In We Were Warned: Tomorrow's Oil Crisis, CNN's Frank Sesno explores the potential ripple effects of this frightening scenario. The events depicted are hypothetical, but oil experts believe the scenario is entirely plausible. His interviews with energy experts reveal that we are nearing the point at which the world, led by the U.S. and China, will begin to consume more oil than can be pumped from the ground and the oceans. Tracking the global race to find new pools of oil, Sesno also considers the viability of alternative fuels, such as ethanol, which is used as fuel for 40% of cars in Brazil. Throughout his investigation, Sesno tries to find out whether any of these ventures can solve our looming energy crisis or whether we are already too late. We Were Warned: Tomorrow's Oil Crisis
Giving in to pressure largely from Congress withholding arms etc. and MOUNTING pressure on Saudi Arabia to lift crude oil production to record levels looks set to be rewarded, as political leaders again warned of the wider implications of persistent high prices. The oil-rich Arab nation was due to respond overnight to a New York Times report it would increase production by 500,000 barrels a day to just under 10 million barrels. If Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi confirms the 5% production increase it may reduce market concern about crude oil supply, which triggered a record one-day barrel price gain of $US10.75 last week. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah at the weekend to discuss oil prices, as well as climate change and the increasing cost of food. Both leaders agreed those three issues "should be dealt with comprehensively", according to UN official Farhan Haq.
"What you want to avoid is a cascade of these sort of challenges that affect a wide range of social and economic sectors and then start also creating political problems," he said. Finance ministers from the G8 forum discussed those issues at the weekend in Japan, declaring high oil and food prices posed a "serious challenge to stable growth worldwide". "Elevated commodity prices, especially of oil and food, pose a serious challenge to stable growth worldwide, have serious implications for the most vulnerable and may increase global inflationary pressure," they said. King Abdullah last week took the unprecedented step of arranging on short notice a major gathering of oil producers and consumers to address the causes of the price rally. Some analysts have predicted that the oil price could reach $US200 a barrel this year as consumption continues to rise rapidly while supplies lag. Saudi Arabia buckles as world demands rise in oil output
* Plus much to my chagrin Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas. The Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations this week providing legal protection to seven oil companies planning to search for oil and gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska if "small numbers" of polar bears or Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed by their activities over the next five years. Environmentalists said the new regulations give oil companies a blank check to harass the polar bear.
About 2,000 of the 25,000 polar bears in the Arctic live in and around the Chukchi Sea, where the government in February auctioned off oil leases to ConocoPhillips Co., Shell Oil Co. and five other companies for $2.6 billion. Over objections from environmentalists and members of Congress, the sale occurred before the bear was classified as threatened in May. Polar bears are naturally curious creatures and sensitive to changes in their environment. Vibrations, noises, unusual scents and the presence of industrial equipment can disrupt their quest for prey and their efforts to raise their young in snow dens. bush grants permission for oil companies to harass endangered Polar Bears
None of this is going to matter period,. Gasoline prices hit yet another record Sunday, with more than half the nation's states paying more than $4 per gallon on average, according to a daily survey from motorist group AAA. The national average price for regular unleaded gasoline climbed slightly to $4.077 a gallon, according to AAA's Web site. The average topped $4 for the first time last week after crude oil prices surged to a trading record above $139 per barrel. The price has swung back and forth in a $10 range since then. Gas is most expensive in California, according to the survey, averaging $4.597, followed by Alaska at $4.436. prices will continue to break records
I have said it too many times but none of this will matter as eventually $10 gas will seem cheap! Just watch what happens when Iran is attacked and everything really gets pressured! You will see food and gas rationing at the very least. WW2 and the great Depression combined will be dwarfed by what is coming. That is not to fear but for you all to be prepared for the inevitable and stay in touch. Be prepared, hope for the best but prepare for the worst!
James Joiner
Gardner Ma
www.anaveragepatriot.com
23 comments:
Just wanted to wish you Happy F-Day! We did an early one during the week for my 80-yr old dad. I'll be back to watch the vid & read your thoughts.
Red
Thanks and Happy Fathers day to your Dad. I hope he is well! I just finished this and was surprised to see your comment. One of my sons was here and just went back to Florida and I have been busy with him, the others, and a bit overwhelmed with events but I am coming around and I will be over!
