Do we assume because John McCain suffered mistreatment at the hands of the Vietnamese, that he empathizes with victims of torture? By presenting a false alternative to Bush’s torture bill, McCain is showing he may just want payback.
I’m not so sure we should believe that McCain was grossly mistreated by the Vietnamese. When he was shot down he was assaulted by angry people that did physically attack him. He was already injured at that point from the fall of his aircraft though.
Why did they attack him when he came down? The answer seems rather obvious, but this assault hardly can be called torture. It was rage at the American criminal that had been napalming and bombing those ‘Gooks’ down below.
As to his later imprisonment? He claims he was beaten and kept in solitary at times. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have suffered these abuses and much worse within America’s own jails. Nobody talks about this even as it goes on massively today in US prisons. I think we all know that rape is an epidemic in US prisons, and is actively encouraged by authorities as a form of control and torture of prisoners. Has McCain ever opened his mouth about this? I think not. He certainly was never threatened with it at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’.
McCain’s debriefing by the US military was set to make it publicly appear as if the Vietnamese were torturing American POWs on a routine basis. The reason for this is that the US was systematically doing much worse to the Vietnamese they held, and a loud campaign of denunciation of supposed Vietnamese abuse of the few Americans they held was meant to take the spotlight off what the US military did in mass to its captives. Returning US GIs were encouraged to join into this campaign with their stories, many of which might well have been coached.
The Pentagon actively pushed US POWs to voice claims that they were grossly mistreated. It became a major industry on the propaganda front. To this day, it is an urban Right Wing myth that huge numbers of returning veterans were spit upon and assaulted by hippie protesters. And the campaign suoppsoedly to aid ‘America’s POw/MIA’ went on for decades, even when it became quite preposterous. No campaign for the victims of US atrocities in SE Asia was ever begun though.
Let’s face it, many people lie and then even begin to believe their own lies. During the first Gulf War, I can’t count the number of Right Wing Americans that claimed to know Kuwaitis. I think we need to take McCains’s claims of being tortured with a big grain… make that a big rock of salt. The verifiable evidence is slim that he was tortured, to say the least.
My father-in-law was tortured by police though. He later died from complications related to that torture. Remember the so-called ‘Operation Cooperation’? It launched the decades long so-called drug wars. My wife’s dad was caught up in the militarization of the US-Mexican Border, thrown in jail, and then tortured. Acid was dropped into his eyes.
As a result, he walked around half blind the rest of his life.
In contrast, McCain is running for president as a Right Wing Republican. I think he is just an asshole and not a torture victim at all. He looks just fine though a little heavy from fine dining.
McCain hardly seems like a torture victim. He’s just your typical Right Wing ex-US-soldier type that wants to be publicly hailed as a hero, even though his activities as an imperialist trooper were dispicable. I can think of a jillion other ‘victims’ of torture out there whose claims of abuse I would take much more seriously. His claims to be a ‘compassionate conservative’ aren’t much more believeable than Bush’s.
