CounterPunch Diary
"Hero" John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He
Was a POW?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
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.
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. We’re running it in our current
CounterPunch newsletter
and we strongly urge you to subscribe.
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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Finally, the campaigns of 1793 and 1794 set Clausewitz on the path of
recognizing war as a
political phenomenon. Wars, as everyone knew, were fought for a purpose
that was political,
or at least always had political consequences. Not as readily apparent
was the implication
that followed. If war was meant to achieve a political purpose, everything
that entered into
war — social and economic preparation, strategic planning, the conduct of
operations, the
use of violence on all levels — should be determined by this purpose, or
at least accord
with it. Even though soldiers had to acquire special expertise, and
function in what in some
respects was a separate world, it would be a denial of reality to allow
them to carry on
their bloody work undisturbed until an armistice brought their political
employer back into
the equation. Just as war and its institutions reflected their social
environment, so every
aspect of fighting should be suffused by its political impulse, whether
this impulse was
intense or moderate. The appropriate relationship between politics and war
occupied
Clausewitz throughout his life, but even his earliest manuscripts and
letters show his
awareness of their interaction.
The ease with which this link — always acknowledged in the abstract —
can be forgotten in
specific cases, and Clausewitz’s insistence that it must never be
overlooked, are
illustrated by his polite rejection toward the end of his life of a
strategic problem set by
the chief of the Prussian General Staff, in which every military detail of
the opposing
sides was spelled out, but no mention made of their political purpose. To
a friend who had
sent him the problem for comment, Clausewitz replied that it was not
possible to draft a
sensible plan of operations without indicating the political condition of
the states
involved, and their relationship to each other: ‘War is not an independent
phenomenon, but
the continuation of politics by different means. Consequently, the main
lines of every major
strategic plan are largely political in nature, and their political
character increases the
more the plan applies to the entire campaign and to the whole state. A war
plan results
directly from the political conditions of the two warring states, as well
as from their
relations to third powers. A plan of campaign results from the war plan,
and frequently - if
there is only one theater of operations - may even be identical with it.
But the political
element even enters the separate components of a campaign; rarely will it
be without
influence on such major episodes of warfare as a battle, etc. According to
this point of
view, there can be no question of a purely military evaluation of a great
strategic issue,
nor of a purely military scheme to solve it.’
Everyman’s Library, 1993 ISBN: 0679420436 On war /by Clausewitz, Carl
von, 1780-1831.
Knopf, 1993. From the introduction by Peter Paret, Pg7
_____________________________________________________________________
The U-2 is a jet-powered reconnaissance aircraft specially designed to fly
at high altitudes
(i.e., above 70,000 ft [21 km]). It was used during the late 1950s to
overfly the Soviet
Union, China, the Middle East, and Cuba; flights over the Soviet Union,
the primary mission
for which the plane was designed, ended in 1960 when a U-2 flown by CIA
pilot Gary Powers
was shot down over the Soviet Union. This event was a major political
embarrassment for the U.S.
http://www.espionageinfo.com/Te-Uk/U-2-Spy-Plane.html
Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev's reaction to the overflights which
were discovered
just before a summit conference in Paris with President Eisenhower: "It
was as though the
Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting" .
. ."How could
they count on us to give them a helping hand if we allowed ourselves to be
spat upon without
so much as a murmur of protest?" The only solution was to demand a formal
public apology
from Eisenhower and a guarantee that no more overflights would take place
. . .
But the apology Khrushchev was looking for would not come. Despite
having trespassed
on the Soviet Union for the past four years with scores of flights by both
U-2's and heavy
bombers, the old general still could not say the words, it was just not in
him. . . A time
bomb had exploded, prematurely ending the summit conference. . .
Back in Washington, the mood was glum. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee was
leaning toward holding a closed door investigation into the U-2 incident .
. . In public,
Eisenhower maintained a brave face. He "heartily approved" of the
congressional probe and
would 'of course fully cooperate,' he quickly told anyone who asked. But
in private he was
very troubled. For weeks he had tried to head off the investigation. His
major concern was
that his own personal involvement in the overflights would surface,
especially the May Day
disaster. Equally, he was very worried that details of the dangerous
bomber overflights
would leak out. The massed overflight may in fact, have been one of the
most dangerous
actions ever approved by a president.
pg. 51-55 ~Body of Secrets; Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security
Agency
James Bamford
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of
human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims,
have been born of
earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing, and for the time
being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does
nothing. If there is
no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and
yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want
rain without
thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may
be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and
it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and
you have found out the
exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and
these will continue
till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The
limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of
these ideas, Negroes
will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as
they submit to those
devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men
may not get all they
pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we
ever get free from
the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.
We must do this by
labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the
lives of others."
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
Frederick Douglass, 1857
- - - - - -> More political discussion continues at
http://www.politicsusaweb.com/
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