How Long will you remain Uninformed about McCain?

Those of us who know the history of Islam from the time Muhammad fled Mecca to avoid an assassination plot and know the full record of John McCain’s collaboration with the enemy, grimace when we hear these people open their mouths. Millions have heard President Obama quote the “Holy Quran” and accidentally mention his Muslim faith. Do these Fox News talking heads live under a rock?

The whole Middle East was Christian for hundreds of years before Islam gobbled it up country by country. It is said that Muhammad himself began the tradition of beheading people by lopping off 54 heads. From the very beginning, Muslims gave infidels three choices, convert to Islam, pay a tax to Islam or die. Arabs were only given two choices, convert or die. That is why there are no non Muslim Arabs today. Can any of these brilliant talking heads EXPLAIN to me the difference between Islam and radical Islam? They cannot because there is no difference, period. Our very first battle after becoming a nation was with the Muslim Barbary Pirates on the Shores of Tripoli.  The Islamic plan for world domination is an open book for ANYBODY, even talking heads to read.

John McCain’s father was the Fleet Admiral in command of the Pacific Command including Vietnam. That’s why McCain was treated like royalty in the Navy. He arrived at the United States Naval Academy on a red carpet and basically dared them to flunk him out. Of course, nobody at Annapolis had the guts to flunk out the son of a Four Star Admiral. McCain graduated 894th out of 899 graduates. Typically about 30% of Annapolis grads become Navy and Marine pilots but only the cream of the crop get to fly jet fighters. Clearly, McCain wrote his own ticket as he checked out in fighters.  McCain’s father was not a shining star at the academy either but he graduated 19 from the bottom. At one point, McCain’s father had so many demerits he was at risk of not graduating; his partying and drinking was especially dangerous as it was taking place during Prohibition. Like father, like son except son never made Admiral.

McCain’s flying career was one disaster after another. McCain’s first crash was due to pilot error, and not, as McCain has stated, an engine failure. Then there was the 1967 USS Forrestal disaster that killed 134 and injured 161. It was the worst carrier fire since WWII and official documents differ from McCain’s own, widely accepted recollection. I have heard that McCain’s actions in doing a Hot Start cooked off the weapons on an aircraft behind his. It is not disputed that his aircraft was destroyed as he fled the deck without helping others. McCain admitted to “daredevil clowning” in an accident that damaged his aircraft but did not result in a crash. McCain crashed another aircraft when the engine failed, probably not his fault and he lost his jet when he was shot down over Hanoi. Some say he was flying too low when hit by anti-aircraft fire.

Many believe McCain was tortured by the enemy and suffered broken bones but that is simply not the case. When McCain ejected he broke a leg and an arm. The North Vietnamese had more of their own wounded than they could take care of so young McCain had to do some fast talking when he was captured. Somehow the Viet Cong learned immediately that McCain was the son of a top Admiral and would cooperate. McCain was taken to the best hospital in Hanoi for treatment and rehabilitation. No other POW was ever treated at that hospital.

It is widely reported that McCain made more than 32 propaganda tapes for the enemy and was interrogated by both Viet Cong and Soviet Agents. McCain denies that Soviets were present which contradicts what other POWs and the Vietnamese have said. Tracy E. Usry was a Special Investigator for the minority (Republican) staff on the select committee looking into the POW situation. McCain served on the committee and had a testy exchange with Usry in 1991 when the investigator testified that American POWs in Vietnam were interrogated by Soviet officers. McCain denied this even though witnesses ranging from fellow POWs to Vietnamese and Soviet veterans contradicted McCain. In 1999, as McCain was prepping for his first presidential run, a U.S. Veteran Dispatch, which may be the first to label McCain a “Manchurian Candidate” accused McCain of “declar[ing] his own personal war” on POW/MIA activists, including Ross Perot. It also accuses McCain of lobbying to have Usry and other investigators fired after the hearings. McCain, then completing his first term as a senator, had seemingly flip-flopped from understandable hatred of the Vietnamese Communists to pushing for improved relations while denigrating POW/MIA activists. McCain was known as the Hanoi Songbird by both his fellow POWs and the prison guards.

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, 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. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain’s role in it, even as the Republican Party made McCain’s military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn’t talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the U.S. prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon’s performance was an insider, Air Force Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon’s position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general’s briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war’s end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a Feb. 2, 1973 formal letter to Hanoi’s premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political conditions.” But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party “in accordance with its own constitutional provisions.” That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored—and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners—just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.

Some Veterans sought criminal charges against McCain and worked hard to expose him all their lives. Nixon pardoned McCain for unspecified activities. Some say McCain designed the air defense system for Hanoi that destroyed 60 US aircraft?

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,”suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios, and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying, “Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.” A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.

About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said, “This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington.” He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, “would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks.”

McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.

McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence—documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs’ sworn testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned—has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the “bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists.” He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “dime-store Rambos.”

Some of McCain’s fellow captives at Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi didn’t share his views about prisoners left behind. Before he died of leukemia in 1999, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter—a response to McCain’s stream of insults hurled at MIA activists. Guy wrote, “John, does this [the insults] include Senator Bob Smith [a New Hampshire Republican and activist on POW issues] and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were ‘last known alive’? Does this include some of your fellow POWs?”

It’s not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo—to try to break down other prisoners—and was broadcast over Hanoi’s state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain.

So why is the media so unaware or simply playing dumb about so many issues? There is no doubt that Russia has all the documents and videos about McCain’s traitorous activities. Had McCain become President he could have been held hostage to blackmail by Vietnam and Russia. Even as a Senator, is McCain overly nice to Russia and Vietnam as some of our POWs are surely still alive somewhere.  WHY IS INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM DEAD IN AMERICA?

Tags: Dana Perino, Fox News, General Tighe, Geraldo Rivera, Hanoi Songbird, Islam, John McCain, Juan Williams, Mecca, Megyn Kelly, MIA, POW, Soviet, Tran Van Quang, VETTING MCCAIN, Vietnam