This question still lingers after a 1997 "60 Minutes" interview with Mike Wallace.
Here is the relevant excerpt of the 1997 interview of Senator John McCain on "60 Minutes" conducted by Mike Wallace which raises this still unanswered question.
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WALLACE: (Voiceover) People who know McCain will say he can hold a grudge. He also has a legendary temper. But if McCain can be hard on his friends and even harder on his enemies, he can also be very hard on himself.
Sen. McCAIN: I m--made serious, serious mistakes and did things wrong when I was in prison, OK?
WALLACE: What did you do wrong in prison?
Sen. McCAIN: I wrote a confession. I was guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people. I intentionally bombed women and children.
WALLACE: And you did it because you were being tortured...
Sen. McCAIN: I...
WALLACE: ...and you'd reached the end of the line.
Sen. McCAIN: Yes. But I should have gone further. I should have--I--I never believed that I would--that I would break, and I did.
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While I am sickened by the horror of any torture and certainly that which Senator McCain endured, this exchange still leaves an essential, though admittedly very impolite, question unanswered.
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Did McCain, in fact, bomb areas with civilian populations and,specifically, did McCain ever drop Napalm in Viet Nam?
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In other words, this interview still leaves unanswered the question of whether McCain ‘confessed’ to an untruth as a result of being tortured or did Senator McCain admit to a truth albeit coerced into the open by torture. I believe the electorate has a need and a right to know.
For me, the issue is not whether McCain ‘broke’ or not but what he actually did on his flight assignments while in Viet Nam.