Why is Donald Trump deliberately picking a fight with the ghost of John McCain? It might seem he has nothing to gain and much to lose from this battle.  Therefore many believe this is just more evidence of his narcissism, impulsiveness, and thoroughly nasty personality.  Beware of underestimating Trump’s skillful and devious political acumen.  As often, the president is speaking in coded language to his base, which regards McCain as the Judas who betrayed all those thousands of American POWs left behind in Vietnam.

In public culture, especially in the corporate media and on the national political stage, John McCain is almost universally acclaimed as a great “American hero.”  Why?  Traditional American heroes in our wars engaged in some heroic combat action.  Sergeant Alvin York, the most celebrated American of the First World War, saved his squad from German machine gunners, personally killing twenty enemy soldiers, including six he shot with his .45 pistol when they charged with bayonets.  The most decorated American of the Second World War was Audie Murphy, who at the age of 19 single-handedly held off an entire company of Nazi soldiers for an hour and led a counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.  Growing up in World War II, I knew the names of these heroes.  Do you know the name of any authentic American hero of the Vietnam War?   How about Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, who landed his helicopter in My Lai, ordered his gunners to shoot any American soldiers who continued to fire, and personally saved a number of Vietnamese jumbled with the mass of dead villagers in a ditch?

As for John McCain, he was shot down by a missile while bombing the thermal power plant responsible for providing electricity to the Hanoi civilian neighborhood in which it was located.  McCain was and is hailed as a great hero not for any of his actions in combat but for what he claimed he endured during his captivity as a prisoner of war.  There are two groups of American heretics who do not revere McCain.  One remembers him as the senator who never saw a war he did not favor.  The other despises him for pretending that America did not abandon many POWs in Vietnam after the war.

Before going any further, let’s get one thing straight.  Only one U.S. POW was left behind in Vietnam: Robert Garwood, who had defected and become an officer on the other side.  Those who still believe otherwise should read my M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America.

The United States of America in the 21st century has two national flags. One is the colorful red, white, and blue banner created during the American Revolution, with stars that represent, in the words of the 1777 Continental Congress, “a new constellation.” The other is the black and white POW/MIA flag, America’s emblem of the Vietnam War.

The POW/MIA flag is the only one besides the Star-Spangled Banner that has ever flown over the White House, where it has fluttered yearly since 1982. As visitors from around the world stream through the Rotunda of the US Capitol, they pass another giant POW/MIA flag, the only flag that has ever been displayed amid the epic paintings and heroic statues, a position of honor granted in 1987 by Congress and the president of the United States. The POW/MIA flag flies over every US post office, thanks to a law passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1997. During the 1980s and 1990s, the legislatures and governors of each of the 50 states issued laws mandating the display of this flag over public facilities such as state offices, municipal buildings, toll plazas, and police headquarters. The POW/MIA flag also hangs over the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and waves at countless corporate headquarters, shopping malls, union halls, and small businesses. It is sewn into the right sleeve of the official Ku Klux Klan white robe and adorns millions of bumper stickers, buttons, home windows, motorcycle jackets, watches, post cards, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and Christmas-tree ornaments. Much of my speaking in the 21st century has been to saltwater fishing clubs meeting at the local headquarters of the VFW, Elks, American Legion, and Knights of Columbus, and over each of these buildings flies the POW/MIA flag.

The flag displays our nation’s veneration of its central image, a handsome American prisoner of war, his silhouetted head slightly bowed to reveal behind him the ominous shape of a looming guard tower. A strand of barbed wire cuts across just below his firm chin. Underneath runs the motto: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN.

This flag has flown and still flies as America’s understanding of the meaning of the Vietnam War. In 1991, that meaning shifted dramatically, as it came to symbolize America as a heroic warrior, victimized by “Vietnam,” but reemerging as Rambo unbound. Those black and white flags had been transformed into symbols of American pride, not shame. This is what George H. W. Bush meant on March 1st, 1991, when he proclaimed “a proud day for America” because, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” How many people knew back then that Bush was really celebrating the beginning of our epoch of the Forever War?

A month after Bush’s proclamation, Jane Franklin and I were on our way to Japan, where I was to teach American Studies for a few weeks as a visiting professor at Tokyo’s Meiji University. I had just finished the manuscript for M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, a history of how Richard Nixon created the “POW/MIA” category and used it to prolong the war, and how and why the preposterous belief in POWs in postwar Vietnam came to possess our nation. I thought I understood everything about the history and meaning of the POW/MIA myth, but I was wrong. And I was about to learn something crucial about American culture and culture in general.

Where does a society’s culture exist? Obviously in the artifacts, cultural productions, and discourse of the society, and of course inside the minds of the people who constitute that society. That’s why sometimes it can be hard to understand or even see what is most peculiar or even bizarre about one’s own culture; it’s inside one’s own head. Learning that in Anthropology 101 is one thing. Discovering how that works in your self is something else.

One night several Japanese scholars of American Studies, from Meiji and other universities, expressed their keen interest in the POW/MIA myth. They said that, on some levels, they understood it, that from their study of POW movies and other cultural artifacts they saw that the prisoner of war was functioning in American society as an icon of militarism. “But,” one said, “that’s what we find so puzzling. When militarism was dominant in Japan, the last person who would have been used as an icon of militarism was the POW. What did he do that was heroic? He didn’t fight to the death. He surrendered.” I was flabbergasted and totally flummoxed. Here I had been studying the POW/MIA myth for years and I had missed its most essential and revealing aspect.

After we got home, I had to look once again at the cultural artifacts vital to the POW/MIA myth.  Because the postwar POWs are imaginary beings, elaborating the POW/MIA myth and implanting it deep in America’s collective imagination has been the job of art forms specializing in imaginary beings: novels, comic books, TV soaps, video games, and, of course, movies.  Although the story of American prisoners abandoned in Southeast Asia could not become a major American myth until the dream factory geared up its assembly line for mass production of the essential images, Hollywood was actually involved in creating bits of the history that its POW rescue movies would soon fantasize.  President Ronald Reagan and Clint Eastwood jointly sponsored raids in Southeast Asia by retired Colonel Bo Gritz, a would-be POW rescuer.

The first POW rescue movie began shooting amid the media hoopla about the Gritz raids.  Starring Gene Hackman as a thinly-veiled counterpart of Gritz, Uncommon Valor made it to the screen for the Christmas season of 1983.  Reviewers, who at first dismissed it as a “grind actioner” and “bore” with “comic-strip-level heroism,” were soon trying to comprehend the startling audience response to what turned out to be the “biggest movie surprise” of the 1983-84 season.  The best explanation seemed to come from “an ordinary moviegoer who said with satisfaction of the bloody ending in which dozens of the enemy are mowed down by the Americans, ‘We get to win the Vietnam War.'”  The film presents a tableau of a nation run by bureaucrats, politicians, and shadowy secret agents in business suits who revile and betray its true warrior heroes.  The idealism, virility, martial powers, and heroism of men who dedicate their lives to rescuing their abandoned comrades, sons, and fathers are presented as the alternative to a weak, decadent America subjugated by materialism, hedonism, and feminism.  Hackman reestablishes patriarchal order by recruiting a team composed of Vietnam veterans who have all been victimized by an American society that castrates military and manly virtue.  Their rescue mission also rescues themselves from the corrupting and degrading bonds of civilian life, and their most revealing salvations are of team members liberated from emasculating women.

The following year came Missing in Action, with Chuck Norris as retired Special Forces Colonel James Braddock, a fantasized version of Colonel James “Bo” Gritz.  Here the myth took more potent shape, with Norris as lone superhero‑-incarnate in a fetishized male body‑-replacing Hackman’s buddy-buddy team of manly warriors and graphically dramatizing how much more erotically exciting it is to make war, not love.  There is no secret about the meaning and tremendous popular allure of Missing in Action, which were expressed in full-page ads showing Chuck Norris, headband half-restraining his savage locks, sleeves rolled up to reveal bulging biceps, and a huge machine gun seeming to rise from his crotch.

The fully mythic Rambo arrived in 1985.  As he is set free from the American prison, he asks his famous question: “Do we get to win this time?”  Rambo’s superhuman powers come from America’s glorious past.  He despises modern technology and science.  His weapons are bow, arrows, knife.  His final victory comes when, after rescuing the POWs, Rambo hurls himself on top of the prostrate Murdock–the arch bureaucrat who embodies feminized, devious, emasculating civil society–and forces this fake man to whimper and moan in terror of our hero’s gigantic phallic knife.  Thus Rambo projects a fantasy in which the audience gets to violate the enemies of everyday life, the boss and his computerized control over work life, the bureaucrats and politicians who conspire to emasculate America’s virility and betray the American dream.

