End Times and Current Events

McCAIN: Shouting 'Allahu Akhbar!' Same as Christians Shouting 'Thank God!'

Sen. John McCain criticized Fox & Friends's Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday after the co-host said he had "a problem with helping out" members of the Syrian opposition who were shouting "Allahu Akbar" as rockets rained down in a government-held district of Homs.
 
During an interview with Sen. McCain, Kilmeade played the clip of the Syrian opposition fighters in order to suggest that McCain's plan to deliver weapons to opposition groups could ultimately backfire, putting rockets in the hands of terrorists.
 
“I have a problem helping out those people screaming that after a hit,” Kilmeade said.
 
Sen. McCain fired back, “Would you have a problem with an American person saying ‘Thank God! Thank God!'?"
 
“That’s what they're saying. Come on!" Sen. McCain said. "Of course they're Muslims, but they're moderates. I guarantee you that they are moderates. I know them and I've been with them. For someone to say 'Allahu Akbar' is about as offensive as someone saying 'Thank God.'"

video: http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/09/mccain-shames-foxs-brian-kilmeade-171681.html#.UiYOBLG6eu4.twitter

Its McCains, good buddies that released the gas, and eat people.

On Tuesday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) suggested that Fox News host Brian Kilmeade was Islamaphobic because he said that Syrian opposition groups shouting “Allahu Akhbar! Allahu Akhbar!” as rockets hit government offices demonstrated Islamist influence among the opposition.
 
“I have a problem helping those people screaming that after a hit,” Kilmeade said. McCain responded: “Would you have a problem with an American or Christians saying ‘thank God? Thank God?’” He added, “That’s what they’re saying. Come on! Of course they’re Muslims, but they’re moderates and I guarantee you they are moderates.” McCain provided no evidence to suggest that Syrian opposition groups are moderate, as opposed to the wide swath of evidence suggesting that the opposition is heavily infested with al Qaeda.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/09/03/McCain-allahu-akhbar

No John, “Allah Akbar” Does Not Mean “Thank God” and It Matters

(http://frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/27342-423x350.jpg)
"Of course they’re Muslims, but they’re moderates and I guarantee you they are moderates.”


Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blasted Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday for questioning members of a Syrian opposition groups’ use of the phrase “Allahu Akbar” after what Kilmeade said “looks like a fighter jet being shot out of the sky.”
 
“I have a problem helping those people screaming that after a hit,” Kilmeade said.
 
McCain criticized Kilmeade for his skepticism of the phrase, which means “God is greater” or “God is the greatest” in Arabic.
 
“Would you have a problem with an American person saying ‘Thank God? Thank God?’” McCain said. “That’s what they’re saying. Come on! Of course they’re Muslims, but they’re moderates and I guarantee you they are moderates.”
 
They’re not saying Thank God. They’re not even saying Thank Allah. If they wanted to praise Allah for surviving, they would say “Alhamdulillah”.
 
The difference is significant. Allah Akbar is a proclamation of Islamic superiority in line with its Koranic mission of making Islam superior over all religions.
 
Koran 61:9. “He it is who has sent his Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth to make it victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist.”
 
It’s not merely a praise of their deity, Allah. It’s a mission statement.

 

“We killed this man. This proves that our god is greater than his.”
 
McCain is being willfully ignorant when he conflates Thank God with Allahu Akbar.
 
The origin of Allah Akbar, which does not appear in the Koran, comes from the Hadith, during Mohammed’s genocide of the Jews.
 
“So, when the day dawned, the Jews came out with their bags and spades. When they saw the Prophet; they said, “Muhammad and his army!” The Prophet said, Allahu–Akbar! (Allah is Greater) and Khaibar is ruined, for whenever we approach a nation (i.e. enemy to fight) then it will be a miserable morning for those who have been warned.” Sahih Bukhari 4:52:195
 
Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud Jash Muhammad Saya’ud, Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Mohammed’s Army Will Return is still used as an anti-Semitic battle cry by Muslims today.
 
Like it, Allahu Akbar has clear hostile religious overtones. It’s used to denote the religious supremacism that is the fundamental mission of Islam.
 
Until Senator McCain gets that, he’s as clueless as any of the 1920s politicians who pretended that the Bolsheviks were just a bunch of social reformers.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/no-john-allah-akbar-does-not-mean-thank-god-and-it-matters/

Muslim Brotherhood in Syria: Shari’a or Death
"Of course they’re Muslims, but they’re moderates and I guarantee you they are moderates.”
John McCain

Armed gunmen claiming to belong to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood gave a glimpse of their growing strength in Syria when they threatened 30 Kurdish fighters they took hostage last month with death if they didn’t accept Shari’ia law and the “Brotherhood’s” interpretation of Islam, a recently uploaded YouTube video showed.

While the Obama administration waits for Congress to vote on whether military action should be taken in Syria, concern is growing among some lawmakers and Middle East analysts that worry a limited U.S. strike in Syria would benefit terrorist groups, like that of Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.
 
The video, originally posted by the nongovernmental watchdog Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,  shows 30 members of the Syrian PKK, also known as the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, being held hostage by the armed gunmen. The group of PKK members is seen sitting on the Persian rugged floor of an empty room, while while a member of the Muslim Brotherhood fighters tells them that they must “practice the real Islam and follow Sha’ria law” or face the “consequences.”
 
The men identified themselves as members of the Muslim Brotherhood and they spoke in a distinct classic Arabic with an Egyptian accent, an Arabic translator, who viewed the video, told TheBlaze.
 
Strangely enough, the Kurdish rebels were forced to sign a contract and were told that if they prayed with the Muslim Brotherhood, turned over all their weapons and refrained from fighting for a full year they would not be harmed.
 
“If you don’t do this, you know the consequences?” warned a man with a strong Egyptian accent. The Kurdish men sat quietly, listening.
 
Under Assad, the Muslim Brotherhood was banned but the uprising in 2011, opened a door that had been closed for nearly 30 years.
 
Some analysts suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood is strongest fighting force against Assad in Syria, and that the group is providing assistance to various rebel military units fighting the regime.
 
“The danger in Syria is what happens next,” said a U.S. Official, who works in the Middle East. “Do we really believe the Muslim Brotherhood members, who are already threatening the (Syrian) people, will just leave when Assad is gone? Or that Al-Qaeda will? No, they won’t – we’ll just be dealing with a new set of bad guys.”

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/04/muslim-brotherhood-in-syria-sharia-or-death/

Gold Star Mom to Poker Player McCain: 'I'm Sorry the Lives of Our Brave Warriors Bore You'

Responding to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) playing online poker on his iPhone during yesterday’s Senate hearing with Secretary of State John Kerry over war with Syria, Gold Star mother Debbie Lee fired back in an exclusive comment to Breitbart News. “It infuriates me,” she said. “We are facing the possibility of sending our sons and daughters to a war, conflict, military action or whatever politically correct term you use – an action that could change the world as we know it – and McCain couldn’t care less.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/04/Debbie-Lee-McCain

I've been saying for some time now, McCain is mentally unstable.

Or blackmailed, paid off, whatever you want to call it - remember his current wife was his FORMER mistress, whom he had an affair with when married to his previous wife.

BUT...Churchianity still supported him in the 2008 election. So much for their outrage over Clinton/Lewinsky. ::)

Rep. Amash Slams McCain for 'Allahu Akbar' Comments

On Friday, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) ripped Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for his argument that when jihadists scream “Allahu Akbar” it is no different than Christians saying “Thank God.”
 
“Senator McCain’s response was completely ignorant and offensive. Good people, whether they’re Muslims, Christians, or Jews--don’t scream ‘Thank God’ when they kill people,” Amash said on Laura Ingraham’s radio program on Tuesday. “It’s completely outrageous that he would say such a thing.”
 
Amash did not hold back from criticizing House GOP leaders, either. Before any congressional hearings on the president’s proposed Syria military strike occurred, House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor both announced they backed military intervention in Syria. Amash told Ingraham he believes this type of behavior is unacceptable and that there is popular opposition to it.

rest: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/06/Amash-unloads-on-McCain-on-his-Allahu-Akbart-comments-over-Syria

Again, I hate to say it - not that I "enjoy" watching this puppet show, per se, but at the same time b/c Jesus Christ says let not our hearts be troubled, I can't help but to sit back, grab some popcorn and blueberry juice, and just relax while watching the whole thing.

Now it seems like everyone's going after everyone - not just GOPers going after Dems, and vice versa.

Precious Little Girl Dismembered While She Is Still Alive By Obama’s Psychotic Syrian Rebels


Should the United States be allied with radical Islamic jihadists that dismember little girls while they are still alive?  That question sounds ridiculously absurd, but that is precisely what Barack Obama is proposing.  Obama wants the United States to go to war so that it will be easier for al-Qaeda Christian killers to take over Syria.  What you are about to read should absolutely shock you.  Please send it out to your friends and share it everywhere that you can.  If America willingly sides with psychotic, murderous savages that behead little children, it will bring a curse upon our nation.  It is imperative that the American people be told the truth about this.

(Read More.....)
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/precious-little-girl-dismembered-while-she-is-still-alive-by-obamas-psychotic-syrian-rebels

Barring video proof, I've always had no trust in these type stories. Both sides have always put out propaganda about all kinds of wicked things the enemy is doing. Just look at how much stuff is produced between Israel and Palestinians. They do it ALL the time, claim each side has done this or that, when in reality, one must look at the source of the story to really get to the truth.

Now who is the source of all this?...

"RT" is "Russia Today". Read their stuff with extreme caution!

Really? You call that credible?  ::)

Official Arizona GOP Body Passes Formal Rebuke of John McCain

The Legislative District 26 Republican Party in Arizona has passed a formal rebuke of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for abdicating GOP principles in helping Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) secure votes to approve several of President Barack Obama’s controversial nominees.

“Senator John McCain unilaterally negotiated with the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to secure Republican votes necessary to pass a number of controversial Presidential nominees,” the resolution, which passed the official GOP body in the state by a 24-13 vote with four abstentions on Tuesday evening, reads.

The resolution notes that President Obama nominated “Gina McCarthy for head of the Environmental Protection Agency, an environmental bureaucrat who supports anti-job/consumer policies,” “Richard Corday to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFRB), an unaccountable, unconstitutional agency created by the Dodd-Frank legislation,” and “Thomas Perez as Labor Secretary who has a known record for abusing power as Maryland’s Labor Secretary, handing political appointments to Big-Labor bedfellows.”

It argues that McCain “provided the votes necessary for the confirmation of the above nominees,” and his “’deal’ was nothing more than capitulation to the Senate Majority Leader, giving him everything he asked for.”

“Senator McCain claims in defense of his actions, that they were taken to prevent the Senate Majority Leader from ‘going nuclear’ and illegally breaking the Senate rules to pass these nominees,” the GOP resolution states, adding that McCain’s activity contradicted GOP principles and “the position of Legislative District 26 Republicans is that senators should call the Senate Majority Leader’s bluff and force him to get the votes necessary from members of his own party.”

The resolution says that given those facts, McCain must “cease deal-making and negotiations for Republican votes that undermine the Senate Republican Leader.”

The resolution also argues that because of McCain’s work to help Reid and Obama secure confirmation of those liberal nominees, “the conduct of Senator McCain, is unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate, weakened the Senate Republican Leader, and is hereby strongly rebuked and condemned.”

Matt Papke, the third vice chair of the body, told Breitbart News that “McCain is the poster child for term limits.”

“His back room dealings, insatiable war drum, and eroding base call to question why this man is our Senator,” Papke, who is also a candidate for Tempe, AZ, City Council, said in an email. "It is my hope that Senators McCain and Flake work to reestablish their relationships with the boots on the ground members of Legislative District 26 Republicans."

This latest rebuke comes on the heels of the Maricopa County GOP blistering McCain in recent web literature, and his increased distance from Republicans in the state, including the House GOP delegation, as Breitbart News has reported.

rest: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/11/Official-Arizona-GOP-body-passes-formal-rebuke-of-John-McCain-for-conduct-unbecoming

McCain is a progressive through and through.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbvzWh5r6PU&feature=youtube

Yeah, wouldn't surprise me if alot io(not all, but some to most) political leaders, "religious" leaders, entertainment types, and even professional athletes/coaches are these fallen angelic demonic spirits disguised as humans(ie-I'm a baseball fan, but nonetheless I find it hard to believe pitchers can throw over 95 miles per hour. And alot of these entertainment types' backgrounds before they became famous just almost never adds up). But, I do feel this is God's judgment in the latter days for the nations that reject Jesus Christ.

Psalms 78:49  He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and indignation, and trouble, by sending evil angels [among them].

Rev 9:20-21  And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.


I suppose, for some, temporary superhuman ability to throw 95 mph pitches is more important than the love of truth and eternal salvation. I see more reports these days of musicians that admit that they sold their soul to the devil. They signed a “contract”. People still have the choice to actively invite a walk-in. But it’s just a matter of time before they realize that this is the same as trading their birthright for a bowl of porridge.

And I'd say virtually all of those people pursued their career innocently enough, in ignorance initially, because of how they were raised by their parents. They weren't taught the gospel of Jesus Christ, or if they were part of churchianity, they still were misled into living in the world just like the unbelieving, so they naturally pursued worldly things, all the while society is telling them that's how it's done "these days".

Today is no different though, as man has always esteemed men, be it warriors or gladiators and mystics, because they don't look to God.

And yes, they eventually will learn the truth, that the offer they took for their kingdom in the world was a scam all along.

Jesus shows us here who are vipers do you think they had reptilian blood?

Matthew 3:7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

Matthew 12:34 O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Matthew 23:33 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

Luke 3:7 Then said he to the multitude that came forth to be baptized of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

it is interesting do you think that there were reptilians on earth when Jesus walked in Israel?

I was kind of thinking the same thing too - that they've been *among* us on this earth the whole time, even way back during the days when the bible was being written.

Isaiah 59:4  None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth: they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity.
Isa 59:5  They hatch cockatrice' eggs, and weave the spider's web: he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper.

Isaiah 14:9  Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations.

Jeremiah 8:17  For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the LORD.

Gen 6:4  There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Which is why I believe alot of these political leaders, religious leaders, entertainment types, and even professional sports athletes could be just that. Like I said, sometimes it just bewilders me how they have THIS much talent.

There have been fallen angels/demons on the earth since they were cast out of heaven. Been here ever since, and no question were present in Jesus' time in the flesh.

Now, are they spirit only, so that man is possessed, or do they also walk the earth looking like humans? Don't know. Regardless, they are still here messing with man.

