POW hero: Obama usurping rights of God

The man behind one of the most courageous and unforgettable broadcasts in television history is scheduled to speak at a Feb. 13 luncheon at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Jeremiah Denton, whose book "When Hell Was in Session" recently was republished by WND Books, will be talking about new stories included in the updated edition.

Americans were introduced to Denton in an extraordinary TV interview in 1966. A prisoner during the Vietnam War, he was interviewed for enemy propaganda purposes and expected to renounce his nation's "war crimes." Instead, his defiant statement stridently reaffirmed his support for his country. And at the same time, Denton blinked in Morse code the word "T-O-R-T-U-R-E" to alert military intelligence to the treatment he and his fellow captives were suffering.

I read Denton's book - it was horrific and inspirational at the same time. You cannot believe the torture he describes at the hands of the Communist Vietnamese.

Denton was also a man of great faith in Jesus Christ.

Obama is an evil man. Obama would do well to read the Proverbs about what happens to the house of the wicked.

Since Reagan's time, says Denton, "things have not gone as well." Why? "One malady continues to worsen: the ongoing influence exerted by the misinformation campaign waged by the liberal media/academic community continues to confuse the citizenry," he writes. The most basic principle that distinguishes America as a nation, he said, is the Declaration of Independence's assertion that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. "Nobody is interpreting rights now in terms of the Creator." President Obama, Denton contended, is usurping the rights of God, "as did Hitler and Stalin and the emperors of Rome."

The War Secrets Senator John McCain Hides
Former POW Fights Public Access to POW/MIA Files
By Sydney Schanberg
April 25, 2000

NEW YORK (APBnews.com) — The voters who were drawn to John S. McCain in his run for the Republican presidential nomination this year often cited, as the core of his appeal, his openness and blunt candor and willingness to admit past lapses and release documents that other senators often hold back. These qualities also seemed to endear McCain to the campaign press corps, many of whom wrote about how refreshing it was to travel on the McCain campaign bus, “The Straight Talk Express,” and observe a maverick speaking his mind rather than a traditional candidate given to obfuscation and spin.

But there was one subject that was off-limits, a subject the Arizona senator almost never brings up and has never been open about — his long-time opposition to releasing documents and information about American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the missing in action who have still not been accounted for. Since McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for 5 1/2 years, his staunch resistance to laying open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed his career. Critics say his anti-disclosure campaign, in close cooperation with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, has been successful. Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy.

For example, 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. APBnews.com has repeatedly asked the senator for an interview for this article and for permission to view his debriefing documents. He has not responded. His office did recently send APBnews.com an e-mail, referring to a favorable article about the senator in the Jan. 1 issue of Newsweek. In the article, the reporter, Michael Isikoff, says that he was allowed to review McCain’s debriefing report and that it contained “nothing incriminating” — although in a phone interview Isikoff acknowledged that “there were redactions” in the document. Isikoff declined to say who showed him the document, but APBnews.com has learned it was McCain.

Many Vietnam veterans and former POWs have fumed at McCain for keeping these and other wartime files sealed up. His explanation, offered freely in Senate hearings and floor speeches, is that no one has been proven still alive and that releasing the files would revive painful memories and cause needless emotional stress to former prisoners, their families and the families of MIAs still unaccounted for. But what if some of these returned prisoners, as has always been the case at the conclusion of wars, reveal information to their debriefing officers about other prisoners believed still held in captivity? What justification is there for filtering such information through the Pentagon rather than allowing access to source materials? For instance, debriefings from returning Korean war POWs, available in full to the American public, have provided both citizens and government investigators with important information about other Americans who went missing in that conflict.

Would not most families of missing men, no matter how emotionally drained, want to know? And would they not also want to know what the government was doing to rescue their husbands and sons? Hundreds of MIA families have for years been questioning if concern for their feelings is the real reason for the secrecy.

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