McCain fought when his country asked. This alone makes him a hero! But in retrospect (too easy a position) his country was asking him to fight in an unjust war. A lot of guys fell for this line from our friends in DC - who did not bear arms. Hero today is much more difficult to define than it was 50 years ago. JFK was not the hero he is made out to be but he did bear arms. John "Live Shot" Kerry did bear arms but there was nothing heroic about him (who the fuck goes to war with their own film crew?) Kerry evaluated everything based on Kerry's needs and wants.

BTW, the next person who thanks me for my service should know I did not bear arms for them or the U.S.

Wars are great opportunities to kill nice people for lousy people.

 

McShame never had to answer for any of his misdeeds.... The man lived a privileged life.

His free pass started long before he was shot down or became a US Senator....

The USS Forrestal

In 1967, the USS Forrestal suffered near catastrophic damage from a fire that raged on-board for nearly two days. John McCain was stationed on the Forrestal at the time and was quite likely responsible for the fire that killed 134 sailors and injured 62 others.

Hot dog pilots were well known for their "wet-starts," a process which allows fuel to build up in the engine before hitting the plane's start switch. The result of the wet-start is a long flame erupting from the tail of the plane. It was done simply for effect, a showy procedure meant to draw attention to the pilot.

On June 29, 1967, John McCain is alleged to have used a wet-start to "shake up" a pilot in the plane behind him. The result was a fired rocket, dropped bombs and a fire that raged for nearly two days. 134 sailors lost their lives and another 62 were badly injured.

McCain never had to answer for the incident. His father and grandfather were Navy admirals with a great deal of sway.

Three months after the Forrestal disaster McCain was shot down over North Vietnam. You know the rest of the story.

 

Clearing The Record On John McCain’s Record Of Service In The Navy
August 29, 2018 Richard Cameron



by Richard Cameron



Due to the proliferation of fictitious accounts of the late Senator John McCain’s actions and experiences while serving in the United States Navy during the Vietnam conflict, I made the decision as Editor in Chief of National Compass, that we must correct the record regarding the most frequently cited episodes – his role during a catastrophe that took place on the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Forrestal, his time as prisoner of the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi, and allegations that he was a supporter of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The U.S.S. Forrestal Episode
Let’s begin with the widely disseminated allegation that John McCain, Navy Pilot on the U.S.S. Forrestal, was instrumental in a series of events that resulted in a massive fire on the carrier – and consequentially, 134 fatalities.

The fictional account blaming McCain for the inferno, appears to have originated from noted Libertarian and Ron Paul protege of the alt-right net, Lew Rockwell. Whatever might be said of Rockwell’s various other historical revisions, this one is so lacking in documentation, citations and a basic accurate understanding of the operations of a 1967 era Aircraft Carrier, that it casts a shadow on most anything else he claims to comport with reality.

There have been, at this point, dozens, perhaps hundreds of regurgitations of the accusation of McCain’s involvement in the tragedy, but here is a generic paraphrase of the many similar versions in existence on the internet:

In 1967, the USS Forrestal suffered near catastrophic damage from a fire that raged on-board for nearly two days. John McCain was stationed on the Forrestal at the time and was quite likely responsible for the fire that killed 134 sailors and injured 62 others. Hot dog pilots were well known for their “wet-starts,” a process which allows fuel to build up in the engine before hitting the plane’s start switch. The result of the wet-start is a long flame erupting from the tail of the plane.

It was done simply for effect, a showy procedure meant to draw attention to the pilot.
On June 29, 1967, John McCain is alleged to have used a wet-start to “shake up” a pilot in the plane behind him. The result was a fired rocket, dropped bombs and a fire that raged for nearly two days. 134 sailors lost their lives and another 62 were badly injured. McCain never had to answer for the incident. His father and grandfather were Navy admirals with a great deal of sway.

That is the widespread contention. What actually did happen on July 29, 1967 on-board the U.S.S. Forrestal?

The Official Report from the Judge Advocate General
According to the official report dated 19 September 1967 from the office of the Judge Advocate General (JAG), to the Chief Of Naval Operations, none of the above account from Rockwell, is confirmed. Note that in this transcript of the original, names of the C.O.s – (Commanding Officers) have been assigned a “(b) (6) redaction”, which according to the Pentagon, is a redaction which “applies to information release of which would constitute an unwarranted invasion of the personal privacy of other individuals.” In the declassified copy of the report, released August 21, 1969, the basic outline of events is as follows:

The catastrophic fire aboard the Forrestal resulted from a chain of events starting at about 1051 local time on 29 July 1967. The Forrestal had been on Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin since 24 July and had been launching airstrikes against North Vietnam since 25 July. Other carriers in the area were the Oriskany and Bon Homme Richard. The Intrepid was on route Yankee Station and the Constellation was moored in Subic Bay (Phillippines).

Captain __(b) (6) , USN, was commanding Forrestal; Real Admiral ___(b) (6) , USN, was commanding the Task Group comprised of Forrestal and Destroyers Rupertos and Tucker. Commander __(b) (6) , USN, commanded Fighter Squadron Eleven, which was assigned to Air Wing Seventeen at the time. 12 A-4, 12 F-4 and 3 A-6 aircraft were on the deck ready for a launch to begin at about 1100 (hours). Each airplane was variously loaded with bombs, missiles, rockets and 20MM ammunition.

A preliminary launch of on KA-3B and one EA-1F had been made at 1050. Launches of another KA-3B and one E-2A were in progress. Three KA-5C aircraft were on the starboard side of the flight deck, abaft (toward) the island. A-4E #405, piloted by Lieutenant Commander __(b) (6) , USN, was the third aircraft forward of the stern on the port side of the flight deck. An F-4, #110, was spotted on the extreme starboard quarter of the flight deck, headed inboard at approximately a 45 degree angle to the ship’s head.

Lieutenant Commander (b) (6) , USN, was pilot; Lieutenant (Junior Grade), (b) (6) , USN, was pre-flighting the rear cockpit. Eight crewmen were engaged in checking ordnance and assisting in starting and otherwise readying the plane for launch. External electrical power was being supplied to the airplane in connection with starting the starboard engine.

Sermisedly (sic) due to a combination of material deficiencies and team operational procedures affording less than (optimal?) emphasis on safety, in the course of switching from externally supplied electrical power to the internal power system of the F-4, sufficient electric current reached one of three launchers on the port inboard wing station to fire a ZUNI rocket.

