In the custody of enemy psywar specialists, McCain became what he is today: a psywar stooge

[MikeWB]

"In the custody of enemy psywar specialists, McCain became what he is today: a professional psywar stooge."

http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine06132008.html

June 13-15, 2008

From Glory Boy to PW Songbird
John McCain: War Hero or North Vietnam's Go-To Collaborator?

By DOUGLAS VALENTINE

If you have no idea what war is about, thank your gods. It is not what you see in Mel Gibson movies, nor is it hidden within the Big Lie Big Brother tells you about Pat Tillman's heroic "Army of One" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When my father was in New Guinea with the 32nd Division in 1942, his fellow American soldiers would point their long Springfield rifles skywards and shoot at American pilots flying overhead.

"Glory Boys," the long-suffering ground troops called them.

The pilots had comfortable quarters beside the airstrip in Port Moresby. When orders for a mission came down, they'd climb in their planes, rattle down the runway, and soar over the Owen Stanley Mountains with the clouds in spotless uniforms, breathing fresh clean air. The Glory Boys weren't trapped in the broiling jungle, in the mud and pouring rain, their skin rotting away, chewed by ghastly insects, bitten by poisonous snakes, stricken with cerebral malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and a host of unknown diseases delivered by unknown parasites.

If the Fly Boys perished, it was in a blaze of glory, not from a landmine, or a misdirected American mortar, or a Japanese bayonet in the brain.
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War. If you're a Glory Boy like John Sidney McCain III, you really have no idea what it is. You drop bombs on cities, on civilians, maybe on enemy forces, maybe on your own troops. Glory Boys like John McCain rarely get a taste of the horror they inflict on others. Their suffering rarely extends beyond the high anxiety that they might get shot down and that some bombarded mob on the ground might take its revenge.
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Being a POW is what my father and John McCain have in common; although their experience as POWs was as different as their class and their character.

Class indeed has privileges, and while the government refused to provide my combat-veteran father with medical benefits for his malaria, McCain, who spent ten hours of his life in mortal danger, was decorated with the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart.

And thus the "war hero" myth was born.
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McNasty

In the fall of 1967, Navy pilot John McCain was routinely bombing Hanoi from an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. On October 26, he was trying to level a power plant in a heavily populated area when a surface-to-air missile knocked a wing off his jet. Banged-up John McCain and what was left of plane splashed into Truc Bach Lake.

A compassionate Vietnamese civilian left his air raid shelter and swam out to McCain. McCain's arm and leg were fractured and he was tangled up in his parachute underwater. He was drowning. The Vietnamese man saved McCain's sorry ass, and yet McCain has nothing but hatred for "the gooks" who allegedly tortured him. As he told reporters on his campaign bus (The Straight Talk Express) in 2000, "I will hate them as long as I live." (1)

Americans have to hate people, and dehumanize them as "gooks" or "rag-heads" in order to drop bombs on them. Stirring up such hatred is the forte of the US government, as witnessed by its Israeli-driven PR campaign against Arabs and Moslems. That's why Bush and his media minions tied "brutal dictator" Saddam Hussein to 9/11 – so Americans would hate Iraqis enough to kill and abuse them in a thousand ways, everyday, for five years. Or, according to McCain, for 100 years if necessary.

The flip side to the equation is that people generally hate those who drop bombs on them.
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Likewise, Iraqi and Afghani resistance fighters hate the Americans (who more and more resemble the Germans of 1940) for occupying their countries. They especially hate our Gestapo – the CIA – and its torturers. But that's War for you, and John McCain is lucky the locals didn't eat him alive – like Uzbek nationalists trapped in a horrid prison camp in Afghanistan nibbled on CIA officer John "Mike" Spann shortly after Spann summarily executed a prisoner. Spann was killed in the ensuing riot, shortly before the CIA and its Afghan collaborators massacred the remaining Uzbek prisoners on 28 November 2001.
The Vietnamese had good reason to hate McCain. On his previous 22 missions, he had dropped God knows how many bombs killing God knows how many innocent civilians. "I am a war criminal," he confessed on "60 Minutes" in 1997. "I bombed innocent women and children." (2)

If he is sincere when he says that, why isn't he being tried for war crimes by the U.S .Government?
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The question is: "What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate his alleged torturers for the rest of his life?"

Put 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?

Covering-up can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking in his subconscious, waiting to explode.
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However....two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not "name rank and serial number, or kill me," as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of US pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships. (5)

So McCain leveraged some details to get some medical attention. That's not anything too contemptible. And who among us civilians is to judge someone in the position?

On the other hand, according to one source, McCain's collaboration may have had very real consequences. Retired Army Colonel Earl Hopper, a veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, contends that the information that McCain divulged classified information North Vietnam used to hone their air defense system.

Hopper's son, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Earl Pearson Hopper was, like McCain, shot down over North Vietnam. Hopper the younger, however, was declared "Missing in Action." Stemming from the loss of his son, the elder Hopper co-founded the National League of Families, an organization devoted to the return of Vietnam War POWs.