Only after looking at these and the other POW/MIA films once again did I comprehend this myth of imprisonment, a myth that draws deep emotional power by displacing onto Vietnam the imprisonment, helplessness, and alienation felt by many Americans in an epoch when alien economic, technological, and bureaucratic forces control much of their lives. The man on that flag is American manhood itself, beset by all those bureaucratic and feminine forces seeking to emasculate him. The man incarnates that once great America, now an imprisoned victim, waiting to be rescued by a great man who has contempt for anyone or anything seeking to restrain him.  Someone named, say, John Rambo or Donald Trump.

To understand the roles of the myth in American culture and politics, one needs to look at its history.  For the first fifteen years of U.S. covert and overt combat in Vietnam‑-that is, from 1954 to 1969‑-there was not even a POW/MIA concept.  Its seeds were sown in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive and its aftermath, including President Johnson’s withdrawal from the election campaign, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the tidal wave of urban rebellions, the opening of peace negotiations in Paris, and the nomination of Richard Nixon as the Republican peace candidate.  Remember that in his acceptance speech Nixon declared that “as we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” and then vowed that “if the war is not ended when the people choose in November,” “I pledge to you tonight that the first priority foreign policy objective of our next Administration will be to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.”

Richard Nixon had no intention of ending the Vietnam War without preserving a U.S. client government in Saigon.  But how many Americans in 1968 could have predicted that he would be able to continue the war year after bloody year until 1973? Perhaps even fewer than those who remembered that back in 1954 as Vice President he had been the first Administration official to advocate sending American troops to fight in Vietnam because, as he put it, “the Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war by themselves or govern themselves.”  Nixon, however, had several formidable problems. Negotiations had already opened in Paris.  The Tet Offensive had convinced most Americans and even much of his own Defense Department that the war was unwinnable.  The antiwar movement was growing ever more powerful, domestically and within the armed forces.  There was certainly no enthusiasm for the war.  What could he do?

What he needed was something to wreck the negotiations, shift the apparent goal of the war, counter the antiwar movement, and generate some zeal for continued combat.  Soon after his inauguration, Nixon and an enterprising businessman named H. Ross Perot solved his problem by concocting a brand new issue: demanding a “full accounting” for Americans missing in action and the release of American prisoners of war as a precondition of any peace accord.  This was truly a brilliant, albeit demonic, strategy.

This issue created, for the first time, sizable emotional support for the war.  It deadlocked the Paris negotiations for four years.  It counteracted the antiwar movement. It even provided a basis for continuing economic and political warfare against Vietnam for decades after the United States had conceded defeat.  The POW/MIA issue also neutralized another White House and Pentagon problem that had been building throughout 1968: American revulsion at the torture and murder of the prisoners of U.S. and Saigon forces.

Domestically, the issue was a masterful stroke.  After all, how else could any deeply emotional support for the war be generated?  Certainly not by holding out the old discredited promises of military victory. And who would be willing to fight and die for the notoriously corrupt generals ruling Saigon?  But supporting our own prisoners of war and missing in action was something no loyal American would dare oppose.  It also seemed easy to understand, requiring no knowledge of the history of Vietnam and the war.  Before the end of the war, fifty million POW/MIA bumper stickers had been sold and ten million Americans were wearing POW/MIA bracelets 24 hours every day.

Perot was put in charge of building mass support, and he was soon rewarded.  Thanks to White House intervention, his EDS corporation got 90 percent of the computer work on Medicare claims, enabling Perot to become what one writer in 1971 dubbed “the first welfare billionaire.”

Perot was to buy “full-page ads in the nation’s 100 largest newspapers” and run “United We Stand,” a heart-wrenching program about POWs on TV stations in 59 cities.  Perot himself appeared on the top TV interview shows.  Perot’s United We Stand on November 9 ran full-page advertisements featuring the picture of two small children praying “Bring our Daddy home safe, sound and soon.”  Headlined THE MAJORITY SPEAKS: RELEASE THE PRISONERS, the ads demanded the immediate release of all U.S. POWs.  In December, the Senate and House unanimously passed an outlandish resolution demanding the immediate release of all U.S. POWs.

Nixon used the POW/MIA issue to deadlock the peace negotiations until 1973, when he finally accepted the terms, mostly word for word, which he had been offered when he took office in 1969.

In 1980, while running for president, Ronald Reagan coined the term “noble cause” to describe the Vietnam War, and it was during his presidency that the POW/MIA issue evolved into a full-blown cultural myth exerting enormous political power.  His successor was to bear some of the consequences.

In 1992, while the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was conducting hearings amid a flurry of phony pictures of purported POWs, President George H. W. Bush was fighting for his political life. The very man who had boasted that his war had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all” was trying to win reelection by turning what Bill Clinton had or hadn’t done during the Vietnam War into a major campaign issue.  Meanwhile Ross Perot was campaigning for the White House as the wartime champion of the POWs and as a Rambo who would finally rescue all those still alive–as well as the nation itself.

Unlike Bush and Clinton, Perot had no national party apparatus.  What he used as an effective substitute was a ready-made national infrastructure, a network of activists motivated by religious fervor and coordinated by grassroots organizations: the POW/MIA movement.  Perot chose ex-POW James Stockdale as his running mate and ex-POW Orson Swindle as his campaign manager.  At his typical rally, Perot sat with former POWs and family members on a stage bedecked with POW flags.  POW activists and organizations were central to the petition campaigns that got Perot on the ballot in every state.

Portraying himself as the lone outsider from Texas ready to ride into Washington to save us from its sleazy bureaucrats and politicians who had betrayed the POWs and the American people, Perot cut deeply into President Bush’s constituency.  In the national debates, Perot aimed almost all his fire on Bush and Bush’s Iraq war. Without Perot’s deft undermining of Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton would probably not have gotten to reside in the White House.  And Perot’s national organization would prove to be the incubator of the Tea Party and other organized forces that would take over the Republican Party and elect Donald Trump as America’s savior.

The POW/MIA myth was deployed as a weapon in each of the first three presidential elections of the 21st century.  In each case, the candidate targeted by the weapon lost.

In 2000, John McCain, running as America’s late 20th-century iconic hero—the Vietnam POW—overwhelmed his four Republican opponents in the New Hampshire primary, crushing runner-up George W. Bush by 19 points.  But in the next primary, in South Carolina, his “Straight Talk Express” was derailed by an explosive charge:  that as a member of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs he had viciously betrayed those hundreds or thousands of his fellow POWs left behind in Vietnam.  The main ingredients for the charge came from a 1992 article by Ted Sampley, “John McCain: The Manchurian Candidate,” which claimed that he had been brainwashed by the Vietnamese and might very well be acting as their secret agent.  McCain’s campaign never recovered from the defeat and shattered image inflicted in South Carolina.

In 2004, the defeat of Senator John Kerry by incumbent President George W. Bush was widely attributed to the heavily bankrolled “swiftboating” by “Swift Vets and POWs for Truth,” an assault that torpedoed Kerry’s status as a heroic Vietnam veteran.  But even earlier, the campaign to use the POW/MIA issue to destroy Kerry’s Vietnam credentials was launched by Sidney Schanberg, one of the most fanatical of the POW/MIA cultists.  Using long discredited “evidence” that after the war Vietnam held “many” American POWs to be used “as future bargaining chips,” Schanberg’s “When John Kerry’s Courage Went M.I.A” appeared on February 24th in the Village Voice and was soon widely disseminated. Schanberg claimed that as chair of the Senate Select Committee, Kerry had deliberately “covered up voluminous evidence” of “perhaps hundreds” of these left-behind POWs.

In 2008, Schanberg recycled his anti-Kerry article, plus other articles that he had been reissuing for decades, as “McCain and the POW Cover-up,” an especially vitriolic assault on John McCain, who was then in what seemed to be a tight presidential race with Barack Obama.  As he had done in earlier articles, Schanberg drew heavily on Ted Sampley’s 1992 article about “The Manchurian Candidate.” There was nothing surprising or even new in Schanberg’s piece.  But what some people found startling, indeed shocking, was where it was published: in the Nation, one of America’s leading liberal and anti-Vietnam War journals.

Even more appalling, liberal and progressive media responded by deliriously ballyhooing Schanberg’s POW/MIA fantasy.  DemocraticUnderground.com ran excerpts from and links to the Nation article, along with ads for POW/MIA flags, pins, and bracelets.    Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Alternet.org, and many others reprinted the Nation piece, some adorning it with large images of the POW/MIA flag.  Democracy Now, the nationally syndicated progressive radio and TV show, on October 23 ran a long adulatory interview with Schanberg and linked on its web site to a longer version of his article published online by The Nation Institute. Scattered protests from some historians, antiwar activists, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War were drowned out by denunciations—from right, left, and center—of McCain as a betrayer of all those POWs abandoned in Vietnam.