The rocket crossed the flight deck and struck A-4 #405 some 100 feet away, rupturing the full 400 gallon fuel tank on the A-4 and igniting the jet fuel. A fragment punctured the centerline external fuel tank of another A-4 just aft of the jet blast deflector of catapult #3. Fuel from this tank poured on deck and was ignited. The burning fuel spread aft, fanned by 32 knots of wind from 360 degrees relative and by exhaust of at least three jets forward.

Fire quarters, then general quarters were sounded at 1052 and 1053. An AN-H65 1000 lb. Bomb fell to the deck from A-4 #405, came to rest in a pool of burning jet fuel, split and was observed to be burning brightly. Within one and one thirds minutes after initiation of the fire, the first hose began to play salt water on the forward boundary of the fire. Some fourteen seconds later, a bomb exploded on the flight deck with 35 personnel in close proximity.

This explosion decimated two hose teams and carried 27 other casualties, plus spreading the fire to three A-4 aircraft spotted across the stern. Nine seconds later, a second bomb exploded at the after end of the flight deck even more violently than the first, hurling bodies and debris as far as the bow.

The second major explosion extended the fire along 7 F-4s and toward the 3 RA-5Cs on the starboard side abaft the island. Further, the second explosion interrupted effective fire fighting efforts on the flight deck. Five other major explosions followed, precluding resumption of effective fire fighting for some five minutes. During that five minutes however, jettisoning of ordnance, care of the injured and preparations for further fire fighting were carried on in the shelter of the island.

Some 40,000 gallons of jet fuel aboard burning aircraft on the flight deck, fed the flames. Fuel flowed over the sides and stern, setting fires on the sides, sponsons, fantail and in Hanger Bay 3. The force of bombs exploding on the flight deck penetrated to Hanger Bay3, starting fires on the 03, 02 and 01 decks aft. The force of the explosions killed some fifty sleeping night check crew personnel and others for a total of 91 killed in the after areas of the ship.

The report, in its entirety, goes on to detail the fire fighting and damage control efforts and summarizes that 134 sailors were dead or missing and 161 sustained varying degrees of injury. It also contains an exhaustive definition and description of all of the systems that were a factor in the tragic chain of events.

The JAG report attributes “poor and outdated doctrinal and technical documentation of ordnance and aircraft equipment and procedures, evident at all levels of command” as contributing causes of the accidental rocket firing, which “was the first event in the catastrophic chain”.

The more exhaustive version of the report, a 7,500-page “Manual of the Judge Advocate General Basic Final Investigative Report Concerning the Fire on Board the USS Forrestal (CVA-59)”, states in its above the line summary that, “A review of the voluminous material contained in the Report of Investigation establishes the central fact that a ZUNI rocket was inadvertently fired from an F-4 aircraft (#110) and struck the external fuel tank of an A-4 aircraft (#405)…”.

It’s worth considering a few things here. The pilot of A-4 #405, was later identified as Lt. Commander Fred D. White. The findings of the report do not point to any specific wrongdoing or negligence on the part of either the aviators or the crew on the flight deck. Even with the redactions of the named fliers, it is clear that they are incidental to the system failures and in no way were they the cause of them. That is true of John McCain.

The ‘Wet Start’ fallacy
There were no “antics” referenced in the Navy’s narrative of the event, by McCain or anyone. There is no mention anywhere in the report of any pilot “wet starting” or attempting to wet start a jet. One expert on the incident, Gregory A. Freeman, interviewed surviving crew members in order to flesh out the specifics of the official report. His research resulted in a book, “Sailors To The End”. Freeman strongly disputes the claims about McCain’s actions on July 29, 1967.

McCain felt a huge impact as the Zuni rocket tore through his plane on the right side and exited on the left side, ripping open his fuel tank with four hundred gallons of JP5 jet fuel. … The jet fuel was ignited soon by fragments of burning rocket propellant, but there was a delay of a second or so.

Freeman specifically addresses the “wet start” fallacy, stating:

One incorrect but widely quoted theory has him triggering the Zuni missile with the exhaust of his own plane by “wet-starting” – deliberately dumping fuel into the afterburner before starting in order to shoot a large flame from the tail of the aircraft. This is a preposterous notion. For one thing, the tail of McCain’s plane was pointed over the side of the carrier and away from other planes at the time, and the F4 Phantom fighter that fired the missile was facing McCain’s plane from the opposite side of the deck.

This illustration – (courtesy of U.S.S. Forrestal researcher J.M. Caiella), recreating the photo images of the overhead view of the Forrestal, demonstrates the orientation of the Navy jets on the flight deck.



Freeman, posting on the book’s landing page, strongly disputes any notion that McCain was in any way responsible for the accident. “McCain was never suspected of causing the fire because investigators determined immediately that the rocket misfired from the other side of the flight deck.”

Fact Check.org, following their initial review of the claims regarding the Forrestal incident, was contacted by a pilot with extensive knowledge of the jet McCain was flying:

A former military pilot messaged us to point out an even more convincing reason why the “wet start” story must be false. The A-4 Skyhawk did not come equipped with an afterburner in the first place. We’ve confirmed that elsewhere. According to the Military Analysis Network site maintained by the Federation of American Scientists, the A-4 was powered by a “Single, Pratt & Whitney, J-52-P-408A non-afterburning, turbojet engine.” The manufacturer’s description of the aircraft also describes the powerplant as “One 11,187-pound-thrust P&W J52-P408 engine,” with no mention of an afterburner.

Let that sink in. There was no possible way any Navy pilot – in this case, Lt. Commander John McCain – could have “wet started” an A-4 Skyhawk.

But let’s just for the sake of speculation, suppose that McCain was clever enough to cause such an effect despite the known capabilities of the aircraft – as you have seen, causing anything to ignite, much less a Zuni missile on a jet on the opposite side of the flight deck, would have been a physical impossibility. Why? Because the tail of McCain’s A-4 jet was pointed away from, not toward the deck area of the Forrestal.

This is not speculation. The History Channel aired film footage (called PLAT footage) of the arrangement of the jets on the flight line on the Forrestal, so you can verify this fact visually. As to the statements about “reports by witnesses” confirming the fictional account so widely in circulation – no witnesses have ever been cited. However, in the preparation of the JAG Final Investigative Report, over 100 witnesses were interviewed by investigators. Not one of them recalled pilot misconduct on the part of Lt. McCain or any other pilots.