So Ted Cruz realizes this NOW? ::) You mean he didn't know McCain has been doing this for years and years and years? When will Cruz finally be 'embarrassed' to have worked on George W. Bush's 2000 election campaign?

http://news.yahoo.com/ted-cruz--%E2%80%98embarrassed%E2%80%99-to-support-mccain-for-president-in-2008-022523878.html
Ted Cruz: ‘Embarrassed’ to have supported McCain for president in 2008
9/23/13

Ted Cruz had barely been in the Senate for two months in March when Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain famously voiced his frustration with the new Texas lawmaker by calling him a “wacko bird.”

The two seem to have never quite gotten along, even though McCain apologized soon after he made the comment. But Cruz, who this week is finding himself at the receiving end of Republican vitriol for his plan to risk a government shutdown in order to defund the 2010 federal health care law, doesn’t think much of McCain either.

In a new lengthy GQ profile, Cruz told the magazine that conservatives were “embarrassed” to vote in 2008 — the year that McCain was the Republican presidential nominee.

“I don’t know a conservative who didn’t feel embarrassed voting in 2006 or 2008,” Cruz told GQ. “I think the Republican Party lost its way. We didn’t stand for the principles we’re supposed to believe in.”

The profile of Cruz, a politician who has ignited speculation about whether he himself may run for president in 2016 by speaking to Republican groups in early-voting states such as New Hampshire and Iowa, provides a glimpse into Cruz’s background as a fiercely ambitious — some might say cocky — Ivy League-educated immigrants’ son who is shaking up the GOP.

According to the article, despite Cruz’s rapid rise, he still has work to do to win the approval of McCain.

As one McCain aide told GQ: “He (expletive) hates Cruz.”

Syria Analyst Fired Over False Academic Creds Finds New Employment With

Elizabeth O’Bagy, the Syria analyst who was fired after it emerged that she had misrepresented her academic credentials, has found new employment with Sen. John McCain, Foreign Policy’s The Cable reported.
 
O’Bagy was an analyst for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War where she advocated for U.S. intervention in Syria. Her work was cited by McCain (R-Ariz.), a leading voice in favor of action in Syria.
 
But earlier this month, the institute announced that it had “learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University” and terminated her employment.
 
She will start next week as a legislative assistant in McCain’s office.
 
“Elizabeth is a talented researcher, and I have been very impressed by her knowledge and analysis in multiple briefings over the last year,” McCain told The Cable in a statement. “I look forward to her joining my office.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7JqP8MMLYM&feature=player_embedded

Days before her firing, O’Bagy also came under scrutiny after an opinion piece she penned for The Wall Street Journal did not disclose her affiliation with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group for the Syrian rebels.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/27/syria-analyst-fired-over-false-academic-creds-finds-new-employment-with/

Wow...

Yeah, no kidding! Par for the course I guess that a mental case politician would knowingly hire a liar.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/john-boehner-very-quietly-made-232606217.html
John Boehner Very Quietly Made A Major Move On Immigration Reform Today
12/3/13

House Speaker John Boehner announced on Tuesday the hire of Rebecca Tallent, a top immigration policy aide who will advise the Speaker on the topic.

Tallent joins Boehner's office from the Bipartisan Policy Center, where she was the director of immigration policy. Her hire — which was announced at the bottom of a press release along with other new staff additions — signals that there's still life for an immigration reform bill to become law sometime over the next year.

And it came two weeks after Boehner declared in a press conference that despite press pronouncements, immigration reform was "absolutely not dead."

Pro-immigration reform advocates that have been critical of Boehner hailed the move, while groups that have decried Senate-passed legislation as "amnesty" pushed back furiously.

"The Speaker remains hopeful that we can enact step-by-step, common-sense immigration reforms — the kind of reforms the American people understand and support," Michael Steel, a Boehner spokesman, said in an email.

"Becky Tallent, a well-known expert in this field of public policy, is a great addition to our team and that effort."

Prior to joining the BPC, Tallent was the point person on Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) staff, often leading his various pushes for immigration. From the 108th to 110th Congresses, Tallent helped draft four major immigration-related bills while working for both McCain and Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) . She was also a policy adviser on McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

Her move back to the Hill drew differing reactions from both sides of the immigration debate.  Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the  Center for Immigration Studies, said on Twitter that Boehner is "ready for amnesty."

Boehner also got praise from unlikely sources — like Marshall Fitz, the director of immigration policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

"Hiring Becky is an important signal that the Speaker is serious about achieving a legislative result," Fitz told Business Insider in an email.

"He could have hired someone junior to simply manage the issue portfolio; that would have signaled that he was going in to a defensive crouch on the issue, just trying to run out the clock. But instead he hired someone senior with deep experience on the issue and a proven track record of effectively working across the aisle. In other words, he hired someone who knows how to get to yes."

Boehner and other members of House GOP leadership have long signaled that they believe something needs to be done to reform the nation's immigration system. But contra the comprehensive bipartisan Senate bill, they prefer to do so through a piecemeal method. Recently, President Barack Obama said he was open to that idea.

"If they want to chop that thing up into five pieces, as long as all five pieces get done, I don't care what it looks like," Obama said during an interview at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council.

Not everyone is convinced that Tallent's hiring means that a solution on immigration reform is imminent, however.

A spokeswoman for the  Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a group that supports the Senate-passed bill, told Business Insider that the group has brought more than 40 children to Washington this week to lobby for immigration reform. 

"The Speaker can call a vote at any time and immigration reform would pass," said Kica Matos, a spokeswoman for FIRM.

"The entire year has passed and he has completely failed all relevant tests of leadership on this issue. We want an end to family separations and the only move we want to see from the Speaker is a vote on a pathway to citizenship that would achieve an end to such suffering.”

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Lindsey Graham, R-SC, and John Barrasso R-Wyo., say they support lasting peace process, but not one that puts Israel at disadvantage - @NBCNews

(http://www.freesmfhosting.com/gallery/endtimesandcurrentevents/1_20_08_12_7_47_52.gif)

Yeah, I know both "political" parties are controlled-opposition, but nonetheless you can't deny both McCain and Graham have been the 2 biggest traitors to conservatives in Congress. McCain helped get Obama elected in 2008(and Churchianity just stood down and blindly supported McCain like he was some conservative born again Christian). Graham has been pushing Amnesty for a long, long time.

Ultimately, enemies come from WITHIN.

Photo: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - via @SenJohnMcCain

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BdEPyGLIEAAop9F.jpg:large)

Sen. John McCain was overheard saying "With friends like me, you dont need Palastinians."

With "friends" like me? ::)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10588308/US-secretly-backs-rebels-to-fight-al-Qaeda-in-Syria.html
US secretly backs rebels to fight al Qaeda in Syria

Sources tell Telegraph that America is backing 'friendly' rebels with millions in cash and non lethal aid to take on extremists in Syria
1/21/14

The United States and Gulf countries have been secretly backing efforts by opposition rebels to destroy al-Qaeda's most extreme wing in Syria, diplomats and rebels involved in the plan have told The Telegraph.

As Western leaders publicly push the Syrian regime and the opposition to the Geneva II peace conference that begins Wednesday Washington has also been quietly supporting moves by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to give weapons and cash to rebel groups to fight al-Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) in Syria.

One source said the US was itself handing out millions of dollars to rebel groups best equipped to take on the extremists while another confirmed America was providing non-lethal aid.

The development marks a new phase in the conflict, with international backers working directly with rebel commanders to target al-Qaeda cells, who are seen as a major threat by Western intelligence agencies.

"Everyone is offering us funding to fight them," said one commander in a rebel group affiliated to the Western-backed Supreme Military Council. "We used to have no weapons with which to fight the regime, but now the stocks are full."

more

Not very secret if you ask me! I think natives down in the Amazon knew about it. ::)

Arizona GOP Censures Sen. John McCain for Supporting Issues ‘Associated With Liberal Democrats’

The Arizona Republican Party formally censured Sen. John McCain on Saturday, citing a voting record they say is insufficiently conservative.

The resolution to censure McCain was approved by a voice-vote during a meeting of state committee members in Tempe, state party spokesman Tim Sifert said. It needed signatures from at least 20 percent of state committee members to reach the floor for debate.

Sifert said no further action was expected.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers declined to comment on the censure.

McCain isn’t up for re-election until 2016, when will turn 80. He announced in October that he was considering running for a sixth term.

According to the resolution, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee has campaigned as a conservative but has lent his support to issues “associated with liberal Democrats,” such as immigration reform and to funding the law sometimes known as Obamacare.

Several Republican county committees recently censured McCain.

Timothy Schwartz, the Legislative District 30 Republican chairman who helped write the resolution, said the censure showed that McCain was losing support from his own party.

“We would gladly embrace Sen. McCain if he stood behind us and represented us,” Schwartz said.

Fred DuVal, a Democrat who plans to run for Arizona governor, called the censure an “outrageous response to the good work Sen. McCain did crafting a reasonable solution to fix our broken immigration system.”

McCain has been dogged by conservatives objecting to his views on immigration and campaign finance, among other issues, since he first ran for Congress in 1982. Republican activists were also turned off by his moderate stances in the 2000 presidential race.

McCain was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982 and won his Senate seat in 1986.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/25/arizona-gop-censures-sen-john-mccain-for-supporting-issues-associated-with-liberal-democrats/

And his FAKE conservative stance when running for Prez in 2008 - he all but helped Obama get elected that year. And even worse, Churchianity gave their blind support to McCain like he was some conservative, born-again bible believing Reaganesque patriot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llef8ZRTWQo

What Do You Suppose John McCain and George Soros Talked About Between Handshakes and Smiles?

There’s no telling what words were exchanged between U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and liberal financier George Soros at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

But you can have a look at some photos of Thursday’s tete-a-tete:

What’s the connection between McCain and Soros?

According to The Huffington Post, in an article published during McCain’s 2008 presidential run, Soros funded the McCain’s Reform Institute, a nonpartisan 501c3 organization focused on promoting accountability and transparency in government, while the senator was still with the organization.

The Huffington Post article also referenced two Talking Points Memo reports: One indicated that Soros gave the Reform Institute $150,000; another said Soros’ Open Society Institute in 2002 gave $300,000 in grants to groups defending McCain’s campaign finance law against legal challenges to it.

Interestingly the Huffington Post article initially focuses on McCain’s campaign “aggressively” hitting back at news that Soros was taking part in a $40 million third-party effort to battle Republicans in the fall leading up to the elections.

pics: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/26/what-do-you-suppose-john-mccain-and-george-soros-talked-about-between-handshakes-and-smiles/

It's a 501c3, meaning the IRS/Caesar is its head - this says it all.

See, that's the thing. If you want to live and play in the world, you are required to play by their rules. They like to say, "When in Rome...", so that's how they think, and what they expect of people in that world. Your resume' must have the right things on it, or your not even considered. Part of that financial statement is your charitable giving. And also the IRS and election laws require politicians to report things and not do certain things in relation to any money in relation to their political career, so they end up all doing certain things, like running a "PAC", or something "non-profit". It's a place, in part, to park the profits without showing profit, whiling using that "non-profit" to spread doctrine under other names that don't appear connected at first. It becomes a hide and seek to determine who really is behind a given "non-profit" or "think tank" 501c3.

Syrian extremistsMccain;s buddies amputated a man’s hand and live-tweeted it

The extremist Syrian group deemed too radical even for al-Qaeda performed what may have been a Twitter first Friday: live-tweeting the amputation of a hand.

The amputation took place in the remote rural town of Maskanah in the northern province of Aleppo, according to a series of tweets posted by the account of a supporter of the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

The first showed a photograph of a blindfolded man having his arm positioned on a table by fighters as a masked man wielding a sword waits nearby. Another man, wearing a white robe of the kind favored in Arab Gulf countries, is reading a statement. A caption states that the blindfolded man is a thief who had asked to have his hand cut off "in order to cleanse his sins."

A second photograph was taken just as the sword is about to strike the hand while a burly fighter restrains the victim.

A third picture posted an hour later is too graphic to show here. The man appears to be passed out, with his bloodied arm and his severed hand resting on the table. Fresh slashes in the wood suggest it took four swipes of the sword to cut the hand off.

ISIS evolved from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq, which U.S. forces battled to contain before they withdrew in 2011. The group's attempts to impose strict interpretations of Islamic law on the parts of rebel-held northern Syria under its control have earned it many enemies.

Mainstream Free Syrian Army fighters declared war on the group in January and ejected its fighters from several locations. Earlier this month, al-Qaeda's central command issued a statement dissociating the organization from ISIS, suggesting its methods were too harsh even for al-Qaeda to stomach. On Tuesday, al-Qaeda's official Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, gave ISIS an ultimatum threatening war unless ISIS submits to arbitration of its disputes with other rebels.

Under pressure, ISIS on Friday pulled out from the northern town of Azaz. A video posted on YouTube showed scenes of celebration among residents.

pics vids: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/28/syrian-extremists-amputated-a-mans-hand-and-live-tweeted-it/

John McCain Is Going To Ukraine
3/12/14
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-12/john-mccain-going-ukraine

Three weeks ago, John Kerry came, saw, and launched a blitz-diplomatic campaign which promptly resulted in, well, Russia annexing Crimea.

Now it is the turn of that other foreign policy titan, neo-con John McCain, to complete Kerry's job and finally launch the GDP-boosting World War III. He may have the chance to do that as soon as Thursday, when he, along with other senators, is slated to travel to Ukraine to "show support for the government there." Or, said otherwise, to show support for the government that is in power thanks to an illegitimate and deadly coup that took place just over two weeks ago, despite the formal signing of a memorandum, endorsed by all Western powers, that stipulated a peaceful transition as well as presidential elections in the coming months. When presented like that, one almost thinks back to the roaring success that was the US endorsement of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood regime (where the US too had zero involvement, repeat zero involvement) that also took over following a violent coup. As well as the largely predictable countercoup that overthrew said regime.

The Hill explains:

The meeting comes ahead of a planned referendum in Crimea on Sunday to secede from Ukraine and join Russia — something the U.S. has said would violate the country’s constitution.

McCain's office said the group would be meeting with members of the interim government and other stakeholders Thursday through Sunday.

The delegation will be made up of a group of eight senators from both parties. Aside from McCain, those traveling to Ukraine are Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

McCain and Murphy also visited the country in December as protests flared in Ukraine. In February, President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country and Russian troops invaded the Crimea peninsula.

Curious for more? Don't be. Not even McCain's office knows much:

McCain’s office said it did not have specifics on the agenda when asked which parts of the country the delegation would be visiting.

It is of course possible the McCain simply doesn't know where Ukraine is to begin with, but all that does matter is to show support for the US military industrial complex, and to show solidarity with US allies in Europe who after last year's botched attempt to get Qatar nat gas, will get some resource self reliance damn it, even if it means killing millions of innocent Ukrainians on both sides of the soon to be east-west split border.

