At times, I've lamented here that we just can't seem to get past Vietnam in so many ways. The perceived wound to our national pride and horrible misadventure that was our presence there reverberates 30+ years later, and McCain, during his presidential campaign, has used his POW "get out of a tight spot" card freely throughout. I thought it was craven and cowardly that he would use his status in this manner to avoid answering questions about his behavior or cast his opponents as substandard. Sydney H. Schanberg's investigative piece in The Nation only confirms my opinion, and also offers (to me at least), the capstone reasons that McCain is not fit to be president. In his writing, Schanberg posits that McCain actively worked to deny release of information from government records that could have ended the grieving and questioning of families of POW/MIA in Vietnam by sponsoring legislation and government policy that did so.
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I'm a military vet, and McCain's position on veteran's issues sickens me, but this just really takes the cake.
From Schanberg's Why Has John McCain Blocked Info on MIAs?
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 people would logically imagine to be 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 McCain has made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also 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--probably hundreds--of the US prisoners held in 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.
The article describes in detail how McCain accomplished this obfuscation, and in the interest of copyright protection, I won't duplicate those here, so please do read the article.
Some low points of McCain's behavior:
*McCain blocked the release of classified intelligence data that indicated at least twenty airmen survived crashes in Vietnam and attempted to communicate with US personnel following the crash via electronic devices. These communications were coded and specific to each of the airmen involved.
*McCain wrote and pushed through legislative amendments that barred the release of POW/MIA information that contained secrets (effectively anything of value that could indicate a POW/MIAs status).
*In another legislative amendment McCain wrote, he stripped from law criminal penalties for governmental employees and military personnel who actively hid POW/MIA information from those who sought it out.
*McCain bullied a survivor of a POW testifying before a Senate committee on POW's to the point of tears.
*McCain calls those investigating MIA/POWs "MIA hobbyists," "hoaxers," "charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos."
McCain justifies his actions as being sensitive to the grief of those who lost family in Vietnam, and his actions have actively denied those people access to information that could actually help them end that grief by providing them conclusive information as to the finality of their relatives status.
Why?
Schanberg puts forth a possible explanation, linking McCain's active denial efforts to hide his embarrassment at confessing to war crimes under torture. I don't fault McCain for this, torture is awful and unbearable (and McCain's acquiessence to it's current practice by US forces is inexplicable given the circumstances). But it appears he's let his personal experience and unresolved shame get in the way of the lives of others.
Schanberg also brings forward a revelation from McCain's book Faith of My Father's, in which McCain writes of his two suicide attempts due to the shame he felt upon succumbing to torture and the possibility that his father would learn of his confession.
McCain obviously lacks the character to be president. Schanberg finds fault in his actions, but also finds fault in the actions of the media, who have turned the other way and not reported these actions. McCain, in so many ways, is not a friend to the military, and is psychologically incapable of being president.