McCain had a brush with death during the incident. While he was exiting the cockpit, his flight suit was on fire and he sustained moderate injuries from flying shrapnel resulting from the ordnance that exploded.



Senator McCain himself, was interviewed about the Forrestal incident. Recalling the moments during the explosion and the fire that ensued, McCain told the Arizona Republic in 2007, “I still remember joining other aviators as we escaped our aircraft; jumping to the burning flight deck below and rolling through burning jet fuel to avoid the heat and flame. I still remember joining other aviators as we escaped our aircraft; jumping to the burning flight deck below and rolling through burning jet fuel to avoid the heat and flame.”

In the book, “Faith of My Fathers”, McCain said of the heroics of the crew managing the nearly uncontrollable blaze, “They fought the inferno with a tenacity usually reserved for hand-to-hand combat. They fought it all day and well into the next, and they saved the Forrestal.”

Documented facts versus unsubstantiated rumors and lies
McCain’s critics who persist in disseminating the worthless and dishonorable accusations, dismiss the findings of the JAG report, asserting that the report was a “cover up” intended to protect Lt. Commander McCain.

Common sense repudiates this. How reasonable is it to believe that the Navy, whether McCain’s father was an admiral or not, would concoct and publish a narrative of the fire, the purpose of which, was to shield a man from the consequences of intentional neglect that claimed the lives of 134 Navy personnel?

Beyond that, the persons making these claims cannot bring forth a single, solitary individual who was aboard the U.S.S. Forrestal that day that will corroborate these indecent charges. Not one. So, your choice is to believe the attestation of witnesses who provided sworn testimony for the report – or the claims of persons, who for purely political reasons, found it expedient to smear John McCain’s reputation and service record.

The ‘Songbird McCain’ allegations
Dealing with the second of the evil trifecta of false narratives about John McCain, is comparatively a much simpler affair, due to the fact that there are not many moving parts to it. John McCain has been slurred with the title, “Songbird McCain” or alternately, “Hanoi Hilton Songbird”. It is alleged by the purveyors of this attack on McCain’s loyalty to his country, that McCain:

• was not tortured while in captivity in North Vietnam
• provided the North Vietnamese officials with sensitive information voluntarily and not under duress
• participated in the production of propaganda recordings

Let’s analyze these contentions. First, can it be credibly stated that John McCain was not tortured by his Vietcong captors? The answer is a flat, no. The superintendent of the prison camp, Col. Tran Trang Duyt acknowledges that McCain was severely tortured and admired McCain for his endurance, emotional intelligence and resilience. That statement despite the fact that the official policy of Vietnam has been that the government does not admit mistreatment of captives during the war.

However, the fiction peddlers rely on the statements of one of Duyt’s subordinates, made in 2008. In an interview with Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Nguyen Tien Tran, while admitting that conditions for enemy prisoners were “tough, though not inhuman”, added the claim that, “We never tortured McCain. On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded.”

Tran, when asked how a 36 year old would leave prison with prematurely gray hair, asserted that it had nothing to do with harsh or brutal treatment, but rather that, “It’s that in prison you think too much.”

That is it. That is the only shred of testimony that all of the surrounding allegations are based on. You can decide for yourself whether this low level prison official is credible or not, but there is a fundamental problem with his statement. There is a large body of evidence to the contrary.

McCain was not alone in the POW prison. There were 600 other men held captive. None of them have stepped forward and supported professions of non-torture. Just two prisoners have made statements that have been lifted from their proper context in order to bolster the false story line. Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, told the Phoenix New Times in 1999, that;

“Between the two of us, it’s our belief, and to the best of our knowledge, that no prisoner was beaten or harmed physically in that camp [known as “The Plantation”],” Larson says. “. . . My only contention with the McCain deal is that while he was at The Plantation, to the best of my knowledge and Ted’s knowledge, he was not physically abused in any way. No one was in that camp. It was the camp that people were released from.”

Both men admit that they have no direct knowledge of what was done to John McCain in Hanoi – and “The Plantation”– a former French military compound, was not where McCain sustained the intense mistreatment that violated every provision of the Geneva Convention. That prison was the Hua Lò complex, nicknamed by American captives, the “Hanoi Hilton”.

Ted Sampley – an author of one of the notorious flyers accusing McCain of cooperating with the enemy, and a deranged sociopath with a long history of unconscionable behavior, was also interviewed by the Phoenix New Times. The article summarizes the magazines’ assessment of Sampley’s claims:

Sampley offers no credible proof of these allegations, other than quotes from unnamed former POWs and suggestions that the Vietnamese still have film of McCain’s activities in the prison camps.
Sampley, consistent with his personal history, without a trace of verification, accuses McCain as being “an agent of the Vietnamese”. Does this sound anything like the sort of hyperventilated fabrications being trafficked by the “Q anon” cult?

Rolling Stone magazine published a highly politicized article on McCain in 2008, just three weeks before the presidential election, in which they collated a narrative painting McCain as a rudderless party boy and womanizer without any firm objectives during his career as an officer and pilot. No one really disputes that outline – not even John McCain himself. But even with the hit piece, the author of the article, Tim Dickenson, states clearly:

There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain’s broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.

As to the matter of John McCain providing valuable information to the enemy – such is not the case. There was, despite the limitless innuendos in circulation – no actionable intelligence in anything McCain told his captors. In fact, consistent with one of the key facets of McCain’s well known objections to the use of torture to extract intelligence from a detainee – McCain, under physical coercion, fed his captors false information.

The factual data given, was somewhat beyond the strict limits of what captured servicemen are permitted to comment on, based on the Military Code of Conduct (name, rank, serial number) but the final judgment on McCain by the Navy and the Pentagon, found no grounds for discipline.

The price paid for resisting
McCain internalized his failure to maintain strict adherence to the code, “I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine,” McCain wrote in a first-person account published in US News & World Report in May 1973.

John McCain paid the price for not complying with the violent coercion of the North Vietnamese. The interrogators broke bones repeatedly. They put him through repeated episodes of near starvation. McCain never gave his captors the home run in terms of a confession they were looking to exploit for propaganda. Prison authorities beat some of the captives to death as an example to McCain and other high value prisoners – and McCain witnessed some of them. One particular of many interrogations spanned 96 hours, with McCain drifting in and out of consciousness.

