McCain not fit to be President

[Joanne98]

http://www.etherzone.com/2008/lebo081808.shtml

McCAIN UNFIT TO SERVE
AS SENATOR HE ABANDONED AMERICAN POWS

By: Bill Hendon & John LeBoutillier

Ed. note: This message from former U.S. Congressmen Bill Hendon (R-NC) and John LeBoutillier (R-NY) is being posted today on numerous military blogs and websites.

He has told me several times over the years that the myth of live POWs was a cruel hoax on the families. He chaired hearings into the issue in the 1990s and found nothing. “The committee … pored over thousands of records and every claim of a sighting, no matter how outlandish,” says Salter. “It was all untrue.”

Jonathan Alter, When Ross Perot Calls…, Newsweek.com January 16, 2008

Senator John McCain’s heroic and inspiring wartime service in Vietnam notwithstanding, we know from personal experience he is not fit to serve as Commander-in-Chief of America’s armed forces. Here is how we know this:

In mid-summer 1991, the U.S. Senate created the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs and charged it with conducting a no-holds-barred investigation into the long-festering matter of American POWs reportedly still held captive by the Communist North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao. On the day the legislation creating the Select Committee was passed, August 2, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted nationwide showed that 69% of Americans surveyed believed that Americans were still held captive in Southeast Asia and 75% believed the U.S. government wasn’t doing enough to get them home.

Following months of negotiations between the committee and a very reluctant George H. W. Bush administration, committee intelligence investigators were finally able to obtain the postwar intelligence files relating to live POWs. Committee investigators spent some 2,700 man hours vetting, analyzing and crosschecking the postwar intelligence. They found it a textbook blend of human intelligence (HUMINT); intercepts of secret enemy radio traffic (SIGINT), and images taken by unmanned reconnaissance drones and U.S. spy satellites (IMINT). The committee’s intelligence investigators told the senators that collectively the intelligence indicated the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao had held back hundreds of POWs at Operation Homecoming in 1973 and that many were still alive in captivity during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

By the time committee investigators finally began briefing the senators in secret sessions in early spring, 1992, the issue of live POWs had become, as McCain later described it, “white hot;” this not only because of intense public interest in the plight of the POWs, but also because Texas businessman and longtime POW advocate H. Ross Perot had entered the presidential race, and had done so amid press accounts that he thought President Bush was not doing enough to bring the POWs home. By late May Perot was in first place in the national polls, ahead of President Bush, who was in second place, and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Governor Bill Clinton, who was in third. What would the committee find? Might a ruling that 69% of the American people were right and that, in fact, there were live POWs still held half a world away throw the election to Perot? How could it not?

Enter John McCain.

Given his wartime experiences as a POW in Vietnam, Sen. John McCain was by default the most powerful and influential member of the Select Committee. Members on both sides of the aisle deferred to his judgment; reporters hung on his every pronouncement. And so when McCain, his chief of staff Mark Salter and their allies on the Select Committee joined forces with top Bush administration officials to assail, ridicule, attack, discredit, photoshop, retouch, manipulate, massage and/or “cherry-pick” the intelligence in order to destroy its intelligence value and keep the matter of live POWs from becoming an issue in the 1992 election, the live POWs never had a chance.

http://robwbright.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/mccain-not-fit-to-be-president/

[midnight]

1. Very sad.