Jim, you're being a little bit rough on Dubya. You know he loves Polar Bears! He has two or three rugs down in Crawford made out of their pelts.
Why shouldn't Bush slaughter Polar Bears, he has caused the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.
Look at the hero Jim:
How war hero John McCain betrayed the Vietnamese peasant who saved his life
By William Lowther
In all the tales of wartime courage peppering John McCain's presidential campaign trail, perhaps the most outstanding example of selfless heroism involves not the candidate but a humble Vietnamese peasant.
On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.
In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore.
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Reunited: Senator McCain and his Vietnamese rescuer Mai Van On in Hanoi in 1996
And when a furious mob at the water's edge began to beat and stab the captured pilot, Mr On drove them back.
Nearly three decades later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting in Hanoi, McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and presented him with a Senate memento.
From that brief encounter to his death at the age of 88 two years ago, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published an autobiography that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On.
It is a snub Mr On took to his death.
His widow, Bui Thi Lien, 71, said: ?In his last years, my husband was very sad sometimes.
He would say, 'Mr McCain has forgotten me.'
?Mr McCain would be dead if it weren't for my husband. He would never have returned to his family and he wouldn't be in the presidential race today.?
Last week on a visit to Britain to meet Gordon Brown, McCain paid tribute to the role played by British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan - comments that carried extra weight in the light of McCain's own wartime exploits.
In his 1999 autobiography, Faith Of My Fathers, which laid the ground for his first, unsuccessful run for president in 2000, McCain wrote a Boy's Own-style narrative of his rescue: ?When I came to, I was being hauled ashore on two bamboo poles.
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To the rescue: John McCain, lying on his back across a bamboo log, is saved by villagers - including Mai Van On - after his jet was shot down in 1967
?A crowd of several hundred Vietnamese gathered around me as I lay dazed before them, shouting wildly at me, stripping my clothes off, spitting on me, kicking and striking me repeatedly.?
What followed, according to McCain, was five-and-a-half years of torture and brutal beatings as a prisoner of war - an account that has given a steely edge to his candidacy by establishing him as a true American war hero.
But the story is at odds with the version uncovered by Vietnam veteran Chuck Searcy, who lives in Hanoi and is in charge of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund.
?In 1995, Mr On gave me a letter he wanted me to deliver to McCain,? said Searcy.
?'It said, 'I am the guy who pulled you out of the lake and I have followed your progress over the years. I wish the best for you and your family and I hope some day you will be president of the United States.'
?I thought it was endearing. I sent the letter to McCain's office and I got back a sniffy response from some assistant saying, 'Mr McCain isn't interested in these fanciful stories.'?
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Republican candidate John McCain met French President Nicholas Sarkozy this week
Indeed, claiming to have saved McCain had by then become something of a cottage industry in Hanoi.
Searcy, 63, recalled: ?There had been a lot of preposterous claims, but I asked the neighbours around the lake if it was true and they said that was exactly how it happened.?
The story was also confirmed by the Vietnamese government.
Later in 1995, Searcy met McCain at a veterans' reunion in Washington.
He said: ?I mentioned the story of Mr On to him, and told him it was true. He said, 'Hell, I would like to meet this guy - I'll set it up.'?
McCain, then a senator closely involved in rebuilding US-Vietnam relations, visited Hanoi in 1996, and a meeting was arranged with Searcy and Mr On.
Searcy said: ?Mr On was a wiry little guy. He looked as if he had only ever shaved once or twice and he had his old uniform on.
?He raced up to McCain and kept repeating his name as he embraced him.?
Then, through an interpreter, Mr On recounted the events of that day as McCain listened.
?He launched into a very emotional description,? said Searcy.
?Suddenly they saw this parachute coming down into their small lake.
?Everybody was afraid because they knew it was an American pilot and they didn't know what to do.
?He said he just instinctively grabbed this big bamboo log and threw it into the water and jumped in after it.
?One of his neighbours joined him and the two of them swam out to the parachute.
?Apparently McCain had broken both arms and one leg, and had sunk to the bottom, but they pulled him out of the lake.
?When they got to the bank, a couple of men attacked McCain, breaking his shoulder with a rifle butt and stabbing his leg, before Mr On stopped them.
?That day, he saved McCain from drowning and then from maybe being killed by the mob.
?McCain listened but there was no dramatic response. He just nodded, said, 'Thank you very much,' and gave Mr On a little Senate seal.