By contrast, Donald Trump, the man who notoriously said, referring to John McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said sarcastically. “I like people that weren’t captured” – was living the life of a playboy in Manhattan, with his dad’s limo at his beckon call and a quarter of a million in pocket money at his disposal. While McCain was being starved, Trump dined lavishly at New York City’s finest eateries. When hack medical personnel were inflicting permanent injuries on John McCain’s body, Trump was partying at “Le Club” – the Studio 54 of its era.


Young, rich, draft dodging Donald clubbing in NYC in the 70s, while John McCain was staying in the exclusive Hanoi Hilton
McCain also was consciously aware of the situation he was in with regards to the offer by the North Vietnamese government to be released early. “I knew that every prisoner the Vietnamese tried to break, those who had arrived before me and those who would come after me, would be taunted with the story of how an admiral’s son had gone home early, a lucky beneficiary of America’s class-conscious society.”

Historian David Foster Wallace, describes the emotional Catch-22 of McCain’s dilemma:

“Try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? If so, would you have refused to go?”

Robert Timberg, who interviewed several POWs while writing the biography, “John McCain: An American Odyssey”, told reporters that. “I’ve never known of any occasion in which Sen. McCain provided the North Vietnamese with anything of value.”

Witnesses to the truth
McCain’s fellow POW’s don’t concur with the unsubstantiated rumors and allegations regarding McCain. Tom McNish, a prisoner who was in the neighboring cell to McCain’s at the “Hanoi Hilton”, says about the other men, including McCain – “If you’ve walked through a fire together like that, you’ve shared an experience very few people can relate to.”

Many of the men who knew McCain from the years at the prison, had laudatory views of McCain’s tenacity and ability to persevere in the circumstances they found themselves in. This testimony, from George “Bud” Day, is particularly compelling and credibly dispels the falsehoods in circulation about McCain as Prisoner of War;


Orson Swindle, one of McCain’s cellmates, recalls, “He was a dear friend; I loved him like a brother. We came home [from Vietnam] and we had a long friendship.”

Another American POW in an adjacent cell, Paul Galanti, “He came within a heartbeat of dying. He was put in a full plaster body cast and he couldn’t take it off for six months. His body just was becoming unglued.”

Major General John Borling, also a prisoner for six years, describes the maintenance of camaraderie among the detainees:

“We were crouched in the dark or dull light often in conditions of climate that were either hot or cold, but we were together. For many of us this was something — to be able to interact freely with other human beings. This was our attempt to stay sane stay competitive, stay reinforcing one to another. John was highly contributory to that.”
Borling, as do others, say that they have at times, had policy disagreements with McCain, yet – Borling says, “When push comes to shove not only [did] he have my back and I’ve got his, but he’s got the back of the country in mind. I’ve always regarded him as a great American citizen. America’s better for his presence.”

John McCain, as a footnote, did not retire from service in 1973. He flew for eight more years and commanded an A-7 squadron in Jacksonville, Florida until 1981.

 

Snopes

A catastrophic fire aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in 1967 that killed 134 sailors and injured 161 was caused by reckless behavior on the part of then-Navy pilot John McCain.

Rating

False

Beginning in August 2017 and well into the fall, a series of pro-Trump fake news web sites took aim at the reputation of Trump administration critic Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) by regurgitating an old, fabricated account of what caused a catastrophic fire aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in 1967. The naval disaster killed 134 sailors and injured 161—one of those survivors was McCain himself, who sustained minor injuries...

Copied word-for-word from a blog post originally published in 2008, the text is an unholy mixture of inaccuracies and outright lies. For starters, the Associated Press’ FOIA that the post references actually revealed a slew of the military’s top awards and commendations. The post also asserts that “27 died” in the fire (there were 134 fatalities, in point of fact) and that the incident occurred on 19 July 1967 (it actually took place on 29 July). It further asserts that eyewitnesses and investigators evinced the belief that the explosion and fire were caused by McCain showing off by “wet-starting” his A-4 Skyhawk aircraft. (In pilot lingo, “wet-starting” a jet engine refers to flooding its combustion chamber with extra fuel before ignition, which usually results in a loud bang and/or plume of flame on start-up.)

There are no eyewitness accounts in the official record supporting that version of events, however. According to the U.S. Navy’s exhaustive investigation into the incident, the findings of which are summarized below in an excerpt from an article by Commander Hank Stewart, USN (Ret.), a naval engineer, the fire was actually caused by the accidental firing of an Mk-32 “Zuni” rocket as a result of an electrical power surge during preparations for a strike against a target in North Vietnam...

U.S. Navy investigators found that the carrier personnel were inadequately trained or equipped to cope with such an emergency at the time, oversights which have since been corrected with improved vessel design, damage control procedures, and equipment...

Sources

• Madsen, Wayne. “Navy Releases McCain’s Records.”
  Wayne Madsen Report. 19 May 2008.
  
  
• McCain, John and Mark Salter. Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir.
  New York: Random House, 1999. ISBN 9780399590894 (pp. 177-8).
  
  
• Moon, Troy. “Heroism Recalled 50 Years After Deadly Fire Aboard USS Forrestal.”
  Pensacola News Journal. 29 July 2017.
  
  
• Stewart, Hank. “How the 1967 Fire on USS Forrestal Improved Future U.S. Navy Damage Control Readiness.”
  The Sextant. 28 July 2017.
  
  
• Yates, Teddy. “USS Forrestal — Trial by Fire.”
  The Sextant. 29 July 2015.
  
  
• U.S. Dept. of the Navy. “Investigation of Forrestal Fire.”
  
  
  

 

I am waiting for the attempt to prove that ab A-4 Skyhawk could have caused the issue by a "wet start" as the Trumpies claim to defame McCain. Oh please oh toothless wonders amaze me with your bullshit.

 

McCain’s Deathbed Secret Has Come To Light About What He Did To Men He Was In Captivity With

The biggest traitor in Washington D.C. might be none other than Senator John McCain. Disturbing information continues to emerge about his direct ties to Muslim terrorists and the London bomber, and how he’s owned and funded by Saudi terrorists and George Soros. Ever since Trump got into office, McCain was doing everything in his power to subvert the President of the United States, which is a federal crime. As McCain continued to garner the sympathy of many Americans who still falsely believe he’s a Vietnam “war hero,” it’s time that we finally set the record straight about the unbelievable things McCain did during his time in the military.
It’s important to note that due to McCain’s familial ties to high ranking Naval commanders during his time in service (his father and grandfather were both four-star admirals), the majority of McCain’s massive catastrophes and scandals in the Navy were completely buried, and his military records sealed.