According to the elder Hopper, McCain told his North Vietnamese captors, "highly classified information, the most important of which was the package routes, which were routes used to bomb North Vietnam. He gave in detail the altitude they were flying, the direction, if they made a turn... he gave them what primary targets the United States was interested in." Hopper contends that the information McCain provided allowed the North Vietnamese to adjust their air-defenses. As result, Hopper claims, the US lost sixty percent more aircraft and in 1968, "called off the bombing of North Vietnam, because of the information McCain had given to them." 6

The Psywar Stooge

McCain was held for five and half years. Collaborating during the first two weeks might have been pragmatic, but he soon became North Vietnam's go-to collaborator for the next three years. Given the quality of the military information he allegedly shared, his situation isn't as innocuous as the pragmatic French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

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.

Not content with divulging military information, McCain provided his voice in radio broadcasts used by the North Vietnamese to demoralize American soldiers.

Vietnamese radio propagandists made good use out of McCain. On June 4, 1969, a U.S. wire service headlined a story entitled "PW Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral." (7)
http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine.pdf

The story reported that McCain collaborated in psywar offensives aimed at American servicemen. "The broadcast was beamed to American servicemen in South Vietnam as a part of a propaganda series attempting to counter charges by U.S. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird that American prisoners are being mistreated in North Vietnam."
On one occasion, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the top Vietnamese commander and a nationalist celebrity of the time, personally interviewed McCain. His compliance during this command performance was a moment of affirmation for the Vietnamese. His Vietnamese handlers thereafter used him regularly as prop at meetings with foreign delegations.

In the custody of enemy psywar specialists, McCain became what he is today: a professional psywar stooge.
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According to Fernando Barral, a Cuban psychologist who questioned McCain in January 1970, "McCain was 'boastful' during their interview and 'without remorse' for any civilian deaths that occurred 'when he bombed Hanoi.' McCain has a similar recollection, writing in his [autobiography] that he responded, 'No, I do not' when Barral asked if he felt remorse." (9)

McCain told [Barral] that he had not been subjected to "physical or moral violence," and "lamented in the interview that 'if I hadn't been shot down, I would have become an admiral at a younger age than my father.'"

"Barral said McCain boasted that he was the best pilot in the Navy and that he wanted to be an astronaut." The Cuban psychologist concluded that McCain was [a] 'psychopath.'" (10)

'He felt superior to the Vietnamese up there in his plane, with all his training,' Barral recalled.

Psychopath McCain emerges, now, as a contemptible elitist, stewing in the crucible of his class conscience, the ultimate right wing psywar stooge.

McJekyll and McHyde

There are no public records from other POWs to confirm McCain's self-aggrandizing claims, but his detractors, like fellow POWs Ted Guy and Gordon 'Swede' Larson, and Colonel Hopper, have yet to be discredited or silenced by McCain's PR team.

Hopper, Guy and Larson are part of a larger movement concerned with the fate of the 2,000 American veterans still missing in Vietnam. They've been pressing McCain to own up to his POW experience, drop the "war hero" posturing, and do more to provide a full accounting of the POWs and MIAs who were not as fortunate, privileged, or willing to collaborate as the would-be president.

McCain's supporters are trying to quiet detractors by ignoring them. 'Nobody believes these idiots. They're a bunch of jerks. Forget them,' said Mark Salter, McCain's chief mythologist. Salter is credited by casting McCain as a modern Teddy Roosevelt, "the war hero turned domestic reformer." (11)

By in large the Salter strategy has worked. The American media accepts McCain's "war hero" myth as gospel and, in so doing, bolsters the "straight talk" image so essential to his success in politics. In a recent TV interview with John Kerry, victim of the Swift Boat Heroes for Truth Movement in the last election, another "fortunate son," Chris Wallace, actually took umbrage when Kerry criticized McCain. Son of media admiral Mike Wallace, Chris made Kerry admit that McCain was a hero.

When it comes to psywar, the Vietnamese have nothing on the good old USA.

McCain learned his lesson well from the Vietnamese propagandists who used him for their psywar projects. But it's not the collaboration that makes John McCain unfit for office; it's the fact that he has managed to rewrite his collaboration into political capital. "He's a war hero, respect him, or die."

As a pedigree, the McCain family's stature rests on the status and prestige of its achievements in the military: rank, medals, and most importantly to John McCain's presidential campaign, the image of warrior masculinity: the straight talking maverick of the Republican Party, the 21st century rendering of Teddy Roosevelt.

Not exactly. In his current presidential campaign, he's cozying up to the hate-mongering Christian right he once criticized. He's reversed positions on so many issues that his Democratic rivals have assembled his contrasting statements into "The Great McCain Versus McCain Debates. (12)

Underlying the Jekyll-Hyde reversals is McCain's hidden past of collaboration. Somewhere in the unplumbed human part of John Sidney McCain III, he knows his POW experience contradicts the war hero image he projects. This essential dishonesty, this lie of the soul, is a sign of a larger lack of character - like the major in my father's POW camp, but without the come-uppance.

McCain is not some principled leader, not a maverick cowboy fighting the powerful. He's a sycophant. He believes in nothing but power and will do anything to attain it. He explodes in anger when challenged because, when a criticism hits to close to home, it goes to straight his deep-seeded shame.

McCain's handlers have turned his unspeakable reality into a myth worthy of Teddy Roosevelt. No wonder the Glory Boy has stuck around Washington so long.

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Doug Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, the story of his father's experiences in a Japanese POW camp in World War Two. The Hotel Tacloban is available at Mr Valentine's websites http://www.DouglasValentine.com and http://valentine.sb2.authorsguild.net
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