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The Counterfeit Hero
Senator John Sidney McCain

If Your name is John McCain and your father and grandfather were famous admirals, violating the Military Code of Conduct by "aiding the enemy" translates into fodder for a political career, book deals, and adulation bordering on sainthood with the Navy never considering prosecution as an option.

Pentagon pencil pushers chose a political spin that lifted McCain, the former POW turned U.S. Senator, up to a glorified pedestal where he sprouted a halo and wings and became America's "POW-hero" with a springboard to become U.S. President.

Is John McCain a hero because he made the moral choice not to take an early release from the Hanoi Hilton prison?

No he is just a survivor following orders from the Senior Ranking Officers (SROs) in the prison camp, the same orders all the other prisoners followed. We respect John for the pain and suffering he went through as a POW.

McCain, who claims he was brutally tortured by the communist Vietnamese, ironically emerged, as early as 1986, as Hanoi's leading advocate for normalized relations with the United States.

McCain's high-profile and unrelenting support for a government that brutally tortured and murdered his fellow POWs begs the question of what drives McCain to work so hard for Hanoi and so diligently to discredit any possibility, in fact the probability, that Hanoi held back live U.S. prisoners of war after the 1973 prisoner release.

From the first days of McCain's captivity, he seriously violated the military Code of Conduct, when he promised to give the communists "military information" in exchange for special hospital care not ordinarily available to U.S. prisoners. He also made numerous antiwar radio broadcasts.

The following is McCain's own admission of collaboration in an article he wrote, printed May 14, 1973 in U.S. News and World Report:
"I think it was on the fourth day [after being shot down] that two guards came in, instead of one. One of them pulled back the blanket to show the other guard my injury. I looked at my knee. It was about the size, shape and color of a football. I remembered that when I was a flying instructor a fellow had ejected from his plane and broken his thigh. He had gone into shock, the blood had pooled in his leg, and he died, which came as quite a surprise to us a man dying of a broken leg.

Then I realized that a very similar thing was happening to me.

"When I saw it, I said to the guard, `O.K., get the officer.'

"An officer came in after a few minutes. It was the man that we came to know very well as `The Bug.' He was a psychotic torturer, one of the worst fiends that we had to deal with.

I said, `O.K., I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.'"

McCain claims it was only a coincidence that, about the same time he was begging to be taken to a hospital, the Vietnamese learned his father was Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., commander of all U.S. forces in Europe and soon to be commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, including Vietnam.

McCain was taken to Gai Lam military hospital. (U.S. government documents) "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."

On Nov. 9, 1967, Hanoi press began quoting the seriously injured McCain giving specific military information.
One report dated read, "To a question of the correspondent, McCain answered: 'My assignment to the Oriskany, I told myself, was due to serious losses in pilots, which were sustained by this aircraft carrier (due to its raids on the North Vietnam territory - VNA) and which necessitated replacements.

"'From 10 to 12 pilots were transferred like me from the Forrestal to the Oriskany.

"'Before I was shot down, we had made several sorties. Altogether, I made about 23 flights over North Vietnam.'"

In that report, McCain was quoted describing the number of aircraft in his flight, information about rescue ships, and the order of which his attack was supposed to take place.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, the U.S. Veteran Dispatch acquired a declassified Department of Defense (DOD) transcript of an interview prominent French television reporter Francois Chalais had with McCain.

Chalais told of his private interview with POW McCain in a series titled Life in Hanoi, which was aired in Europe. In the series, Chalais said his meeting with McCain was "a meeting which will leave its mark on my life."

"My meeting with John Sidney McCain was certainly one of those meetings which will affect me most profoundly for the rest of my life. I had asked the North Vietnamese authorities to allow me to personally interrogate an American prisoner. They authorized me to do so.

"When night fell, they took me---without any precautions or mystery--to a hospital near the Gia Lam airport reserved for the military. (Passage omitted) The officer who receives me begins: I ask you not to ask any questions of political nature. If this man replies in a way unfavorable to us, they will not hesitate to speak of 'brainwashing' and conclude that we threatened him.

"'This John Sidney McCain is not an ordinary prisoner. His father is none other than Admiral Edmond John McCain, commander in chief of U.S. naval forces in Europe. (Passage omitted)'"

". . . Many visitors came to talk to me [John McCain]. Not all of it was for interrogation. Once a famous North Vietnamese writer-an old man with a Ho Chi Minh beard-came to my room, wanting to know all about Ernest Hemingway . . . Others came to find out about life in the United States.

"They figured because my father had such high military rank that I was of the royalty or governing circle . . . One of the men who came to see me, whose picture I recognized later, was Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dienbienphu."

U.S. News and World Report, May 14, 1973 article written by former POW John McCain;
December 1967, Vietnamese doctors operate (early December) on McCain's Leg. Later that month, six weeks after he was shot down, McCain was taken from the hospital and delivered to Room No. 11 of "The Plantation" into the hands of two other U.S. POWs, Air Force majors George "Bud" Day and Norris Overly. They helped further nurse him along until he was eventually able to walk by himself.

More special prisoner treatment:

McCain's January 1970 meeting with the Cuban Fernando Barral, a Spanish psychiatrist "took place in an office of the Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations in Hanoi" away from the POW camp.

On August 2, 1991, the United States Senate approved a resolution introduced by Sen. Robert Smith U. S. Senator from New Hampshire providing for the creation of a Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to serve during the remainder of the 102nd Congress.