We reported several weeks ago how John McCain was solely responsible for the horrifying atrocity aboard the USS Forrestal Aircraft Carrier on July 31 1967, where McCain’s cocky maneuver of doing a “wet start” of his plane would go on to kill 134 sailors, in the deadliest loss of life the Navy has ever seen. But because of McCain’s daddy being a 4-star admiral, the entire incident was buried, and the Navy never officially put blame on anyone for the tragedy. Astonishingly, McCain would not only be allowed to continue serving in the Navy, but would go on to be responsible for the deaths of numerous other men, in a scandal that has been successfully buried for decades.

Three months after the bloody tragedy on the USS Forrestal Aircraft Carrier, John McCain was sent on a bombing mission over Hanoi in October of 1967 when he was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese, where he’s go on to be a prisoner of war until 1973. After being released from captivity, McCain would use his POW story and veteran status to rise to political prominence, where his image as a “Vietnam war hero” would go on to propel him to be elected as a United States Senator.

John “Songbird” McCain is welcomed back as a hero by President Nixon

But a “hero” is the last thing that John McCain was or will ever be. What most people don’t know is the massive government scandal that McCain helped hide, as he’d go on for decades to tirelessly work to bury stunning information about American prisoners over in Vietnam who unlike him, didn’t return home. Using his position as a senator, McCain would be behind the scenes quietly pushing and sponsoring federal laws that would keep the most damning information about our POWs buried through classified documents.
The secrets that John McCain has sought to hide about Vietnam POWs are massive. Despite sworn testimony by two Defense Secretaries of “the men left behind” in Vietnam, McCain continued to push the massive lie that there were no survivors, much to the horror of POW families who were frantic to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones. Enormous amounts of government documents indicate that hundreds of prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when President Nixon signed the peace treaty in January of 1973. Only 591 in Hanoi were released, among them, Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.


After the war, President Nixon promised the Vietnamese a $3.25 billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political conditions.” But there was a catch to this promise, where Nixon had included that Congress would have to approve these funds; approval that never happened. Furious that the American government had double-crossed them, Nanoi decided to keep the remaining hundreds of American prisoners, because their ransom money (post war provisions) never came.

CIA whistleblowers said that the government wanted to keep these missing men a secret, because as more years passed, it became more and more difficult for the government to admit that it knew about the prisoners that were left behind. Years later, CIA officials admitted that their intel indicated that the remaining POWs were eventually executed by the Vietnamese, as they were no longer useful bargaining chips.

After the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office was publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers that there were in fact still men in Vietnam being held as POWs, the pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the government in 1991 to create the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, to investigate these allegations. John Kerry was made chairman of the board, and McCain became its most pivotal member. In the end, this committee became part of the debunking machine, and McCain would become paramount to sweeping the entire atrocity of these forgotten POWs under the rug.

But what people don’t know is John McCain’s vital role in keeping this story about these abandoned POWs hidden from the American public, as a traitor who completely turned his back on his brothers-in-arms who had remained in captivity by the Vietnamese.

In the 1990s, legislation was proposed to Congress called “the Truth Bill” that would’ve provided complete transparency about these prisoners and missing men. But the Pentagon and McCain bitterly opposed the bill, and it went nowhere. People were predictably outraged over the bill being shot down, so in an effort for McCain and crooked Pentagon officials to cover their asses, the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared several months later.

This bill eventually became law in 1991, but would only create a bureaucratic maze, making the truth for the families completely impossible to discover. The provisions of the law explicitly states why the Pentagon and other agencies are justified for not releasing information about prisoners held in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, and McCain and Kerry would work together to bury the last renaming evidence on the missing men.

The American Conservative reported on the other ways McCain screwed over the POWs, by authoring a crippling amendment to the Missing Service Personnel Act, that stripped away the obligations that commanders were previously held to of speedily searching for missing men and reporting these incidents to the Pentagon. The American Conservative reported:

“McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying, ‘Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.’ A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.”

“About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said, ‘This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington.” He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, “would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks.’”

“McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.”

What’s even more sick is how McCain demonized the two Pentagon chiefs’ sworn testimonies who testified under oath about the men left behind, while insisting that all the evidence — to include documents, witnesses, satellite photos — be completely buried. He would go on to paint the entire story as an “unpatriotic myth” calling the testimony of anyone coming forward Vietnam’s POW’s the “bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists.” To this day, McCain regularly vilifies those who try to get their hands on these classified documents (that he’s worked for decades to conceal) as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists,” and "dime-store Rambos.”

Ironically, the very same man who who for decades has been propped up and hailed a POW war hero and crusader for the interests of other POWs, is the very same man responsible for their deaths. It’s absolutely sick how this man, despite his murdering and treasonous and crooked antics for decades, is to this day regarded as a “hero” in the minds of millions of Americans. It’s finally time that we set the record straight on who John “Songbird” McCain truly is before he dies of brain cancer, and nauseating tributes are made about his “patriotic service” to our country.

 

This article is a couple of years old, but it hits the point about McShame very well....

Courageous Ron Unz Wonders How John McCain Gets Away With It
February 15, 2017 |


Courageous Ron Unz Wonders How John McCain Gets Away With It

John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President

by Ron Unz

What Was John McCain’s True Wartime Record in Vietnam?

With Sen. John McCain so much in the headlines these days due to his harsh criticism of the foreign policy positions of Donald Trump, a few people suggested that I republish my article from a couple of years ago exploring McCain’s own very doubtful military record.

Given the massive media coverage of rather fanciful allegations that the Russians are blackmailing Trump, perhaps similar resources should be devoted to investigating a much more plausible case of blackmail, and one that is far better documented.

Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her trial for treason after the war, which stripped her of her citizenship and sentenced her to a long prison term, made the national headlines.

