[THS] Alexander Cockburn: Hero John McCain as Phony and Collaborator

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19777.htm


"Hero" John McCain as Phony and Collaborator
What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

By Alexander Cockburn

20/04/08 "Counterpunch" -- - 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. . .”