By then, some observers of the American cultural and political scene were becoming aware of a visible ultra-right movement, growing directly out of the POW/MIA fetish.  A spectacular manifestation of the movement had burst into view in 1988 as the first Rolling Thunder motorcade roared into Washington.  Thousands of bikers, flying the black POW/MIA flag along with the stars and stripes and an assortment of white-nationalist, misogynist, and jingoist insignia, then encamped for two days of heavily lubricated demonstrating for the rescue of the POWs.  In 2018, half a million bikers participated in Rolling Thunder.

When Trump says, “”I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,” he is sending a message, very lightly coded, to this movement.   These are the “second amendment people” he threatened to unleash during the 2016 presidential debates.  When he picks a fight with McCain’s ghost, he revels in the responses from the corporate press and the political establishment because these responses are proof that they don’t know the code language that Trump shares with his most devoted followers.

Remember when the election of 2016 was going to be a showdown between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton?  Well of course Donald Trump deftly disposed of the Bushes and Clintons.  Now he evidently thinks that the ghost of John McCain is interfering with his consolidation of power.  Why? To answer that question, we need to understand why the black and white POW/MIA flags still fly all over America.

This jovial retort about killing people by bombing them was not surprising to those who remembered that during the US war on Vietnam McCain was shot down on a mission to bomb a power generation plant in Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, in the course of the entrancingly-named Operation Rolling Thunder.  If he hadn’t been shot down before he released his bombs there would almost certainly have been civilian casualties and deaths. Power stations in cities are not manned by soldiers, after all, and around the Hanoi plant there were houses that would doubtless be struck by errant bombs.   

But who cares about civilians who are killed or maimed in bombing or rocket attacks?

In Syria, for example, in October 2018 “the US-led coalition was responsible for 46% of civilian casualties from all explosive weapon use in Syria.”  And in November Reuters reported that “At least 30 Afghan civilians were killed in US air strikes in the Afghan province of Helmand, officials and residents of the area said on Wednesday, the latest casualties from a surge in air operations aimed at driving the Taliban into talks.”

Forbes records that “the US has never dropped as many bombs on Afghanistan as it did this year. According to U.S. Air Forces Central Command data, manned and unmanned aircraft released 5,213 weapons between January and the end of September 2018. The UN announced that the number of civilian casualties in the first nine months of 2018 is higher than in any year since it started documenting them in 2009.”  On January 25 Defense Post reported that “Afghanistan is investigating reports that at least 16 civilians including women and children were killed in an airstrike in southern Helmand province, the defense ministry said in a statement.” On and on its goes — Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Afghanistan.

There’s nothing new in this, so far as US Secretary of State Pompeo is concerned. As a member of Congress in 2014 he made it clear that he was one of the bombing club. As The Nation reported, “Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS), participating in the same [Foreign Affairs Committee] roundtable, urged the United States and its allies to strongly consider a pre-emptive bombing campaign of Iran’s nuclear sites. He said ‘In an unclassified setting, it is under 2,000 sorties to destroy the Iranian nuclear capacity. This is not an insurmountable task for the coalition forces’.”

The fact that when Pompeo was asked at a US Senate hearing in April 2018 if he was supportive of a preemptive strike on Iran he declared “I’m not. I’m absolutely not” is indicative only of the fact that he is given to duplicity. 

Which brings us to Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who has been an advocate of bombing for many years.  He is the man who declared in November 2002 that “We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq” and four weeks before the US invaded Iraq, according to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in February 2003, “US Undersecretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on Monday that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards.”

Iraq was duly bombed and rocketed and reduced to chaos, and Bolton was totally unrepentant. In an article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph in 2016 he pronounced that “Iraq today suffers not from the 2003 invasion, but from the 2011 withdrawal of all US combat forces. What strengthened Iran’s hand in Iraq was not the absence of Saddam [Hussein], but the absence of coalition troops with a writ to crush efforts by the ayatollahs to support and arm Shi’ite militias. When US forces left, the last possibility of Iraq succeeding as a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state left with them. Don’t blame Tony Blair and George W Bush for that failure. Blame their successors.”

In November 2016 Bolton was aptly described by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough as “a massive neocon on steroids” but the Financial Times argues that he is not a neocon, because “Neocons believe US values should be universal. Mr Bolton believes in aggressive promotion of the US national interest, which is quite different.”  Be that as it may, there are some things that are certain, such as that Bolton is a rabid warmonger who avoided serving in Vietnam just like Donald Trump and George W Bush and Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney and many others. (And here it has to be said that my feelings are strong about this, having served in Vietnam in the Australian Army in 1970-71.) 

As noted by the Daily News of his Alma Mater, Yale, “though Bolton supported the Vietnam War, he declined to enter combat duty, instead enlisting in the National Guard and attending law school after his 1970 graduation. ‘I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,’ Bolton wrote of his decision in the 25^th reunion book. ‘I considered the war in Vietnam already lost’.”  But now that it is obvious that Washington lost its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bolton is ready for another one.

In July 2018, while tension between the US and Iran was heightening, the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, warned Washington about pursuing a hostile policy against his country, saying “Mr Trump, don’t play with the lion’s tail, this would only lead to regret… America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars.”  That was a red rag to a bull, and Trump responded in his normal way by tweeting “To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)”

That is frightening.  Any world leader who tweets such things as “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen” is verging on the psychotic. And, in his own words, the demented.

Trump’s former foreign policy officials were not altogether in favour of having Iran and North Korea suffer unspecified by obviously terrifying consequences for having expressed its views on Trump policy, but now, as the BBC notes, “Mr Trump has built a foreign policy team that is largely on the same page — his page.” 

That’s the Fire and Fury Page, and it’s being proof-read and expanded by Pompeo and Bolton.  Stand by for Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.

Unfortunately, very little of the story is true. The entire hagiographic saga of the warrior prince that has been woven around McCain by those in the media and the political world that want to use him to demonstrate the deficiency of those qualities in Donald Trump is little more than a work of fiction. John McCain was a monster, betraying his country while a prisoner in Hanoi and then his former comrades-in-arms after the war ended. From Vietnam he learned nothing, saying “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.”

McCain subsequently embraced every war that came his way while also promoting regime change and doing his best to start new wars in places where America had no interests. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine, Somalia and Syria just for starters. A prosperous Libya was bombed into anarchy and is now ruled by gangs who have reopened slave markets. McCain was also an opportunist par excellence, parlaying his dubious war record into a political career and at the same time ditching a first wife whom he considered a liability to marry the daughter of a multi-millionaire Arizona beer distributor to finance his personal ambitions.

The number of politicians of all stripes and media hacks eager to climb on the McCain bandwagon is quite astonishing, particularly as the Senator’s real track record is well known inside the beltway. Songs of praise were of course expected from leading Establishment and Deep State toadies completely lacking moral compasses, to include George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, self-described socialist and darling of America's progressives, enthused over the “maverick” warrior, whom she never had met, whose “…legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service.” Another leftist who should know better, Senator Elizabeth Warren, recalled fondly how McCain advised her “To always get in the fight and throw some punches.”

Only the honest and honorable ex-President Jimmy Carter has had the courage to buck the trend and tell it like it is regarding McCain, describing him in 2014 as a “warmonger.” Hanging the human decency label on McCain is the ultimate travesty as he is a man who actively promoted the policies that have killed millions around the world, to include thousands of his own countrymen. Indeed, he was a symbol of American interventionism, having led the Republican wing of the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government funded democracy promotion engine which has interfered in more elections and governments than even the CIA did in its heyday.

So who is the real John McCain? A credible case has been made that McCain, who was shot down while bombing a civilian target, almost certainly crossed the line and collaborated extensively while a prisoner in North Vietnam before being exonerated through a Navy Department cover-up of his behavior after his release from captivity. His own subsequent actions as a congressman to block any inquiry into the status of possible US prisoners of war remaining in Indochina have also been examined in some detail by prize winning journalist Sydney Schanberg and quite appropriately condemned.

But McCain is perhaps best known for his recent efforts to increase US involvement in Syria and also instigate war with Russia and Iran. Fighting between Georgia and Russia broke out in 2008 when Tbilisi threatened and then attacked Russian peacekeepers in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. McCain responded, “We are all Georgians now,” urging that the US enter the conflict on behalf of Georgia. He later was present in Maidan Square in Kiev together with the odious Victoria Nuland, stirring up opposition to the regime in power that was friendly to Russia. When regime change subsequently took place and fighting broke out, McCain led congressional moves to actively support the new Ukrainian government against Moscow. And who can forget the good Senator’s photo-op with ISIS terrorists in Syria as well as his sparkling rendition of “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” on the Howard Stern radio program?

So it is goodbye to John McCain. And I would add, good riddance.

As the Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist Helena Cobban participated in an academic conference at an upscale resort near Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in the Middle East. When she attended what was listed as the “Gala Dinner with keynote speech”, she quickly learned that the virtual theme of the evening was, “Adopt a Muj.”

“I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women from the Phoenix suburbs and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban told me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at the event next to their personal ‘muj.’”

The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain.

