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"Hero" John McCain
as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a
POW?
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counterpunch
Monday, April 21, 2008
John McCain’s been getting kid-glove treatment from
the press for years, ever since he wriggled free of the Keating
scandal and his profitable association – another collaboration,
you might say -- with the nation’s top bank swindler
in the 1980s. But nothing equals the astounding tact with
which his claque on the press bus avoids the topic of McCain’s
collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he’d
been shot down.
How McCain behaved when he was a prisoner is key. McCain
is probably the most unstable man ever to have got this close
to the White House. He’s one election away from it.
Republican senator Thad Cochrane has openly said he trembles
at the thought of an unstable McCain in the Oval Office with
his finger on the nuclear trigger.
What if a private memory of years of collaboration in his
prison camp gnaws at McCain, and bursts out in his paroxysms
of uncontrollable fury, his rantings about “gooks”
and his terrifying commitment to a hundred years of war in
Iraq. What if “the hero” knows he’s a phony?
Doug Valentine has written the definitive history of the Phoenix
Program in Vietnam. He knows about the POW experience. His
dad, an Army man, was captured by the Japanese and sent to
a POW camp in the Philippines for forced labor. Many of his
mates died. Doug wrote a marvelous book about it, The Hotel
Tacloban.
(Article continues below)
Now Valentine has picked up the unexploded bomb lying on
McCain’s campaign trail this year. As he points out,
he’s not the first. Rumors and charges have long swirled
around McCain’s conduct as a prisoner. Fellow prisoners
have given the lie to McCain’s claims. But Valentine
has assembled the dossier. It’s devastating.
Some excerpts from Valentine’s indictment.
“War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is
another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes
at the heart of McCain’s character. . .or lack thereof.
In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War
II, collaboration to that extent spells an automatic death
sentence.. . .The question is: What kind of collaborator
was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate
the Vietnamese for the rest of his life?
“Put it another way: how psychologically twisted
is McCain? And what actually happened to him in his POW
camp that twisted him? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was
it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up? Covering-up
can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking there in
his subconscious, waiting to explode. ”
“McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he
was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where
he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after
three or four days he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese
captors, “I’ll give you military information
if you will take me to the hospital ...
“His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW,
John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the
American military elite. . .The Vietnamese realized, this
poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy
was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that.
They were working him.”
“. . .two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital,
the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not ‘name
rank and serial number, or kill me’. as specified
by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific
military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier
on which he was based, the number of U.S. pilots that had
been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation,
as well as information about the location of rescue ships.”
“…McCain was held for five and half years.
The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism,
but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator…..McCain
cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three
years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of
the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier.
McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.
“This is the lesson of McCain’s
experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his
only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s
campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and,
in return, he danced to their tune. . .”
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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