Nothing Is Sacred

I don’t mean for this to become McCain week here on Hullabaloo, but I can’t let this pass. It’s just that it’s always a sad day to find that people on my own side can be just as fucked up and full of shit as the Republicans. Here we have a lefty who is calling McCain a coward in Vietnam:

Well…Unfortunately, McCain is just one more bad example in the pantheon of power-hungry white guys who are leading the country right now. Follow with me.

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Let’s start with his tenure as a prisoner of war. McCain was a naval fighter pilot during the Vietnam conflict, at the same time that his father was in charge of all American forces in Europe. When JM was shot down in 1967, he was captured, enduring some fairly bad injuries at the time of capture. However, almost immediately following his imprisonment, McCain started talking to his captors in exchange for medical treatment. BY HIS OWN ADMISSION (link) in an article he wrote for US News and World Report, McCain talked not only to North Vietnamese interrogators, but also to European and Asian reporters about bombings of civilian targets, combat air operations, and his own status within the military.

There’s no doubt that the Vietnamese who held JM knew of his high-value status, and used him as a public-relations tool, but that doesn’t relieve JM from his obligations as a soldier. The military Code of Conduct bars prisoners of war from using either their status or military knowledge to benefit from privileges or for reduced discomfort. In fact, the CoC makes it perfectly clear that you should never allow yourself to become a POW, and if it happens anyway, you are never allowed to cooperate with the enemy. Now, understanding that all human beings do have a breaking point at which they will no longer be able to control themselves, it would be understandable to see someone breaking down and babbling nonsense in order to get one’s captors to stop a torture session. But McCain admitted that it took only FOUR DAYS for him to trade information for medical care. As the Virgin Mary said, ‘Come again?’

The link he refers to above is to one of Ted Sampley’s propaganda pieces. In fact, McCain’s own words are here and they’re not quite what old Ted said they were.

They beat McCain senseless on the floor of a cell for those four days, denying him care for his crushed and infected leg and arm. When he realized he was going to die without medical care he said he’d talk. They said never mind, thinking he was a goner. It was only when they found out that he was an admiral’s son that they got him some medical care.

As for whether anyone is “allowed” to cooperate with the enemy, I’ll just let the POW’s speak for themselves on this:

BAUGH: You’re always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that’s covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he’s always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don’t know. You really don’t know. But he doesn’t — he’s going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the — the torture. And he’s a — he’s a big guy that knows what he’s doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.

FER: They tied me in knots uh, with this nylon strap cutting off the circulation to my arms and my wrists and the pain is getting very great. And so uh, I gave out a great big holler and I said okay, okay, okay. I’ll tell you what you want to know. I says you know, you’ve been trained, you’ve been raised to be a — a real — a tough resister. This is embarrassing. You have given in John Fer, you have given in in a very short period of time. Now it wasn’t that bad uh, and so when he said what’s your unit again, I said uh, I can’t tell you that. Well he got very upset and he said something very sternly to this guy and he really tied me up this time and really cinched it down tight uh, when the pain got so great this time, they didn’t come back right away.

BAUGH: There’s a point where you’ve completely had it. Where you lose control of your bowels, you throw up, uh, you’ll sell your mother down the river uh, in a heart beat. And there’s a point everybody reaches that you decide I’ve had it. I’ve got to do something to get out of this program. And like me like most everybody we started telling them stories. We made up targets. I had em bombing footbridges in China over creeks which I knew weren’t real targets.

MCMANUS: The beatings were going to occur for a specified period of time almost regardless of what happened. Again, it was to establish uh, the rules of the game. They were in control. That they were the masters. Uh, uh, and — and you were subservient to them and you’d better be careful.

BURROUGHS: They wanted propaganda. They wanted us to denounce our leaders. They wanted us to denounce capitalism. They wanted us to praise Ho Chi Minh. They wanted us to praise the communist initiative. They would put the standard communist glowing terms on every little thing that happened.

MCMANUS: They did a lot of beatings but beatings are easy. Uh, the — the body responds to a beating very well you know, for that point where your body can’t take it anymore, it just shuts down and you go unconscious. So I mean there’s very little a person truthfully can do to you by beating you. Uh, but the — the ropes were — they were scary because they you know, you’d been put in a position whereby if you did something, you’d choke yourself.

MCGRATH: I was in terrible, terrible pain. They were using the rope trick. The Vietnamese — we called it the Vietnamese rope trick and that was to take the arms behind your back, tie your hands together, tie them up real tight and then rotate your arms behind and over your shoulder until your shoulders dislocate. Well this one is already broken and dislocated so that was easy. And I remember this one starting over the top and I can remember the cracking and breaking and my elbow also dislocated. I was in terrible pain. Trying to scream. Wishing I could die. I finally said I can’t live. I can’t live another day. And no — no food, no water, no sleep uh, twenty four hours a day of this and I started talking. And I broke what we call breaking, I broke past name, rank, serial number.

RISNER: Some guys had been hurt, they’d been tortured. They were scared. Now think of this for a moment. Although we had pretty much the cream of the crop as pilots, they had to be highly educated and highly motivated to get there. Now how do you train? Well still you’ve got — you got uh, a variation in humanity. One guy told me, he said I can’t even stand unpleasantness let alone being tortured. He said in the court, when the interrogator pounds the desk he said it just shrivels me up inside. What if you have a man that’s claustrophobic and they put him in a black cell. He’s going to lose it. He’s going to go crazy probably.

DENTON: I put out the word Roll back, bounce back. That was the first time that was initiated. It was very important to last us the rest of the time. You could be tortured to give something, but then you don’t just lie back and continue to give them things as they just gradually exploit you. You stop and don’t give them anything, you make them torture you again and again and give them as little as you can the next time. In other words, they never advance their indoctrination of you to the object they wanted was you become a slave without torture to do anything they want to help their cause.

STUTZ: I really thought before I was shot down and when I was first shot down that I was the toughest fighter pilot in the world. That I was John Wayne uh, Superman all of them rolled up into one and by God, they couldn’t break me. I was one tough son of a gun. Uh, I found out real fast how weak I was. Uh, pain may cleanse but by God, it also hurts. And uh, and I’m telling you, when your shoulders rotate in the sockets and you’re hanging there and — and you cry and you — you bleed and you pray and you scream and when you scream, all they do is pick up a dirty rag and stick it in your mouth so they don’t have to listen to you, and the thing that affects you, at least me, affected me the most was, God, I don’t want to die here and nobody even know it.

The Vietnamese knew that John McCain’s father was an admiral and they were willing to let him go early as a PR stunt. He declined and ended up spending more than five years in that hellhole. Today he cannot raise his arms above his head because his shoulders were dislocated so many times. And unless you consider “material comfort” to mean that the torture stopped for a little while then McCain never got any material comfort and neither did anyone else. Read this transcript if you want to know what hell really is.

Goddamn this makes me mad. You can hate John McCain all you want for being a right wing asshole, but it is insulting to humankind to denigrate the physical and psychological courage those guys showed under pressure we can’t even imagine. Our condemnation of the torture at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo is righteous and true because we can see ourselves in that horrible situation and have empathy for it. Yes, even terrorists and Republicans feel pain.

Jesus, this country is so incredibly fucked up.