?It was the kind of thing you buy in the souvenir shop in the Senate basement.
?But Mr On, to the day he died, treated it as if it were a Congressional Medal of Honour.?
But although McCain appeared to believe the story, it was one he would later seem to ignore in his autobiography and there was no more contact between the two men.
When Mr On died in 2006, an email was apparently sent to McCain's office requesting a message of condolence for the family. There was no response.
Whether or not McCain believed Mr On is unclear.
But his refusal to acknowledge his heroism is likely to fuel other, more damaging allegations that McCain exaggerated elements of his PoW ordeal in Hoa Lo prison.
Phung Van Chung, 70, who was a Communist Party official at the time, claims McCain was quickly singled out for softer treatment, adding: ?I found out he was the son of an American admiral, so the top people wanted to keep him as a live witness so they could use him for negotiations.?
Mr On's son-in-law, Nguyen Ngoc Toan, said: ?Before he died, he told us not to sell the medal McCain gave him.
He said, 'If any of the grandchildren ever go to America, having it might help them.'?
In 2000, McCain, by then a presidential candidate, visited the lake that almost claimed his life.
?His entourage was outside our house but Mr McCain just passed by,? said Mr On's widow, who insists she bears no grudge.
Behind her calm words, however, lies an anxiety to right the injustice she feels her husband suffered.
As we prepared to leave she clutched my hand and said: ?Please help us to remind Mr McCain what my husband did.
?Just a few words will be enough to let the family know that he is grateful.?
Hope you don't mind my returning but I read about the polar bears and it confuses me as to why it makes such a difference to him.
Hey there Jim....
Great post..okay...not great...depressing..sad...pathetic..angering...infuriating...shameful....humbling...worrisome......sigh..
So friend...how are you..I hope you had a wonderful fathers day....that you had a grill heated up..and those boys got in touch with their dad...and that the potato salad was just right...and that the beer was nice and cold....
Many hugs...
Big Oil needs more wells to cap off. If you can't drill 'em, you can't cap 'em off.
Within a matter of months, we could increase domestic oil production by as much as 50% if the oil companies wanted to.
There'll be no oil/gas shortages when the price hits $10/gal.
Increasing domestic production by 50% doesn't sound like much. And it wouldn't last but a few years.
How about 50,000%?
And you're right. There will be no shortages when it hit's $10/Gal. But when it hits $12/gal, there will be an extreme shortage of $10/gal gasoline.
Just like right now, there is a huge shortage of gasoline selling at $1.25 /gallon.
It occurs to me (and I'm positive this is not a new thought) that this oil situation could work out well for undeveloped countries who were never that dependent on oil. See, there's always an upside.
And where is our solar and/or wind power, please? If our grandparents (those hearty pioneers) could live without oil, so can we.
D.K. Raed
Yeah, it will get harder for the US to exploit them.
The only problem is that every nation has become dependent on fertilizers made from fossil fuels, or food imports.
Every silver lining has it's cloud...
The Real John McCain Jim:
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.
One day my father and his last remaining friend, Charlie Ferguson, were walking through the jungle up to the front line. One the way they passed a group of bare-chested Aussies in khaki shorts sitting round a grindstone sharpening their knives. Every once in a while one of the Aussies would hoist his rife and casually put a bullet into a Japanese sniper who had tied himself into the top of a nearby tree. Not in any place that would outright kill him, but some place painful enough to make the point.
A little further toward the front line, my father and Charlie came upon Master Sergeant Harry Blackman, an adult man in his forties, regular army, a grizzled combat veteran. A few days earlier in a fight with the Japanese, a young lieutenant, a “90-Day Wonder,” had curled up in a fetal position when he should have been directing mortar fire. As a result, US mortar rounds landed on several US soldiers. Blackman, in front of everyone, took the lieutenant behind a tree and blew his brains out.
As my father and Charlie waked through the jungle they saw Harry Blackman perched on the lower limb of a huge tropical tree, babbling incoherently among the butterflies and flowering vines, driven stark raving mad by sorrow and jungle war with the Japanese.
Several days later my father was sent on a patrol into Japanese held territory. He was the last man in a formation moving single file through the jungle. Plagued by malaria and exhaustion, he kept falling behind. Around noon, a group of Japanese soldiers sitting high up in trees dropped concussion grenades on the patrol. As he lay on the ground, unable to move, my father watched the Japanese slide down the trees. Starting with the point man on patrol, they pulled down the pants and castrated each man, before clubbing him to death with their rifle butts or running a bayonet into his gut.