The actual historical facts seem to have been somewhat different than the popular myth. Instead of a single “Tokyo Rose” there were actually several such female broadcasters, with Ms. Toguri not even being the earliest, and their identities merged in the minds of the embattled American GIs. But she was the only one ever brought to trial and punished, although her own radio commentary turned out to have been almost totally innocuous. The plight of a young American-born woman alone on a family visit who became trapped behind enemy lines by the sudden outbreak of war was obviously a difficult one, and desperately taking a job as an English-language music announcer hardly fits the usual notion of treason. Indeed, after her release from federal prison, she avoided deportation and spent the rest of her life quietly running a grocery shop in Chicago. Postwar Japan soon became our closest ally in Asia and once wartime passions had sufficiently cooled she was eventually pardoned by President Gerald Ford and had her U.S. citizenship restored.

Despite these extremely mitigating circumstances in Ms. Toguri’s particular case, we should not be too surprised at America’s harsh treatment of the poor woman upon her return home from Japan. All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.


My earliest recollections of John McCain are vague. I think he first came to my attention during the mid-1980s, perhaps after 1982 when he won an open Congressional seat in Arizona or more likely once he was elected in 1986 to the U.S. Senate seat of retiring conservative icon Barry Goldwater. All media accounts about him seemed strongly favorable, describing his steadfastness as a POW during more than five grim years of torture by his Vietnamese jailers, with the extent of his wartime physical suffering indicated by the famous photo showing him still on crutches as he was greeted by President Nixon many months after his return from enemy captivity. I never had the slightest doubts about this story or his war-hero status.

https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2015/07/20/BostonGlobe.com/National/Images/mccain-big.jpg

McCain’s public image took a beating at the end of the 1980s when he became one of the senators caught up in the Keating Five financial scandal, but he managed to survive that controversy unlike most of the others. Soon thereafter he became prominent as a leading national advocate of campaign finance reform, a strong pro-immigrant voice, and also a champion of normalizing our relations with Vietnam, positions that appealed to me as much as they did to the national media. By 2000 my opinion had become sufficiently favorable that I donated to his underdog challenge to Gov. George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of that year, and was thrilled when he did surprisingly well in some of the early contests and suddenly had a serious shot at the nomination. However, he then suffered an unexpected defeat in South Carolina, as the large block of local military voters swung decisively against him. According to widespread media reports, the main cause was an utterly scurrilous whispering campaign by Karl Rove and his henchmen, which even included appalling accusations that the great war-hero candidate had been a “traitor” in Vietnam. My only conclusion was that the filthy lies sometimes found in American politics were even worse than I’d ever imagined.

Although in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I turned sharply against McCain due to his support for an extremely bellicose foreign policy, I never had any reason to question his background or his integrity, and my strong opposition to his 2008 presidential run was entirely on policy grounds: I feared his notoriously hot temper might easily get us into additional disastrous wars.

Everything suddenly changed in June 2008 when I read a long article by an unfamiliar writer on the leftist Counterpunch website. Shocking claims were made that McCain may never have been tortured and that he instead spent his wartime captivity collaborating with his captors and broadcasting Communist propaganda, a possibility that seemed almost incomprehensible to me given all the thousands of contrary articles that I had absorbed over the decades from the mainstream media. How could this one article on a small website be the truth about McCain’s war record and everything else be total falsehood? The evidence was hardly overwhelming, with the piece being thinly sourced and written in a meandering fashion by an obscure author, but the claims were so astonishing that I made some effort to investigate the matter, though without any real success.

However, those new doubts about McCain were still in my mind a few months later when I stumbled upon Sidney Schanberg’s massively documented expose about McCain’s role in the POW/MIA cover up, a vastly greater scandal. This time I was presented with a mountain of hard evidence gathered by one of America’s greatest wartime journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winning former top editor at The New York Times. In the years since then, other leading journalists have praised Schanberg’s remarkable research, now giving his conclusions the combined backing of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes, while two former Republican Congressmen who had served on the Intelligence Committee have also strongly corroborated his account.

In 1993 the front page of the New York Times broke the story that a Politburo transcript found in the Kremlin archives fully confirmed the existence of the additional POWs, and when interviewed on the PBS Newshour former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the document was very likely correct and that hundreds of America’s Vietnam POWs had indeed been left behind. In my opinion, the reality of Schanberg’s POW story is now about as solidly established as anything can be that has not yet received an official blessing from the American mainstream media. And the total dishonesty of that media regarding both the POW story and McCain’s leading role in the later cover up soon made me very suspicious of all those other claims regarding John McCain’s supposedly heroic war record. Our American Pravda is simply not to be trusted on any “touchy” topics.

I have no personal knowledge of the Vietnam War myself nor do I possess expertise in that area of history. But after encountering Schanberg’s expose in 2008, I soon got in touch with someone having exactly those strengths, a Vietnam veteran who later became a professor at one of our military service academies. At first, he was quite cagey regarding the questions I raised, but once he had read through Schanberg’s lengthy article, he felt he could respond more freely and he largely confirmed the claims, partly based on certain information he personally possessed. He said he found it astonishing that in these days of the Internet the POW scandal had not attracted vastly more attention, and couldn’t understand why the media was so uniformly unwilling to touch the topic.

He also had some very interesting things to say about John McCain’s wartime record. According to him, it was hardly a secret in veterans’ circles that McCain had spent much of the war producing Communist propaganda broadcasts since these had regularly been played in the prisoner camps as a means of breaking the spirits of those American POWs who resisted collaboration. Indeed, he and some of his friends had speculated about who currently possessed copies of McCain’s damning audio and video tapes and wondered whether they might come out during the course of the presidential campaign. Over the years, other Vietnam veterans have publicly leveled similar charges, and Schanberg had speculated that McCain’s leading role in the POW cover up might have been connected with the pressure he faced due to his notorious wartime broadcasts.

In late September 2008 another fascinating story appeared in my morning New York Times. An intrepid reporter decided to visit Vietnam and see what McCain’s former jailers thought of the possibility that their onetime captive might soon reach the White House, that the man they had spent years brutally torturing could become the next president of the United States. To the journalist’s apparent amazement, the former jailers seemed enthusiastic about the prospects of a McCain victory, saying that they hoped he would win since they had become such good friends during the war and had worked so closely together; if they lived in America, they would certainly all vote for him. When asked about McCain’s claims of “cruel and sadistic” torture, the head of the guard unit dismissed those stories as being just the sort of total nonsense that politicians, whether in America or in Vietnam, must often spout in order to win popularity. A BBC correspondent reported the same statements.