And just in case McCain isn't senile enough to provoke the start of another world war, moments ago the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did its best to further antagonize Russia when it approved legislation granting aid to Ukraine and authorizing sanctions on Russia in a 14-3 vote. Four Republicans voted for the bill despite International Monetary Reform provisions opposed by some conservatives. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the panel's ranking member, and Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) joined the panel's Democrats in backing the bill.  “I believe we are at a defining moment right now,” said Corker, who negotiated the final draft. “Our friends and allies in the region are watching.”

Sadly, like everything else in Congress, this vote too was just for show, especially since it would involve actual work to enact it into law:

It will be difficult, however, for Congress to complete its work on the bill before lawmakers leave for a recess on Friday.

Legislation passed by the House does not include the IMF provisions, and the pace of action in the Senate will be slowed if conservatives, as expected, refuse to agree to move the bill forward by unanimous consent.

That means there would be no action by Congress on aid to Ukraine before Sunday, when a referendum in Crimea will be held on whether that region should divorce Ukraine for Russia.

By then Crimea will be officially a part of Russia, at which point our best wishes to Congress in legislating away just how Putin should promptly hand over the keys to what he quickly annexed without making more than a couple public statements and in the process once again made the US foreign policy wizards look like the proverbial pigeon playing chess.

Somebody get that man a one way ticket!

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/204238-mccain-says-illegal-immigrants-are-not-going-home
4/23/14
McCain: Illegal immigrants are 'not going home'

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday that immigrants living in the United States illegally are not going home, and that the U.S. has no practical way of forcing them to leave.

"They're not going home. And so why don't we give them a path to citizenship," McCain asked at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy Jr. forum.

"There are not enough buses to deport them," he added. "It's de facto amnesty."

The senator, who has pushed for immigration reform, said once Congress passes legislation he believes it will be named after the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Kennedy and McCain had worked on a comprehensive bill in 2005 that eventually made it into a 2007 measure that failed to make it to a Senate vote.

McCain was a member of the "Gang of Eight," a group of senators that helped push an immigration reform bill through the Senate last year. House GOP leaders have refused to take up that version.

The senator emphasized the bill does not provide automatic amnesty.

"It's really tough," he said, adding it would take years for people's status to change. "If you keep these people in the shadows, it is a stain on America’s honor."

McCain also repeated his previous prediction that "the Republican Party will never win another nationwide election unless we enact comprehensive immigration reform."

http://news.yahoo.com/mccain-urges-boots-ground-combat-190527393.html
1/19/15
McCain urges 'boots on the ground' to combat IS

Jerusalem (AFP) - US Senator John McCain on Monday urged the deployment of international ground forces to combat jihadists in Syria and Iraq, as he toured the Middle East with a Senate delegation.

"For months we've been bombing (Syrian border town) Kobane and we still haven't driven ISIS out," the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman told reporters in Jerusalem, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.

"Since the air campaign started... ISIS has increased their size and areas of control.

"The reality is, we need more boots on the ground... we need intelligence, we need special forces, and we can't treat Iraq and Syria as different battlegrounds because it's the same enemy," McCain said.

"We are going to have to have an aircraft exclusionary zone which provides a buffer in order for us to not only train and equip (rebels), but to take care of refugees," he added.

IS began its offensive on Kobane in mid-September and came close to overrunning the town. But Kurdish fighters, backed by a steady campaign of US-led air strikes, have gradually recaptured territory.

McCain was heading a delegation of US senators on a trip to the region that included visits to Israel, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The US military is to send more than 400 troops to train Syrian rebel forces as part of a long-planned effort to build up a moderate opposition to take on IS.

The training will take place in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar and is expected to start in the "early spring," the Pentagon says.

But President Barack Obama, wary of having the US drawn into the multi-sided civil war in Syria, has been accused by some rebel groups, lawmakers and allies of moving too slowly to help the Syrian opposition.

US troops have already started training Iraqi government and Kurdish forces in the fight against the IS jihadists, with about 2,100 Americans deployed to Iraq.

Bet if you completely carpet bomb the town into nothing, you would drive them out then... just saying.

I would really hate to be a friend of McCain, one minute your his best buddy, the next he wants to kill you. 

88 Percent Agree With Trump! John McCain Betrayed His Supporters, Our Veterans And The Country - BONUS: Trumps Rips Hillary!

By Susan Duclos - All News PipeLine

In an unofficial poll conducted by USA Today on an op-ed article written by Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, 88 percent of respondents agree with him on his assertions about AZ Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain with 73 percent stongly agreeing. (Votes are still coming in, but the screen shot below is from 8:30 am on July 20, 2015)

Once again the politically incorrect Donald Trump is being attacked from all sides for comments he made about John McCain, despite the fact that he is technically correct in his assertions.

The key phrase that the mainstream media grabbed on to and blared in headlines was "He's not a war hero. I like people that weren’t captured. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured."

Sharyl Attkisson does a little fact checking on those blared headlines and finds them to be intellectually dishonest, marking four points, as follows:

Discussion

1. The Post did not provide context at the outset disclosing that McCain and Trump have been feuding, with McCain characterizing some Trump supporters as “crazies” and Trump stating that McCain graduated last in his class in Annapolis. The charged rhetoric continued at the conservative Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa this weekend.

2. When a panelist characterized McCain as a “war hero,” the Post is accurate in reporting that Trump initially said McCain is “not a war hero.” But then, Trump immediately modified his statement saying– four times– that McCain is a war hero:

“He is a war hero.”

“He’s a war hero because he was captured.”

“He’s a war hero, because he was captured.”

“I believe, perhaps, he’s a war hero. But right now, he’s said some very bad things about a lot of people.”

3. Did Trump say McCain is not a war hero because he was captured? No, not in the exchanges represented in the Post.

4. Is the Post’s characterization an accident? It would appear not, because it is repeated in the Post’s caption of the video clip, which also states: “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam war veteran, was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese [emphasis added].”

Further, in the Post’s second sentence, Trump is quoted as stating of McCain, “He’s not a war hero…He’s a war hero because he was captured,” but the article selectively left out the phrase Trump had uttered in between: “He is a war hero.”
Donald Trump is being attacked from all sides, the political establishment from both sides of the aisle and conservative news outlets, because "how DARE he criticize veteran," yet looking at the points Trump makes in his USA Today op-ed, once again, he is correct in his assertions.

Thanks to McCain and his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders, their legislation to cover up the VA scandal, in which 1,000+ veterans died waiting for medical care, made sure no one has been punished, charged, jailed, fined or held responsible. McCain has abandoned our veterans. I will fight for them.

The reality is that John McCain the politician has made America less safe, sent our brave soldiers into wrong-headed foreign adventures, covered up for President Obama with the VA scandal and has spent most of his time in the Senate pushing amnesty. He would rather protect the Iraqi border than Arizona’s. He even voted for the Iran Nuclear Review Act of 2015, which allows Obama, who McCain lost to in a record defeat, to push his dangerous Iran nuclear agreement through the Senate without a supermajority of votes.

While the "establishment" is trying to portray Trump as anti-veteran, the organization Veterans For a Strong America has publicly come out in support of Trumo, issuing the following statement:

“Donald Trump was recently extremely well received in Arizona while discussing national security and border security. Senator John McCain’s reaction to Mr. Trump’s success in Arizona is instructive in that it belies a concern the Senator clearly has about how his stance on issues like immigration are perceived by his constituents.

The feuding between Mr. Trump and Senator McCain has nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s high regard for the military or veterans as a whole.  Mr. Trump is supporter of the U.S. military and of America’s veterans.  It is well known that when Mr. Trump is attacked by a detractor, he swings back.  As veterans, we do not hide behind military service to deflect criticism, and when Senator McCain attacked, Mr. Trump hit back.

We are glad that Mr. Trump has clarified his remarks to acknowledge that Senator McCain is a war hero.  But, Senator McCain is also a politician and what Donald Trump has tapped into is that people just don’t trust politicians and the slow pace the Congress is moving in addressing critical issues like border security, veteran’s issues and military funding.  Donald Trump has a history of calling out people and groups that don’t deliver results.  There are clearly problems that are being identified by Donald Trump, that are not being adequately addressed by the political leadership in Congress and the Administration today.

Phraseology aside, what the American people are really concerned about is how 250,000 veterans – who are also heroes – were put onto a VA death list, why 40,000 active troops are going to receive pink slips over the next four years and why border security is not addressed even as our porous border results in more financial strain on our country and southern border states’ budgets.”
The fact is career politicians who are always more worried about being politically correct rather than telling the truth, hate Trump because he has absolutely no desire to be politically correct. Another important fact is that Trump is tapping into a segment of the population that is sick and tired of sacrificing America to political correctness.

I saw a graphic which pretty much sums up why everyone in the establishment, including the media, is doing everything in their power to act like Donald Trump is not a serious contender for president, despite the fact that he is leading in national polls against the other GOP candidates.

The below image says it all:

rest: http://allnewspipeline.com/Trump_McCain_88_Percent_Agree.php

McCain and the POW cover-up
The 'war hero' candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam

Sydney H. Schanberg won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for international reporting “at great risk” from Vietnam and Cambodia. After the war he served as city editor of the New York Times. The Academy Award-winning film “The Killing Fields” was based on his book “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” Schanberg was a journalist for 50 years.

This is an expanded version of a story that appeared in the Oct. 6, 2008, issue of The Nation. Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

By Sydney H. Schanberg

The Nation – John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain’s role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain’s military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn’t talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington – and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number – the documents indicate probably hundreds – of the U.S. prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

Mass of Evidence

The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What’s more, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of “debunking” POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.

The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.

One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon’s performance was an insider, Air Force Lieut. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon’s position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general’s briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war’s end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a February 2, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi’s premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political conditions.” But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party “in accordance with its own constitutional provisions.” That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored – and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners – just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.

In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi’s desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men – those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture – were eventually executed.

My own research, detailed below, has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few – if any – are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters was conducted “off the record,” but because the evidence from my own reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)

For many reasons, including the absence of a political constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans’ groups, very few Americans are aware of the POW story and of McCain’s role in keeping it out of public view and denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in his campaign to hide the scandal.

The Arizona senator, now the Republican candidate for president, has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon’s and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and national security advisor, not to mention Dick Cheney, who was George H. W. Bush’s defense secretary. Their biggest accomplice has been an indolent press, particularly in Washington.

Read WND’s related story, “POW case haunts McCain’s image as war hero”

McCain’s Role

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge – only records that revealed no POW secrets – it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, when the Pentagon cited McCain’s bill in rejecting a FOIA request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios and justifications for not releasing any information at all – even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying: “Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.” A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.

About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said: “This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington.” He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, “would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks.”

McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.

McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence – documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs’ sworn testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned – has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the “bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists.” He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as “hoaxers,” charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists” and “dime-store Rambos.”

Some of McCain’s fellow captives at Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi didn’t share his views about prisoners left behind. Before he died of leukemia in 1999, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter – a response to McCain’s stream of insults hurled at MIA activists. Guy wrote: “John, does this [the insults] include Senator Bob Smith [a New Hampshire Republican and activist on POW issues] and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were ‘last known alive’? Does this include some of your fellow POWs?”

It’s not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his post-war behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo – to try to break down other prisoners – and was broadcast over Hanoi’s state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain. (See the Pentagon’s rejection of my attempt to obtain records of this debriefing.)

All humans have breaking points. Many men undergoing torture give confessions, often telling huge lies so their fakery will be understood by their comrades and their country. Few will fault them. But it was McCain who apparently felt he had disgraced himself and his military family. His father, John S. McCain II, was a highly regarded rear admiral then serving as commander of all US forces in the Pacific. His grandfather was also a rear admiral.

In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda value. Other prisoners at Hoa Lo say his captors considered him a prize catch and called him the “Crown Prince,” something McCain acknowledges in the book.

Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. “I felt faithless and couldn’t control my despair,” he writes, revealing that he made two “feeble” attempts at suicide. (In later years, he said he tried to hang himself with his shirt and guards intervened.) Tellingly, he says he lived in “dread” that his father would find out about the confession. “I still wince,” he writes, “when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace.”

He says that when he returned home, he told his father about the confession, but “never discussed it at length” – and the admiral, who died in 1981, didn’t indicate he had heard anything about it before. But he had. In the 1999 memoir, the senator writes: “I only recently learned that the tape … had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father.”

Is McCain haunted by these memories? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing would rekindle his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions.

Many stories have been written about McCain’s explosive temper, so volcanic that colleagues are loathe to speak openly about it. One veteran congressman who has observed him over the years asked for confidentiality and made this brief comment: “This is a man not at peace with himself.”

He was certainly far from calm on the Senate POW committee. He browbeat expert witnesses who came with information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced McCain and pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to tears. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: How dare you question my patriotism? In 1996, he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.

But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of McCain’s mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: If American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that’s something the American public ought to know about.

10 Key Pieces of Evidence That Men Were Left Behind

1. In Paris, where the Vietnam peace treaty was negotiated, the United States asked Hanoi for the list of American prisoners to be returned, fearing that Hanoi would hold some prisoners back. The North Vietnamese refused, saying they would produce the list only after the treaty was signed. Nixon agreed with Kissinger that they had no leverage left, and Kissinger signed the accord on January 27, 1973, without the prisoner list. When Hanoi produced its list of 591 prisoners the next day, U.S. intelligence agencies expressed shock at the low number. Their number was hundreds higher. The New York Times published a long, page-one story on February 2, 1973, about the discrepancy, especially raising questions about the number of prisoners held in Laos, only nine of whom were being returned. The headline read, in part: “Laos POW List Shows 9 from U.S. – Document Disappointing to Washington as 311 Were Believed Missing.” And the story, by John Finney, said that other Washington officials “believe the number of prisoners [in Laos] is probably substantially higher.” The paper never followed up with any serious investigative reporting – nor did any other mainstream news organization.

2. Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, both speaking at a public session and under oath, said they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data – letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: “I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion … some were left behind.” This ran counter to what President Nixon told the public in a nationally televised speech on March 29, 1973, when the repatriation of the 591 was in motion: “Tonight,” Nixon said, “the day we have all worked and prayed for has finally come. For the first time in twelve years, no American military forces are in Vietnam. All our American POWs are on their way home.” Documents unearthed since then show that aides had already briefed Nixon about the contrary evidence.

Schlesinger was asked by the Senate committee for his explanation of why President Nixon would have made such a statement when he knew Hanoi was still holding prisoners. He replied: “One must assume that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United States … was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out and we were not going to roil the waters …” This testimony struck me as a bombshell. The New York Times appropriately reported it on page one but again there was no sustained follow-up by the Times or any other major paper or national news outlet.

3. Over the years, the DIA received more than 1,600 first-hand sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 second-hand reports. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed “credible” in the agents’ reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports, which are impressive in their detail. A lot of the sightings described a secondary tier of prison camps many miles from Hanoi. Yet the DIA, after reviewing all these reports, concluded that they “do not constitute evidence” that men were alive.

4. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, listening stations picked up messages in which Laotian military personnel spoke about moving American prisoners from one labor camp to another. These listening posts were manned by Thai communications officers trained by the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors signals worldwide. The NSA teams had moved out after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and passed the job to the Thai allies. But when the Thais turned these messages over to Washington, the intelligence community ruled that since the intercepts were made by a “third party” – namely Thailand – they could not be regarded as authentic. That’s some Catch-22: The U.S. trained a third party to take over its role in monitoring signals about POWs, but because that third party did the monitoring, the messages weren’t valid.

Here, from CIA files, is an example that clearly exposes the farce. On December 27, 1980, a Thai military signal team picked up a message saying that prisoners were being moved out of Attopeu (in southern Laos) by aircraft “at 1230 hours.” Three days later a message was sent from the CIA station in Bangkok to the CIA director’s office in Langley. It read, in part: “The prisoners … are now in the valley in permanent location (a prison camp at Nhommarath in Central Laos). They were transferred from Attopeu to work in various places … POWs were formerly kept in caves and are very thin, dark and starving.” Apparently the prisoners were real. But the transmission was declared “invalid” by Washington because the information came from a “third party” and thus could not be deemed credible.

5. A series of what appeared to be distress signals from Vietnam and Laos were captured by the government’s satellite system in the late 1980s and early ’90s. (Before that period, no search for such signals had been put in place.) Not a single one of these markings was ever deemed credible. To the layman’s eye, the satellite photos, some of which I’ve seen, show markings on the ground that are identical to the signals that American pilots had been specifically trained to use in their survival courses – such as certain letters, like X or K, drawn in a special way. Other markings were the secret four-digit authenticator numbers given to individual pilots. But time and again, the Pentagon, backed by the CIA, insisted that humans had not made these markings. What were they, then? “Shadows and vegetation,” the government said, insisting that the markings were merely normal topographical contours like saw-grass or rice-paddy divider walls. It was the automatic response – shadows and vegetation. On one occasion, a Pentagon photo expert refused to go along. It was a missing man’s name gouged into a field, he said, not trampled grass or paddy berms. His bosses responded by bringing in an outside contractor who found instead, yes, shadows and vegetation. This refrain led Bob Taylor, a highly regarded investigator on the Senate committee staff who had examined the photographic evidence, to comment to me: “If grass can spell out people’s names and a secret digit codes, then I have a newfound respect for grass.”

6. On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, the sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee’s public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.

The devices were motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. Shaped on one end like a spike with an electronic pod and antenna on top, they were designed to stick in the ground as they fell. Air Force planes would drop them along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other supply routes. The devices, though primarily sensors, also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground – a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang – could manually enter data into the sensor. All data were regularly collected electronically by U.S. planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge or contradiction by the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors – as U.S. pilots had been trained to do – “no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POWs who were lost in Laos.” Alfond added, according to the transcript: “This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.”

McCain attended that committee hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel’s work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of “denigrating” his “patriotism.” The bullying had its effect – she began to cry.

After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned away and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don’t know anything about those twenty POWs.

7. As previously mentioned, in April 1993, in a Moscow archive, a researcher from Harvard, Stephen Morris, unearthed and made public the transcript of a briefing that General Tran Van Quang gave to the Hanoi politburo four months before the signing of the Paris peace accords in 1973.

In the transcript, General Quang told the Hanoi politburo that 1,205 U.S. prisoners were being held. Quang said that many of the prisoners would be held back from Washington after the accords as bargaining chips for war reparations. General Quang’s report added: “This is a big number. Officially, until now, we published a list of only 368 prisoners of war. The rest we have not revealed. The government of the USA knows this well, but it does not know the exact number … and can only make guesses based on its losses. That is why we are keeping the number of prisoners of war secret, in accordance with the politburo’s instructions.” The report then went on to explain in clear and specific language that a large number would be kept back to ensure reparations.

The reaction to the document was immediate. After two decades of denying it had kept any prisoners, Hanoi responded to the revelation by calling the transcript a fabrication.

Similarly, Washington – which had over the same two decades refused to recant Nixon’s declaration that all the prisoners had been returned – also shifted into denial mode. The Pentagon issued a statement saying the document “is replete with errors, omissions and propaganda that seriously damage its credibility,” and that the numbers were “inconsistent with our own accounting.”

Neither American nor Vietnamese officials offered any rationale for who would plant a forged document in the Soviet archives and why they would do so. Certainly neither Washington nor Moscow – closely allied with Hanoi – would have any motive, since the contents were embarrassing to all parties, and since both the United States and Vietnam had consistently denied the existence of unreturned prisoners. The Russian archivists simply said the document was “authentic.”

8. In his 2002 book, Inside Delta Force, Retired Command Sgt. Major Eric Haney described how in 1981 his special forces unit, after rigorous training for a POW rescue mission, had the mission suddenly aborted, revived a year later and again abruptly aborted. Haney writes that this abandonment of captured soldiers ate at him for years and left him disillusioned about his government’s vows to leave no men behind.

“Years later, I spoke at length with a former highly placed member of the North Vietnamese diplomatic corps, and this person asked me point-blank: ‘Why did the Americans never attempt to recover their remaining POWs after the conclusion of the war?’” Haney writes. He continued, saying that he came to believe senior government officials had called off those missions in 1981 and 1982. (His account is on pages 314 to 321 of my paperback copy of the book.)

9. There is also evidence that in the first months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1981, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi in Indochina. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice-President Bush, CIA director William Casey and National Security Advisor Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992.

Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion relating to the ransom offer and reported on it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that “it would be worth the president’s going along and let’s have the negotiation.” When his testimony appeared in the Union Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story and claiming his memory had played tricks on him. His new version was that some POW activists had asked him about such an offer in a meeting that took place in 1986, when he was no longer in government. “It appears,” he said in the letter, “that there never was a 1981 meeting about the return of POW/MIAs for $4 billion.”

But the episode didn’t end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981, when the offer was discussed by Reagan, Bush, Casey, Allen and other cabinet officials.

Syphrit, a veteran of the Vietnam War, told the committee he was willing to testify but they would have to subpoena him. Treasury opposed his appearance, arguing that voluntary testimony would violate the trust between the Secret Service and those it protects. It was clear that coming in on his own could cost Syphrit his career. The committee voted 7 to 4 not to subpoena him.

In the committee’s final report, dated January 13, 1993 (on page 284), the panel not only chastised Syphrit for his failure to testify without a subpoena (“The committee regrets that the Secret Service agent was unwilling …”), but noted that since Allen had recanted his testimony about the Roosevelt Room briefing, Syphrit’s testimony would have been “at best, uncorroborated by the testimony of any other witness.” The committee omitted any mention that it had made a decision not to ask the other two surviving witnesses, Bush and Reagan, to give testimony under oath. (Casey had died.)

10. In 1990, Colonel Millard Peck, a decorated infantry veteran of Vietnam then working at the DIA as chief of the Asia Division for Current Intelligence, asked for the job of chief of the DIA’s Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. His reason for seeking the transfer, which was not a promotion, was that he had heard from officials throughout the Pentagon that the POW/MIA office had been turned into a waste-disposal unit for getting rid of unwanted evidence about live prisoners – a “black hole,” these officials called it.

Peck explained all this in his telling resignation letter of February 12, 1991, eight months after he had taken the job. He said he viewed it as “sort of a holy crusade” to restore the integrity of the office but was defeated by the Pentagon machine. The four-page, single-spaced letter was scathing, describing the putative search for missing men as “a cover-up.”

Peck charged that, at its top echelons, the Pentagon had embraced a “mind-set to debunk” all evidence of prisoners left behind. “That national leaders continue to address the prisoner of war and missing in action issue as the ‘highest national priority,’ is a travesty,” he wrote. “The entire charade does not appear to be an honest effort, and may never have been. … Practically all analysis is directed to finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective, active follow through on any of the sightings, nor is there a responsive ‘action arm’ to routinely and aggressively pursue leads.”

“I became painfully aware,” his letter continued, “that I was not really in charge of my own office, but was merely a figurehead or whipping boy for a larger and totally Machiavellian group of players outside of DIA. … I feel strongly that this issue is being manipulated and controlled at a higher level, not with the goal of resolving it, but more to obfuscate the question of live prisoners and give the illusion of progress through hyperactivity.” He named no names but said these players are “unscrupulous people in the Government or associated with the Government” who “have maintained their distance and remained hidden in the shadows, while using the [POW] Office as a ‘toxic waste dump’ to bury the whole ‘mess’ out of sight.” Peck added that “military officers … who in some manner have ‘rocked the boat’ [have] quickly come to grief.”

Peck concluded: “From what I have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was, in fact, abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with ‘smoke and mirrors’ to stall the issue until it dies a natural death.”

The disillusioned colonel not only resigned but asked to be retired immediately from active military service. The press never followed up.

My Pursuit of the Story

I covered the war in Cambodia and Vietnam, but came to the POW information only slowly afterward, when military officers I knew from that conflict began coming to me with maps and POW sightings and depositions by Vietnamese witnesses.

I was then city editor of the New York Times, no longer involved in foreign or national stories, so I took the data to the appropriate desks and suggested it was material worth pursuing. There were no takers. Some years later, in 1991, when I was an op-ed columnist at Newsday, the aforementioned special Senate committee was formed to probe the POW issue. I saw this as an opening and immersed myself in the reporting.

At Newsday, I wrote thirty-five columns over a two-year period, as well as a four-part series on a trip I took to North Vietnam to report on what happened to one missing pilot who was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh trail and captured when he parachuted down. After Newsday, I wrote thousands more words on the subject for other outlets. Some of the pieces were about McCain’s key role.

Though I wrote on many subjects for Life, Vanity Fair and Washington Monthly, my POW articles appeared in Penthouse, the Village Voice and APBnews.com. Mainstream publications just weren’t interested. Their disinterest was part of what motivated me, and I became one of a very short list of journalists who considered the story important.

Serving in the army in Germany during the Cold War and witnessing combat first-hand as a reporter in India and Indochina led me to have great respect for those who fight for their country. To my mind, we dishonored U.S. troops when our government failed to bring them home from Vietnam after the 591 others were released – and then claimed they didn’t exist. And politicians dishonor themselves when they pay lip service to the bravery and sacrifice of soldiers only to leave untold numbers behind, rationalizing to themselves that it’s merely one of the unfortunate costs of war.

John McCain – now campaigning for the White House as a war hero, maverick and straight shooter – owes the voters some explanations. The press were long ago wooed and won by McCain’s seeming openness, Lone Ranger pose and self-deprecating humor, which may partly explain their ignoring his record on POWs. In the numerous, lengthy McCain profiles that have appeared of late in papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, I may have missed a clause or a sentence along the way, but I have not found a single mention of his role in burying information about POWs. Television and radio news programs have been similarly silent.

Reporters simply never ask him about it. They didn’t when he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination in 2000. They haven’t now, despite the fact that we’re in the midst of another war – a war he supports and one that has echoes of Vietnam.

The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW files is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW families I’ve met over the years, only a few have said they want the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.

Isn’t it possible that what really worries those intent on keeping the POW documents buried is the public disgust that the contents of those files would generate?

How the Senate Committee Perpetuated the Debunking

In its early months, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs gave the appearance of being committed to finding out the truth about the MIAs. As time went on, however, it became clear that they were cooperating in every way with the Pentagon and CIA, who often seemed to be calling the shots, even setting the agendas for certain key hearings. Both agencies held back the most important POW files. Dick Cheney was the Pentagon chief then; Robert Gates, now the Pentagon chief, was the CIA director.

Further, the committee failed to question any living president. Reagan declined to answer questions; the committee didn’t contest his refusal. Nixon was given a pass. George H.W. Bush, the sitting president, whose prints were all over this issue from his days as CIA chief in the 1970s, was never even approached.

Troubled by these signs, several committee staffers began asking why the agencies they should be probing had been turned into committee partners and decision makers. Memos to that effect were circulated. The staff made the following finding, using intelligence reports marked “credible” that covered POW sightings through 1989: “There can be no doubt that POWs were alive … as late as 1989.” That finding was never released. Eventually, much of the staff was in rebellion.

This internecine struggle (see coverage, at left) continued right up to the committee’s last official act – the issuance of its final report. The “Executive Summary,” which comprised the first forty-three pages – was essentially a whitewash, saying that only “a small number” of POWs could have been left behind in 1973 and that there was little likelihood that any prisoners could still be alive. The Washington press corps, judging from its coverage, seems to have read only this air-brushed summary, which had been closely controlled.

But the rest of the 1,221-page Report on POW/MIAs was quite different. Sprinkled throughout are pieces of hard evidence that directly contradict the summary’s conclusions. This documentation established that a significant number of prisoners were left behind – and that top government officials knew this from the start. These candid findings were inserted by committee staffers who had unearthed the evidence and were determined not to allow the truth to be sugar-coated.

If the Washington press corps did actually read the body of the report and then failed to report its contents, that would be a scandal of its own. The press would then have knowingly ignored the steady stream of findings in the body of the report that refuted the summary and indicated that the number of abandoned men was not small but considerable. The report gave no figures but estimates from various branches of the intelligence community ranged up to 600. The lowest estimate was 150.

Highlights of the report that undermine the benign conclusions of the Executive Summary:

* Pages 207-209: These three pages contain revelations of what appear to be either massive intelligence failures, or bad intentions – or both. The report says that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the specific distress signals US personnel were trained to use in the Vietnam war, nor had they ever been tasked to look for any such signals at all from possible prisoners on the ground.

The committee decided, however, not to seek a review of old photography, saying it “would cause the expenditure of large amounts of manpower and money with no expectation of success.”

It might also have turned up lots of distress-signal numbers that nobody in the government was looking for from 1973 to 1991, when the committee opened shop. That would have made it impossible for the committee to write the Executive Summary it seemed determined to write.

The failure gets worse. The committee also discovered that the DIA, which kept the lists of authenticator numbers for pilots and other personnel, could not “locate” the lists of these codes for Army, Navy or Marine pilots. They had lost or destroyed the records. The Air Force list was the only one intact, as it had been preserved by a different intelligence branch.

The report concluded: “In theory, therefore, if a POW still living in captivity [today], were to attempt to communicate by ground signal, smuggling out a note or by whatever means possible, and he used his personal authenticator number to confirm his identity, the U.S. Government would be unable to provide such confirmation, if his number happened to be among those numbers DIA cannot locate.”

It’s worth remembering that throughout the period when this intelligence disaster occurred –from the moment the treaty was signed in 1973 until 1991 – the White House told the public that it had given the search for POWs and POW information the “highest national priority.”

