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Title: John McCain's Collaboration With The Enemy
Source:
Counterpunch
URL Source: [None]
Published: Apr 22, 2008
Author: Alexander Cockburn
Post Date: 2008-04-22 15:13:22 by ghostdogtxn
Keywords: None
Views: 466
Comments: 16
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#1. To: ghostdogtxn (#0)
(Edited)
I'm quite sure McCain made sure they knew this from the second he was captured...probably screaming it at the top of lungs "I'm important! Don't kill me!"
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition "Corporation: An entity created for the legal protection of its human parasites, whose sole purpose is profit and self-perpetuation." © IndieTx Law Enforcement Against Prohibition "Corporation: An entity created for the legal protection of its human parasites, whose sole purpose is profit and self-perpetuation." © IndieTx As much as I enjoy attacking McCain for being a warmonger, I will not engage in attacking him for whatever happened when he was a POW.
'Individuals should not take responsibility for their own defense. That’s what the police are for. ... If I oppose individuals defending themselves, I have to support police defending them. I have to support a police state.”' Alan Dershowitz
I think he is on the record as admitting such. As soon as he did they fixed his leg or whatever, then they fixed his weak mind.
Why not???? Other men suffered, he had it made. He was not the only one, there were other traitors.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
He was indeed a "Fortunate Son" as annunciated in the song by John Fogarty.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition "Corporation: An entity created for the legal protection of its human parasites, whose sole purpose is profit and self-perpetuation." © IndieTx
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
At least Tokyo Rose didn't throw temper tantrums.
You could be absolutely correct, I just cannot stand in judgment of him on this issue. I was never a POW who was tortured but it unimaginable how awful it must have been. Those who were and were there may do so and I accept that. And if you feel that certain and strongly about it, go ahead. There's plenty of other stuff we have on McCain, more current too.
'Individuals should not take responsibility for their own defense. That’s what the police are for. ... If I oppose individuals defending themselves, I have to support police defending them. I have to support a police state.”' Alan Dershowitz
I have a neighbor named Walter Eugene Wilber that was worse than McKooK. He played basketball for the videos to show how good they had it. He also "got religion" while a POW and said war was against his principles. Mind you he was a Lt. Cmdr. which took some years before he found himself. If you want to read of such a person, just google his name. The vets that were there never forgot McKooK or Wilber.
I understand you cannot but those of us that took the oath most certainly do. Had the SOB not been the CiCs son he would still be in prison.
Here is the url for a full report written by his fellow POWs that did suffer. The Navy wanted to hang him but to do so they would have to hang McKooK, so everyone walked away, a deep stain on the Navy.
Or just SOS if his captors had been in an unpleasant mood that day..his screaming probably made them hesitate long enough to realize they'd better wait unil they spoke to their CO.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition "Corporation: An entity created for the legal protection of its human parasites, whose sole purpose is profit and self-perpetuation." © IndieTx
The allegations of McCain's responsibility for the Forrestal fire are unproven. John McCain And The USS Forrestal Fire While not found criminally culpable, McCain's actions as one of "The Keating Five" seriously undermine his posturing as an ethics reformer. http://www.slate.com/id/1004633/ Is John McCain a Crook? Posted Friday, Feb. 18, 2000, at 2:35 PM ET The controversial George W. Bush-sponsored poll in South Carolina mentioned John McCain's role in the so-called Keating Five scandal, and McCain says his involvement in the scandal "will probably be on my tombstone." What exactly did McCain do? In early 1987, at the beginning of his first Senate term, McCain attended two meetings with federal banking regulators to discuss an investigation into Lincoln Savings and Loan, an Irvine, Calif., thrift owned by Arizona developer Charles Keating. Federal auditors were investigating Keating's banking practices, and Keating, fearful that the government would seize his S&L, sought intervention from a number of U.S. senators. At Keating's behest, four senators--McCain and Democrats Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Alan Cranston of California, and John Glenn of Ohio--met with Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, on April 2. Those four senators and Sen. Don Riegle, D-Mich., attended a second meeting at Keating's behest on April 9 with bank regulators in San Francisco. Regulators did not seize Lincoln Savings and Loan until two years later. The Lincoln bailout cost taxpayers $2.6 billion, making it the biggest of the S&L scandals. In addition, 17,000 Lincoln investors lost $190 million. In November 1990, the Senate Ethics Committee launched an investigation into the meetings between the senators and the regulators. McCain, Cranston, DeConcini, Glenn, and Riegle became known as the Keating Five. (Keating himself was convicted in January 1993 of 73 counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud and served more than four years in prison before his conviction was overturned. Last year, he pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud and was sentenced to time served.) McCain defended his attendance at the meetings by saying Keating was a constituent and that Keating's development company, American Continental Corporation, was a major Arizona employer. McCain said he wanted to know only whether Keating was being treated fairly and that he had not tried to influence the regulators. At the second meeting, McCain told the regulators, "I wouldn't want any special favors for them," and "I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper." But Keating was more than a constituent to McCain--he was a longtime friend and associate. McCain met Keating in 1981 at a Navy League dinner in Arizona where McCain was the speaker. Keating was a former naval aviator himself, and the two men became friends. Keating raised money for McCain's two congressional campaigns in 1982 and 1984, and for McCain's 1986 Senate bid. By 1987, McCain campaigns had received $112,000 from Keating, his relatives, and his employees--the most received by any of the Keating Five. (Keating raised a total of $300,000 for the five senators.) After McCain's election to the House in 1982, he and his family made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, three of which were to Keating's Bahamas retreat. McCain did not disclose the trips (as he was required to under House rules) until the scandal broke in 1989. At that point, he paid Keating $13,433 for the flights. And in April 1986, one year before the meeting with the regulators, McCain's wife, Cindy, and her father invested $359,100 in a Keating strip mall. The Senate Ethics Committee probe of the Keating Five began in November 1990, and committee Special Counsel Robert Bennett recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation. They were not. McCain believes Democrats on the committee blocked Bennett's recommendation because he was the lone Keating Five Republican. In February 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee found McCain and Glenn to be the least blameworthy of the five senators. (McCain and Glenn attended the meetings but did nothing else to influence the regulators.) McCain was guilty of nothing more than "poor judgment," the committee said, and declared his actions were not "improper nor attended with gross negligence." McCain considered the committee's judgment to be "full exoneration," and he contributed $112,000 (the amount raised for him by Keating) to the U.S. Treasury. http://www.newsmax.com/politics/mccain_keating/2008/03/23/82393.html McCain: I Learned From Keating Five Case WASHINGTON -- Sen. John McCain 's ethics entanglement with a wealthy banker ultimately convicted of swindling investors was such a disturbing, formative experience in his political career that he compares the scandal in some ways to the five years he was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. "I faced in Vietnam, at times, very real threats to life and limb," McCain told The Associated Press. "But while my sense of honor was tested in prison, it was not questioned. During the Keating inquiry, it was, and I regretted that very much." In his early days as a freshman senator, McCain was known for accepting contributions from Charles Keating Jr., flying to the banker's home in the Bahamas on company planes and taking up Keating's cause with U.S. financial regulators as they investigated him. The Keating Five was the derisive name given McCain and four Democratic senators who were defendants in a congressional ethics investigation of their connections to Keating. McCain is the only one still in the Senate. They were accused of trying to intimidate regulators on behalf of Keating, a real estate developer in Arizona and owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan based in Irvine, Calif. Keating and his associates raised $1.3 million combined for the campaigns and political causes of all five. McCain's campaigns received $112,000. The investigation ended in early 1991 with a rebuke that McCain "exercised poor judgment in intervening with the regulators." But the Senate ethics committee also determined McCain's actions "were not improper nor attended with gross negligence." McCain has claimed the Keating scandal sensitized him even to the appearance of potential conflicts of interest. But in recent weeks, McCain has defended himself anew over another instance in which he intervened with federal regulators on behalf of a prominent campaign contributor _ years ago but after the Keating rebuke. Again, McCain denies acting improperly. McCain wrote two letters in late 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications. He urged quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh, although he did not ask the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal. At the time, one FCC commissioner's formal nomination was pending before McCain's Senate committee, and the FCC chairman complained that McCain's letters were improper. McCain wrote the letters after receiving more than $20,000 in contributions from the company's executives and lobbyists. Chief executive Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson also lent McCain his company's jet at least four times during 1999 for campaign travel. In the Keating investigation, the committee said more than one year had passed _ a "decent interval" _ between the last contributions Keating raised for McCain and the two 1987 meetings he attended with banking regulators. McCain later paid $112,000 _ the amount Keating raised for him _ to the U.S. Treasury. None of the five senators was punished by the Senate. The harshest rebuke went to Alan Cranston, D-Calif., who accepted $1 million in contributions tied to Keating. The