Let us consider the implications of this story. Throughout his entire life John McCain has been notable for having a very violent temper and also for holding deep grudges. How plausible does it seem that the men who allegedly spent years torturing him would be so eager to see him reach a position of supreme world power?
But what about the famous photo, showing McCain still on crutches even months after his release from captivity? In early September 2008, someone discovered archival footage from a Swedish news crew which had filmed the return of the POWs, and uploaded it to YouTube. We see a healthy-looking John McCain walking off the plane from Vietnam, having a noticeable limp but certainly without any need of crutches. After returning home he had eventually entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for corrective surgery on some of his wartime injuries, and that recent American surgery was what explained his crutches in the photo with Nixon.

https://youtu.be/6YwnTnmbOMQ

It is certainly acknowledged that considerable numbers of American POWs were indeed tortured in Vietnam, but it is far from clear that McCain was ever one of them. As the original Counterpunch article pointed out, throughout almost the entire war McCain was held at a special section for the best-behaving prisoners, which was where he allegedly produced his Communist propaganda broadcasts and perhaps became such good friends with his guards as they later claimed. Top-ranking former POWs held at the same prison, such as Colonels Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have gone on the record saying they are very skeptical regarding McCain’s claims of torture.

I have taken the trouble to read through John McCain’s earliest claims of his harsh imprisonment, a highly detailed 12,000 word first person account published under his name in U.S. News & World Report in May 1973, just a few weeks after his release from imprisonment. The editorial introduction notes the “almost total recall” seemingly demonstrated by the young pilot just out of captivity, and portions of the story strike me as doubtful, perhaps drawn from the long history of popular imprisonment fiction stretching back to Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. Would a young navy pilot so easily develop and remember a “tap code” to extensively communicate with others across thick prison walls? And McCain describes himself as having a “philosophical bent,” spending his years of solitary confinement reviewing in his head all the many history books he had read, trying to make sense of human history, a degree of intellectualizing never apparent in his life either before or after.

One factual detail, routinely emphasized by his supporters, is his repeated claim that except for signing a single written statement very early in his captivity and also answering some questions by a visiting French newsman, he had staunchly refused any hint of collaboration with his captors, despite torture, solitary confinement, endless threats and beatings, and offers of rewards.

Perhaps. But that original Counterpunch article provided the link to the purported text of one of McCain’s pro-Hanoi propaganda broadcasts as summarized in a 1969 UPI wire service story, and I have confirmed its authenticity by locating the resulting article that ran in Stars & Stripes at the same time. So if crucial portions of McCain’s account of his imprisonment are seemingly revealed to be self-serving fiction, how much of the rest can we believe? If his pro-Communist propaganda broadcasts were so notable that they even reached the news pages of one of America’s leading military publications, it seems quite plausible that they were as numerous, substantial, and frequent as his critics allege.

When I later discussed these troubling matters with an eminent political scientist who has something of a military background, he emphasized that McCain’s history can only be understood in the context of his father, a top-ranking admiral who then served as commander of all American forces in the Pacific Theater, including our troops in Vietnam. Indeed, the alleged headline of the UPI wire story had been “PW [Prisoner of War] Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral,” highlighting that connection. Obviously, for reasons both of family loyalty and personal standing it would have been imperative for John McCain’s father and namesake to hush up the terrible scandal of having had his son serve as a leading collaborator and Communist propagandist during the war and his exalted rank gave him the power to do so. Furthermore, just a few years earlier the elder McCain had himself performed an extremely valuable service for America’s political elites, organizing the official board of inquiry that whitewashed the potentially devastating “Liberty Incident,” with its hundreds of dead and wounded American servicemen, so he certainly had some powerful political chits he could call in.

Placed in this context, John McCain’s tales of torture make perfect sense. If he had indeed spent almost the entire war eagerly broadcasting Communist propaganda in exchange for favored treatment, there would have been stories about this circulating in private, and fears that these tales might eventually reach the newspaper headlines, perhaps backed by the hard evidence of audio and video tapes. An effective strategy for preempting this danger would be to concoct lurid tales of personal suffering and then promote them in the media, quickly establishing McCain as the highest profile victim of torture among America’s returned POWs, an effort rendered credible by the fact that many American POWs had indeed suffered torture.

Once the public had fully accepted McCain as our foremost Vietnam war-hero and torture-victim, any later release of his propaganda tapes would be dismissed as merely proving that even the bravest of men had their breaking point. Given that McCain’s father was one of America’s highest-ranking military officers and both the Nixon Administration and the media had soon elevated McCain to a national symbol of American heroism, there would have been enormous pressure on the other returning POWs, many of them dazed and injured after long captivity, not to undercut such an important patriotic narrative. Similarly, when McCain ran for Congress and the Senate a decade or so later, stories of his torture became a central theme of his campaigns and once again constituted a powerful defense against any possible rumors of his alleged “disloyalty.”

And so the legend grew over the decades until it completely swallowed the man, and he became America’s greatest patriot and war hero, with almost no one even being aware of the Communist propaganda broadcasts that had motivated the story in the first place. I have sometimes noticed this same historical pattern in which fictional accounts originally invented to excuse or mitigate some enormous crime may eventually expand over time until they totally dominate the narrative while the original crime itself is nearly forgotten. The central theme of McCain’s presidential campaign was his unmatched patriotism and when he went down to defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, the widespread verdict was that even the greatest of war-heroes may still lose an election.

I must reemphasize that I am not an expert on the Vietnam War and my cursory investigation is nothing like the sort of exhaustive research that would be necessary to establish a firm conclusion on this troubling case. I have merely tried to provide a plausible account of McCain’s war record and highlight some of the important pieces of evidence that a more thorough researcher should consider. Unlike the documentation of the POW cover up accumulated by Schanberg and others, which I regard as overwhelmingly conclusive, I think the best that may be said about my reconstruction of McCain’s wartime history is that it seems more likely correct than not. However, I should mention that when I discussed some of these items with Schanberg in 2010 and suggested that John McCain had been the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam War, he considered it a very apt description.

John McCain is hardly the only prominent political figure whose problematic Vietnam War activities have at times come under harsh scrutiny but afterwards been airbrushed away and forgotten by our subservient corporate media. Just as McCain was widely regarded as the most prominent Republican war-hero of that conflict, his Democratic counterpart was probably Vietnam Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who had run for president in 1992 and then considered doing so again in the late 1990s.