* Page 13: Even in the Executive Summary, the report acknowledges the existence of clear intelligence, made known to government officials early on, that important numbers of captured US POWs were not on Hanoi’s repatriation list. After Hanoi released its list (showing only ten names from Laos – nine military men and one civilian), President Nixon sent a message on February 2, 1973, to Hanoi’s Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. saying: “U.S. records show there are 317 American military men unaccounted for in Laos and it is inconceivable that only ten of these men would be held prisoner in Laos.”

Nixon was right. It was inconceivable. Then why did the president, less than two months later, on March 29, 1973, announce on national television that “all of our American POWs are on their way home”?

On April 13, 1973, just after all 591 men on Hanoi’s official list had returned to American soil, the Pentagon got into step with the president and announced that there was no evidence of any further live prisoners in Indochina (this is on page 248).

*Page 91: A lengthy footnote provides more confirmation of the White House’s knowledge of abandoned POWs. The footnote reads:

“In a telephone conversation with Select Committee Vice-Chairman Bob Smith on December 29, 1992, Dr. Kissinger said that he had informed President Nixon during the 60-day period after the peace agreement was signed that U.S. intelligence officials believed that the list of prisoners captured in Laos was incomplete. According to Dr. Kissinger, the President responded by directing that the exchange of prisoners on the lists go forward, but added that a failure to account for the additional prisoners after Operation Homecoming would lead to a resumption of bombing. Dr. Kissinger said that the President was later unwilling to carry through on this threat.”

When Kissinger learned of the footnote while the final editing of the committee report was in progress, he and his lawyers lobbied fiercely through two Republican allies on the panel – one of them was John McCain – to get the footnote expunged. The effort failed. The footnote stayed intact.

* Pages 85-86: The committee report quotes Kissinger from his memoirs, writing solely in reference to prisoners in Laos: “We knew of at least 80 instances in which an American serviceman had been captured alive and subsequently disappeared. The evidence consisted either of voice communications from the ground in advance of capture or photographs and names published by the Communists. Yet none of these men was on the list of POWs handed over after the Agreement.”

Then why did he swear under oath to the committee in 1992 that he never had any information that specific, named soldiers were captured alive and hadn’t been returned by Vietnam?

* Page 89: In the middle of the prisoner repatriation and U.S. troop-withdrawal process agreed to in the treaty, when it became clear that Hanoi was not releasing everyone it held, a furious chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, issued an order halting the troop withdrawal until Hanoi complied with the agreement. He cited in particular the known prisoners in Laos. The order was retracted by President Nixon the next day. In 1992, Moorer, by then retired, testified under oath to the committee that his order had received the approval of the President, the national security advisor and the secretary of defense. Nixon, however, in a letter to the committee, wrote: “I do not recall directing Admiral Moorer to send this cable.”

The report did not include the following information: Behind closed doors, a senior intelligence officer had testified to the POW committee that when Moorer’s order was rescinded, the angry admiral sent a “back-channel” message to other key military commanders telling them that Washington was abandoning known live prisoners. “Nixon and Kissinger are at it again,” he wrote. “SecDef and SecState have been cut out of the loop.” In 1973, the witness was working in the office that processed this message. His name and his testimony are still classified. A source present for the testimony provided me with this information and also reported that in that same time period, Moorer had stormed into Defense Secretary Schlesinger’s office and, pounding on his desk, yelled: “The bastards have still got our men.” Schlesinger, in his own testimony to the committee a few months later, was asked about – and corroborated – this account.

*Pages 95-96: In early April 1973, Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements “summoned” Dr. Roger Shields, then head of the Pentagon’s POW/MIA Task Force, to his office to work out “a new public formulation” of the POW issue; now that the White House had declared all prisoners to have been returned, a new spin was needed. Shields, under oath, described the meeting to the committee. He said Clements told him: “All the American POWs are dead.” Shields said he replied: “You can’t say that.” Clements shot back: “You didn’t hear me. They are all dead.” Shields testified that at that moment he thought he was going to be fired, but he escaped from his boss’s office still holding his job.

*Pages 97-98: A couple of days later, on April 11, 1973, a day before Shields was to hold a Pentagon press conference on POWs, he and Gen. Brent Scowcroft, then the deputy national security advisor, went to the Oval Office to discuss the “new public formulation” and its presentation with President Nixon.

The next day, reporters right off asked Shields about missing POWs. Shields fudged his answers. He said: “We have no indications at this time that there are any Americans alive in Indochina.” But he went on to say that there had not been “a complete accounting” of those lost in Laos and that the Pentagon would press on to account for the missing – a seeming acknowledgement that some Americans were still alive and unaccounted for.

The press, however, seized on Shields’ denials. One headline read: “POW Unit Boss: No Living GIs Left in Indochina.”

*Page 97: The POW committee, knowing that Nixon taped all his meetings in the Oval Office, sought the tape of that April 11, 1973, Nixon-Shields-Scowcroft meeting to find out what Nixon had been told and what he had said about the evidence of POWs still in Indochina. The committee also knew there had been other White House meetings that centered on intelligence about live POWs. A footnote on page 97 states that Nixon’s lawyers said they would provide access to the April 11 tape “only if the Committee agreed not to seek any other White House recordings from this time period.” The footnote says that the committee rejected these terms and got nothing. The committee never made public this request for Nixon tapes until the brief footnote in its 1993 report.

McCain’s Catch-22

None of this compelling evidence in the committee’s full report dislodged McCain from his contention that the whole POW issue was a concoction by deluded purveyors of a “conspiracy theory.” But an honest review of the full report, combined with the other documentary evidence, tells the story of a frustrated and angry president, and his national security advisor, furious at being thwarted at the peace table by a small, much less powerful country that refused to bow to Washington’s terms. That President seems to have swallowed hard and accepted a treaty that left probably hundreds of American prisoners in Hanoi’s hands, to be used as bargaining chips for reparations.

Maybe Nixon and Kissinger told themselves that they could get the prisoners home after some time had passed. But perhaps it proved too hard to undo a lie as big as this one. Washington said no prisoners were left behind, and Hanoi swore it had returned all of them. How could either side later admit it had lied? Time went by and as neither side budged, telling the truth became even more difficult and remote. The public would realize that Washington knew of the abandoned men all along. The truth, after men had been languishing in foul prison cells, could get people impeached or thrown in jail.

Which brings us to today, when the Republican candidate for President is the contemporaneous politician most responsible for keeping the truth about his matter hidden. Yet he says he’s the right man to be the Commander-in-Chief, and his credibility in making this claim is largely based on his image as a POW hero.

On page 468 of the 1,221-page report, McCain parsed his POW position oddly: “We found no compelling evidence to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some evidence – though no proof – to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans may have been kept behind after the end of America’s military involvement in Vietnam.”

“Evidence though no proof.” Clearly, no one could meet McCain’s standard of proof as long as he is leading a government crusade to keep the truth buried.

To this reporter, this sounds like a significant story and a long overdue opportunity for the press to finally dig into the archives to set the historical record straight – and even pose some direct questions to the candidate.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/mccain-and-the-pow-cover-up/#Yz9POIHR1v76QH6p.99

I wonder if he remembers his name most days

McCain on tape: Trump damages my reelection hopes
Lets hope so

'If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket,' the senator says in a recording obtained by POLITICO, 'this may be the race of my life.'

Publicly, John McCain insists Donald Trump will have a negligible effect on his campaign for reelection. But behind closed doors at a fundraiser in Arizona last month, the Republican senator and two-time presidential hopeful offered a far more dire assessment to his supporters.

“If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life,” McCain said, according to a recording of the event obtained by POLITICO. “If you listen or watch Hispanic media in the state and in the country, you will see that it is all anti-Trump. The Hispanic community is roused and angry in a way that I've never seen in 30 years.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trump-latinos-mccain-222810#ixzz47pDyAVJy

US Senate Candidate Provides Bombshell Evidence Hillary Clinton Created ISIS - From Benghazi To Orlando, Clinton's Hands Are Covered In American Blood - 'America Needs A President That Represents America, Not ISIS'

Anybody who has been paying attention to real news and global events from the alternative media knows that there is a great deal of evidence that proves that our own leaders created the ISIS terrorist group that's now slaughtering Christians around the world. However, we've been largely missing that huge video that puts together all of the evidence and from a public figure who is within politics and now actually running for US Senate. That video has arrived.

As we hear in the slam-dunk video below from John McCain's opponent in the upcoming election Dr. Kelli Ward, McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were responsible for creating the terrorist group that is now inspiring Americans to carry out slaughters such as that which recently allegedly happened in Orlando, Florida.

Dr. Ward calls out McCain on his hypocrisy on this matter, having changed his earlier statement backing Trump that Obama was directly responsible for the massacre in Orlando due to his policies after realizing that in doing so, McCain was calling himself out as guilty as hell as well. "Once the left put on the heat, McCain got out of the kitchen" Dr. Ward tells us, "he did what we're used to, he folded like a cheap lawnchair and said he'd misspoken". "Well, John McCain didn't misspeak" Dr. Ward goes on, "actually, he realized he had implicated himself". As well as Obama and Hillary.

"You see, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain have been partners in arming ISIS" Dr. Ward tells us, sharing courageous truths that should quickly lead to McCain's 'retirement' or arrest for treason though we're quite concerned not enough people living in Arizona and other Americans will learn these facts.

The mainstream media has a way of making sure cold, hard truths like these involving the 1% like Hillary, Obama and McCain don't see the light of day so we're doing our best to make sure the msm doesn't get their way.

Dr. Ward then breaks down the facts that PROVE to us that McCain, Clinton and Obama are responsible for the rise of the terrorists that have been terrorizing the world, slaughtering Christians and are now terrorizing Americans leading us to ask, how is it that Obama, Clinton and McCain haven't yet been arrested by the US military for treason for providing aid and comfort to the enemy? Keep in mind, not only have they armed ISIS but they're going after Americans guns! What should that tell us?

We can also now see that the tide is quickly turning against Hillary, Obama and the globalists as Brexit votes to get out of the European Union, Obama's immigration plan is totally rebuffed by the US Supreme Court at a time when babies being born in America to minorities outnumber those born to whites. As this story from Breitbart tells us, in Brexit, Great Britain has sided with Donald Trump and rebuffed Hillary and Obama. Is the world awakening?

Unless America is able to reign in those who have been secretly arming ISIS and putting every American in the country and every Christian around the world at risk of being killed, the facts brought forth in this video mean nothing. Unless Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and everybody else responsible for the rise of ISIS are held responsible for their roles in that rise of the terrorist group, 'justice' means absolutely nothing in America and the world.

Dr. Ward slams her message home in her concluding statement: "Just this week, John McCain bragged about an additional $1.3 billion to provide more weapons to Syrian jihadists, and to provide border security. Not in Arizona, but in Lebanon and Jordan. I'm Dr. Kelli Ward and I'm running for the United States Senate because John McCain has equipped our enemies, put our soldiers in harms way and turned even our own American soil into a battleground. Arizona needs a senator who represents Arizona, not ISIS."

At ANP, we'll strongly agree....America needs a president that represents America, not ISIS.

https://youtu.be/dzV9bjMg2ZU

http://allnewspipeline.com/Bombshell_Evidence_Obama_Clinton_Created_ISIS.php

U.S. McCain Backed Syrian Rebels Behead 10 Year-Old Boy After Posing For Selfies With Him

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please email this story to John McCain
https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact-form

This story is horrifying on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. Why is the Obama administration backing these people?

    US Backed 'Moderate' Rebels Film Themselves Beheading a Boy Near Aleppo https://t.co/UEgrzNCAuC#Syria pic.twitter.com/qiiOT6Gh7O

    — Ian56 (@Ian56789) July 20, 2016

BBC News reports:

    Syria conflict: Rebels ‘filmed beheading boy’ in Aleppo

    One video shows five men posing with the frightened child, who could be as young as 10, in the back of a truck. One of the men grips him by the hair.

    The same man is later filmed apparently cutting the boy’s head off.

    The incident is reported to have taken place in Handarat, north of Aleppo, where there has been heavy fighting…

    The group is reported to have benefited from financial and military support from the US, UK, France, Turkey, Qatar and other Gulf Arab states in the past.

Twitchy reports on the Obama administration’s unbelievable response:

    When confronted with the story, State Department spokesman Mark Tonerf said that the U.S. might stop further assistance to these animals if the allegations are proven true.

    His exact quote: “I can’t — again, I can’t say what the consequences will be, but it will certainly give us, as I said, serious pause and we’ll look at, frankly, any affiliation or cooperation with this group we may have going forward, if these allegations are proven true.”

See the video in the tweet below:

    Toner: proof that Zinki committed beheading would give US "pause about any further assistance to them" #Syriahttps://t.co/icfHaxaGxQ

    — Walid (@walid970721) July 19, 2016

And yet the left is protesting at the Republican Convention… not the White House.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/07/u-s-backed-syrian-rebels-behead-10-year-old-boy-posing-selfies/

Time to Say Thank You and Goodbye to Sen. McCain

John McCain was a pilot in Viet Nam and there is no question that he and his fellow POWs suffered immeasurably in the Hanoi Hilton.  For that we owe them all a debt of gratitude.

McCain did not suffer as the others did. His dad was a big wig admiral in the navy.

Yet that does not give any one person the right to do harm to our country from a legislative position nor to put others in peril around the world by ill-conceived policy.


Since I have been in Congress, Senator John McCain has pushed an agenda ranging from blanket amnesty for illegal aliens to support for President Barrack Obama’s and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s disastrous Arab Spring endeavors that have made the United States much less safe as a result.

Sen. McCain has been relentless in demanding amnesty for people illegally in this country long before Barrack Obama became president. He has refused to use his vast seniority and political power to safeguard the American people by securing the border, but has, instead, been the best friend law-breaking immigrants in this country could have.

After President­­­­­ Obama encouraged the ouster of United States ally and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the radical Islamic group known internationally as the Muslim Brotherhood took over in Egypt, seeing to an election of one of their own, Mohamed Morsi.  While I was in Egypt, many people told me of the widespread atrocities, attacks on churches and massive suffering of Christians and Jews at the hands of the Muslim Brothers empowered by the Morsi presidency. Egypt’s Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II told me it was the first time the Coptic Cathedral had been attacked in nearly 1,000 years.

Morsi was amassing power in disregard of the new Egyptian constitution and was on his way to becoming a dictator.  As the Egyptian protests continued to grow, the Muslim Brotherhood violence grew.  Then in June of 2013, a glorious thing happened.

A protest began and grew into an estimated 33 million Egyptian Christians, Muslims and secularists. They went into the streets of Egypt in what has been described as the largest peaceful revolt in the history of the world. They demanded Morsi’s ouster, but this radical Egyptian president was undeterred.  Pope Tawadros II told me of two separate occasions of being moved to tears as moderate Muslim protesters against Morsi were in the streets apologizing to him for the widespread Christian persecution under the Morsi regime.

