Tag Archives: John McCain

McCain and the POW Cover-Up, by Sydney Schanberg

Posted on August 27, 2018 | Leave a comment

An article SLL posted last night by Ron Unz, “John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President,” mentioned this article. It is long, but it reveals the supposed “war hero” in action, preventing inquiries about or efforts to bring him the forgotten POWs and MIAs left behind in Southeast Asia. From Sydney Schanberg at theamericanconservative.com:

Eighteen months ago, TAC publisher Ron Unz discovered an astonishing account of the role the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, had played in suppressing information about what happened to American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. Below, we present in full Sydney Schanberg’s explosive story.

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.

To continue reading: McCain and the POW Cover-Up

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What the McCain Eulogies Tell Us About the Media and the Regime, by Tom Woods

Posted on August 27, 2018 | Leave a comment

McCain the so-called maverick was a believer and proponent of every Deep State desire, especially in foreign and military affairs. The eulogies are revolting. From Tom Woods at tomwoods.com:

John McCain is dead.

People tell me I should not criticize him right now.

I do think some people are behaving in bad taste. But I do not think I am prohibited from making sober remarks at a moment when so many Americans, and the opinion molders who tell them what to think, are getting ludicrously carried away.

The phenomenon we are witnessing is so Orwellian that I can’t resist exploring it. I am less concerned with criticizing McCain — there will be ample time for that — than I am with trying to understand the regime under which we live, and the media lackeys that glorify it.

The tributes to McCain from the major newspapers are so over the top that there’s something more going on here than the perfunctory respect the media shows for most deceased politicians.

They will not be speaking this way about Pat Buchanan — a real maverick, who was the first conservative I ever saw who broke with both parties (that’s what a maverick does) to point out that the sanctions on Iraq were creating a humanitarian catastrophe that no moral person could support (that’s what an actual conservative says).

As if to show that she has every Establishment ritual already down to a science, even democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to say this:

John McCain’s legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service.

As an intern, I learned a lot about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen. Kennedy.

He meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.

“But she had to say something!” some say.

She had to say “an unparalleled example of human decency and American service”?

To continue reading: What the McCain Eulogies Tell Us About the Media and the Regime

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John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President, by Ron Unz

Posted on August 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

In a few days we’ll let John McCain rest in torment, but first we’ll do our best to counter the mainstream media’s hagiography onslaught. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her trial for treason after the war, which stripped her of her citizenship and sentenced her to a long prison term, made the national headlines.

The actual historical facts seem to have been somewhat different than the popular myth. Instead of a single “Tokyo Rose” there were actually several such female broadcasters, with Ms. Toguri not even being the earliest, and their identities merged in the minds of the embattled American GIs. But she was the only one ever brought to trial and punished, although her own radio commentary turned out to have been almost totally innocuous. The plight of a young American-born woman alone on a family visit who became trapped behind enemy lines by the sudden outbreak of war was obviously a difficult one, and desperately taking a job as an English-language music announcer hardly fits the usual notion of treason. Indeed, after her release from federal prison, she avoided deportation and spent the rest of her life quietly running a grocery shop in Chicago. Postwar Japan soon became our closest ally in Asia and once wartime passions had sufficiently cooled she was eventually pardoned by President Gerald Ford and had her U.S. citizenship restored.

Despite these extremely mitigating circumstances in Ms. Toguri’s particular case, we should not be too surprised at America’s harsh treatment of the poor woman upon her return home from Japan. All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

To continue reading: John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President

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The Real John McCain, by Jack Kerwick

Posted on August 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

SLL recently called John McCain a half-baked warmonger jackass, and there’s no reason his death changes that assessment. From Jack Kerwick at lewrockwell.com:

As soon as John McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer, Democrats and Republicans in Washington and the press spared no opportunity to lavish praise upon this lifelong government employee.

The truth, though, is that in exchange for the billions and billions of dollars that McCain has confiscated from them for well over three decades, taxpayers have received an ever-burgeoning administrative state, relentless illegal immigration from the Third World, and, of course, war—and all while McCain has pretended to be a “conservative.”

Thanks to his labors, hundreds of thousands of human beings, both foreign and American alike, are now dead.

