I can say I’m a German Shepherd. I go on what I can confirm. I knew a Hanoi Hilton POW of higher rank. I know he endorsed McCain in 2008 and at least two others can confirm it. But due to konspiracy kooks who like to harass I will not post his name.
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/