John Fleming:
McCain wrote on behalf of ex-trooper now awaiting trial in civil rights slaying: Presidential hopeful John McCain has a connection to a former Alabama state trooper charged with the murder of a man at the height of the civil rights movement, according to documents obtained by The Star. In the early 1990s, Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., wrote a letter to the State Department regarding James B. Fowler, who was at the time imprisoned in Thailand on narcotics charges....
In 2005, The Star published an interview with James B. Fowler who admitted publicly for the first time that he shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, during a melee in February 1965 in the west Alabama town of Marion. Fowler insisted it was in self defense.... Fowler, whose trial was scheduled to start this month until a judge delayed it Monday, has a complex and varied background. He fought in the Vietnam War, he has said, to avenge his brother's death. He later worked with military prosecutors to expose a murder-for-hire plot in Southeast Asia. He raised a family in Thailand and in Alabama, and for about five years in the early 1990s, he was in a Thai prison cell after being arrested for heroin trafficking....
Robert Fischer, a press spokesman for McCain's Senate office in Washington, said files in his office do not go back to 1991, so he was not able to find additional correspondence involving the case, but added that "it is our policy not to comment on cases such as this." A McCain campaign press official... said Monday the office's spokesman... was not available to comment.... A press official at McCain's headquarters... could not provide comment to a regional publication...