Because the new Egyptian constitution, reportedly penned under advisement of the Obama administration, neglected to include an impeachment provision, the only way to get Morsi out of office was for enough people to demand the military remove him for treason.  The military finally removed him, and Morsi was jailed for an assortment of crimes.

The Muslim Brotherhood was outraged and began a new wave of havoc and church burnings while demanding Morsi’s reinstatement.  Reportedly more than 70 churches and monasteries were set ablaze by Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

Sen. McCain flew to Egypt in August of 2013 to stand with the Obama administration and the Muslim Brotherhood in demanding Morsi’s reinstatement as their corrupt, radical Islamist President. Fortunately, McCain’s wrongheaded efforts were not heeded by the Egyptian people because they did not want the radical Muslim Brother as a President.

A new Constitution was written followed by the election of a new President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the military leader who heeded the demand of the largest peaceful uprising in the history of the world and removed the treasonous president.  Pope Tawadros II has since told me that President Sisi and the Egyptian army are actively helping to rebuild the churches.

Some leaders in Israel have privately conveyed to me that this new Egyptian leader, whose removal McCain and Obama demanded, has done more to combat radical Islamic violence and terrorism than most any Egyptian leader in Israel’s modern history.

Sen. McCain at one time showed support for dictator Muammar Qaddafi. While visiting Qaddafi in Libya in August of 2009, this tweet was sent from McCain’s official Senate office Twitter account: “@SenJohnMcCain: Late evening with Col. Qaddafi at his ‘ranch’ in Libya – interesting meeting with an interesting man.”  He later sided with President Obama supporting Qaddafi’s removal, and even providing bombing support to rebels we knew contained al Qaeda. He did not seem to care, but continued his demand for siding with the Libyan rebels who have now helped create widespread chaos into surrounding countries.

Indicating a further lack of judgment, one of Sen. McCain’s friends was former Libyan al-Qaeda leader Abdelhakim Belhadj, who the CIA had captured in 2004 and renditioned back to Libya.

Ousting Qaddafi led to massive, widespread unrest in the entire region, yet Sen. McCain also insisted that President Obama remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Had President Obama listened to McCain then, not only would Islamic radicals have taken over in Syria the way they initially did in Egypt, but innumerably more Syrians would be dead beyond the current 400,000 body count. That would include those killed by Sen. McCain’s Syrian rebel friends who have been accused by international human rights groups of a number of human rights violations and war crimes.

On the domestic front, McCain recently used a very heavy hand to push into the Defense Department bill a measure that forces women to register for the Selective Service so that women will be involuntarily drafted and sent to combat in times of war.  Senator McCain’s hair trigger temper became well known as he even was reported to have blown up, even using the f-word in his verbal assault in the face of another Republican Senator.

We are indeed fortunate that Senator McCain is not regarded strongly enough that he has gotten his way with amnesty for those who have come illegally, women being drafted, the Muslim Brotherhood having more power, and groups who persecute Christians and Jews being empowered worldwide, to list only some of his misguided judgement.

While acknowledging the sympathy he is due for his suffering in Viet Nam, I hope the voters of Arizona will rise up and stop John McCain from continuing to promote policies that are dangerous to the future of America and her allies.

On August 30th, the prescription that has the best chance of curtailing suffering at home and abroad from the McCain wrongheaded, misguided, heavy-handed judgment is to vote for Dr. Kelli Ward to be the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. People of the world and the politically non-establishment citizens of the U.S. are praying that the people of Arizona will say, “enough is enough; please come home, John McCain, take a rest, let Arizona, the nation and world recover.”

Congressman Gohmert is the Chairman of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and the Vice Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. Prior to being elected to serve in Congress, he was elected to three terms as State District Judge in Smith County, Texas and was appointed by then Texas Governor Rick Perry to complete a term as Chief Justice of the 12th Court of Appeals of Texas.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/07/27/time-say-thank-goodbye-sen-mccain/

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mccain-walks-back-pledge-to-block-clinton-supreme-court-nominee/ar-AAj4hWk?ocid=ansmsnnews11
10/17/16
McCain walks back pledge to block Clinton Supreme Court nominee

Sen. John McCain is quickly walking back his statement that Republicans would automatically oppose any potential Supreme Court nominee from Hillary Clinton.

Rachael Dean, a spokeswoman for the GOP senator, said that while McCain "believes you can only judge people by their record" and the Democratic presidential nominee "has a clear record of supporting liberal judicial nominees," the Arizona senator would consider any Supreme Court pick sent to the chamber.

"Senator McCain will, of course, thoroughly examine the record of any Supreme Court nominee put before the Senate and vote for or against that individual based on their qualifications as he has done throughout his career," she said.

The pivot comes hours after McCain pledged that Senate Republicans would unite against any Supreme Court nominee that a hypothetical President Clinton would try to get confirmed.

"I promise you that we will, we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton - if she were president - would put up," the Arizona Republican told a Philadelphia radio station on Monday. "This is why we need the majority."

Republicans have put the late Justice Antonin Scalia's Supreme Court seat at the center of their push for winning the White House and keeping control of Congress, stressing that whoever fills the vacancy could decide the direction of the court for decades. They've also refused to consider Merrick Garland, President Obama's nominee.

Republicans are defending 24 Senate seats. To win control of the Senate, Democrats need to pick up five seats, or four if Clinton is in the White House.

McCain also cast doubt Monday on whether GOP nominee Donald Trump would be "superior" to Clinton because of his potential Supreme Court nominees, saying, "I don't know because I hear him saying a lot of different things."

McCain is up for reelection and is leading in the polls by an average of 16 percentage points, according to Real Clear Politics. He revoked his endorsement of Trump earlier this month.

But Trump has earned praise from some conservatives for floating roughly 20 names, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), as potential Supreme Court nominees should he win the White House.

McCain's initial comments were a break from pledges by some of his Senate GOP colleagues that they will consider- though not necessarily support - any Supreme Court nominee that the next president submits.

EXCLUSIVE: Saudi Arabia Is Astroturfing America To Roll Back 9/11 Law Via @dailycaller
Eric OwensEducation Editor

5361155

The government of Saudi Arabia and its agents appear to be recruiting U.S. military veterans and people with foreign policy credentials to submit basically the same op-ed to newspapers around the country in an effort to concoct the appearance of an organic groundswell of opposition to a new federal law that allows civil lawsuits against state sponsors of terrorism.

The law — the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) — creates a way for American citizens to file civil claims against foreign governments for deaths, injuries and other damage related to terrorist acts if the foreign governments financed those attacks.

The immediate effect of the new legislation is to allow a group of plaintiffs to proceed in a longstanding lawsuit against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The plaintiffs point to evidence that the Saudi government partially financed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which killed 2,996 people.

A cursory review of five different newspaper submissions allegedly written by five different authors — and placed in five different major newspapers from Oct. 5, 2016 to Nov. 28, 2016 — strongly suggests an astroturf campaign conducted by some single source.
Examining the astroturf

All five op-eds use exactly the same language at different points, with full paragraphs that are clearly, almost lazily repetitive.

Below, for instance, is a Nov. 4 op-ed in The Tennessean, Nashville’s primary newspaper, entitled “JASTA will harm our soldiers and diplomats overseas.” The author is Air Force Major Gen. (Ret.) William Russell Cotney.

    “The principle known as sovereign immunity has governed relations between states for centuries. It holds that governments cannot be sued for civil wrongs without their consent. In international relations, it preserves the right and responsibility of governments to settle disputes with other governments on behalf of their citizens.”

And here is Angela Sinkovits, described as “an attorney and was a medical specialist in the U.S. Army,” writing in The Denver Post on Oct. 5:

    “The principle of sovereign immunity has governed relations between states for centuries. It holds that governments cannot be sued for civil wrongs without their consent. In international relations, it preserves the right and responsibility of governments to settle disputes with other governments on behalf of their citizens.”

Only the word “of” instead of the phrase “known as” separates what Sinkovits wrote from what Cotney wrote. Otherwise, 46 words — out of 47 and 48, respectively — are identical.

But wait. There’s more. On Nov. 28, the Cedar Rapids Gazette published an op-ed titled “JASTA’s negative consequences” by “guest columnist” Don Pugsley with exactly the same string of 47 words contained in the Oct. 5 op-ed in The Denver Post by Sinkovits.

The Gazette describes Pugsley as “a special forces Green Beret Sargeant [sic] Major with 87 military parachute jumps, a top Secret Security Clearance and a medi-vac in Vietnam.”

In the Concord Monitor on Nov. 20, a letter to the editor by Ken Georgevits — no description given — changes three words but is otherwise a carbon copy of the identical wording by Cotney, Sinkovits and Pugsley.

On Oct. 27, the Miami Herald published an op-ed by Paul Crespo entitled “Congress must revisit flawed 9/11 lawsuit law.” Slightly to his credit, Crespo appears to have taken some time to paraphrase the language a bit:

    “Sovereign immunity has been a bedrock principle governing relations between states for five centuries. It holds that governments cannot be sued for civil wrongs without their consent. It preserves the right of governments to settle disputes with other governments on behalf of their citizens.”

The Herald describes Crespo as “president and CEO of Spectre Global Risk, an international security consulting firm” as well as “a former officer in the U.S. Marine Corps” and a former Defense Intelligence Agency attaché.

There is much more evidence of a planned astroturfing campaign in the five allegedly different op-ed pieces published in five different major newspapers.

In a second instance, both Pugsley — the “special forces Green Beret” writing in The Cedar Rapids Gazette — and Cotney — the retired Air Force major general writing in The Tennessean — appear to present this entire, 47-word paragraph as something they did not plagiarize but composed by themselves:

    “No nation wants this. In fact, several countries have raised their deep concerns about JASTA with the United States government, including the Gulf Cooperation Council, the European Union, the Netherlands, Turkey and Pakistan — countries where many thousands of U.S. servicemen and women are or have been present.”

Crespo, writing in the Miami Herald, wrote exactly the same thing substantively and used many of the same words. However, he at least appeared to have changed things up a bit.

The five writers use virtually the same — or exactly the same — words to make their arguments in several other instances.

Pugsley in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Cotney in The Tennessean, Sinkovits in The Denver Post and Crespo in the Miami Herald all managed to produce a similar variation of a sentence obviously sourced from the same original document:

    “Whether the allegations have merit or not is immaterial; what matters is that they would be subject to local courts — not just in Canada or Germany, but even potentially in places like Pakistan, Russia or Venezuela.”

In all of the instances of similarity, Cotney and Pugsley — the op-ed writers most reliant on their military credentials — appear to have been the laziest in their reproduction of the original document.

For example, here’s Pugsley in The Gazette claiming that there is no evidence that Saudi Arabia participated in the Sept. 11 terror attacks:

    “Remember, there is no evidence that the government of Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attacks of 9/11, yet the families want to bring suit against it.”

And here’s Cotney in The Tennessean:

    “Remember, and as much as some wish were the case, there is no solid evidence the government of Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attacks of 9/11.”

In addition to the lazy similarity in their op-eds, Pugsley and Cotney are also flatly wrong about the lack of evidence against Saudi Arabia.

This summer, well before the two ex-military men presented the op-eds to major newspapers as their own, the U.S. Congress released 28 pages of a congressional inquiry. These 28 pages produce solid evidence showing Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The official inquiry by Congress states that the September 11 hijackers “received support and assistance from” “Saudi intelligence officers.” “A [deleted], dated July 2, 2002,” suggests “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists inside the Saudi Government,” the congressional finding says.
The source of the astroturf

Who coordinated the five impressively identical op-eds allegedly written by five different authors in five different major newspapers in the last two months? The obvious candidate — the only candidate, really — is a lobbyist or a public relations firm working on a large retainer for Saudi Arabia.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia appears to be the only foreign government named in any lawsuit alleging material foreign-government support for the Sept. 11 hijackers. The practical effect of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act has been to allow lawsuits to go forward against Saudi Arabia because of 9/11.

In response to the 9/11 law (now and when it was a bill), the Saudi government has been engaging in a furious lobbying effort.

As of early November, The Hill reports, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is paying 14 lobbying firms to convince Congress to change the law — and thus to prevent any federal trial in which Saudi Arabia must defend itself.

The 14 lobbying firms include public-relations big guns such as Squire Patton Boggs, Podesta Group and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

Fees are exorbitant. As of October, Saudi Arabia was paying American lobbyists and public relations firms $1.3 million each month to fight against the right of Americans to sue terror-financing nations, according to The Hill.

Last year, the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia paid DLA Piper, a huge law firm, $450,000 for just nine months of work to “assist the Embassy in strengthening the ability of the United States and Saudi Arabia to advance mutual national security interests,” according to The Washington Post.

The fact that this multitude of lobbyists is working on behalf of Saudi Arabia is public knowledge because firms working with foreign governments must disclose their work in a U.S. Justice Department database. (Other firms on retainer with Saudi Arabia include Sphere Consulting and Glover Park Group.)
‘An absolute betrayal’

Congress enacted the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act on Sept. 28, 2016 after the House voted 348 to 77 to override a veto by President Barack Obama. (The Senate had previously voted to override Obama by a 97-to-1 vote.)

Terry Strada, a widow and the national chair for the 9/11 Families & Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorists, spoke to The Daily Caller about her group’s continuing effort to sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in federal court.

“It is the Saudi talking points that these people are publishing,” Strada told TheDC.

The five people who signed their names to op-eds containing impressively large chunks of the same words were likely contacted by people they know and trust, she suggested.

“I think they are approached and agree to put their name on the op-ed. The lobbying firms and communications firms reach out to the individuals,” Strada said.

“But you are doing it for the government of Saudi Arabia,” she added. “This is Saudi Arabia trying to dictate our laws and that is frightening. That just can’t happen. You can’t let Saudi Arabia pull the strings in our legislative process.”

“We want the right to present our evidence in a U.S. courtroom, just like anyone else,” Strada said.

“This is Washington, D.C. at its worst,” Strada also said. “We are counting on President-elect Trump to continue his support for the law.”

During his presidential campaign, now-President-elect Trump expressed vigorous support for the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act in its current form.

Hillary Clinton also said she supports the law as it stands, according to CNN.

Last week, two Republican senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, proposed an amendment to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The amendment would only allow Americans to sue foreign governments for damages related to terrorist attacks if the foreign nations “knowingly engage with a terrorist organization directly or indirectly, including financing,” reports Politico.

Strada and other proponents of the legislation as it is currently written believe the amendment would effectively make the law meaningless.

“Senator Graham is now stabbing the 9/11 families in the back. He and Senator McCain are seeking to torpedo JASTA by imposing changes demanded by Saudi Arabia’s lobbyists,” the 9/11 widow said in a statement sent to TheDC. “We have reviewed the language, and it is an absolute betrayal.”

http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/05/exclusive-saudi-arabia-is-astroturfing-america-to-roll-back-911-law/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnoukNWR840

McCain: Mexico Paying for Border Wall ‘Not a Viable Option’

How did this nut get reelected?