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.
Magically, my father was spared that day when his patrol was slaughtered. Against regulations, he had stolen a cross-swords patch and sewn it on his shirt sleeve. At the age of 16, he thought it looked cool. On the morning of the patrol, when the new “90-Day Wonder” told him to take it off, my father said “Sure.” He and the lieutenant stared at each other for a while and then the lieutenant moved away. Insubordination was the least of anyone’s worries. No one expected to survive the patrol, anyway.
When the Japanese who had ambushed the patrol got to my father, they stood poised to mutilate and kill him. Then they saw the cross-swords patch. They apparently felt that dear old dad was an important person with inside information about American forces. Instead of killing him, they took him prisoner. When they realized he was just a stupid kid, the Japanese sent him to a POW camp in the Philippines.
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.
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. When the Germans dropped bombs on London, the Allies called it Terror Bombing. The French resistance especially hated the Germans, especially after the Gestapo set up shop in occupied France in 1940.
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?
In any event, the man who rescued McCain tried to ward off an angry mob, which stomped on McCain for a while until the local cops turned him over to the military. McCain was in pain, but suffering no mortal wounds. He was, however, in enough pain to break down and start collaborating with the Vietnamese after three days in a hospital receiving treatment from qualified doctors – something no other POW ever enjoyed.
War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain’s character…or lack thereof.
There are certainly degrees of collaboration. As a famous novelist once asked, “If you’re a barber and you cut a German’s hair, does that make you a collaborator?”
Being an informant for the Gestapo, or its stepson the CIA in Iraq, and informing on the resistance and sending them to their death, is different than being a barber. In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War Two, collaboration to that extent is an automatic death sentence.
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. A number of US officials, including Andrew Card, have commented on McCain’s inexplicable angry outbursts.
In a July 5 2006 NewsMax.com article, former Senator Bob Smith (R-NH), was quoted as having said about McCain: “I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues.... He would disagree about something and then explode.” Smith called it “irrational behavior. We've all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I've never seen anyone act like that."
So, you say, McCain has a short fuse behind the plastered TV smile. So he calls his colleagues assholes and shit-heads. In high school they called him “McNasty.” That’s just how he is. Always was, always will be.
Well, maybe. And maybe it’s not a quality we want in a president. And maybe that repressed anger actually has its roots in a Vietnamese POW camp, where John McCain betrayed his forefathers and his country.
The Admiral’s Bad Boy
In the forced-labor camp where my father was tortured by the Japanese, the POWs killed anyone who collaborated. Indeed, the ranking POW in my father’s camp, an English Major, made a deal with the Japanese guaranteeing that no one would attempt to escape. When four prisoners escaped, the Major reported it. The Japanese sent out a search party, which found the POWs and brought them back to camp, where they were beheaded on Christmas morning 1943.
The POWs held a war council that night. They drew straws, and the three who got short were given a mission. A few hours later, under cover of darkness, they crept to the major’s hut. My father had gotten one of the short straws and kept watch while the other two POWs strangled the Major in his sleep.
That’s how it happens in real life.
McCain, in his carefully prepared statements, claims he was tortured while in solitary confinement, and that is why he signed a confession saying, “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.” (3)
However, on March 25, 1999, two of his fellow POWs, Ted Guy and Gordon "Swede" Larson told the Phoenix New Times that, while they could not guarantee that McCain was not physically harmed, they doubted it.
As Larson said, "My only contention with the McCain deal is that while he was at The Plantation, to the best of my knowledge and Ted's knowledge, he was not physically abused in any way. No one was in that camp. It was the camp that people were released from."
Guy and Larson’s claims are given credence by McCain’s vehement opposition to releasing the government’s debriefings of Vietnam War POWs. McCain gave Michael Isikoff a peek at his debriefs, and Isikoff declared there was “nothing incriminating” in them, apart from the redactions. (4)
McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days, he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital."
His Vietnamese capturers soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line of American military elites. McCain’s father, John Jr., and grandfather, John Sr., were both full Admirals. A destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, is named after both of them.
While his son was held captive in Hanoi, John McCain Jr., from 1968 to 1972, was the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Pacific Command; Admiral McCain was in charge of all US forces in the Pacific including those fighting in Vietnam.