And hundreds of thousands more are traumatized, orphaned, homeless, maimed, and continually besieged by those murderous terrorist organizations, like ISIS, that have taken over their countries after McCain’s policies prevailed.

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McCain is not alone in having their blood on his hands.  Yet in a Regime, a Government-Media-Complex, comprised of warmongers, McCain enjoys the dubious distinction of being the warmonger par excellence.

On the false pretense that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat against the United States via the “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) that he never possessed, McCain urged as loudly and tirelessly as anyone for war.  Those libertarians and old right conservative sorts who exposed holes in the WMD narrative and forecasted the disaster to which such a war would lead were dismissed, ignored, or mocked.

Estimates of casualties vary, but today, some 14 years after McCain got his way, anywhere between 195,000 and possibly one million Iraqis are dead.  The Iraq Body Count project found that during the decade following the invasion, 174,000 Iraqis were killed. Of this number, 112,000-123,000 were civilian noncombatants.  At present, the number is closer to 200,000 civilian noncombatant deaths.

Between 2003 and 2014, nearly 5,000 American service members lost their lives in this war that McCain and his ilk cooked on the basis of a lie.

Yet contractors, aid relief workers, and journalists are also among those who lost their lives.

While we can tabulate numbers, the pain, suffering, and trauma endured by the loved ones of those killed is incalculable.

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and American corpses that McCain and his comrades left in the wake of their rush to war, there are that many more who have lived but who suffer daily.

To continue reading: The Real John McCain

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The “Magnitsky Trio” Pushes For War With Russia with New Sanctions, by Tom Luongo

Posted on August 5, 2018 | Leave a comment

What if a story that was the justification for heavy US sanctions against Russia has gaping holes? From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

If half of what I have come to understand about the Curious Case of Bill Browder is true, then the “Magnitsky Trio” of Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Ben Cardin are guilty of espionage, at a minimum.

Why?  Because they know that Browder’s story about Sergei Magnitsky is a lie.  And that means that when you tie in the Trump Dossier, Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the Skripal poisoning and the rest of this mess, these men are consorting with foreign governments and agencies against the sitting President.

As Lee Stranahan pointed out recently on Fault Lines, Cardin invited Browder to testify to Congress in 2017 to push through last year’s sanctions bill, a more stringent version of the expiring Magnitsky Act of 2011, which has since been used to ratchet up pressure on Russia.

Cardin knew there were problems with Browder’s story about Magnitsky’s death and yet brought him into Congress to testify to secure the vote.

That’s suborning perjury, as Lee points out.

Just the holes in Browder’s story about Magnitsky’s death are alone enough to warrant a perjury charge on him.  If you haven’t read Lucy Komisar’s detailed breakdown of Browder’s dealings then you owe it to yourself to do so.

I’d read it a few times, because it’s about as murky as The Swamp gets. And, still my eyes glaze over.

The Magnitsky Act and its sequel have been used to support aggressive policy actions by the U.S. against Russia and destroy the relationship between the world’s most prominent militaries and nuclear powers.

The new bill is said to want to put ‘crushing sanctions’ on Russia to make ‘Putin feel the heat.’   In effect, what this bill wants to do is force President Trump to enforce sanctions against the entire Russian state for attempting to do business anywhere in the world.

The new financial penalties would target political figures, oligarchs, family members and others that “facilitate illicit and corrupt activities” on behalf of Putin.

It would also impose new sanctions on transactions tied to investments in state-owned energy projects,  transactions tied to new Russian debt, and people with the capacity or ability to support or carry out a “malicious” cyber act.

To continue reading: The “Magnitsky Trio” Pushes For War With Russia with New Sanctions

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John McCain’s Revisionist History Is a Team Effort, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on May 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

Insiders don’t say nasty things about other insiders. From Matt Taibbi at rollingstone.com:

In HBO’s ‘John McCain: For Whom The Bell Tolls,’ the Arizona Senator is pre-eulogized by ghoulish ex-foes

I hope my editors boil in oil in the afterlife for asking me to review John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, the new HBO doc that premieres Memorial Day and stars David Brooks, Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and a succession of other wax-museum escapees who line up to evade and prevaricate about things McCain-related and not.