During the Vietnam war, McCain had been captured by the North Vietnamese Army after being shot down on his way to bomb a civilian lightbulb factory. He spent two years in solitary confinement and underwent torture that left him with crippling injuries. McCain returned from the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors, remarking as late as 2000, “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” After he was criticized for the racist remark, McCain refused to apologize. “I was referring to my prison guards,” he said, “and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends.”

‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison where McCain was tortured. (Wikimedia Commons)

McCain’s visceral resentment informed his vocal support for the mujahedin as well as the right-wing contra death squads in Central America — any proxy group sworn to the destruction of communist governments.

So committed was McCain to the anti-communist cause that in the mid-1980s he had joinedthe advisory board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader of WACL’s British chapter who had turned against the group in 1974, described the organization as “a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international.”

Joining McCain in the organization were notables such as Jaroslav Stetsko, the Croatian Nazi collaborator who helped oversee the extermination of 7,000 Jews in 1941; the brutal Argentinian former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla; and Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcon. Then-President Ronald Reagan honored the group for playing“a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day.”

Being Lauded as a Hero

On the occasion of his death, McCain is being honored in much the same way — as a patriotic hero and freedom fighter for democracy. A stream of hagiographies is pouring forth from the Beltway press corps that he described as his true political base. Among McCain’s most enthusiastic groupies is CNN’s Jake Tapper, whom he chose as his personal stenographer for a 2000 trip to Vietnam. When the former CNN host Howard Kurtz asked Tapper in February, 2000, “When you’re on the [campaign] bus, do you make a conscious effort not to fall under the magical McCain spell?”

“Oh, you can’t. You become like Patty Hearst when the SLA took her,” Tapper joked in reply.

Ocasio-Cortez: Called McCain ‘an unparalleled example of human decency.’

But the late senator has also been treated to gratuitous tributes from an array of prominent liberals, from George Soros to his soft power-pushing client, Ken Roth, along with three fellow directors of Human Rights Watch and “democratic socialist” celebrity Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who hailed McCain as “an unparalleled example of human decency.” Rep. John Lewis, the favorite civil rights symbol of the Beltway political class, weighed in as well to memorialize McCain as a “warrior for peace.”

If the paeans to McCain by this diverse cast of political climbers and Davos denizens seemed detached from reality, that’s because they perfectly reflected the elite view of American military interventions as akin to a game of chess, and the millions of dead left in the wake of the West’s unprovoked aggression as mere statistics.

There were few figures in recent American life who dedicated themselves so personally to the perpetuation of war and empire as McCain. But in Washington, the most defining aspect of his career was studiously overlooked, or waved away as the trivial idiosyncrasy of a noble servant who nonetheless deserved everyone’s reverence.

McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention of the post-Cold War era from the Senate floor, while pushing for sanctions and assorted campaigns of subterfuge on the side. He was uniquely ruthless when it came to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zones to another to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies.

In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al Qaeda as allies, and in Ukraine, McCain courted actual, sig-heiling neo-Nazis.

While McCain’s Senate office functioned as a clubhouse for arms industry lobbyists and neocon operatives, his fascistic allies waged a campaign of human devastation that will continue until long after the flowers dry up on his grave.

American media may have sought to bury this legacy with the senator’s body, but it is what much of the outside world will remember him for.

‘They are Not al-Qaeda’

When a violent insurgency swept through Libya in 2011, McCain parachuted into the country to meet with leaders of the main insurgent outfit, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), battling the government of Moamar Gaddafi. His goal was to make kosher this band of hardline Islamists in the eyes of the Obama administration, which was considering a military intervention at the time.

What happened next is well documented, though it is scarcely discussed by a Washington political class that depended on the Benghazi charade to deflect from the real scandal of Libya’s societal destruction. Gaddafi’s motorcade was attacked by NATO jets, enabling a band of LIFG fighters to capture him, sodomize him with a bayonet, then murder him and leave his body to rot in a butcher shop in Misrata while rebel fanboys snapped cellphone selfies of his fetid corpse.

A slaughter of Black citizens of Libya by the racist sectarian militias recruited by McCain immediately followed the killing of the pan-African leader. ISIS took over Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte while Belhaj’s militia took control of Tripoli, and a war of the warlords began. Just as Gaddafi had warned, the ruined country became a staging ground for migrant smugglers on the Mediterranean, fueling the rise of the far-right across Europe and enabling the return of slavery to Africa.

Many might describe Libya as a failed state, but it also represents a successful realization of the vision McCain and his allies have advanced on the global stage.

Following the NATO-orchestrated murder of Libya’s leader, McCain tweeted, “Qaddafi on his way out, Bashar al Assad is next.”

McCain’s Syrian Boondoggle

Like Libya, Syria had resisted aligning with the West and was suddenly confronted with a Salafi-jihadi insurgency armed by the CIA. Once again, McCain made it his personal duty to market Islamist insurgents to America as a cross between the Minutemen and the Freedom Riders of the civil rights era. To do so, he took under his wing a youthful DC-based Syria-American operative named Mouaz Moustafa who had been a consultant to the Libyan Transitional Council during the run-up to the NATO invasion.

In May 2013, Moustafa convinced McCain to take an illegal trip across the Syrian border and meet some freedom fighters. An Israeli millionaire named Moti Kahana who coordinated efforts between the Syrian opposition and the Israeli military through his NGO, Amaliah, claimed to have “financed the opposition group which took senator John McCain to visit war-torn Syria.”

“This could be like his Benghazi moment,” Moustafa remarked excitedly in a scene from a documentary, “Red Lines,” that depicted his efforts for regime change. “[McCain] went to Benghazi, he came back, we bombed.”

During his brief excursion into Syria, McCain met with a group of CIA-backed insurgents and blessed their struggle. “The senator wanted to assure the Free Syrian Army that the American people support their cry for freedom, support their revolution,” Moustafa said in an interview with CNN. McCain’s office promptly released a photo showing the senatorposing beside a beaming Moustafa and two grim-looking gunmen.

Days later, the men were named by the Lebanese Daily Star as Mohammad Nour and Abu Ibrahim. Both had been implicated in the kidnapping a year prior of 11 Shia pilgrims, and were identified by one of the survivors. McCain and Moustafa returned to the U.S. the targets of mockery from Daily Show host John Stewart and the subject of harshly critical reports from across the media spectrum. At a town hall in Arizona, McCain was berated by constituents, including Jumana Hadid, a Syrian Christian woman who warned that the sectarian militants he had cozied up to threatened her community with genocide.

McCain with then-FSA commander Salam Idriss, an insurgent later exposed for kidnapping Shia pilgrims

But McCain pressed ahead anyway. On Capitol Hill, he introduced another shady young operative into his interventionist theater. Named Elizabeth O’Bagy, she was a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, an arms industry-funded think tank directed by Kimberly Kagan of the neoconservative Kagan clan. Behind the scenes, O’Bagy was consulting for Moustafa at his Syrian Emergency Task Force, a clear conflict of interest that her top Senate patron was well aware of. Before the Senate, McCain cited a Wall Street Journal editorial by O’Bagy to support his assessment of the Syrian rebels as predominately “moderate,” and potentially Western-friendly.

Days later, O’Bagy was exposed for faking her PhD in Arabic studies. As soon as the humiliated Kagan fired O’Bagy, the academic fraudster took another pass through the Beltway’s revolving door, striding into the halls of Congress as McCain’s newest foreign policy aide.

McCain ultimately failed to see the Islamist “revolutionaries” he glad handled take control of Damascus. Syria’s government held on thanks to help from his mortal enemies in Tehran and Moscow, but not before a billion dollar CIA arm-and-equip operation helped spawn one of the worst refugee crises in post-war history. Luckily for McCain, there were other intrigues seeking his attention, and new bands of fanatical rogues in need of his blessing. Months after his Syrian boondoggle, the ornery militarist turned his attention to Ukraine, then in the throes of an upheaval stimulated by U.S. and EU-funded soft power NGO’s.

Coddling the Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

On December 14, 2013, McCain materialized in Kiev for a meeting with Oleh Tyanhbok, an unreconstructed fascist who had emerged as a top opposition leader. Tyanhbok had co-founded the fascist Social-National Party, a far-right political outfit that touted itself as the “last hope of the white race, of humankind as such.” No fan of Jews, he had complained that a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” had taken control of his country, and had been photographed throwing up a sieg heil Nazi salute during a speech.

None of this apparently mattered to McCain. Nor did the scene of Right Sector neo-Nazis filling up Kiev’s Maidan Square while he appeared on stage to egg them on.

“Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better!” McCain proclaimed to cheering throngs while Tyanhbok stood by his side. The only issue that mattered to him at the time was the refusal of Ukraine’s elected president to sign a European Union austerity plan, opting instead for an economic deal with Moscow.