In October 1991, a Chairman (Sen. John Kerry), Vice-chairman (Sen. Robert Smith), and ten additional Members were appointed to the Committee. A resolution providing funding was approved. The hearings began on November 5, 1991.
The Chairman of this Committee, Senator John Kerry appointed his Legislative Assistant, Ms Francis Zwenig, as the Chief of Staff for the Committee.

During the life of the Committee Senator Kerry worked most closely with Representative Douglas "Pete" Peterson to authorize funding for the new, expanded effort to account for missing American servicemen in Vietnam. Representative "Pete" Peterson was later appointed by President Clinton as Ambassador to Vietnam.

When Col. Bui Tin, a former Senior Colonel in the North Vietnamese Army (he had actually interrogated McCain and other U.S. prisoners) testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in 1992, McCain did not display that same "pit bull" inclination to attack as he did when the POW/MIA families and activists were testifying.

During a break in the hearing, Sen. McCain moved to where Col. Bui Tin was seated and warmly embraced him as if he were a long lost brother.

Sen. John McCain warmly greeted Vietnam Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet during a 1992 visit to Hanoi. Kiet was a ranking communist party member of the secret Central Committee of the former National Liberation Front (Viet Cong). Kiet ordered American POWs to be punished by execution and helped formulate the Vietnamese communist policy that resulted in the murder of thousands of pro - U.S. South Vietnamese in Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

Communist Party henchmen executed over 5,000 men, women, and children, burying many of them alive in mass graves during the brief time North Vietnamese troops held that historic ancient Vietnamese city.

July 11, 1995 Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., gave President Bill Clinton, the valuable political cover he needed to remove the U.S. imposed trade embargo against communist Vietnam. All major U.S. veterans' organizations, the two POW/MIA family groups, and the majority of Vietnamese Americans in this country opposed Clinton's lifting of the embargo.

Senator McCain embracing Mai Van On in Hanoi, November 13, 1996. Mai Van On identified himself as one of the Vietnamese who pulled McCain from Hanoi's Truc Bach Lake, where McCain parachuted in 1967 after his bomber was shot down. McCain has said, many times, that, after pulling him from the lake, the Vietnamese brutally beat him and stabbed him with a bayonet.

Candidate McCain must explain why he refuses to ask for a war crimes investigation of the Vietnamese, his former captors.

McCain must explain why, during a May 1993 meeting with Vietnamese officials in Hanoi, he and former POW Pete Peterson (now U.S. ambassador to Vietnam) asked the Vietnamese to keep "Vietnamese files in their possession pertaining to American POWs who were released in 1973 available ONLY to Defense Intelligence Agency researchers."
Could these documents reveal POW collaboration, even POW brainwashing by Vietnamese and Soviet intelligence agents. What do Peterson and McCain want to hide from the world and the U.S, citizens?

In November 1991, when Tracy Usry, the former chief investigator of the Minority Staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, testified before the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, he revealed that the Soviets interrogated U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam. Sen. McCain became outraged, interrupting Usry several times, arguing that "none of the returned U.S. prisoners of war released by Vietnam were ever interrogated by the Soviets."

Yet, former U.S. POW Laird Gutterson, who was held with McCain, told the U.S. Veteran Dispatch that McCain told him the Soviets were involved when McCain needed special medical attention as a result of his shoot down in 1967.

Former KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin testified under oath before the 1992 Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs that the KGB interrogated U.S. POWs in Vietnam.

Gen. Kalugin stated that one of the POWs worked on by the KGB was a "high-ranking naval officer," who, according to Kalugin, agreed to work with the Soviets upon his repatriation to the United States and has frequently appeared on U.S. television.

Col. Bui Tin, a former Senior Colonel in the North Vietnamese Army, testified on the same day, but after Usry, that because of his high position in the Communist Party during the war, he had the authority to "read all documents and secret telegrams from the politburo" pertaining to American prisoners of war. He said that not only did the Soviets interrogate some American prisoners of war, but that they treated the Americans very badly.

McCain, however, does not think so highly of the POW/MIA families and activists who openly challenge the U.S. government's POW/MIA policy, many of whom walked the halls of Congress during the Vietnam War years demanding America's prisoners of war, including POW McCain, not be forgotten.
None of the Senators on the Select Committee have been as vicious in their attacks on POW/MIA family members and activists than the man behind the mask of war hero, former POW, and patriotic United States Senator . . .John McCain
While a member of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs (1991-1993) McCain consistently referred to POW/MIA Family Members and POW/MIA Activists as whiners and vultures and the lunatic fringe. The Committee's Final Report was issued on January 13, 1993.

McCain's Hanoi Memorial.
The Communist Vietnamese erected a bust of John McCain inside Vietnam. His defenders say that it is in tribute to the PAVN gunners that shot him down. When was the last time you visited a memorial to the American Military where there was a bust of the enemy?

Former POW McCain claims his experience as a prisoner of the communists better qualifies him to be President of the United States. He has forged that experience along with his military record deeply into his campaign like John F. Kerry. The U.S. Navy Awarded McCain Medals For Valor Without Required Eyewitnesses, Navy regulations say two eyewitnesses are required for any award of heroism and McCain has none for the valor awards he received.

However, John McCain's actual behavior from October to December 1967 is quite different from the Navy's version of events.

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