Friday on CNN’s “At This Hour” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said Mexico paying back the United States for a border wall is “not a viable option.”

Partial transcript as follows:

    MCCAIN: If you only build a wall, only a wall, without using technology individuals and drones, observation, et cetera, you’re not going to secure the border.

    REPORTER: Obviously he’s talking about having Mexico pay for it. Do you think that’s a viable option?

    MCCAIN: No.

    REPORTER: Why do you say that?

    MCCAIN: Because it’s not a viable option.

    REPORTER: Taxpayers could be left with the bill.

    MCCAIN: Taxpayers are paying a lot of money right now, one of the biggest problems we have is the enforcement of existing law.

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/02/03/mccain-mexico-paying-for-border-wall-not-a-viable-option/

John McCain just systematically dismantled Donald Trump’s entire worldview

 Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hit out at President Trump in a speech on Feb. 17 at the Munich Security Conference, saying, "this administration is in disarray." (Reuters)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hit out at President Trump in a speech on Feb. 17 at the Munich Security Conference, saying, “this administration is in disarray.” Sen. John McCain hits out at Trump in speech (Reuters)

John McCain is increasingly mad as hell about President Trump. And on Friday, he went after Trump — hard.

During a speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the Republican senator from Arizona delivered a pointed and striking point-by-point takedown of Trump's worldview and brand of nationalism. McCain didn't mention Trump's name once, but he didn't have to.

And even considering the two men's up-and-down history and the terrible things Trump has said about McCain, it was a striking display from a senior leader of a party when it comes to a president of the same party.

In his speech, McCain suggested the Western world is uniquely imperiled this year — even more so than when Barack Obama was president — and proceeded to question whether it will even survive.

“In recent years, this question would invite accusations of hyperbole and alarmism; not this year,” McCain said. “If ever there were a time to treat this question with a deadly seriousness, it is now.”

In case there was any doubt that this was about Trump. Here's what followed:

    "[The founders of the Munich conference] would be alarmed by an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood and race and sectarianism.”
    “They would be alarmed by the hardening resentment we see towards immigrants and refugees and minority groups -- especially Muslims.”
    “They would be alarmed by the growing inability -- and even unwillingness -- to separate truth from lies.”
    "They would be alarmed that more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent."

That's Trump, Trump, Trump and Trump.

McCain continued: “But what would alarm them most, I think, is a sense that many of our peoples, including in my own country, are giving up on the West, that they see it as a bad deal that we may be better off without, and that while Western nations still have the power to maintain our world order, it's unclear whether we have the will.”

Trump has repeatedly suggested a desire to pull out of or scale back on international involvement and agreements. His slogan is “America first,” after all. And it's not just on free trade: It's also when it comes to things like NATO, the transatlantic military alliance that Trump has suggested the United States is getting a bad deal on and has flirted with not enforcing.

Then McCain invoked some of those close to Trump and emphasized that his message won't square with theirs:

    I know there is profound concern across Europe and the world that America is laying down the mantle of global leadership. I can only speak for myself, but I do not believe that that is the message you will hear from all of the American leaders who cared enough to travel here to Munich this weekend. That's not the message you heard today from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. That is not the message you will hear from Vice President Mike Pence. That's not the message you will hear from Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. And that is certainly not the message you will hear tomorrow from our bipartisan congressional delegation.

McCain then concluded with another direct shot at Trump.

“I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries,” he said. “I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West, and I believe we must always, always stand up for it. For if we do not, who will?

Two weeks ago, you may recall, Trump suggested the United States didn't exactly have the moral high ground on Russia. Asked by Fox News host Bill O'Reilly about wanting good relations with a “killer” like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump demurred.

“There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” Trump said. “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”

Ever since, it seems, he and McCain have been on a collision course. McCain didn't fight back when Trump questioned his war-hero status long ago — perhaps because both men were trying to win elections — but the battle between McCain and the White House is picking up steam.

And on Friday, McCain traveled across the Atlantic to deliver a calculated, planned attack on Trump's entire system of beliefs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/17/john-mccain-just-systematically-dismantled-donald-trumps-entire-worldview/?utm_term=.8d606057f8e1

Rand Paul: We’re “Very Lucky” Trump Is in Charge and Not McCain (Video)  :D

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) blasted fellow Republican and anti-Trump Senator John McCain (R-AZ) this morning on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Kentucky senator said the nation is “very lucky” Donald Trump is in charge and not McCain.

Meanwhile, McCain continued his attacks on Trump this morning comparing his actions to a dictator.
The Hill reported:

    Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) ripped fellow Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) on Sunday after McCain criticized President Trump’s escalating war of words with the media.

    He argued that the nation is “very lucky” that Trump is president and not McCain, who won the 2008 GOP nomination but lost to Barack Obama in the general election.

    Paul said that McCain’s recent criticisms of Trump are driven by his “personal dispute” with the president over foreign policy.

    He added that McCain and Trump are at odds because McCain supports the wide deployment of U.S. troops to protect and promote American interests abroad while he characterized Trump’s views as closer to a realpolitik approach to foreign policy.

    “Everything that he says about the president is colored by his own personal dispute he’s got running with President Trump and it should be taken with a grain of salt because John McCain’s the guy who’s advocated for war everywhere,” Paul said on ABC’s “This Week.”

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/02/rand-paul-lucky-trump-charge-not-mccain-video/

WOW! Wikileaks Document Shows John McCain Requested Donations from Russians

WOW!
John McCain is leading a vicious campaign against the Russian government since the November election.

In January McCain suggested the Russian “hacking” of the election was an “act of war.”

But it wasn’t that long ago that Senator McCain requested campaign donations from Russian officials.

Wikileaks released documents this week following the sudden death of Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin.

There are several documents on McCain’s request for donations from the Russians.

In 2008 the Russian mission released a letter on a fundraising attempt from John McCain.

According to Reddit users John McCain illegally asked for campaign donations from the Russian Ambassador. (the same ambassador that died suddenly on Monday) This globalist shrieks about Russian influence while he himself participated in it.

The Russians told McCain they would not donate to his campaign.

(http://16004-presscdn-0-50.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/mccain-russia-donation-575x597.png)

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/02/wow-wikileaks-document-shows-john-mccain-requested-donations-russians/

http://redstatewatcher.com/article.asp?id=64953
Breaking! John McCain Just Exposed - Career Could Be In Jeopardy
2/24/17

White House officials believe John McCain tapped into classified telephone calls with world leaders.

Truepundit reported: This could be the beginning of the end for embattled Sen. John McCain’s life in politics. According to White House officials, McCain is believed to have somehow gained access to the content of President Donald Trump’s private, classified telephone calls with world leaders. And he isn’t keeping quiet about what was talked about either.

An analysis of McCain’s recent public statements by White House officials, coupled with information from intelligence personnel working with the Trump administration, paints a disturbing picture for McCain — or any elected U.S. politician. Officials believe the senator has inside knowledge of a number of President Trump’s telephone conversations, including at least one conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

more

McCain-Linked Nonprofit Received $1 Million From Saudi Arabia

Just saying...

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-31/mccain-linked-nonprofit-received-1-million-from-saudi-arabia


John McCain works for terrorist states like Saudi Arabia

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/01/16/john-mccain-works-for-terrorist-states-like-saudi-arabia/

It's time for this false hero to be put out to pasture

John McCain: Rand Paul ‘Is Now Working for Vladimir Putin’

After the Kentucky senator objected to a bill advancing Montenegro’s push for NATO membership, McCain lost his cool and accused his colleague of being a Putin operative.

The long-simmering war between Sens. John McCain and Rand Paul boiled over on Wednesday when the Arizona lawmaker directly accused his colleague of working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While speaking from the Senate floor in support of a bill advancing Montenegro’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), McCain noted objection from his Kentucky colleague, saying that if you oppose the measure, “You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin... trying to dismember this small country which has already been the subject an attempted coup.”

McCain continued: “If they object, they are now carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin and I do not say that lightly.”

Several moments later, after the 80-year-old senator asked for unanimous consent to move the bill forward, Paul took the mic to raise his objection before dramatically exiting the room.

In response, McCain began railing against Paul, his voice trembling with anger: “I note the senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action he has just taken. That is really remarkable, that a senator blocking a treaty that is supported by the overwhelming number—perhaps 98, at least, of his colleagues—would come to the floor and object and walk away.”

rest: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/15/john-mccain-rand-paul-is-now-working-for-vladimir-putin.html

http://redstatewatcher.com/article.asp?id=69938
3/25/17

SHOCKING: McCain Renews Calls For "New World Order", And It's Bad

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has stated that, "the new world order is under enormous strain," and seemed to gloat as President Trump's healthcare bill fell apart. 

From Zerohedge:

It was a bumper day for John McCain when on Friday Donald Trump's Republican nemesis gloated as Trump's "art of the deal" collapsed in the last minute, after the President and Ryan-led effort to repeal Obamacare suffered what appears to be a terminal setback. In the wake of Trump's misfortune, McCain renewed his calls on Friday for a return to a legacy neocon status quo, when speaking at the Brussels forum, said that the world "cries out for American and European leadership" through the EU and Nato, and said that the EU and the US needed to develop "more cooperation, more connectivity".



In a "new world order under enormous strain" and in "the titanic struggle with forces of radicalism … we can't stand by and lament, we've got to be involved," said McCain who is now chairman of the armed services committee in the US Senate, quoted by the EU Observer. "I trust the EU," he said, defending an opposite view from that of US president Donald Trump, who said in January that the UK "was so smart in getting out" of the EU and that Nato was "obsolete". He said that the EU was "one of the most important alliances" for the US and that the EU and Nato were "the best two sums in history", which have maintained peace for the last 70 years.

Further attacking Trump's global worldview, McCan said that "we need to rely on Nato and have a Nato that adjusts to new challenges." He noted that "the EU has too many bureaucrats, not much bureaucracy," but added that "it's not the only place on earth with that problem." He said that he was "still wondering what the overall effect of Brexit will be" and that he did not know "if this is the beginning of a serious problem for the EU". McCain did not disagree, however, with Trump's demand that European countries increase their defense spending for Nato.

McCain also revealed he hasn’t met the President Donald Trump in person since he took office, and he urged Trump to reach out to his opponents—Democratic and otherwise—ala Ronald Reagan if he wants to repeal Obamacare. “Do some outreach. Get to know some of these Democratic leaders,” he said. “You can find common ground.” McCain said he’d met Trump “some years ago” when he was a businessman, but had not met him since. McCain said he did speak “almost daily” to National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, however.

“He doesn’t seem to be that upset that he’s not talking to him,” said German Marshall Fund’s Derek Chollet, a former Obama Pentagon official. “He’s trying to run U.S. defense policy through Mattis and effectively ignore Trump.”

That said, McCain also said it was "too early" to pass judgment on his presidency, although his series of critical comments in recent weeks have demonstrated his growing skepticism about the Trump administration.

Furthermore, while McCain said he was "very pleased" by Trump's picks for his national security team - despite suggesting that they were being bypassed by more ideological and less competent people - he took the opportunity to attack Trump's decisionmaking, saying "the question is: who does the president listen to, who drives the tweets at 6 in morning?”, he said.Asked whether he thought that "Russia owns a significant part of the White House," he said: "I don't worry about that."

The unspoken suggestion: Russia.

What worries McCain, he said, was "the Russian role in our elections", even if he admitted that he has seen "no evidence they succeeded” in affecting the outcome of last year's US vote. Noting that Russia was now trying to influence elections in France and in Germany, he said that if it succeeded it would be "a death warrant for democracy".

     "It's an act of destruction that is certainly more lethal than dropping some bombs," he insisted. McCain, a Russia hawk, said that Putin wanted to restore the Russian empire: “He wants the Baltics, he has taken Crimea, he's been in Ukraine."
 
     "These are KBG thugs, my friends," he said, referring to the former Russian spy service for which Putin used to work. He added that the US needed to "respond accordingly". He said however that there was "nothing wrong" if Trump met Putin.

"I'm not against meeting," he said, reminding the Brussels forum that US presidents met Soviet leaders during the Cold War. But he added that "the best way to go to a meeting is with a strong hand" and that was not the case for the US right now.

RINO John McCain Comes Out Swinging Against President Trump, Joins Chorus Of Far-Left Voices

John McCain’s comments add to rumblings among certain other Republicans on Capitol Hill who have signaled their willingness to abandon Trump over the allegations in Comey’s memo and reports of discussion of classified information with Russian diplomats. The Hill reported Wednesday that the Comey Memo was causing more GOPers to try and detach their legislative agenda from the president.

http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/rino-john-mccain-comes-swinging-president-trump-joins-chorus-far-left-voices/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GECxKjm31Y

http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/john-mccain-institute-international-leadership-receives-funding-george-soros/
The John McCain Institute For International Leadership Receives Funding From George Soros
The McCain Institute has accepted contributions of as much as $100,000 from billionaire liberal activist-funder George Soros and from Teneo, a for-profit company co-founded by Doug Band, former President Bill Clinton’s “bag man.” Teneo has long helped enrich Clinton through lucrative speaking and business deals.
6/20/17

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain in 2012 turned over nearly $9 million in unspent funds from his failed 2008 presidential campaign to a new foundation bearing his name, the McCain Institute for International Leadership.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Donald Trump promised to ‘drain the swamp’ when he was elected. RINO Sen. John McCain is one of the swamp’s key major players. McCain has created an “international institute” for the furtherance of the New World Order, and he is using money provided to him by people like George Soros to do it. Now you know why McCain is so against the president, Trump wants to drain the very swamp that feeds him.

The institute is intended to serve as a “legacy” for McCain and “is dedicated to advancing human rights, dignity, democracy and freedom.” It is a tax-exempt non-profit foundation with assets valued at $8.1 million and associated with Arizona State University.

Conservative and liberal critics, however, believe the institute constitutes a major conflict of interest for McCain, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

McCain, a former Navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and was then a prisoner of war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton until 1973, is a major political force in Washington, D.C. He is presently chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

Critics worry that the institute’s donors and McCain’s personal leadership in the organization’s exclusive “Sedona Forum” bear an uncanny resemblance to the glitzy Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) that annually co-mingled special interests and powerful political players in alleged pay-to-play schemes.

more

http://redstatewatcher.com/article.asp?id=87070
Breaking: McCain To Delay The Vote!!!!

According to reports, the healthcare vote may be delayed due to Senator John McCains recovery from surgery.

The Hill reported: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will miss this week's votes in the Senate after undergoing surgery on Saturday, depriving Republicans of a key vote on healthcare.

McCain's absence means Senate Republicans almost certainly will not have the 50 votes they'd need to win a procedural vote.


Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have already said they would oppose the procedural vote. With all Democrats voting no, that would leave Republicans with just 49 votes, given McCain's absence.

