McCain Was No Maverick on POWs
by R. Cort Kirkwood
TheNewAmerican.com
Sunday, 26 August 2018
The predictable hosannas to Senator John McCain, who died Saturday of brain cancer, came surging in like a category 5 hurricane. The Washington Post published 14 items on its front webpage today; the New York Times a mere six.
The Republican from Arizona was a “maverick” and a “hero” and, as the Post put it, “a force of nature in Washington with an unrivaled global stature.”
True perhaps, and McCain’s tenure in school, the Navy, and in Congress, stories about which are legion, are legendary. But not always in the best way.
McCain On POWs
One would think that McCain’s nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam would have made a him natural to lead the effort to recover the POWs the Nixon Administration left behind. But alas, the “maverick” toed the government line: It had “no evidence” we left men there.
McCain fought tooth and nail against anyone who attempted to disclose the truth. And as The New American reported in its most recent print edition, quoting the late Vietnam war correspondent Sydney Schanberg, McCain was quite vicious about it when he served on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs (“Evidence of POWs in Vietnam,” Sept. 3).
The evidence the committee gathered showed without doubt that at least 700 men were left behind in Vietnam. But McCain didn’t want to hear the truth.
Wrote Schanberg:
McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence — documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs’ sworn testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned — has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the “bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists.” He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “dime-store Rambos.
As well, TNA reported, McCain “browbeat expert witnesses,” while family members who “pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to tears.”
When POW activist Dolores Alfond, of the National Alliance of Families, appeared before the committee, and cited iron-clad electronic intelligence that showed Americans alive in Vietnam in 1974, McCain, the “maverick,” showed up to make pound her into the ground. Alfond’s brother, Victor Apodaca, was a Air Force pilot shot down over North Vietnam.
The Rest…HERE