McCain met with Social-National Party co-founder Oleh Tyanhbok

McCain was so committed to replacing an independent-minded government with a NATO vassal that he even mulled a military assault on Kiev. “I do not see a military option and that is tragic,” McCain lamented in an interview about the crisis. Fortunately for him, regime change arrived soon after his appearance on the Maidan, and Tyanhbok’s allies rushed in to fill the void.

By the end of the year, the Ukrainian military had become bogged down in a bloody trench war with pro-Russian, anti-coup separatists in the country’s east. A militia affiliated with the new government in Kiev called Dnipro-1 was accused by Amnesty International observers of blocking humanitarian aid into a separatist-held area, including food and clothing for the war torn population.

Six months later, McCain appeared at Dnipro-1’s training base alongside Sen.’s Tom Cotton and John Barasso. “The people of my country are proud of your fight and your courage,” McCain told an assembly of soldiers from the militia. When he completed his remarks, the fighters belted out a World War II-era salute made famous by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators: “Glory to Ukraine!”

Today, far-right nationalists occupy key posts in Ukraine’s pro-Western government. The speaker of its parliament is Andriy Parubiy, a co-founder with Tyanhbok of the Social-National Party and leader of the movement to honor World World Two-era Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera. On the cover of his 1998 manifesto, “View From The Right,” Parubiy appeared in a Nazi-style brown shirt with a pistol strapped to his waist. In June 2017, McCain and Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan welcomed Parubiy on Capitol Hill for what McCain called a “good meeting.” It was a shot in the arm for the fascist forces sweeping across Ukraine.

McCain with Dnipro-1 militants on June 20, 2015

The past months in Ukraine have seen a state sponsored neo-Nazi militia called C14 carrying out a pogromist rampage against Ukraine’s Roma population, the country’s parliament erecting an exhibition honoring Nazi collaborators, and the Ukrainian military formally approving the pro-Nazi “Glory to Ukraine” greeting as its own official salute.

Ukraine is now the sick man of Europe, a perpetual aid case bogged down in an endless war in its east. In a testament to the country’s demise since its so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” the deeply unpopular President Petro Poroshenko has promised White House National Security Advisor John Bolton that his country — once a plentiful source of coal on par with Pennsylvania — will now purchase coal from the U.S. Once again, a regime change operation that generated a failing, fascistic state stands as one of McCain’s greatest triumphs.

McCain’s history conjures up memory of one of the most inflammatory statements by Sarah Palin, another cretinous fanatic he foisted onto the world stage. During a characteristically rambling stump speech in October 2008, Palin accused Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” The line was dismissed as ridiculous and borderline slander, as it should have been. But looking back at McCain’s career, the accusation seems richly ironic.

By any objective standard, it was McCain who had palled around with terrorists, and who wrested as much resources as he could from the American taxpayer to maximize their mayhem. Here’s hoping that the societies shattered by McCain’s proxies will someday rest in peace.

consortiumnews.com

Bipartisan neocons infesting Washington want Russia marginalized, weakened, contained and isolated.

They’re recklessly heading things toward possible nuclear war, unthinkable madness if launched.

Endless Russia bashing persists, things invented to vilify the country and its leadership. US imperialism works this way, a diabolical plot for world conquest, colonization and dominance no matter the human cost.

In a letter to Trump, top-ranking Senate Armed Services Committee members John McCain and Ben Cardin claimed congressional sanctions imposed last summer on Russia haven’t been implemented – the so-called Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATS).

Enacted on August 2, Trump issued a statement saying “(w)hile I favor tough measures to punish and deter aggressive and destabilizing behavior by Iran, North Korea, and Russia, this legislation is significantly flawed.”

“In its haste to pass this legislation, the Congress included a number of clearly unconstitutional provisions.”

“My Administration will give careful and respectful consideration to the preferences expressed by the Congress in these various provisions and will implement them in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations” – indicating he may not enforce certain provisions, notably with regard to Russia.

A second statement said “(t)he bill remains seriously flawed – particularly because it encroaches on the executive branch’s authority to negotiate.”

“By limiting the Executive’s flexibility, this bill makes it harder for the United States to strike good deals for the American people, and will drive China, Russia, and North Korea much closer together.”

On August 2, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said newly enacted US sanctions on his country breached the nuclear deal, indicating an appropriate reaction from his government.

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry called unilateral US sanctions “outrageous leverage to (serve) its own interests.”

Russia responded to the legislation by ordering Washington to reduce its embassy and consular staff to 455 personnel – equaling Russian diplomatic staff in America.

A US retreat and storage facility in Moscow were ordered closed, Putin saying he personally ordered the action in response to unacceptable US behavior toward his country – including end of August closure, seizure and searches of Russian diplomatic facilities in San Francisco, Washington and New York.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry attributed new congressional sanctions to “Russophobic hysteria,” reserving the right to respond appropriately.

Prime Minister Medvedev said Trump was displeased with the legislation but signed it anyway. Apparently he hasn’t implemented its provisions on Russia, at least not to the satisfaction of neocons McCain and Cardin.

In a letter to Trump, they said “it is imperative that your Administration implement the law to its fullest extent to uphold and protect American interests.”

“Congress’ swift and united action, and your signature, sent a strong message to our allies and adversaries alike, and particularly to those such as Russia, who have sought to undermine our democracy.”

The latter comment referred to nonexistent Russian US election hacking. No US democracy exists.

On Friday, the White House released a memo, directing the State Department, Treasury and Director of National Intelligence to decide on implementing congressional sanctions on Russia.

McCain and Cardin want administration agencies to brief them on what they’re doing. Part of what they’re up to is an attempt to curtail Russian arms exports to benefit US defense firms, their letter saying:

“As the Russian Federation is the second largest arms exporter in the world, arms purchases remain an area of vigilant oversight.”

“The administration should also take full advantage of a provision of the law that allows it to urge countries to significantly decrease Russian arms purchases to avoid sanctions.”

There you have it. Congressional sanctions aim to harm Russia economically, benefitting corporate America, notably its arms and munitions manufacturers, along with its energy industry, hoping to increase US natural gas exports to European countries at the expense of Gazprom.

The legislation prevents Trump from lifting sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea without congressional permission – for sure not forthcoming.

stephenlendman.org

John McCain set an ugly precedent in the U.S. Senate this week. On Wednesday, McCain and two Democrats—Ben Cardin of Maryland and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire—asked the Senate for a unanimous consent vote to advance Montenegro’s bit to join NATO. McCain would brook no dissent: to any colleague who would object to unanimous consent, he warned, “You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin… trying to dismember this small country which has already been the subject an attempted coup.” Sen. Rand Paul did object, then left the chamber. And McCain, on the floor of the Senate, explicitly called his colleague an agent of a foreign power.

“The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no argument to be made. He has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians,” McCain said. “So I repeat again: The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”

Once upon a time the Senate used to pride itself on its collegiality. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren so much as quoted a letter from Coretta Scott King that impugned the motives of Jeff Sessions—during the Alabama senator’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general last month—she was reprimanded and silenced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell under the chamber’s Rule 19, which states, “No senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” Even at the height of 1950s red-hunting, Sen. Joseph McCarthy never took to the Senate floor to accuse a colleague of working for Moscow; he reserved his invective for the campaign trail. Senator McCain has now outdone him.

For McCain to charge anyone else with serving foreign interests is more than a little ironic. During the Arizona senator’s campaign for the White House in 2008, one of his top advisors, Randy Scheunemann, was a partner in a lobbying firm that took on a $200,000 contract to work for the government of Georgia. According to the Washington Post, the very day that Scheunemann signed the contract, he coached McCain for a call with Georgia’s president and “helped the presumptive Republican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic.” There is no doubting the sincerity of McCain’s internationalist convictions, but the world in which he operates is one in which large sums of money cement the relationship between American war hawks and foreign capitals.

As for Rand Paul, McCain knows that his objections to NATO enlargement are rooted in the Kentucky senator’s libertarian-inflected understanding of America’s national interest. On Thursday, Paul released a statement explaining his vote in terms that are abundantly familiar to friends and critics alike: “Currently, the United States has troops in dozens of countries and is actively fighting in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen (with the occasional drone strike in Pakistan). In addition, the United States is pledged to defend twenty-eight countries in NATO. It is unwise to expand the monetary and military obligations of the United States given the burden of our $20 trillion debt.”

To discredit opponents by linking them to Vladimir Putin is, however, the fashion of the season in Washington, DC. McCain’s attack on Paul shows that the hype will not stop with investigations into the 2016 election—where there are serious questions to be answered about Russian hacking and other attempts to influence the race, as well as the connections of Trump advisors such as Michael Flynn to Moscow. In the president’s case, much of the media—to say nothing of Democrats and Never Trump Republicans—has skipped ahead to a verdict in advance of the evidence: suspicion is proof of guilt. (How many viewers of MSNBC, for example, know that no criminal wrongdoing of any sort has actually been alleged against the president?)

