McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying, “Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.” A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.
About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said, “This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington.” He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, “would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks.”
McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.
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.”
Some of McCain’s fellow captives at Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi didn’t share his views about prisoners left behind. Before he died of leukemia in 1999, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter-a response to McCain’s stream of insults hurled at MIA activists. Guy wrote, “John, does this [the insults] include Senator Bob Smith [a New Hampshire Republican and activist on POW issues] and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were ‘last known alive’? Does this include some of your fellow POWs?”
It’s not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo-to try to break down other prisoners-and was broadcast over Hanoi’s state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain.
[In an interview with 60 Minutes in 1997, McCain mentioned the confession his North Vietnamese captors forced him to write: “I was guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people. I intentionally bombed women and children.” The truth, of course, is that what McCain wrote under duress is actually an accurate statement.All humans have breaking points. Many men undergoing torture give confessions, often telling huge lies so their fakery will be understood by their comrades and their country. Few will fault them. But it was McCain who apparently felt he had disgraced himself and his military family. His father, John S. McCain II, was a highly regarded rear admiral then serving as commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. His grandfather was also a rear admiral.
In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda value. Other prisoners at Hoa Lo say his captors considered him a prize catch and called him the “Crown Prince,” something McCain acknowledges in the book.
Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. “I felt faithless and couldn’t control my despair,” he writes, revealing that he made two “feeble” attempts at suicide. (In later years, he said he tried to hang himself with his shirt and guards intervened.) Tellingly, he says he lived in “dread” that his father would find out about the confession. “I still wince,” he writes, “when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace.”
He says that when he returned home, he told his father about the confession, but “never discussed it at length”-and the admiral, who died in 1981, didn’t indicate he had heard anything about it before. But he had. In the 1999 memoir, the senator writes, “I only recently learned that the tape … had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father.”
Is McCain haunted by these memories? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing would rekindle his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions.
Many stories have been written about McCain’s explosive temper, so volcanic that colleagues are loath to speak openly about it. One veteran congressman who has observed him over the years asked for confidentiality and made this brief comment: “This is a man not at peace with himself.”
He was certainly far from calm on the Senate POW committee. He browbeat expert witnesses who came with information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced McCain and 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. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: How dare you question my patriotism? In 1996, he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.
But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of McCain’s mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that’s something the American public ought to know about and John McCain was central to withholding that information from the American people.
Adding to his betrayal of fellow servicemen in the POW/MIA cover up is the fact that he voted dozens of times against funding for veterans’ health care and other crucial services, claiming they were “too expensive.” Also too expensive for McCain’s taste was the 9/11 first responders’ health care bill, which provided life-saving medical care for the thousands of police officers, firefighters, paramedics and others who selflessly rushed to the burning Twin Towers that fateful morning and who suffered from deadly cancers and other diseases years later. A watered-down version of the bill was ultimately passed after months of Republican objection.
On 21 June 2018, Judicial Watch released newly obtained internal IRS documents, including material revealing that Sen. John McCain’s former staff director and chief counsel on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee, Henry Kerner, urged top IRS officials, including then-director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner, to “audit so many that it becomes financially ruinous.” Kerner was appointed by President Trump as Special Counsel for the United States Office of Special Counsel.
Lerner and other IRS officials met with select top staffers from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a “marathon” meeting to discuss concerns raised by both Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that the IRS was not reining in political advocacy groups in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Senator McCain had been the chief sponsor of the McCain-Feingold Act and called the Citizens United decision, which overturned portions of the Act, one of the “worst decisions I have ever seen.”
Judicial Watch previously reported on the 2013 meeting. Senator McCain then issued a statement decrying “false reports claiming that his office was somehow involved in IRS targeting of conservative groups.” The IRS previously blacked out the notes of the meeting but Judicial Watch found the notes among subsequent documents released by the agency.
Warmonger
Senator John McCain has been the top war-monger in Congress. In one rhetorical bombing run after another, McCain has bellowed for “lights out in Belgrade” and for NATO to “cream” the Serbs. At the start of May he began declaiming in the US senate for the NATO forces to use “any means necessary” to destroy Serbia. “When John wakes up in the morning the first thing he says is ‘Air strikes!”’ his friend Sen. Dick Lugar once said.
Afghanistan and Iraq
McCain, more than almost anybody else, pushed for more troops in Iraq. When George W. Bush caved and sent in 20,000 extra troops to Iraq in 2007, Democrats labeled the move “The McCain doctrine”. Americans even dumber than Bush II have begun to label Bush “reasonable”. The reasonable Bush talked of 50 years in Iraq, McCain raised him to 100. McCain was among the most enthusiastic advocates of war in Afghanistan as well. And like his buddy Barack across the aisle, he felt threatened by Libya’s success under Muammar Gaddafi.
Obviously every US senator (besides California’s Barbara Lee) voted to give president George W. Bush the power to invade Afghanistan following the events of September 11th. However, McCain wasn’t happy with just moving to invade Afghanistan. No, he had other targets on his mind as early as the day after the towers fell.
