John McCain - A Hollow Man?

This is from an article by Alexander Cockburn on CounterPunch, which purports to tell "What Really Happened When He Was a POW?"

Mr. Cockburn notes first of all, rightly, that McCain has been treated with kid-gloves by the media "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."

Ever more curious, however, is the way in which the press "avoids the topic of McCain's collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he'd been shot down."

Cockburn believes that McCain's behavior as a prisoner is crucial, and indicates great instability and thus McCain's proximity to the White House could be disastrous - if he were to be elected. He tells how one Republican senator, Thad Cochrane, has stated he "trembles" to think that McCain might find himself "in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear trigger."


Doug Valentine, a man with intimate knowledge of the Vietnam War as well as "the POW experience" - his father was a Japanese POW in the Philippines during WWII, "has assembled the dossier" on McCain's conduct as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. CounterPunch is running it in their current newsletter, but you need to subscribe to view it.

Cockburn, however, provides some excerpts from Mr. Valentine. These accuse McCain of collaborating with the enemy, and that, he says, "is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain's character. . .or lack thereof ...

"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?"


Valentine tells how McCain was brought to the infamous Hanoi Hilton 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 ..."

Realizing that McCain's father was a U.S. Navy admiral, and that McCain was one of America's elite and thus of great propaganda value, the Vietnamese took him to a hospital, and it was there he was quoted in the Hanoi press as divulging specific military information such as the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, how many U.S. pilots had been lost, the number of planes in his particular flight formation, and information regarding the location of rescue ships.

For a period of three years, McCain collaborated with the North Vietnamese. They treated him kindly and he responded in kind.

Valentine says "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 . . ."


(See also this News By US for more details of McCain's capture and subsequent treatment)