But where Rand Paul is concerned, we now have a situation in which principled ideological differences are portrayed as unpatriotic, even morally treasonous—a situation reminiscent not only of the Red Scare but of the moral blackmail that proponents of the Iraq War employed against their foreign-policy critics. Back then, critics of the war were tarred as so many Baghdad Bobs, unpatriotic Americans, useful idiots for Saddam Hussein. Now Putin occupies the role once assigned to the Iraqi dictator.

But the stakes here are much higher. Russia is a great regional power, one with which the United States and Europe must deal realistically—recognizing both its illiberalism and the strategic interests that limit as well as spur Moscow’s actions. Russia is not the Soviet Union, and while moralism was a potent weapon against Communist ideology, it is far less effective in changing how another nation understands its national self-interest. McCain goes beyond the limits of the Cold War not only in his intemperate insults to Rand Paul’s patriotism, but in his unrealistic view of NATO expansion. During the Cold War, the United States was careful to choose only allies it could plausibly defend. McCain does not apply any such test.

The Arizona senator does not see it that way, obviously. But by failing to credit the good faith of those who take a more limited view of American interests, figures like McCain deprive the country of the benefits of robust debate. The reduction of foreign policy to a series of caricatures and boastful assertions of values led to catastrophe in the Middle East, as even many former enthusiasts for the Iraq War readily admit. To indulge in pettiness, paranoia, and bad-faith insults where our policy toward Russia is concerned risks leading to something a lot worse.

nationalinterest.org

The original McCarthyism of the early 1950s appeared with the consolidation of the Cold War. It was a witch hunt over supposed communist subversion of America’s democratic institutions. It was all about the Red Menace and the Russians are coming. Today’s New McCarthyism grew with the onset of a New Cold War and also has been about the Russians, especially the vilification of Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Flickr Gage Skidmore)

This anti-Russian hysteria reached a point of near absurdity in the last days of the Obama Administration with its trust-us allegations that the Russians defeated Hillary Clinton by releasing some emails showing how the Democratic National Committee sabotaged Bernie Sanders and other emails revealing what Clinton had told Wall Street banks but didn’t want the voters to know. If you noted that Clinton had previously blamed her defeat on FBI Director James Comey for reopening and re-closing the investigation into her use of a private email server, you risked being labeled a “Putin apologist” or a “Kremlin stooge.”

Of course, the anger toward anyone who resisted the “Russia-did-it” conformism did not come from nowhere. One can trace the current hostility to dissenters against U.S. foreign policy back to the presidency of George W. Bush when he gutted the Bill of Rights in promulgating the Patriot Act with almost no public challenge. In the post-9/11 climate – when any resistance to Bush’s edicts was regarded as close to treason – many of us became uneasy while talking politics on the phone or looking up certain topics on the Internet or taking books out of the library.

This intimidating surveillance did not go away when the Democrats retook the White House and Congress in the 2008 elections, but we stopped thinking about it because supposedly the “right people” now held the levers of power and surely wouldn’t repeat the abuses of Bush-43. However, not only did the surveillance state consolidate its powers under Barack Obama but the former constitutional lawyer sharply escalated the legal persecution of whistleblowers who dared give the American people a look behind the curtain.

Obama’s unprecedented assault on government transparency was compounded by the liberal-chic contempt meted out to anyone who questioned the wisdom of imposing “liberal values”, “human rights”, and “democracy promotion” on countries around the world. “Political correctness” dominated not only domestic U.S. debates but also the formulation of foreign policy.

Vladimir Putin was viewed as a retrograde force in the world, in part, because he aligned himself with Russia’s conservative social values and because he fell short of an ideal notion of what liberal democracy is supposed to be. The fact that the U.S. government also was falling far short of those standards – from ordering targeted assassinations with minimal due process to imprisoning patriotic whistleblowers – was largely ignored by an Obama Administration that saw itself as too wonderful to have flaws.

Blacklisting Dissent

So, when the U.S. confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbas began in the summer of 2013, those of us who did not accept what was becoming the Washington Consensus, which held Putin to blame for everything, began to see ourselves as dissidents in the Soviet sense or at least in the manner of the old McCarthy era. In effect, we were blacklisted, largely excluded from publication in the professional journals, not to mention mainstream print and broadcast media. On campus, we mostly kept our mouths shut fearing for our jobs.

In the narrow, but politically important field of Russian studies, just how bleak the times had become was revealed in the December 2015 “Christmas issue” of Johnson’s Russia List, an important daily digest of expert and generalist writings about Russia which contained a 40-page propaganda barrage against Putin and his ill-begotten country. But the content of that daily issue merely reflected what was entering the editor-publisher’s in-basket each day. Still, the silence of dissenters should not be confused with agreement.

For all his blustery and egotistical faults, Donald Trump has punched huge holes in the dominant neocon ideology that underlay the Washington Consensus on foreign policy during the presidencies of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Trump’s tweets and campaign messages asked, aloud and repeatedly, what could be wrong with the United States getting along with Russia and cooperating on common interests, starting with a joint campaign against ISIS.

Yet, Trump’s rejection of Washington’s foreign-policy orthodoxy went beyond relations with Russia; Trump was questioning the consensus on how America has conducted its role as global leader and he was challenging the arrogance of intervening in other nations’ affairs, whether by finger-waving lectures or various regime-change schemes.

As noisy and messy as Trump’s political approach has been – with a number of unnecessary diversions and self-inflicted wounds – there is a significant and “revolutionary” side of Trump’s approach. It represents a potential reordering of the two major political parties, a revamped struggle for power within the Right-Left dimension.

He restated this “revolutionary” aspect of his foreign policy in his Inaugural Address when he renounced the idea of endless interference in other countries’ politics and a return to the traditional role of America as an example, not an interventionist. This was an in-your-face condemnation of most of those sitting beside and behind him on the rostrum who favored a “values-based” foreign policy, globalization and American exceptionalism.

Taking on McCain

From the Oval Office, Trump has continued his frontal assault on this foreign-policy orthodoxy with his closely watched and disputed tweets. Much ridicule has been directed at Trump for ruling by tweets since they often reveal a lack of intellectual depth and his facile narcissism. But what they lack in refinement, Trump’s tweets make up for in feistiness and courage.

For instance, in a Jan. 30 tweet, Trump urged Republican neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to “focus their energies on ISIS, illegal immigration and border security instead of always looking to start World War III” [emphasis mine]. This was, in its own way, as significant as the pithy and devastating rebuke issued by attorney Joseph N. Welch to Sen. Joe McCarthy on June 9, 1954, after McCarthy attacked the patriotism of a young Army lawyer: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Welch asked.

In a way, Trump’s reference to the behavior of McCain and Graham, running around the world advocating for one war after another, including a military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia, was as precise and cutting as Welch’s putdown of McCarthy. In doing so, Trump broke the decades-long taboo on criticizing McCain despite his behavior as a loose cannon on the deck of foreign affairs, especially during the Obama years.

Behaving as if he had won rather than lost the 2008 election, McCain has traveled to such hot spots as Syria, Georgia and Ukraine with the goal of making U.S. foreign policy in the field, urging militants onward into violent clashes with their own governments or pushing U.S.-client states into conflicts with their neighbors.

Trump began his challenge to McCain during the campaign when he publicly questioned the “war hero” status of the Arizona senator by rhetorically asking in what way spending years in captivity as a Vietnam prisoner of war made McCain a war hero.

McCain took his revenge shortly before the inauguration when he informed the press that he had just handed over to the FBI for follow-up a dubious report generated by a former British intelligence agent accusing Trump of being vulnerable to Russian blackmail because of alleged cavorting with prostitutes during a visit to Moscow years ago.

To stymie any new détente with Russia, McCain also introduced a bill in the Senate calling for new and expanded sanctions against Russia. So, the White House tweet was a direct challenge to McCain for his actions that Trump warned were inviting World War III. In doing so, Trump is at least prying open space for a fuller debate about U.S. foreign policy and the wisdom of neocon interventionism.

So, notwithstanding all the self-righteous exclamations before media microphones by Establishment figures from both parties over the foibles of this populist president and notwithstanding the shouting in the streets by demonstrators, it appears that the President is advancing via his tactic of frontal attack.

A week ago, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump’s bellwether choice to oversee a new foreign policy, was confirmed by the Senate to the surprise and pleasure of those of us who had kept our fingers crossed. It is too early to say how or why Trump won this test of strength. But initial fierce opposition from ranking Republicans John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio was beaten back.

Now, the question is whether Tillerson and Trump’s other foreign policy appointees can achieve genuine change in the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

consortiumnews.com

Parker suggests a double standard favoring Muslim bashing over her presented claim of Russian mischief against the US. She describes Russia as an «enemy». Her overlooked hypocrisy concerns the select outrage over anti-Muslim stances (real and hyped), while being soft on the frequent instances of bias against pro-Russian advocacy.

