John McCain's 14th Amendment Problem

Worth reading and make up your own mind about what this says. One thing to think about is that 100% of people who have been tortured develop PTSD. If he was tortured, then he has it, but the question remains, at what level. The other, if he was not torture, he did give information and did do propaganda pieces for the North Vietnamese. Either way McCain has a problem and needs to explain it fully before Tuesday but given the fact the media have spent so much time on things like people Obama met at some point in his life (without having real relationships with them) and his ex-pastor, who gave a sermon with a lot of anger (but they only came up with one out of all the years Wright was preaching even though the church provides the tapes and Obama was not even there that day) I doubt they will look into any of this at all.

John McCain's 14th Amendment Problem
Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE

Technically, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits John McCain from becoming president of the United States.

Section III of the Amendment says, “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … as an officer of the United States … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have … given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

It is a fact that McCain was an officer in the U.S. Navy and took an oath to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution. This was a solemn appeal to Jehovah to smite him silly in the event he lied about or broke his oath. If he fell into captivity, he was bound by the Military Code of Conduct not to answer questions or make any oral or written statements disloyal or harmful to the U.S. To do so was considered collaborating with the enemy, and meant yet another mighty swipe from Jehovah.

It is also a fact that, in 1967, Lieutenant Commander John McCain was shot out of the sky while dropping bombs on North Vietnamese civilians. McCain’s plane crashed in a lake, and he suffered some broken bones and was slapped around after he was rescued. And all of that hurt, but none of it reached the Rumsfeld-Bush-Cheney standard for torture. Yet after a mere four days, McCain cracked like a robin’s egg. He told his captors, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.”

In his autobiography McCain elaborated, saying, “I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant.”

It is alleged that McCain gave the numbers of aircraft in his flight formation, information about location of rescue ships, and the order of which his attack was supposed to take place. According to retired Army Colonel Earl Hopper, McCain divulged classified information North Vietnam used to hone their air defense system, including “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.” As result, Hopper claims, the U.S. lost 60 per cent more aircraft, and in 1968 “called off the bombing of North Vietnam, because of the information McCain had given to them.”
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http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine10312008.html

Senator McCain and the POW Cover Up

Senator McCain and the POW Cover Up
Sydney H. Schanberg


The Nation Institute

Sep 21, 2008

September 18, 2008 - 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 US 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.
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http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/ArticleID/11219

This makes me sick. Out of all the terrible things McCain has done against veterans, this was one thing I thought he was serious about. If this is true, he is a disgrace as a Vietnam veteran.