Is McCain STILL a "war hero"?

[no_hypocrisy]

NOTE: This comes from The American Conservative Magazine

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain’s role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain’s military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn’t talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the U.S. prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

-snip-

McCain’s Role

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “ head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios, and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

http://amconmag.com/article/2010/jul/01/00010/

[dmallind]

1. Sorry but yes he is

I am no lionizer of military types. Nor am I anything approaching a McCain fan, but being a war hero and being a good, or even honroable, person or politician afterwards are two completely separate things. Hitler was a war hero after all - personal rescuing a wounded soldier under active fire. McCain refused to be freed when he had the chance because others were not going to be freed too. That's intentionally accepting risk to life and limb to beneift others during wartime - the definition of a war hero.

He shouldn't get a sniff at the WH as long as he lives, and I hope to hell he loses re-election (without much hope). But he still was a hero and nothing can take that away.

[thereismore]

2. He heroically dropped bombs on people from a plane. So yes, I guess. nt

[Phx_Dem]

3. Was he ever?

Sorry, but I'm pretty particular about calling people heroes. Being in the military is very admirable and courageous, but getting shot down (after crashing 4 planes) is not what I consider heroic. Sue me.

[dmallind]

7. It's what he did after the shooting down that is germane. NT

[Phx_Dem]

8. He didn't save anyone's life that I'm aware of, so he's not a hero

in my eyes. Declining to leave the prison and leave his fellow prisoners behind is not a viable option and does not make him a hero. Had he left them behind, he'd be a big fucking coward.

I respect his service immensely, I just don't think he did anything heroic.

[DavidDvorkin]

4. He was never a hero

He dropped bombs on civilians. He's as much a hero as the Luftwaffe pilots who bombed England in WWII.

[MurrayDelph]

Yes, he is a war hero

that cannot be taken away from him.

He is also a lying, two-faced, angry, senile, bitter old man, who should have retired decades ago.

[zulchzulu]

5. Johnny was a songbird

Boy, could he sing!

:puke:

[TheKentuckian]

6. Yup, he is also still a dumpsterfuck and an irresponsible moron that has such disdain

for our nation that he'd put Sarah Palin a heartbeat from the Presidency.

War hero sure but that ain't all he is by a longshot. He's spent the last 30+ years selling his soul.

[Political Tiger]

9. He's no more of a "hero" than any other man or woman who served in Vietnam

or any other war. I'm tired of people bowing to Macramé as if he was the only person who suffered in Vietnam.

I can think of tens of thousands of men and woman who are much more deserved of the title "hero" than McShame is!