His seemingly unblemished record of wartime heroism suddenly collapsed in 2001 with the publication of a devastating 8,000 word expose in The New York Times Magazine together with a Sixty Minutes II television segment. Detailed eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence persuasively established that Kerrey had ordered his men to massacre over a dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants—for being witnesses to his botched SEAL raid on a tiny Vietnamese hamlet, an action that somewhat recalled the infamous My Lai massacre of the previous year though certainly on a much smaller scale. Kerrey’s initial response to these horrific accusations—that his memory of the incident was “foggy”—struck me as near-certain proof of his guilt, and others drew similar conclusions.

As a supposed war-hero and a moderate Democrat, Kerrey had always been very popular in political circles, but even the once friendly New Republic was shocked by the alacrity with which pundits and the media sought to absolve him of his apparent crimes. The revelations also seem to have had no impact on his tenure as president of the prestigious New School in New York, an academic institution with an impeccable liberal reputation, which he held for another decade before leaving to make an unsuccessful attempt to recapture his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Bob Dreyfuss, a principled left-liberal journalist, might still characterize him as a “mass murderer” in a 2012 blog post at The Nation, but for years almost no one in the mainstream media had ever alluded to the incident in any of the articles mentioning Kerrey’s activities, just as the media has also totally ignored all of Schanberg’s remarkable revelations. I suspect that Kerrey’s war crimes have almost totally vanished from public consciousness.

The realization that many of our political leaders may be harboring such terrible personal secrets, secrets that our media outlets regularly conceal, raises an important policy implication independent of the particular secrets themselves. In recent years I have increasingly begun to suspect that some or even many of our national leaders may occasionally make their seemingly inexplicable policy decisions under the looming threat of personal blackmail, and that this may have also been true in the past.

Consider the intriguing case of J. Edgar Hoover, who spent nearly half a century running our domestic intelligence service, the FBI. Over those many decades he accumulated detailed files on vast numbers of prominent people and most historians agree that he regularly used such highly sensitive material to gain the upper hand in disputes with his nominal political masters and also to bend other public figures to his will. Meanwhile, he himself was hardly immune from similar pressures. These days it is widely believed that Hoover lived his long life as a deeply closeted homosexual and there are also serious claims that he had some hidden black ancestry, a possibility that seems quite plausible to me given his features. Such deep personal secrets may be connected with Hoover’s long denials that organized crime actually existed in America and his great reluctance to allocate significant FBI resources to combat it.

Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.

An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.

Such notions may seem utterly absurd, but let us step back and consider recent American history. Just a few years ago an individual came very close to reaching the White House almost entirely on the strength of his war record, a war record that considerable evidence suggests was actually the sort that would normally get a military man hanged for treason at the close of hostilities. I have studied many historical eras and many countries and no parallel examples come to mind.

Perhaps the cause of this bizarre situation merely lies in the remarkable incompetence and cowardice of our major media organs, their herd mentality and their insouciant unwillingness to notice evidence that is staring them in the face. But we should also at least consider the possibility of a darker explanation. If Tokyo Rose had nearly been elected president in the 1980s, we would assume that the American political system had taken a very peculiar turn.

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-when-tokyo-rose-ran-for-president/

 

You notice that bitchboy abandoned his attempt to his claim that the fire resulted from a "wet start" and then went onto other baseless claims.
Oh an now a story from the site paulcraigrobets.org? That was repeated on unz.com.
This is what happens when a patriot and hero tells a pussy bone spurs hold out loser like all of these fake ass Merican patriot never have and never will serve bitch boys like csnatureboy, mr smith, truthfull1, and the rest of the cats on braindead isle to stay away form a real heroes funeral, The pussy warhawks of the world that refuse to ever put their asses on the line attack to support another fucking pussy assed rich liar that sucked mommies tit and claimed that partying in college was his own war zone.

 

He had an undistinguished academic career and a somewhat questionably effective military career. Hr endured great Trauma as a POW. Went on to a lifetime of public service and whether that is honorable or not is open to debate.
He and all military deserve respect for their service and sacrifice. Does that make him a hero? Thats debatable. If he had a Metal of Honor around his neck then there would be no question. If others want to call him a hero then thats fine.
He was widely regarded as a jerk during his political career. Dems and Libs hated him, especially when he ran for President. It wasnt until he opposed Trump that he became the Democrat party Patron Saint.
All that being said, bashing a dead man serves no purpose whatsoever and should never be done by those in public office or anyone else.

 

Im not impressed , do you know how many Vietnam vets refuse to even except their metals.

 

One thing I give the guy credit for . flying one of those jets is an incredible feat . The amount of training they must have to go through as to be on believable.
But he still

sucked as a senator the pussy

 

My gawd... some of you have truly sunk to a new low. I don't care if you're not an American, speaking of the deceased this way is shameful.

The word, 'sub-human' comes to mind. How oddly appropriate considering your motivations to post these things.

Fuck humanity... defend the king no matter his failings. Pathetic. You shame even this place.

Hush....an alias

 

My,Don't we all play in the sand box so well these days.

 

Republican goes off on epic rant fact-checking Trump’s attacks on John McCain

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/03/re...ant-fact-checking-trumps-attacks-john-mccain/

And by the way the "hero" part of McCain's military service came when the North Vietnamese offered to release McCain because they found out his father was an admiral and they could use him for propaganda. McCain refused. And his torturers took that personally and increased the amount and duration of his torture until they finally broke him.

I never liked McCain on a persona level and was at war with his politics for all the time he was in Congress. But just because I didn't like him or his politics does not change the fact that he acted heroically in conditions I doubt any of us can even imagine.

 

Was McCain a saint? Oh hell no. Did he have feet of clay? Yep. Did he start the fire on the USS made Forestal? Nope, but to many of Donny's supporters John McCain sank the Titanic and the USS Arizona. Was he a hero? He might have said no, but he went through hell for the US and suffered for his duty, that, in my opinion (for what it's worth) made him a hero.

He was a far better man than Donny will ever be and Donny is just being a pathetic little man by attacking John McCain when McCain is no longer able to fight back.

 

Regardless of what Senator McCain was or wasn't... A number of the members (and their varied socks) on this forum are flat out cowards.

That, is glaringly obvious.

Hush....an alias