The review copy might as well have been titled, Go Ahead, Say Something Bad About a Terminal Cancer Patient. I felt like a monster 20 seconds in.

Having covered McCain’s 2008 run, I had mixed feelings about the man anyway. Just as a person, McCain came across as the kind of insistently obnoxious guy you hear complaining about the slow service in an airport bar – a type I always found oddly sympathetic.

But the political myth-making around McCain has always been tough to take, and this movie is basically two hours of it. The myths aren’t just about McCain, either, but also an effort to gloss over about six decades of American history, and how we got to the terrible place we’re in today.

The movie is called For Whom the Bell Tolls because McCain calls the Hemingway novel his “lodestar.” Mark Salter says its theme, “The harder the cause, even lost, the better the cause,” spoke deeply to his personal belief system.

McCain has certainly fought for a lot of lost causes in his life. But most of them were causes he deserved to lose.

For instance, one of the things McCain will be most harshly judged for is his decision to make Sarah Palin his running mate in 2008. Many people (correctly) believe that moment paved the way for the rise of what David Brooks in the movie calls “a disease” of anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party.

To continue reading: John McCain’s Revisionist History Is a Team Effort

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You Can’t Criticize John McCain! by Jack Kerwick

Posted on May 16, 2018 | 1 comment

You can’t criticize John McCain on certain forums, but SLL publishes its share of critical articles about the half-baked warmonger jackass. From Jack Kerwick at lewrockwell.com:

Did you know that John McCain, Arizona senator and former presidential candidate, is a war hero?

It’s understandable if you didn’t know this, for no one, least of all Senator McCain himself, ever mentions this fact.

In this respect, McCain is not unlike your average combat veteran, particularly those combat veterans from the World War II era, like my late paternal grandfather who died when I was but nine years of age.  Years later, after I reached adulthood, I would ask my father if his dad ever recounted many of his experiences from the war.  My dad would reply in the negative, explaining that most of the men from that generation spoke little about their time in combat.

In other words, they were like McCain, who not only disavows all attempts by others to brand him a war hero, but who aggressively insists that no one ever refer to him as such.

And did you further know that if one of the most visible and among the most influential public figures in the world is dying, that irrespectively of what he’s said or done, it remains immoral to respond to this figure critically?

Senator McCain, you see, has terminal brain cancer. Thus, it is immoral for any remotely decent human being to utter a single critical syllable about him—even if it is in response to remarks that McCain continues to make.

As the reader has doubtless discovered by now, the foregoing paragraphs are to be understood as full-throated sarcasm.  McCain and his admirers have spent decades playing the “war hero” card at every turn.  They continue doing so.  A friend of mine recently remarked that he can’t think of a single other person who has exploited his combat service for personal gain to the extent that McCain has done so.  Neither can I think of anyone who so much as places a distant second.

To continue reading: You Can’t Criticize John McCain!

 

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A Life Wasted, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on May 14, 2018 | 1 comment

John McCain…what might have been. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

What’s happening to John McCain is tragic. It’s not something one should ever wish upon another human being. Nor is it decent, let alone useful, to wish that he would die. Wishing bad things upon someone because they did bad things is too close for comfort to what he himself did. But it’s good to remember that his brain tumor is not the most tragic part of McCain’s life on earth. And no, neither is his time as prisoner of war in Vietnam.

McCain’s main tragedy is that he didn’t learn the one lesson he should have learned about his time in Vietnam, and didn’t turn his back on warfare. Instead, he turned into the biggest and loudest pro-war campaigner in Washington for decades. Talk about a missed opportunity, a life wasted. If there was one person who was presented with the first-hand experience needed to turn against bloodshed, it was John McCain.

What’s more, during his time in the House and later the Senate, McCain completely missed out on a development that might yet have changed his mind. That is, wars became unwinnable. Something even that the US losing their war in Vietnam might have taught him. It entirely passed him by. McCain still never saw an opportunity to wage battle somewhere, anywhere on the planet, that he didn’t like.

That makes him a dinosaur and a fossil who should never have been allowed to remain in the Senate for as long as he did. At the age of 81, and after ‘serving’ for 35 years in Washington, it apparently becomes too difficult to see how the world outside changes, let alone to adapt to those changes. If you limit the time a president can serve, why not do the same for senators? Is it because those same senators would have to vote on that?