7/16/17

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/health/john-mccain-blood-clot-recovery.html?mtrref=www.drudgereport.com
7/16/17
McCain’s Surgery May Be More Serious Than Thought, Experts Say

The condition for which Senator John McCain had surgery on Friday may be more serious than initial descriptions have implied, and it may delay his return to Washington by at least a week or two, medical experts said on Sunday.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has already announced that votes on a bill to dismantle the Affordable Care Act will not begin until Mr. McCain’s return. A statement released by Mr. McCain’s office on Saturday had suggested that he would be in Arizona recovering for just this week, but neurosurgeons interviewed said the typical recovery period could be longer.

The statement from Mr. McCain’s office said a two-inch blood clot was removed from “above his left eye” during a “minimally invasive craniotomy with an eyebrow incision” at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, “following a routine annual physical.” Surgeons there are not conducting interviews. Mr. McCain’s communications director, Julie Tarallo, said further information would be made public when it became available.

A craniotomy is an opening of the skull, and an eyebrow incision would be used to reach a clot in or near the left frontal lobes of the brain, neurosurgeons who were not involved in Mr. McCain’s care said.

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This was all over the news when I was out of town in DC last week. McCain doesn't have that much longer to live - he needs to repent of his sins, and out his faith in Jesus Christ and his word. Or else in the (potential) near future, he'll be lifting up his eyes in that place of torment, and realize the grave mistake he made (living this lifestyle, that is).

http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/rino-john-mccain-shoots-down-obamacare-repeal/
RINO John McCain Takes Major Shot Against Trump Agenda As He Gleefully Shoots Down Obamacare Repeal
A seven-year quest to undo the Affordable Care Act collapsed — at least for now — as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) kept his colleagues and the press corps in suspense over a little more than two hours late Thursday into early Friday. Not since September 2008, when the House of Representatives rejected the Troubled Asset Relief Program — causing the Dow Jones industrial average to plunge nearly 800 points in a single afternoon — had such an unexpected vote caused such a striking twist.
7/28/17

It was the most dramatic night in the United States Senate in recent history. Just ask the senators who witnessed it. John McCain killed the Obamacare Repeal.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In what might have been, due to a recent diagnosis of a brain tumor, John McCain’s last official act as the senator from Arizona, he put a stop to the “skinny” repeal of Obamacare. Not only that, he did it gleefully with a smile on his face, telling his colleagues to “wait for the show” when they asked him how he was planning on voting. John McCain torpedoed President Trump’s quest to end Obamacare, and in doing so, displayed his firm allegiance to Barack Obama and the Far-Left Democrats. Complete and total traitor to both the GOP and the American people.

A seven-year quest to undo the Affordable Care Act collapsed — at least for now — as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) kept his colleagues and the press corps in suspense over a little more than two hours late Thursday into early Friday.

Not since September 2008, when the House of Representatives rejected the Troubled Asset Relief Program — causing the Dow Jones industrial average to plunge nearly 800 points in a single afternoon — had such an unexpected vote caused such a striking twist.

The bold move by the nation’s most famous senator stunned his colleagues and possibly put the Senate on the verge of protracted bipartisan talks that McCain is unlikely to witness as he begins treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer.

“I’ve stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that it was rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict party-line basis without a single Republican vote,” he said in a statement explaining his vote. “We should not make the mistakes of the past.”

Rumors swirled late Thursday that the Arizona Republican, who had captured the nation’s sympathy this week after delaying his cancer treatment in order to return to Washington, might vote against the GOP’s “skinny repeal” plan — a watered-down version of earlier Republican proposals to repeal the 2010 health-care law.

John McCain warned at a hastily arranged news conference Thursday afternoon that he was leaning against supporting the legislation unless House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) assured GOP senators that the House would not move to quickly approve the bill in its current form. McCain and Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) wanted Ryan to launch broad House-Senate negotiations for a wider rollback of the law. Two hours later, Ryan issued a statement signaling he would launch negotiations, and Graham and Johnson announced their support.

But not McCain.

    Reporters spotted him around 11 p.m.

    “Have you decided how you’ll vote?” they asked.

    “Yes,” McCain replied.

    “How?”

    “Wait for the show,” he said.

McCain headed for the stage — the Senate floor — around midnight, emerging from his office in the Russell Senate Office Building for the subway ride to the U.S. Capitol.

When he arrived, he held a brief conversation with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer ( D-N.Y.), an exchange that left the New Yorker smiling.

“I knew it when he walked on the floor,” Schumer later recounted, explaining that McCain had already called to share his plans.

But few, if any, of his Republican colleagues realized what was about to transpire.

Two votes were called just after midnight. The first was on a Democratic proposal to refer the “skinny repeal” bill back to a committee. The second vote was to pass “skinny repeal,” which would have repealed the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and rolled back a tax on medical devices.

“Let’s vote against skinny repeal,” Schumer told his colleagues before the votes as he once again derided the rushed nature of the health-care debate.

McCain stood on the Republican side of the room nodding in agreement.

With Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) already planning to vote against the plan, Republicans could not afford to lose McCain. Vice President Pence was already at the Capitol prepared to break a tie. Instead, he launched a last-ditch effort to win McCain’s support.

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http://www.dcclothesline.com/2017/07/24/john-mccains-foundation-is-funded-by-saudis-rothschilds-soros/
7/24/17
John McCain’s foundation is funded by Saudis, Rothschilds & Soros
Posted by Dr. Eowyn   

Sen. John McCain (RINO-AZ) has an eponymous foundation, the McCain Institute for International Leadership, that is less known and much smaller in scale, but rivals the Clinton Foundation in corruption.

Note: Don’t confuse the McCain Institute with either:

    The philanthropic John and Cindy McCain Family Foundation that, according to NonProfitFacts.com, claimed a paltry $1,002 in income and $6,013 in assets in 2013; or
    The McCain Foundation, which has nothing to do with John McCain, but was founded by McCain Foods.

The Institute describes itself as a tax-exempt non-profit and “non-partisan do-tank dedicated to advancing character-driven global leadership based on security, economic opportunity, freedom and human dignity – in the United States and around the world.”

Reporting for The Daily Caller on June 19, 2017, Richard Pollock writes that the Institute began with $9 million left over from McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, and has become a huge operation, featuring upwards of 80 people including dozens of full time staff and board members. Associated with Arizona State University, the McCain Institute has assets valued at $8.1 million.

According to Pollock:

    “Critics worry that the institute’s donors and McCain’s personal leadership in the organization’s exclusive ‘Sedona Forum’ bear an uncanny resemblance to the glitzy Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) that annually co-mingled special interests and powerful political players in alleged pay-to-play schemes.”

So who exactly are McCain Institute donors?
(1) Saudi Arabia

A WikiLeaks tweet says the McCain Institute is funded by the Saudis:

wikileaks-tweet-on-mccain-instituteThe WikiLeaks tweet is corroborated by a Bloomberg report in 2016 on a $1 million Saudi Arabian donation to the institute, a contribution the McCain group has refused to explain publicly. (See “McCain cuts off questions about Saudi donation“)

Baxter Dmitry of YourNewsWire observes that the secretive $1 million donation from Saudi Arabia “looks suspiciously like a Clinton Foundation style pay-for-play ‘donation’” and explains why Sen. McCain has “certain ‘viewpoints’ about the Middle East, and keeps making secret trips to Syria.” Saudi Arabia, as well as Israel, are adamantly opposed to Syria’s Assad government and seek its overthrow by “rebels” who include Al Qaeda jihidasts.

More than that, according to the censored 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission’s report, the Saudi government was involved in the 9/11 attack. John F Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 commission, said:

    “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government. Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”

See “Congress releases classified 28 pages of 9/11 Report: It’s Saudi Arabia”.

But John McCain took $1 million donations from the very same Saudi government.
(2) The Rothschilds

According to the above-referenced WikiLeaks tweet as well as the McCain Institute’s staff members page, Lynn Forester de Rothschild — a buddy of the Clintons — is a trustee of the McCain Institute.

The involvement of the Rothschilds goes beyond Lynn being an institute trustee.

John McCain has been accused of accepting improper campaign donations from the Rothschilds. U.S. political campaigns are forbidden from accepting contributions from foreign nationals.

According to the nonpartisan citizens’ watchdog group Judicial Watch (via The Guardian), in 2008 John McCain violated election laws by accepting campaign contributions from two non-U.S. nationals.

At issue is a fundraising luncheon held in March at London’s Spencer House during McCain’s swing through the United Kingdom. An invitation to the event lists Lord Rothschild and Nathaniel Rothschild as hosts, and indicates the event was made possible with their “kind permission”. Tickets to the luncheon cost $1,000 to $2,300.
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Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said: “The question is whether or not the Rothschilds paid for the event, the venue, the catering, or any other related costs.”
(3) George Soros & Clinton Crony

According to Richard Pollock of The Daily Caller, the McCain Institute has also “accepted contributions of as much as $100,000 from billionaire liberal activist-funder George Soros” and from Teneo, a for-profit “global strategies” company founded by a Clinton crony named Doug Band, who was Bill Clinton’s “bag man”. As Pollock puts it, “Teneo has long helped enrich [Bill] Clinton through lucrative speaking and business deals.”

Pollock says McCain and Soros became friends after the senator was exposed as a member of the “Keating Five” in the savings and loan (S&L) industry scandal that erupted during George H.W. Bush’s administration. As the S&L bank chairman, Charles Keating had paid $1.3 million to bribe five members of Congress, including McCain, to interfere with government regulators on behalf of the savings bank.

The experience so scarred McCain that he became a vigorous advocate of campaign finance reform and in the process reportedly became friends with Soros.
(4) Moroccan Government

According to Pollock, the McCain Institute has also taken at least $100,000 in “donations” from OCP, S.A., a Moroccan state-owned phosphate company operating in Western Sahara which repeatedly has been accused of worker abuse and exploitation.

Morocco seized Western Sahara in 1975 and has since occupied the region by force in defiance of U.N. resolutions and legal declarations by other international bodies. Human rights groups, including the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice, say Morocco’s state-owned companies, including OCP, subject its workforce to gruesome conditions while exploiting Western Sahara’s natural resources, especially phosphate, Morocco’s “white gold” that is used to make fertilizer. The Western Sahara holds half of the world’s phosphate reserves.

The King of Morocco was also a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary Clinton personally accepted $12 million from the King in return for holding a CGI (the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative) regional meeting in Morocco. OCP, the Moroccan state-owned phosphate company that “donated” $100,000 to the McCain Institute, was a major sponsor of the CGI meeting, and Bill Clinton was the featured speaker.

McCain has lavished effusive praise on the King of Morocco, saying in 2011, that the country was a “positive example to governments across the Middle East and North Africa.”
(5) Pro-Iran Foundation

Pollock reports that the McCain Institute has also accepted at least $100,000 from the pro-Iranian Pivotal Foundation, founded by Francis Najafi who owns the private equity and real estate firm Pivotal Group.

The Pivotal Foundation has in the last three years given $205,000 to the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), which has been a vocal advocate for the Iranian nuclear deal the Obama administration negotiated. The NIAC describes itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening the voice of Iranian Americans and promoting greater understanding between the American and Iranian people.” In other words, the NIAC act as Iran’s lobbyists in Washington, although it has neither registered as a lobbyist with Congress, nor filed as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
READ MORE  142 people fell ill from fecal contaminated food in UK Muslim restaurant

Indeed, NIAC President Trita Parsi has long been an advocate a lobbyist for Iran:

    In May 2013, Parsi spoke to a packed Capitol Hill meeting sponsored by Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison to argue in favor of the nuclear deal. Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress and is also deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
    As recently as May 2017, Parsi demanded that President Donald Trump and officials in his administration “cease questioning the integrity of” the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Sen. McCain’s involvement with Iran lobbyist NIAC is troublesome:

    Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, said: “This is a very real conflict of interest. This is the similar type of pattern we received with the Clinton Foundation in which foreign governments and foreign interests were throwing a lot of money in the hopes of trying to buy influence.”
    Lawrence Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, said that accepting contributions in the name of a sitting senator like McCain raises troubling issues: “In terms of the ethics of it, it does raise a broad question of people trying to get good will with the elected official. From a personal standpoint, I’d rather not see these entities exist.”
    Charles Ortel, a retired Wall Street investment banker and philanthropy law expert, said that “high government officials such as John McCain, [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama should not get involved with vehicles like these where substantial sums can be funneled over time in ways that at best, reeks of impropriety and at worse are public corruption.”

Pollock says the McCain Institute did not respond to requests for the dollar amounts of its high donors, when the donations were made and if there were strings attached to the contributions, claiming it did not have any of the information.

For his part, Sen. McCain professed he has no involvement with his own institute that is named after him, saying “I’m proud that the institute is named after me, but I have nothing to do with it” — which stretches credulity.

The institute’s donations from governments like Saudi Arabia and Morocco raise legitimate questions of pay-for-play. They also contradict McCain’s vision of human rights and national security.

How the McCain Institute spends its millions also raises questions.

Combating human trafficking is an important program of the Institute. The actor Ashton Kutcher is a member of the Institute’s Human Trafficking Advisory Council.

According to Baxter Dmitry of YourNewsWire, the Institute claims to have donated a total of $2.5 million to stop human trafficking: $500,000 in 2012; $500,000 in 2013; and $1,500,000 in 2014.

The only problem is every penny of the $2.5 million went to the Arizona State University Foundation that “does not appear to have anything whatsoever to do with human trafficking.”

(http://media.sermonaudio.com/gallery/photos/CooleyJason-02.jpg)

http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=91417740492

The Spirit of Constant Conspiracy And Paranoia
9/14/2017 (THU)
Audio: http://mp3.sa-media.com/download/91417740492/91417740492.mp3

http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/john-mccain-fights-preserve-obamacare-votes-no-repeal-affordable-care-act/
John McCain Fights To Preserve Obamacare, Again Voting ‘No’ On GOP Repeal Of Affordable Care Act
John McCain, who killed the previous repeal effort with his dramatic “no” vote in July, released a statement saying he would not support the latest proposal, by Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is Mr. McCain’s closest friend in the Senate.
9/22/17

Senator John McCain of Arizona announced on Friday that he would oppose the latest proposal to repeal the Obamacare Affordable Care Act, leaving Republican leaders with little hope of succeeding in their last-ditch attempt to dismantle the health law.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In his last remaining days in the Senate, RINO John McCain is committed to protecting and preserving the legacy of Barack Hussein Obama. He opposes President Trump at every turn in his quest to maintain the Liberal party line. I cannot think of a better case for term limits than John McCain.

John McCain, who killed the previous repeal effort with his dramatic “no” vote in July, released a statement saying he would not support the latest proposal, by Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is Mr. McCain’s closest friend in the Senate.

“I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal,” Mr. McCain said. “I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried. Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will affect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it.” source