Posted on 07/21/2015 4:13:06 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
Though he immediately backtracked, presidential candidate Donald Trump reopened the controversy over Sen. John McCain’s service during the Vietnam War and his subsequent handling of the post-war POW issue by questioning whether the Arizona Republican should be regarded as a hero.
McCain, whose father and grandfather were four-star Navy admirals, has been commended throughout his career in the Senate for enduring five-and-a-half years in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison in North Vietnam.
But various critics, including Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Sydney H. Schanberg, have charged that McCain, working with fellow Vietnam veteran and then-Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., suppressed information about POWs believed to have been left behind by the U.S. government at the end of the Vietnam War.
In a 2008 article published by the Nation Institute when McCain was the Republican nominee for president, Schanberg wrote that the senator, who had risen to political prominence based on his war-hero image, “has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home.”
“Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents,” Schanberg wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
What the bleep is this all about?
I watched most of those hearings in the early '90s that's exactly what happened. Anyone presenting evidence that POWs might still be in SE Asia was treated like a hostile witness by McCain.
It’s all about neutralizing Trump by throwing the patriotism/war-hero card.
The Left is cashing in on the knee-jerk reaction the Right has about dissing soldiers.
Even yardbirds like McCain and JF’nK.
They say he gave the enemy information that resulted in the loss of 60 of our planes.
He thwarted the release of any information about MIA’s that may have still been alive, to cover up what he has done. This information will remain sealed forever.
“Dime store Rambos”
One of McCains kinder terms for the humint sources of where live sightings were reported
Maybe some of the men who never came home knew more about the “Peace Commitee” than Senator McCain was willing to expose
Search on the terms john holland john McCain
Do some reading
Also search up why john McCain will never be invited to participate in Rolling Thunder ( though ironically Sarah Palin was invited)
I don't dislike Mc Cain fr his Naval Service, just the way he dumped his wife and his Political career
It is an interesting and sober read about the various legislative maneuvers McCain used to ensure this information would never be released
Some Pentagon staffers resigned over the way these men were abandoned ... DIA director General Eugene Tighe was forced into retirement
McCain used Nixon’s blanket POW pardon to ride all the way to the Senate And then go back and see how he acted and what he did to leave his buddies behind
I don’t think Trump was alluding to this or even aware, he was just parroting a Chris Rock joke
It is all about what Trump was referring to when he said McCain IS not a hero, he missed interjecting the word today. The issue, as noted by Will88, is that McCain is no hero to the Vets today. Not only in his complicit banding with John F’n Kerry, he is still at it in doing absolutely nothing more than gum smacking for the cameras on the VA Hospitals, border security and illegal immigration.
I distinctly remember his last campaign add where he was at the border promising to build the fence and stop illegal immigration. All of which we know now is a bald faced lie as he declares us concerned about the issues as “crazies”.
WAS he a hero for his withstanding the HH? Yes, absolutely. But that stature lies in the past just as the notable actions of another hero at Ticonderoga and Saratoga made him a hero in his day. None other than Benedict Arnold.
McCain’s arrogance led him to believe he was unassailable when he made his deal with the Keating devil. The establishment Ruling Party bought him out by letting him go when all the others went to prison. Since then, he continues the hero charade while being a bought and paid for shill for the establishment elite progressives.
You should dislike his naval service because he cost the U.S. taxpayers a lot of money for crashed or damaged aircraft, not to mention the human cost of what he did to the abandoned MIAs
And while teaming up,with John Kerry!!
That there should tell you something about his concern for US servicemen in Vietnam
The media could destroy McCain if it wanted to; and McCain knows this.
Accordingly, he readily dances to the tune the media calls.
Actually this is old news that everybody has forgotten about except a few that were involved with the discovery of info indicating not only were they left behind but were alive.
And no I am not counting the aircraft he was shotdown in over Vietnam in his 20th hour of air combat or the fiasco of the Forrestal of which the truth may never be known except John McCain was very fast removed from the Forrestal the next day and I never did hear if the other pilots were flown to Saigon the next day to be debriefed
Corsi, typically, is full of crap.
I despise McCain’s behavior and antics as a Senator, but attacking his background as a POW is over the top. ADM James Stockdale, who commanded those POWs at the Hoa Loa prison said McCain served honorably while imprisoned there, having witnessed first-hand the behavior of McCain in captivity.
And I will hold the words and accounts of ADM Stockdale higher than anyone on the face of the earth on this subject.
Read for yourselves.. http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/26stoc.html (link may no longer work, but Google “Stockdale on McCain” to access it.)
November 26, 1999
John McCain in the Crucible
By JAMES B. STOCKDALE
CORONADO, Calif. — I am not surprised by reports that Senator John McCain’s political enemies have been spreading rumors that his famous temper is a sign of a broader “instability” caused by his imprisonment in Vietnam.
In fact, a few weeks ago I received a call from an old friend who is also close to the George W. Bush campaign soliciting comments on Mr. McCain’s “weaknesses.” As I told that caller, I think John McCain is solid as a rock.
And I consider it blasphemy to smudge the straight-arrow prisoner-of-war record of a man who was near death when he arrived at Hoa Loa prison 1967: both arms broken, left leg broken, left shoulder broken by a civilian with a rifle butt.
He was eventually taken to the same rat-infested hospital room I had occupied two years earlier, and, like me, he had surgery on his leg. By then the Vietnamese had discovered that his father was the ranking admiral in the Pacific Fleet, and he received an offer that, as far as I know, was made to no other American prisoner: immediate release, no strings attached. He refused, thereby sentencing himself to four more years in a cell.
There was a special cramped and hot privy-like structure in that Hanoi prison reserved for whichever American was causing the Vietnamese the most trouble. I was the first in the camp to be locked up in it, and I gave it the name Calcutta.
There was only room for one person at a time in the cage, and after a couple of months I was taken out and marched back to a regular cell. As I limped along, I sneaked a peek at my replacement: John McCain, hobbling along on his own bad leg.
As one of the few Americans who spent more than four years in solitary confinement during that war, I know that pride and self-respect lead to aggressiveness, and aggressiveness leads to a deep sense of joy when one is under pressure. This is hardly a character flaw.
The military psychiatrists who periodically examine former prisoners of war have found that the more resistant a man was to harsh treatment, the more emotionally stable he is likely to become later in life.
The troublemakers who endured long stretches in solitary, the men we called the tigers, are for the most part more in tune with themselves now than are those who chose the easier path of nonconfrontation, which made them “deserving” of cell mates. The psychiatrists tell us that many of those prisoners who chose a more docile existence missed out on the joy of “getting even” after release; some look back on their performances with regret.
The psychiatrists have it partly right, but the truth of imprisonment is best learned from the writings of men who have spent a lot of time in cells, like Dostoyevsky, Cervantes and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The last described his feeling of high-mindedness in his gulag writings:
“And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. . . .
And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: ‘Bless you, prison!’ “
I understand that, and so does John McCain.
The communists could destroy McCain if any of his reported POW tapes were released from their archives and the communists keep meticulous archives
Talk about a blackmail situation
While the subject matter of Corsi’s article pertains to cases of POWs left behind, I think it’s important to apply some perspective to the McCain-as-POW issue in general.
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