Lacking specifics, Parker's «proof» against Russia is the faith based US Intel report, which unlike her doesn't refer to Russia as an «enemy», while claiming a concerted Vladimir Putin approved Russian government effort to support Trump by defaming Hillary Clinton. Regarding that report, the mind reading point about the Russian government and Russia's mass media preferring Trump over Clinton is in the no kidding and so what category. Trump has openly sought better US relations with Russia, as Clinton was the preferred choice of the anti-Russian neocons.

The January 8 exchange between Fox News host Chris Wallace and Trump's Chief-of-Staff Reince Priebus included the latter saying in the beginning that «he thinks» that Trump accepts the claim of Russian hacking of Democratic Party emails. Wallace's persistent questioning led Priebus to change course later on in the discussion, saying that the president-elect accepted the Intel take of Russian hacking. In any event, Trump (for now) doesn't seem to believe that this matter should cloud the effort to improve US-Russian relations.

There's a difference between hacking from the Russian government and Russian hackers who hack en masse, independent of the Kremlin. For several years, there've been reports of hacking from Russia, the US and elsewhere against ordinary Americans and others throughout the world. Ideally, there should be conclusive proof that the Russian government used a third party to advance their purported cause, as has been suggested in some circles.

With confidentiality respected, a CNN host privately asked how I could consider Julian Assange's take over US Intel? For the record, I didn't specifically say such. Is Assange less biased than the Democratic Party utilized CrowdStrike, that has also essentially been used to promote negativity towards the counter-Euromaidan rebels in Ukraine? CrowdStrike has ties to the Atlantic Council – a group that has been overly partisan against Russia.

I'm not alone in believing that the trustworthiness of US Intel is compromised by its politicized element and a past that has been found to not always be honest. This politicization was noted last week by Fox news host Brett Baier, who said that Trump's criticism of Intel has been misrepresented. Opposing politically driven and questionable Intel claims doesn't necessarily belittle the need for accurate Intel and recognizing that not everyone associated with that grouping has the faulty slants of John Brennan, James Clapper, Malcolm Nance and Michael Hayden. (Nance and Hayden are former US Intel personnel, who're frequent US mass media talking heads.)

There's ample reason to seriously question if the released Democratic party emails (however done) made a difference in the outcome of the 2016 US presidential result. To date, I'm unaware of any poll revealing that the released Democratic Party emails had significantly changed the outcome of that vote.

The Democratic Party should be faulted for having a lax cyber security regimen, along with saying some ethically challenging things. Not to be overlooked are the numerous instances of US government meddling in the elections of other countries  and the reality of major powers (perceived allies and otherwise) spying on each other.

On January 3, there were two segments featuring different perspectives on the released Democratic Party emails in question. Fox News' Sean Hannity, had a lengthy one on one with Assange, that brought up the criminal charges made against the WikiLeaks founder. The PBS NewsHour segment with CIA Director John Brennan, included this quote from him:

«We see what he has done in places like Crimea and Ukraine and in Syria. he tends to flex muscles, not just on himself, but also in terms of Russia's military capabilities. He plays by his own rules in terms of what it is that he does in some of these theaters of conflict.

So I don't think we underestimated him. He has sought to advance Russia's interests in areas where there have been political vacuums and conflicts. But he doesn't ascribe to the same types of rules that we do, for example, in law of armed conflict. What the Russians have done in Syria in terms of some of the scorched-earth policy that they have pursued that have led to devastation and thousands upon thousands of innocent deaths, that's not something that the United States would ever do in any of these military conflicts».

Own rules as in what Turkey has done in northern Cyprus and the Clinton led NATO in Kosovo? It was a shameful example of journalism on the part of PBS to let Brennan's comments go unchallenged. PBS had earlier run a pro-CrowdStrike feature. It's not as if there aren't any expert cyber security/ intelligence sources offering a different perspective.

As for the devastation of thousands of civilians during war (raised by Brennan), consider some past US actions like what happened in Japan during WW II, the Cold War activity in Southeast Asia, as well as post-Cold War actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The collateral damage emphasis has been hypocritically applied. Along with the subjectively dubious comments of Hayden and Nance, the above excerpted comments from Brennan are indicative of a (past and present) politicized element within US Intel.

Among Russia friendly circles, some kudos has been given to Fox News' Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Like their employer, these two individuals have a preference for Trump over the Democrats. However, like many pro-Trump sources, Hannity and Carlson maintain some of the anti-Russian biases, as The WaPo and some others speak of a possible unknown money trail linking Trump to Russia.

Trump has had known business interests involving China and some predominately Muslim countries. That aspect hasn't prevented him from saying things that aren't favored in these countries. There're other Americans besides Trump who favor improved US-Russian relations in opposition to the neocon/neolib preference.

Pat Buchanan serves as an example of an anti-Communist patriotic American, who second guesses the negative image of Putin and Russia. There's also the community of anti-Communist White Russians in the US and elsewhere, which have a good number opposed to the current hostility towards Russia. From a more left leaning perspective, Stephen Cohen and some lessor known individuals aren't anti-American in believing that the US (from its interests) shouldn't be so antagonistic towards Russia. American foreign policy realists include disagreement with the need for having unfriendly US-Russian relations.

An example of the ongoing bias is the obligatory «Putin is a thug» disclaimer frequently bandied about. As has been confidentially acknowledged to me, some well meaning folks do this as a means to soften criticism against their commentary, which otherwise goes against the neocon/neolib slant. Talk about «self-censorship».

From a distance, Putin (IMO) doesn't come across as being more mean spirited than Clinton, John McCain and some others who disparage him. With the pro-Trump/anti-Russian leaning people in mind, was Trump elected for being a nice guy? The personal insults against Putin are hypocritically petty. Upon a reasonable objective and comprehensive overview, the litany of negative claims against him are quite suspect. Yet, they keep getting uncritically rehashed in a way that exhibits a lack of diversity in US mass media and body politic.

Short of providing greater attention to the likes of Lindsey Graham and McCain, the provocative name calling and other forms of posturing against Putin/Russia haven't worked. It's not in America's best interests to use Russia as a political football to get at Trump and cater to anti-Russian advocacy. Trump should be accorded the opportunity to pursue better US-Russian relations. 

My last Strategic Culture Foundation article of January 1, counters the presentation of Obama and his predecessors (Bill Clinton and GW Bush) seeking to pursue that endeavor.

Meanwhile, McCain, Graham, and their neo-conservative allies within the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as press outlets like The Washington Post, have questioned Trump’s ultimate loyalty to the United States. The neocons’ angst arises from their anger over the incoming president wisely doubting the efficacy of Central Intelligence Agency «intelligence» linking Russia to a spate of computer penetrations of U.S. computer systems and networks, including pre-election hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and private email of Hillary Clinton’s top campaign officials.

After President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from Washington, DC and San Francisco and shut down two Russian diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York in retaliation for unproven Russian government involvement in the hacking, McCain and his neocon war hawks doubled down by claiming that Russian hacking of U.S. computer systems amounted to an «act of war». Seizing on the neocons’ war frenzy, the CIA and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the electrical power grid operated by Vermont’s Burlington Electric. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire and CIA cloud computing contractor Jeff Bezos, echoed the grid hacking story as factual.

There was only one problem with the Russian electrical grid hacking headline: it was not true. Burlington Electric revealed that a laptop computer in the possession of a Burlington Electric employee, which allegedly was infected by a malware program linked by the U.S. government to Russian hackers, was never connected to the Vermont electrical grid. The laptop contained a hackers’ software package called Neutrino, which is not linked, in any way, to Russia. An attempt by the «Amazon Post» and the war hawks to pin the Vermont grid story on Russia and link it to the DNC hacking fell flat on its face.

Burlington Electric issued a statement on December 30, 2016, identifying DHS as the «boy who cried wolf» that issued the same «Russian malware» scare to electric utilities across the United States. The statement read, «Last night, U.S. utilities were alerted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of a malware code used in Grizzly Steppe, the name DHS has applied to a Russian campaign linked to recent hacks. We acted quickly to scan all computers in our system for the malware signature. We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems».

It turned out that Ukraine, the country where McCain, Graham, and Minnesota’s rather myopic Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar were kibitzing with army troops and neo-Nazi armed militia members over the holidays, was the source of the malware hacking program used to hack into DNC computers. The Washington Post was also forced to shamefully retract its grid hacking story. The episode was yet another example of the haste at which the outgoing Obama administration and the neocon toadies in the Republican Party led by McCain were apt to blame any bad news on «the Russians». It was as if the Cold War witch hunter senator Joseph McCarthy had met the Keystone Kops. The situation would have been funny had it not been for the fact that the actions of Obama and the neocons propelled the world closer to cataclysmic warfare with the likes of McCain, Graham, and others beating the war drums.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and DHS amateurishly coined the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC computers with the cover term «Grizzly Steppe», a code phrase that would have been rejected by any legitimate Hollywood movie script writer as being too cartoonish and campy. Moreover, the malware used in the hacking of the Democrats’ computers was an antiquated version of PHP, a program originally designed for personal home pages, hence the abbreviation PHP, but which now stands for «PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor».

