Posted on 08/06/2016 3:06:59 AM PDT by MikeSteelBe
>>I wonder if the US propaganda ministry will air this
And risk outing itself in the context of this:
[Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial Complex”
Speech Origins and Significance]
US National Archives
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-jvHynP9Y
?
Not likely.
I would trust Hackworth’s insight far more than McLame’s words about anything done as a POW.
McLame lies, and lies again, to the detriment of his own people. But at least it's made him close friends with liberals.
Those in AZ now have a chance to vote McCain the traitor out of office and I hope they do so.
Really! I heard just the opposite.
That his fellow captors were held in horrific conditions, and he was unseen by them for long periods at a time. As the story goes, as the son of an admiral, he was allegedly residing comfortably in the Real "Hanoi Hilton"...uptown. Checking in occasionally "for appearances".
The doctors were very good and they knew a great deal about the practice of medicine. I remained in the hospital for some time and regained much of my health and strength. Since I arrived in the camp of detention, I received humane and lenient treatment.
I received this kind treatment and food even though I came here as an aggressor and the people who I injured have much difficulty in their living standards. I wish to express my deep gratitude for my kind treatment and I will never forget this kindness extended to me.
If both what you and I said is true, then I believe every word of his statement.
You have no clue: he can’t raise his arms above shoulder height and he can’t use his right arm at all, thanks to his injuries, lousy NVA medical treatment and torture.
Try to stick to subjects you know something about.
They North Vietnamese didn’t call him Songbird for no reason.
McCain couldn’t go home early. He would been an outcast in the Navy and his career would have been over. The POW code is “first man in first man out”.
James B. Stockdale, a retired Navy Vice Admiral, was the Reform Party
vice-presidential candidate in 1992. ............................ Yeah, just another war hero that most would not remember today. Ask anyone walking down a busy street; “Who is James Stockdale?”, and see what you get as an answer. Heroes fade as the years go by. Roger Young, Milton Olive who are they? Forgotten by most remembered by a few.
Well OK, maybe he exaggerated a bit about their medical expertise.
Of course it's true, McCain committed treason.
He then went to the Senate as a blackmailed pawn to do whatever they wanted him to do.
This POS needs to be voted out asap.
EX ACT LEE.
MCCAIN WAS A HERO FOR STAYING AND BEING TORTURED AND THE BEST AND BRAVEST OF THOSE POWs SAID SO.
Now his stand on immigration is crap imho.
Col "Bud" Day, Medal of Honor recipient, and one of the most decorated military officers of all time, was held with McCain. They were cellmates for a time. Day resisted, as did McCain. Both men eventually broke under severe, severe torture. They all did.
The people who are sitting on the sidelines today throwing judgment on these men are a__holes. Plain and simple.
Amen and some of the 300 retired high ranking officers who endorsed him were also POWS at that time. Of course they'd break. The torture at least at first was ongoing even for several years. NV's were very versed in the art. One of the POW's who did endorse McCain in 2008 I saw daily in my time in service.
Same here. I despise this POS but in that situation, I wouldn’t judge him.
Except jane Fonda..F that B.
Would love have seen how would have fared under those same conditions. Very easy to be a hero back here. Minus the gunfire, torture, starvation, bugs and heat, of course..
Those who condemn him for this solitary confession have no appreciation for what the manner of torture atheistic Communists could effect.
Here’s a look at four Northeast Florida veterans who were in captivity with McCain in Vietnam. This story was originally published on Sunday, March 23, 2008...
Byron Fuller dreamed of the houses he would build, counted the number of 2-by-4s he would need, counted each and every nail he would use Dick Stratton repeated the names of the hundreds of tormented souls with him, so they would never be forgotten. Hal Kushner mourned for the men who’d died in his arms, men he could have saved, and wondered if his newborn child back home was a boy or a girl, healthy or sick. Pete Schoeffel wrote poems, tales of home and hope and despair that, for years, existed only in his head...
These men, all held from 1967 to 1973, have a bond with each other. They feel a bond, too, with the fellow POW who wants to be president, even if they can't figure out why he would want to subject himself to more punishment. Thick books could be written about each of these men, cataloguing the indignities and pain they endured. And they would indeed be stories of endurance.
The torturers in the Hanoi Hilton’s knobby-walled room were experts. Consider the straps -- a system of shackles, a nylon strap and an iron bar. The guards pulled the straps taut, forcing Schoeffel’s face to the floor, between his knees. They stomped on his back. He could barely breathe, yet they kept him there: 15 minutes or one hour, or longer. Who could tell? Through the panic and the pain came the thirst: Held in that position, Schoeffel became so dehydrated he sucked his own sweat off the floor. He wondered why he couldn’t faint. Don’t people faint from pain? Why couldn’t he, when it was so bad?...
Stratton, who was a Navy commander, later wrote that the senior ranking American officers at Hoa Lo let out the message: Fight them as long as you can. And “don’t despair when they break you, they have broken us all.” Then do it all over again...
The prisoners were told to sign letters declaring that they were getting “lenient and humane treatment.” Stratton gives a sour laugh: “To them, it was letting me live...”
