Is McCain's War Record Fair Game?
June 30, 2008(The Politico) This story was written by Ben Smith.
The highest voltage third rail of this presidential campaign may not be race, sex, or age, but Senator John McCain's military service.
McCain's campaign Sunday issued a pair of outraged statements after retired general and Barack Obama supporter Wesley Clark said he didn't think that McCain’s service as a fighter pilot and prisoner of war was relevant to running the country. Obama has consistently praised McCain's service, and called him "a genuine American hero."
But farther to the left - and among some of McCain's conservative enemies as well - harsher attacks are circulating. Critics have accused McCain of war crimes for bombing targets in Hanoi in the 1960s. Sunday, a widely read liberal blog accused McCain of "disloyalty" during his captivity in Vietnam for his coerced participation in propaganda films and interviews after he’d been tortured.
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Some anti-war activists link McCain's current position on Iraq to his time in Vietnam.
"I wouldn't characterize anybody who fought in Vietnam as a war hero," said Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the theatrical anti-war group Code Pink. "In 23 bombing sorties, there must have been civilians that were killed and there's no heroism to that."
"Anyone who can't look back and admit how wrong it was to be in Vietnam and be killing civilians deserves to be challenged," she said, though she stressed that her group is more focused on McCain's present support for the war in Iraq than on his past.
Benjamin said she had her doubts about whether criticism of McCain's record could catch on, and she's not the only skeptic. Even Valentine, the CounterPunch author, said McCain's wartime experience could only be questioned "off-Broadway."
Others, however, disagree, and the increasing buzz of emails and blog posts-the new equivalent on the left of what, in the 1990s, would have been stirrings on conservative talk radio-suggest that this line of attack won't go away, at least not from elements of the energized pro-Obama grassroots, and from parts of the anti-war left.
A search of Obama’s community website, my.BarackObama.com, finds two posts calling McCain a “war criminal.â€
Noam Chomsky, the linguist and activist, said in an email that he thought Americans should question the relevance of McCain's torture in an unjust war to his campaign.
"The questions could scarcely even be understood within the reigning intellectual and moral culture-though I don't doubt that much of the population would understand," Chomsky said.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/30/politics/politico/main4218172.shtml