ethics committee said Cranston "engaged in an impermissible pattern of conduct in which fundraising and official activities were substantially linked." Cranston died in December 2000. The ethics committee said McCain took no further action on Keating's behalf after regulators dropped a bombshell during a meeting with the senators: They intended to recommend a criminal investigation of Keating and his savings and loan. "The appearance of wrongdoing, fair or unfair, can be potentially as injurious as actual wrongdoing," McCain told the AP, reflecting on what he said were his lessons from the scandal. "Also, when questions are raised about your integrity or for that matter anything involving your public career, even, for example, a controversial position on the issues, it is best not to hide from the media or public." Now famously accessible to reporters as a presidential candidate, McCain conducted a poisonous newspaper interview nearly 20 years ago with his hometown Arizona Republic. Flashing his quick temper, he insulted, cursed and hung up on reporters questioning him about his ties to Keating. He said he now recognizes it was the worst way to respond. "Taking all the questions and making your arguments is the only way you can prevent an unfair or injurious public perception becoming fixed," McCain said. Former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., a Republican on the ethics panel who investigated McCain, said McCain's political comeback and his personal rehabilitation from his time as a POW were his biggest personal obstacles. "What happened in Vietnam and the Keating Five, those two were life altering," Rudman said in an interview. "He would not put a losing campaign in the same box. But not wallowing in self pity and doing something positive, that is absolutely John McCain." Republican Trent Lott of Mississippi, the former Senate majority leader, said McCain's political revival after the investigation was no accident. "He was so upset at the charges and the impact, he felt an extra need to deal with the kind of things that led to the situation he found himself in," Lott said in an interview. "You can go away disillusioned and angry and just leave, or you can go back to work and try to compensate for it. And that's what John has been about in the years since. He just went back to work. He bent over backwards to be extra careful about ethics." Keating went to prison for more than four years after a federal fraud conviction. The conviction was reversed on appeal after he argued that jurors improperly had knowledge of a prior state conviction on related charges. He was to be retried in federal court but instead pleaded guilty to four federal fraud counts. Keating admitted he siphoned nearly $1 million from his S&L's insolvent parent company. He was sentenced to time he already had served. After prison, Keating moved to his daughter's home in the wealthy Phoenix enclave of Paradise Valley. In 2006, he quietly began work as a business consultant in Phoenix. A spokesman for Keating, reached at his office, said Keating did not want to discuss the banking scandal or McCain's presidential campaign. Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan sold worthless, high-risk junk bonds. Many of the 23,000 investors were elderly customers who didn't realize their investments were not federally insured. Many were left destitute while Keating maintained a lavish lifestyle. Keating also participated in the risky investments that led to the collapse of S&L's across the country. The U.S. government seized Lincoln in 1989, sticking taxpayers with a bailout cost of $2.8 billion. Many other thrifts collapsed, with taxpayers footing nearly $124 billion of the $152.9 billion bailout cost, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Depositors and politicians searched for culprits and turned up the five senators. Keating sought a quid pro quo from the five. He wanted government regulators, who were investigating Lincoln, off his back. And he demanded reversal of a new rule limiting an S&L's direct investment in risky ventures to 10 percent of assets. The banker's attitude was summed up the day a reporter asked whether his political donations to the senators encouraged their intervention. "I want to say in the most forceful way I can, I certainly hope so," Keating replied. But McCain had an additional image problem beyond the intervention and his acceptance of Keating's cash. The two former Navy pilots had become good friends, until the day Keating decided McCain wasn't doing enough for him and called the Arizona senator a wimp. Keating had flown McCain and his family on several occasions to his home in the Bahamas and other locations. When his company tried to take tax deductions for the trips, the IRS raised questions. McCain, who said he mistakenly thought his wife had reimbursed the cost, paid back more than $13,000 _ years after the trips and after the senator knew of Keating's problems with the government. McCain, in his book "Worth the Fighting For," lamented that the senators "were now a two-word shorthand for the entire savings and loan debacle and the rotten way American political campaigns are financed." He also wrote: "My popularity in Arizona was in free fall. ... I expected a rough, and quite possibly unsuccessful re-election campaign in 1992. To the extent I was known nationally anymore, it was as one of the crooked senators who had bankrupted the thrift industry." McCain was re-elected in 1992 with 56 percent of the vote. http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/levin040501.shtml Mr. Levin is also president of the Landmark Legal Foundation. For too long, McCain has been given a free pass by the media, which