The PHP malware was found to be freely distributed by a Ukrainian hacker group as a hackers’ tool. Although the FBI, DHS, and CIA did not bother to investigate whether the Ukrainian hackers were linked to McCain’s and Graham’s friends in the Ukrainian intelligence service, the Ukrainians would have had every reason to initiate a further damaging fracture in relations between the United States and Russia. Furthermore, the Ukrainians could have availed themselves of «network weaving» tools to run their malware through servers in Russia.

In fact, the amateurish FBI/DHS «Grizzly Steppe» report found that the Ukrainian malware, later blamed on the Russians, had passed through the IP [Internet Protocol] addresses of 389 organizations in 61 different countries. None of the 389 malware pass-through IPs, including those of the University of Michigan; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York; Datasource AG in Ingmarso, Sweden; Hunenberg, Switzerland; Kustbandet AB in Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria; Voxility S.R.L. of Bucharest; and Amazon.com – the company owned by none other than Washington Post owner and CIA contractor Mr. Bezos! – were linked to the Russian government. These include the United States, Ukraine, Russia, China, France, Germany, Seychelles, Moldova, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Montenegro, Romania, and Israel. Such a rich global network, which included several TOR anonymous browsing gateways, would have provided more than ample network weaving opportunities to mask the original Ukrainian digital fingerprints on the actual hacking of DNC computers.

The malware program, called P.A.S. version 3.1.7., is contained in a web shell of PHP code. The malware program states that it is «Made in Ukraine» and the date of the program, 2011-2016 is followed by the letters «UA,» the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) two-letter code for Ukraine

In eastern Ukraine, standing alongside a camouflage-festooned chocolate mogul president Petro Poroshenko, McCain and Graham accused Russia of «attacking» the United States, with Graham accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of «hacking our election». Both called for increased sanctions against Russia. However, the sum-total of computer security knowledge of these two Republican fossils would not exceed that possessed by a kindergarten student in Arizona or South Carolina.

Rather than accuse other Americans, including Mr. Trump, of engaging in potentially treasonous activities, perhaps Mr. McCain should recall the charges made by several U.S. prisoners-of-war about his «singing» to his North Vietnamese captors after his plane was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967. McCain, according to some fellow POWs who later spoke out, gladly gave his captors about six months’ worth of U.S. Navy operational plans for the bombing of North Vietnam and Laos. McCain’s psychosis about Russia reportedly could stem from his time at the «Hanoi Hilton» POW prison. McCain was given the Russian KGB code name «Jack Mouse» and, per Chan Chong Duet, the commander of the prison, the downed Navy pilot and son of the U.S. Pacific Forces Commander, Admiral John McCain, Jr., was quite free with the information he passed to North Vietnamese, Cuban, and Soviet officers while being treated for his wounds by Soviet doctors. If McCain wants to question the loyalty of any American, he should look into a mirror. He should also seek out psychiatric assistance.

McCain has mocked Ward as «Chemtraill Kelli» because she had raised questions about the US government’s activities in the area of «geo-engineering» by seeding the atmosphere with weather-altering substances.  

When it comes to «conspiracies», Ward cannot be outdone by McCain, whose non-profit institute that bears his name accepted a $1 million donation from the Saudi Arabian embassy in March of this year.

McCain was one of a few US senators to voice grave reservations over the Senate’s passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which would allow the victims of state-sponsored terrorism to sue governments involved in such acts. The legislation is clearly aimed at Saudi Arabia and the role of key members of its government in the 9/11 attacks in 2001. McCain said he feared the legislation would alienate Saudi Arabia and undermine US security alliances in the Middle East. McCain has buried his head in the Saudi sand when it comes to Saudi support for terrorists of all stripes – al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the al-Nusra Front, and the Taliban factions in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

McCain has also led efforts to ensure that the Obama administration does not declassify 28 key pages from the 2002 joint congressional inquiry report on the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks. It is strongly believed that the 28 pages remain classified because they clearly implicate senior members of the Saudi government in providing support to the Arab hijackers in the United States.

In 2014, McCain actually praised one of those reportedly named in the joint congressional report as providing material assistance to the hijackers, former Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Appearing on CNN, McCain proclaimed, «Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar.» Around the same time that McCain was praising the Saudis, the McCain Institute Foundation, the non-profit money fundraising arm of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, received a $1 million donation from the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, DC.

For Saudi Arabia, McCain is their man. As chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain is a linchpin in the sale of advanced US weaponry to the Saudis and allied Gulf states.

There is very little sunlight between McCain and the Saudis on Middle Eastern issues. McCain actively supported US military intervention in the Syrian civil war on the side of jihadist rebel forces. McCain illegally entered Syrian territory from Turkey to meet with Syrian rebel leaders, including some who were affiliated with ISIL and al-Qaeda. McCain has also praised the Saudi-led genocidal military campaign in Yemen against the Houthi rebels.

McCain actually said that Yemen would have faced an even worse fate had Saudi Arabia not intervened in its civil war. He lauded Saudi King Salman’s «efforts» in Yemen while lashing out at Syria’s President Bashar al Assad for committing «atrocities» against the Syrian people. McCain ignores the fact that the Saudis have committed a systematic campaign of genocide in Yemen, a campaign that has purposefully targeted hospitals, orphanages, crowded marketplaces, and mosques.

McCain is a strong believer that Saudi Arabia and Israel jointly secure America’s future in the Middle East. McCain essentially subscribes to the neo-conservative war hawk myth that America must stand with its problematic allies in Riyadh and Jerusalem, as well as in Turkey’s neo-Ottoman government, to ensure America’s standing in the Middle East. That stance has not only earned McCain’s «Institute» at Arizona State University a million dollars from the Saudis, but his campaign coffers have been satiated with generous contributions from such pro-Israelis as vulture fund billionaire Paul Singer and NORPAC, a notorious lobbying firm that represents Israeli government interests.

After the $1 million contribution to the McCain Institute was made public, McCain, in a typical unhinged outburst, claimed he really had nothing to do with the institute named after him. McCain knows so little about the institute that bears his name that he personally hosts an annual cookout at his Sedona, Arizona residence for those who participate in the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum, a private conclave that has drawn in the past former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Secretary of State and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and actress Demi Moore. McCain knows so little about his institute that in 2014, the year the institute received its million dollars from the Saudis, McCain chaired a session on the Middle East with Mrs Clinton and deputy Secretary of State William Burns.

McCain’s insistence that he has nothing to do with the McCain Institute is belied by the fact that the entity’s board of trustees is packed with McCain political cronies, including Rick Davis, the national chairman of McCain’s presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2008; Lynn Forester de Rothschild, CEO of Rothschild LLC investment company; Jeff Immelt, chairman of General Electric; former Telstra CEO Solomon Trujillo, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for McCain’s campaigns, much of it considered to be «dark money»; former Senator and arch-neocon Joseph Lieberman; disgraced and criminally convicted former CIA director and retired General David Petraeus; Don Brandt, the finance committee chairman for McCain’s 2016 Senate reelection campaign; and Dave Berry, Bob Diamond, Sharon Harper, all deep-pocketed members of McCain’s 2016 reelection finance committee.

The McCain institute has also received lucrative donations from corporations with vested interests in the Middle East, including Chevron and General Electric. Through the Washington-based BGR lobbying group, McCain’s «institute» has also benefited from donations from Raytheon and the Royal Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs.

McCain is now known as «Senator Sellout» to his Arizona constituents. McCain, however, is worse than most politicians who are «for sale». In McCain’s case, he has tailored his policies to suit those who have participated in the worst act of terrorism ever committed on American soil.

Sailors who served on board the USS Forrestal, on station in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1967 when the aircraft carrier experienced the deadliest fire on board a US Navy ship in history, claimed it was McCain performing a dangerous «wet start» of his fighter’s jet engine that caused a series of explosive chain reactions. McCain earned the nickname «Johnny Wet Start» because of his flight deck antics. Only McCain’s immediate transfer to the USS Oriskany – on the orders of his father, Admiral John McCain – saved McCain from being keelhauled by Forrestal sailors.

Some prisoners-of-war who were incarcerated with McCain in Hanoi later revealed that McCain was known as the «song bird» for singing like a canary to his North Vietnamese captors, gladly providing them with a six-month advanced schedule of American bombing runs over North Vietnam. McCain, as a senator, was one of the «Keating Five», five US senators who accepted bribes from savings and loan owner Charles Keating in return for crafting policies that ultimately resulted in the collapse of the US savings and loan industry.

Senator «Sell Out» McCain has been a great representative in the Senate. However, he has not represented the people of Arizona, but the House of Saud, ISIL and al-Qaeda, Chevron, and every crook and gangster who has lined McCain’s pockets over several decades.