This happened in 1969 should McCain be held accountable for it now? He certainly thinks Judge Roy Moore should be held accountable for something that hasn't been proven he did.
LISTEN TO JOHN McCAIN SPILL HIS GUTS TO THE ENEMY
McCain was taken prisoner by the
North Vietnamese and according to reports earned the name “Songbird” because he
immediately caved and gave the enemy the information they wanted. POW’s made
the statement that McCain made 32 propaganda announcements for the Viet Cong.
Nearly twenty-five years later,
what Senator McCain said to Mike Wallace during an interview for a segment of
the 60 Minutes news magazine (originally broadcast on
12 October 1997 and aired again on 6 June 1999) was not a personal declaration
that he had been a “war criminal” who “bombed innocent women and children,” but
a lamentation that while a POW he had, under pain of torture, finally allowed
his captors to coerce him into issuing a “confession” stating such.
A transcript of the relevant portion
of the 60 Minutes interview from 1997 shows that when McCain spoke
the sentences “I was guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people” and “I
intentionally bombed women and children,” he was referring to the substance of
a confession his North Vietnamese captors had forced him to write as wartime
propaganda, not making a open admission of personal guilt:
WALLACE: (Voiceover) People who
know McCain well say he can hold a grudge. He also has a legendary temper. But
if McCain can be hard on his friends and even harder on his enemies, he can
also be very hard on himself.
Sen. McCAIN: I made serious,
serious mistakes and did things wrong when I was in prison, OK?
WALLACE: What did you do wrong in
prison?
Sen. McCAIN: I wrote a
confession. I was guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people. I
intentionally bombed women and children.
WALLACE: And you did it because
you were being tortured and you’d reached the end of the line?
Sen. McCAIN: Yes. But I should
have gone further. I should have — I never believed that I would — that I would
break, and I did.
In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera,
Nguyen Tien Tran acknowledged that conditions in the prison were "tough,
though not inhuman". But, he added: "We never tortured McCain. On the
contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that
at times were not available to our own wounded."