One can only wonder when the concierge at the Hanoi Hilton started taking calls from Admiral McCain. Rather quickly, one surmises, for the Vietnamese soon took John Boy McCain to a hospital reserved for Vietnamese officers. Unlike his fellow POWs, he received care from a Soviet doctor.
“This poor stooge has propaganda value,” the Vietnamese realized. The Admiral’s bad boy was used to special treatment and his captors knew that. They were working him.
For his part, McCain acknowledges that the Vietnamese rushed him to a hospital, but denies he was given any "special medical treatment."
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)
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.
It is impossible to prove exactly what happened to McCain short of traveling to Vietnam and tracking down his captors, and picking up thee trail where it begins. According to The Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain, McCain says he only collaborated when he brutally tortured by his Vietnamese captors and a wicked Cuban he referred to as Fidel. (8)
He says his confession led him to a suicide attempt.
“In the anguished days right after my confession,” McCain said in his autobiography Faith of My Fathers, “I had dreaded just such a discovery by my father.”
But as McCain discovered, dear old dad did know.
“I only recently learned that the tape I dreamed I heard playing over the loudspeaker in my cell had been real; it had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father,” McCain said. “If I had known at the time my father had heard about my confession, I would have been distressed beyond imagination, and might not have recovered from the experience as quickly as I did.”
But wait! McCain did not commit suicide. In fact, he’s alive, running for President on the “war hero” ticket, and promoting more war everywhere. The new McCain feels no distress at having been a collaborator or a war criminal – if he ever did.
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.
Robert
I am stunned! It never stops. Oh don't get it that, that scum can just go ahead and do what he wants. It will only serve to enrich him and his cronies and will do nothing for our dilemma.
I just posted a video on why you should vote Republican. It is short and sweet. I was hoping you would be compelled to post it and or pass it around!
Larry
Nothing is sacred to that bastard and he can do and kill who and what he wants. You have to assume that gives oil companies the right to shoot them on sight for food or whatever! It will do us no damn good only him and his cronies!
Larry
That is really sad about the Vietnamese rescuer and McCain. It is sick and typical of McDinkweed! It is sad that SOB! He doesn't care about the truth the scum. Only the truth he fabricates for his benefit. I refuse to believe the truth was never told about Bush or McCain. Trying now will backfire. This is so frigged up, we cannot stop!
Gee chelsea
What do you mean, I'm honored, please stay involved! Digging in ANWR or anywhere else in Alaska will only benefit him and his cronies! What little oil is there will take 10 years to get to market and will make no difference particularly in price!
enigma
Hi girlfriend! I had a nice day and heard from one of my sons! He is just back from the middle east. One of his brothers is in Iraq. One just went back to Florida after burying his grand father. The youngest who is trying to get in the army combat engineers I have not seen or heard from since the day 6 years ago that I told him I only expected him to do the right thing.
No barbecue no nothing but I am not comfortable being waited on. I prefer to do it myself.
Anyway it is good to hear from you. I have been pretty much keeping to myself except for Robert or others I do not offend. Today I posted a video though that I was going to tell you about. Why I will vote Republicn, not! You will like it and might want to post and pass around yourself. Take care and I hope you and 6-6 are well!
I did hear from my Father who I called earlier and it was nice to talk to him. My real Father died years ago. I have to laugh even by todays standard i have the most screwed up family and childhood you have ever heard or can wildly imagine. Huckleberry Finn revisited!
Wease
love your input man you are always right on like BT!
Red
Like those in the US that are poor and live close to the ground those around the world will be affected the least unless they possess something this hungry machine wants. Muslims have the ill fortune to own much of the deposits that the west or whoever they are wants!
Larry
McCain is not a war hero. Like everything else he is using his POW status to get what he wants and lying all the way. That was an interesting story about WW2 and it sounds familiar.
Funny but I can tell you from watching 2 of my sons nothing has changed. The one in combat is perfect for it and likes it but his fly boy brother is perfect for what he is doing. Jim is always talking about how pampered Joe is and couldn't handle the reality on the ground. So true!
Brother
Sorry I hate typos and I do it often!
Give me a kiss man! You know you are right and $10 gas will be hear before you know it. Attacking Iran this fall will certainly bring it and then some along with food and gas rationing!
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