promotes campaign-finance reform to silence other voices, and by his Republican colleagues, who are concerned about alienating McCain given the GOP's tenuous majority in the Senate. In John McCain's America, any politician who accepts a large contribution or gift from a donor, and then takes steps consistent with the donor's interests — even though there is no legal quid pro quo — is corrupt. Well, then, by his own standard, McCain is corrupt. McCain was one of the so-called "Keating Five" senators. He was investigated by the Senate Select Committee on Ethics in 1991 regarding the acceptance of favors from Lincoln Savings & Loan Association (Lincoln) and its owner, Charles H. Keating, Jr. Simply put, the issue was whether McCain and the other senators used their official positions to attempt to pressure Federal Home Loan Bank Board officials to go easy on the troubled institution. Eventually Lincoln went bust, costing depositors and taxpayers millions. In its final report (November 20, 1991), here is what the Senate Select Committee on Ethics concluded about McCain's conduct: "Mr. Keating, his associates, and his friends contributed $56,000 for Senator McCain's two House races in 1982 and 1984, and $54,000 for his 1986 Senate race. Mr. Keating also provided his corporate plane and/or arranged for payment for the use of commercial or private aircraft on several occasions for travel by Senator McCain and his family, for which Senator McCain ultimately provided reimbursement when called upon to do so. Mr. Keating also allowed Senator McCain and his family to vacation with Mr. Keating and his family, at a home provided by Mr. Keating in the Bahamas, in each of the calendar years 1983 through 1986. "…[F]rom 1984 to 1987, Senator McCain took actions on Mr. Keating's behalf or at his request. The Committee finds that Senator McCain had a basis for each of these actions independent of the contributions and benefits he received from Mr. Keating, his associates and friends. "Based on the evidence available to it, the Committee has given consideration to Senator McCain's actions on behalf of Lincoln. The Committee concludes that, given the personal benefits and campaign contributions he had received from Mr. Keating, Senator McCain exercised poor judgment in intervening with the regulators without first inquiring as to the Bank Board's position in the case in a more routine manner. The Committee concludes that Senator McCain's actions were not improper nor attended with gross negligence and did not reach the level of requiring institutional action against him. The Committee finds that Senator McCain took no further action after the April 9, 1987 meeting when he learned of a criminal referral. "The Committee reaffirms its prior decision that it does not have jurisdiction to determine the issues of disclosure or reimbursement pertaining to flights provided by American Continental Corporation while Senator McCain was a Member of the House of Representatives. The Committee did consider the effect of such on his state of mind and judgment in taking steps to assist Lincoln. "Senator McCain has violated no law of the United States or specific Rule of the United States Senate; therefore, the Committee concludes that no further action is warranted with respect to Senator McCain on the matters investigated during the preliminary inquiry." McCain was the only Republican implicated in the Keating Five scandal, yet today he lectures his party and his president about "the corrupting influence" of money in politics. He rails against the so-called "wealthy special interests" and their ability to buy access to elected officials, yet this is precisely what the Keating Five scandal was all about. And, of course, under McCain's current standard, a politician who takes a principled position that may benefit a donor is corrupt, even if no law has been violated. The John McCain of old should be thankful that his political fate wasn't determined by John McCain the reformer.
“His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite. . .The Vietnamese realized, this poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that. They were working him.”
"There is no 'legitimate' Corporation by virtue of it's very legal definition and purpose."
-- IndieTx
#2. To: ghostdogtxn, redpanther (#0)
ping
"There is no 'legitimate' Corporation by virtue of it's very legal definition and purpose."
-- IndieTx
#3. To: ghostdogtxn (#0)
#4. To: IndieTX (#1)
I'm quite sure McCain made sure they knew this from the second he was captured..
#5. To: robin (#3)
I will not engage in attacking him for whatever happened when he was a POW.
#6. To: robin (#3)
#7. To: Cynicom (#4)
"There is no 'legitimate' Corporation by virtue of it's very legal definition and purpose."
-- IndieTx
#8. To: IndieTX (#1)
#9. To: ghostdogtxn (#0)
I've already said too much.
#10. To: ghostdogtxn, Cynicom (#6)
#11. To: IndieTX (#7)
#12. To: robin (#10)
You could be absolutely correct, I just cannot stand in judgment of him on this issue.
#13. To: IndieTX, robin (#7)
#14. To: Cynicom (#12)
"There is no 'legitimate' Corporation by virtue of it's very legal definition and purpose."
-- IndieTx
#15. To: IndieTX (#14)
Senator Songbird bump to the thread
#16. To: ghostdogtxn (#0)
http://judicial-inc.biz/82jjohn_mccain_and_the_uss_forresta.htm
----- McCain and the Keating Five
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Chris Suellentrop Newsmax.com
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Sunday, March 23, 2008 11:30 AM Remember the Keating Five?
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McCain’s own standards would have hung him.
April 5, 2001 9:15 a.m.
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