From Bill Hendon & John LeBoutillier, two former GOP Congressmen heavily involved in efforts to return Vietnam POWs home.
The setting:
...in early spring, 1992, the issue of live POWs had become, as McCain later described it, "white hot;" this not only because of intense public interest in the plight of the POWs, but also because Texas businessman and longtime POW advocate H. Ross Perot had entered the presidential race, and had done so amid press accounts that he thought President Bush was not doing enough to bring the POWs home. By late May Perot was in first place in the national polls, ahead of President Bush, who was in second place, and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Governor Bill Clinton, who was in third. What would the committee find? Might a ruling that 69% of the American people were right and that, in fact, there were live POWs still held half a world away throw the election to Perot? How could it not?
Given his wartime experiences as a POW in Vietnam, Sen. John McCain was by default the most powerful and influential member of the Select Committee. Members on both sides of the aisle deferred to his judgment; reporters hung on his every pronouncement. And so when McCain, his chief of staff Mark Salter and their allies on the Select Committee joined forces with top Bush administration officials to assail, ridicule, attack, discredit, photoshop, retouch, manipulate, massage and/or "cherry-pick" the intelligence in order to destroy its intelligence value and keep the matter of live POWs from becoming an issue in the 1992 election, the live POWs never had a chance.
McCain was in a unique position to help these men, and instead, he decided to sell them out to provide political cover to the first Bush.
The SIGINT – the half-dozen or so postwar intercepts of secret Pathet Lao radio transmissions where the PL were heard describing how, when, where and/or why they were holding and/or moving American POWs from one point to another inside their country - got the same treatment. When analyzed carefully by committee intelligence investigators and cross-checked with the HUMINT, it was clear these postwar radio intercepts alone collectively described the confinement and/or movement of well over 100 American POWs inside Laos. McCain’s and Salter’s ruling? Same as with the POWs described in the HUMINT, "nothing to any of it. All radio intercepts are false."
The full article goes on to describe satellite imagery Photoshopped after the fact to remove quite visible pleas for help.
Given this and McCain's support of the Military Commissions Act can someone please tell the traditional media to get a freakin' clue and stop acting like his POW experience makes him fit to lead? If anything, it's only served to clearly illustrate that the man is a spineless little troll who do anything that he believes will advance his personal agenda.
As LeBoutillier puts it:
John McCain could have saved these men but chose not to. For that reason - and because one can photoshop pleas for help out of desert sand and/or rocky, mountain terrain just as easily as one can photoshop them out of jungle terrain, fields and rice paddies - he must not be accorded the highest and most sacred of all honors - that of serving as Commander-in-Chief of America's armed forces.