And upon his release from Vietnam, a wire service reporter wrote that “Stratton’s gaunt, stooped figure and haunted expression” had become “a symbol of the plight of the American POWs.” Still, the suspicion lingered far longer than that, even as McCain, shortly after his release, took pains to clear Stratton’s name. “He stood up for me when other people were saying things,” Stratton says. “When I was down, people kicking me, he stood up for me, and he didn’t have to. He gained nothing...”
And lonely -- it could be so lonely. Fuller, who went to Landon Junior-Senior High School in Jacksonville and the U.S. Naval Academy, broke his right arm and injured his left after he was forced to eject from his downed A-4 Skyhawk over North Vietnam on the afternoon of July 14, 1967...
After 10 days of torture, he was taken to an empty cell, barely able to move. Days later, another prisoner was shoved in with him -- an Air Force pilot named Wayne Waddell. They were together for 100 days: “He saved my life. He set my bones. Wiped my ass. Fed me. Bathed me. He’d use his water ration to daub my heat rash.”
Much of the time, though, the men were alone. Fuller, for one, spent more than two years in solitary confinement, from Oct. 25, 1967, to Nov. 25, 1969.
Kushner was a late arrival to all of this, having survived years of a very different kind of hell. The only survivor of a horrific helicopter crash in South Vietnam, he was kept for 3 1/2 years in small jungle camps in the south. Prisoners’ clothes rotted off their bodies, and disease, starvation and beatings killed many of them. - http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2015-07-20/story/out-tortured-past-story-john-mccain-and-his-fellow-pows#
on the eve of the 2008 South Carolina Republican primary, a group that calls itself Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain has distributed a flyer alleging that McCain, widely regarded as a hero for his five years as a prisoner of war, is a traitor.
The flyer says that when he was a POW, McCain was a "Hanoi Hilton songbird" who collaborated with the enemy.
The flyer provides scant evidence to back up this claim and it is strongly contradicted by many other accounts reviewed by PolitiFact: interviews with other POWs, an author who has written a McCain biography and the senator's own accounts.
Robert Timberg, author of John McCain: An American Odyssey , who has interviewed many POWs who served with McCain, said there's no evidence that he ever collaborated with the North Vietnamese. "I've never known of any occasion in which Sen. McCain provided the North Vietnamese with anything of value," Timberg said...
The flyer contains 1 pages of criticisms of McCain, but only a few support the accusation that he was helping the enemy...
In his memoir Faith of My Fathers , McCain says that he initially offered the information because he was badly injured and afraid of dying. But, he wrote, "I didn't intend to keep my word."
When he was later interrogated, McCain gave his ship's name and squadron number and confirmed the target of his failed mission, he wrote. He also gave the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line and said they were members of his squadron.
Asked to identify future targets, he mentioned North Vietnamese cities that U.S. planes had already bombed.
George "Bud" Day and Orson Swindle, fellow POWs, told PolitiFact that POWs sometimes were forced to talk when they were tortured, but they tried to tell lies to mislead their captors.
"We were all tortured and we wrote confessions under the pressure of torture," said Swindle, who was a cellmate with McCain and is active in his campaign. "John McCain never collaborated with the enemy. He, like every one of us, submitted to severe torture. John McCain did nothing dishonorable. He was heroic."
At one point, McCain broke down and signed a confession. But Timberg, the biographer, said McCain deliberately used misspellings, grammatical errors and Communist jargon to show he was writing under duress: "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died, and the Vietnamese people saved my life . . . "
The man behind the flyer is Gerard "Jerry" W. Kiley, 61, of Garnerville, N.Y., who says he served in Vietnam for about a year.
He describes his group as a one-man operation unaffiliated with any political party or campaign. He says he opposes McCain because of the senator's efforts to normalize relations with the Vietnamese communist government and because, in his view, McCain has helped the U.S. government keep information about POWs classified.
"John McCain has made sure the information concerning the lives of Americans we clearly abandoned after the war remain in government files 40 years later," he says.
He teamed with political activist Ted Sampley of North Carolina to distribute the fliers to South Carolina media outlets this month. Sampley did not respond to requests for comment...
Kiley says he bases his most damning charges against McCain — that McCain gave information about the schedule of U.S. attacks in Vietnam in 1967, the year his plane was shot down and McCain was captured — on the word of Earl Hopper, a retired Army colonel. In an interview, Hopper's wife, Patty, said that Hopper wasn't able to address the charges over the phone because of poor hearing. - http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jan/17/mccains-pow-record-attacked/
Five and a half years in a brutal commie prison and he has to relive this? He’s not so good politically but deserves much love for surviving to the end. Only people that could critique him for this IMHO is others who have spent time and the HH-NVM. Not many could survive that.
“...I guess she had no choice....”
It’s ALWAYS a choice.
Either cooperate, or do not. It’s still a choice.
She should not have been pardoned. Young American men died while she helped the enemy, and then went on to live out her life.
I was on my way back from Med Sea 77-78 deployment when at Change of Command I saw him get his Rear Admiral Star penned on him. Fuller's word is good enough for this sailor.
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