people he had been bombing just before being shot out of the sky? John McCain failed to even mention the guy in his speech describing only how he parachuted “into a small lake in Hanoi to an angry crowd.”
Below, is a relevant article from Mail On Line of the Daily Mail Company of the United Kingdom, (additional reporting: William Lowther, in Washington).
Published October 23, 2008
“How war hero John McCain betrayed the Vietnamese peasant who saved his life”
In all the tales of wartime courage peppering John McCain’s presidential campaign trail; perhaps the most outstanding example of selfless heroism involves not the candidate but a humble Vietnamese peasant.
On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.
In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore.
And when a furious mob at the water’s edge began to beat and stab the captured pilot, Mr On drove them back.
Nearly three decades later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting in Hanoi, McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and presented him with a Senate memento. It was the kind of thing you buy in the souvenir shop in the Senate basement. “But Mr On, to the day he died, treated it as if it were a Congressional Medal of Honour.
From that brief encounter to his death at the age of 88 two years ago, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published an autobiography that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On.
It is a snub Mr On took to his death.
His widow, Bui Thi Lien, 71, said: “In his last years, my husband was very sad sometimes. He would say, ‘Mr McCain has forgotten me.’”
”Mr McCain would be dead if it weren’t for my husband. He would never have returned to his family and he wouldn’t be in the presidential race today.”
But although McCain appeared to believe the story, it was one he would later seem to ignore in his autobiography and there was no more contact between the two men.
When Mr On died in 2006, an email was apparently sent to McCain’s office requesting a message of condolence for the family. There was no response.
Whether or not McCain believed Mr On is unclear.
But his refusal to acknowledge his heroism is likely to fuel other, more damaging allegations that McCain exaggerated elements of his PoW ordeal in Hoa Lo prison.
What followed, according to McCain, was five-and-a-half years of torture and brutal beatings as a prisoner of war – an account that has given a steely edge to his candidacy by establishing him as a true American war hero.
But the story is at odds with the version uncovered by Vietnam veteran Chuck Searcy, who lives in Hanoi and is in charge of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund.
Phung Van Chung, 70, who was a Communist Party official at the time, claims McCain was quickly singled out for softer treatment, adding: “I found out he was the son of an American admiral, so the top people wanted to keep him as a live witness so they could use him for negotiations.”
=============== |