Moreover, if wars are unwinnable, but you incessantly call for new wars anyway, then regardless of moral issues about going to war in the first place, you have de facto become a threat to your own people and your own country that you purport to serve. Especially, and first of all, to the American soldiers you desire to send out there to fight those wars. But also a threat to the image of America around the globe.

To continue reading: A Life Wasted

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McCain As Metaphor, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on October 19, 2017 | 6 comments

Insanity may not be repeating the same thing and expecting a different result, but it’s certainly idiocy, an idiocy of which John McCain is the living embodiment. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

Some people are living symbols, sheer embodiments of a concept that fits their persona as snugly as their skin: e.g. the Dalai Lama personifies Contemplative Piety, Harvey Weinstein is the incarnation of Brazen Vulgarity, and John McCain’s very person exudes the sweaty blustery spirit of Empire. His entire history – born in the Panama Canal zone, son of an admiral, third-generation centurion, the War Party’s senatorial spokesman – made it nearly impossible for him to be other than what he is: the country’s most outspoken warmonger and dedicated internationalist.

As George Orwell remarked, “After forty, everyone has the face they deserve,” and in McCain’s case this is doubly true. That Roman head, fit for a coin of high denomination, looks as if it might sprout a crown of laurel leaves at any moment:  Grizzled brow, wrinkled with the tension of an inborn belligerence, eyes alight with a perpetual flame of self-righteous anger, McCain is Teddy Roosevelt impersonating Cato the Elder. In the extreme predictability of his warlike effusions, he’s become a bit of a cartoon character. Who can forget his enthusiastic rendition of “Bomb bomb bomb Iran!” to the tune of “Barbara Ann”?

The Senator from Arizona represents something relatively new on the American scene: the emerging class of colonial administrators, Pentagon contractors, and high-ranking military personnel, and their families, many of them stationed overseas. These people have a material interest in the expansion of our role as global cop, they number in the tens of thousands, and they are strategically placed in the social order, with enough social power to constitute an influential lobby.

To continue reading: McCain As Metaphor

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It’s Time To Support Your President, America, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on August 9, 2017 | Leave a comment

The only good thing you can say about the mainstream media is that fewer and fewer people pay attention to it. The only good thing you can say about Congress is, well, nothing comes to mind. They’re both trying to cripple Trump, especially as far as relations with Russia go. This is not a good thing, and Raúl Ilargi Meijer, who’s had his share of unflattering things to say about Trump, says the situation compels support for Trump. From Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

A Guardian headline today shouts: “Trump Has Taken Us To The Brink Of Nuclear War. Can He Be Stopped?”. And I’m thinking that is such obvious nonsense, how dare you print it? The North Korea nuke build up has been going on for decades, and neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush nor Obama ever took any decisive actions against it. And now it all falls into Trump’s lap. But that doesn’t mean he’s ‘taken us’ anywhere at all. The last thing Trump wants is this.

It’s not the last thing people like John McCain want, however. Who said about Trump’s “fire and fury” threat to Kim Jong-un that you shouldn’t make that threat unless you’re willing to execute it. Yeah, that’s exactly what McCain and Lindsey Graham and their entire entourage of friends and servants on Capitol Hill have been looking for for ages: war. And they see this in the same way that their peers saw Grenada in the Reagan era.

Small country, no challenge, good publicity. But Kim, crazy as he may or may not be, has learned a few lessons on the way. Cheney, W. and Rumsfeld ‘regime-changed’ Saddam Hussein, and Obama/Hillary ‘came saw and he died’ Gaddafi. They got offed before they could develop nukes. Kim knows that’s the dividing line. Sure, as I said, he may be crazy, but then everybody in this movie is.

That “Trump Has Taken Us To The Brink Of Nuclear War” line is based on da Donald’s “fire and fury” comment. But that is just him trying to talk to Kim in his own language. It was my first thought as soon as I heard it. Every other approach has failed, try this. My second thought was it was directed as much against Beijing as it was against Kim: Xi Jinping, once again, you have to stop this.

To continue reading: It’s Time To Support Your President, America

 

 

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