Despite McCain’s claim in 2014 that “the Iraq war probably wouldn’t have happened” if he had won the 2000 Republican primary and then general election, this assertion seems ridiculous. On September 12th 2001, McCain appeared on MSNBC presenting a long list of countries he felt were providing a “safe harbor” to groups like al Qaeda. This list of course included Iraq and several other countries that appear later on this list.
Syria
Another country on that 2001 list (of course) was Syria. Now, the Bush regime may have never gotten a chance to continue toppling Mideast countries (thanks to the failure in Iraq and the exposure of that war being sold on lies). But McCain seemingly never lost sight of his hatred for Bashar Al-Assad.
Shortly after the Arab Spring “broke out” in Syria, McCain – and his constant partner in war crimes Sen. Lindsey Graham – quickly found communication channels with the “Syrian opposition.” Just a few short months after the US endorsed protests in Syria (even having their ambassador attend), McCain and Graham began calling for arms to start flowing to the Free Syrian Army and other “rebel” groups.
In one photograph, McCain can be seen presenting a gift to the former LIFG emir, Abdel Hakim Bel-Hadj. In Syria, as in Libya, McCain repeatedly lobbied for ‘rebels’ to be given military aid by the US, as well as calling for cruise missile strikes on government positions.
Important visit with brave fighters in #Syria who are risking their lives for freedom and need our help pic.twitter.com/tx4uX572ZP
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) May 28, 2013
In April 2013, the man described as “America’s leading advocate of intervention in the Syrian crisis” met with Syrian ‘rebels’- crossing into Syria illegally (little things like national sovereignty don’t matter much to neocons like McCain). GOP Senator McCain at an Idlib, Syria Terrorist Gathering Pledged US Money and Weapons to Ex-US POW Ibrahim Al-Badri of the “Free Syrian Army,” an Al Qaeda Leader Then Already Among Washington’s Five Most Wanted Terrorists with a $10 Million Reward on His Head; McCain’s Moderate Democratic Protege Badri Was Simultaneously Emir of ISIS, Styling Himself Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and Now Claims to Rule the World as Caliph Ibrahim of the Restored Caliphate.
(Below) John McCain meeting illegally in a rebel safe house with the heads of the “Free Syrian Army” in Idlib, Syria in April, 2013. In the left foreground, top al Qaeda terrorist leader Ibrahim al-Badri (aka Al-Baghdadi of ISIS, aka Caliph Ibrahim of the recently founded Islamic Empire) with whom the Senator is talking. Behind Badri is visible Brigadier General Salim Idris (with glasses), the former military chief of the FSA, who has since fled to the Gulf states after the collapse of any semblance of the FSA. (Courtesy VoltaireNet.org)
Two years later, the great ‘human rights crusader’ led a delegation of US Senators to meet that other well-known champion of human rights, Crown Prince Salman of Saudi Arabia and the commander of Saudi Arabia’s Syrian ‘rebel’ training and equipment program. Just think of the hundreds of thousands killed in Syria because of these McCain supported ‘training and equipment’ programs.
Having played his part in keeping the fires burning in Syria, McCain reacted to the presence of ISIS there- by outrageously claiming that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was a greater threat than Islamic State. One wonders what the families and loved ones of those killed in ISIS terrorist atrocities in the Middle East, Africa and around the world thought of that statement.
It was an open “secret” that our government armed and created ISIS even before the Kerry tapes surfaced. Yet McCain continued to meet with ISIS/Al Qaeda terrorists, sneaking across the border to meet with them at the end of February 2017. McCain’s policy of creating & aiding ISIS for regime change was NOT Trump’s policy of destroying ISIS. Why was his secret meeting not aiding & abetting terrorists and seditious conspiracy?
Libya and Yemen
McCain’s plans for Syria never quite worked the way he wanted but he probably should’ve know they would never yield a positive result. If McCain didn’t want to look at Iraq to prove that point, he had another more recent example he could’ve used: the NATO intervention in Libya.
It was less than a year before McCain wanted to arm Syrian takfiris that he had supported with the bombing and no fly zones in Libya. McCain even wanted tougher actions against the country. Which has now become an anarchic Wild West that’s home to all sorts of horrors from the Islamic State to a new slave trade.
The U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen was backed by McCain as well.
West and Central Africa
McCain is also a champion of the “war on terror” in other parts of Africa. While McCain hasn’t directly supported terrorists in some countries in Africa, he still has called for more US intervention across the continent.
This list includes countries dealing with Islamic insurgencies, such as Mali. McCain has also called for plans like “deploying Special Forces” to rescue girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria and intervention in Sudan, where McCain and his wife have invested money for some time.
Iran
Another country on the list of hated nations originally put forth by Bush undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, and also another long time target of McCain, is of course Iran. Although McCain has always said “he prays” there will never be at war with Iran, the man constantly calls for it and even jokes about bombing the country when he feels the mood is right. The truth of the matter is, McCain’s positions towards Iran are so hostile that even flagship neoconservative institutions like the Cato Institute think he is too hawkish.
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