Need your help - McCain POW voting record

[GunnyFreedom]

I am currently in an argument concerning John McCain's voting record on POW issues. He has demanded a record of the specific votes regarding his abhorrent record on POW issues.

I found a listing of McCain's voting record at Washington Post .com but it is 60 pages long, and would take me a week to sift through the whole thing.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/m000303/votes/page1/

Does anybody here have some distilled information on McCain's voting record?

The more we can prevent McCain's vote for the Primaries, the bigger voice we give Ron Paul at the convention. So this leads directly to our cause.

Please help!

[IcyPeaceMaker]

I know McCain worked with Kerry to make sure the pows mias were never heard from again:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Pows+mias+against+mccain&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

See this also:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Pows+mias+against+mccain+kerry&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

This is his heinous voting record and what he supports:
http://moonseeds.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/do-you-really-know-john-mccain/

[GunnyFreedom]

I've seen this, but it's not influential for this guy. it can be dismissed as rhetoric and spin. I need actual congressional records, and voting records. surely such things exist?

[GunnyFreedom]

I can't find anything on the congressional record, or in the votes.

[GunnyFreedom]

See, I keep finding the title of a bill, "Missing Service Personnel Act of 1996" in documents like those, but do a search at thomas.loc and it turns up nothing. 8-( WTF?

[nate895]

See, I keep finding the title of a bill, "Missing Service Personnel Act of 1996" in documents like those, but do a search at thomas.loc and it turns up nothing. 8-( WTF?

Find the bill number, otherwise you have to enter the exact title of the bill in THOMAS.

[GunnyFreedom]

So how do I find dozens of articles regarding the Missing Service Personnel Act of 1996, but not one mentioning the bill number? this is driving me nuts! Surely this stuff wasn't just made up about McCain. Where are the congressional records??!!??

[IPSecure]

Hope this helps:

http://www.nationalalliance.org/korea/k-alfond.htm

http://www.nationalalliance.org/bits/naf2005/050507.htm

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-565567711663005640

[GunnyFreedom]

There is nothing about the Congressional record in any of the above three links. 8-(

There is an example of McCain being rude to the family of a POW but that is all.

If McCain is really being obstructionist in regards to the POW MIA issue, and if he is really voting against recovery efforts, then there HAS to be instances in the congressional record. Right?

[IPSecure]

There is nothing about the Congressional record in any of the above three links. 8-(

There is an example of McCain being rude to the family of a POW but that is all.

If McCain is really being obstructionist in regards to the POW MIA issue, and if he is really voting against recovery efforts, then there HAS to be instances in the congressional record. Right?

I was thinking you could contact Dolores, from the above 2nd link. She may be able to help...

[GunnyFreedom]

Well, I sent an e-mail to her asking for information, but I am also concerned about the timeframes involved. In todays A.D.D. inspired world, even if an answer is RIGHT, if it takes longer than a day or two it doesn't count.

It should not be this hard to dig out this information! Believe you me, I utterly despise McCain for many reasons, of which the POW issue is one among many. But it is relatively easy to find Ron Paul's positions and voting records with regard to the Federal reserve in the Congressional Record. Why is it so hard to find anything regarding John McCain and the POW issue?

I can see only 2 possibilities. 1) something has taken place amongst the powers that be to make said information difficult to access. or 2) McCain's POW record is more rhetoric than reality.

I don't like EITHER possibility. I am hoping for a third possibility - that I am being stupid and somehow obstructing my own search.

But regardless of what possibility it turns out to be, I need to find the truth in any case. I rather pride myself in my ability to face up to and accept a truth I may not like. That very inability is one of the primary things that disgusts me about the American sheeple.

So IS there information in the Congressional Record revealing McCain's obstructionism WRT the POW issue, or are the Vietnam Vets Against McCain exaggerating things?

My own OCD will prevent me from resting or sleeping until I know the answer to that question, and I have broached the law of diminishing returns on my searching already. This thing could send me to the nuthouse!

[Aratus]

ross perot got annoyed at mccain...
is there a way to ask perot's people?

[Phantom]

Gunny, send these guys an e-mail. They may be able to help you.

http://powwarrior.wordpress.com/ (http://powwarrior.wordpress.com/)

[IcyPeaceMaker]

It's right here:
http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=53270

This is his voting record on every issue:
http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=53270

[Uncle Emanuel Watkins]

I am currently in an argument concerning John McCain's voting record on POW issues. He has demanded a record of the specific votes regarding his abhorrent record on POW issues.

I found a listing of McCain's voting record at Washington Post .com but it is 60 pages long, and would take me a week to sift through the whole thing.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/m000303/votes/page1/

Does anybody here have some distilled information on McCain's voting record?

The more we can prevent McCain's vote for the Primaries, the bigger voice we give Ron Paul at the convention. So this leads directly to our cause.

Please help!

To advance Social-Contract theory -- the ideal of great government that our forefathers shared with the French-Revolution during the American Enlightenment -- we should break from the past by understanding the significance of the terms below:

Transcendental Civil Disobedience: An American movement that led people out from under legal tyranny towards the civil purpose our Founding Fathers designed into the Constitution which irresponsibly placed a flesh and blood face to tyranny. The theory of Civil Disobedience moved people to alter events by disciplining forces outside of themselves.
Don't underestimate the significance of this movement started by Ralph Waldo Emerson. While it was our Founding Fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence, it has been said that it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who defined the American character by shining a light on it.

Transcendental Legal Disobedience: A movement out from legal tyranny towards natioal civil purpose by responsibly viewing legal tyranny as not a force made up of a face of flesh and blood but one made up of a faceless principality and power without a soul.
The actions of Legal Disobedience require us to discipline ourselves within by not bickering politically about liberal or conservative issues concerning the legal precedents outside of the original civil purpose our founding fathers designed into the Constitution -- We the people in order to establish a more perfect Union of collective contentment . . ..
We achieve this legal disobediance by compromising with our neighbors rather than taking them to court, by firing our lawyers, by legally abolishing the paying of taxes, by lowering our fines, by boycotting large corporations who use lawyers as mouthpieces when speaking to us as both employees and customers, by expanding the rights of inventers of the American dream while diminishing the schemes of money changing lobbyists who buy forgiveness for past sins and future indulgences against the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution . . . etc..
The science here is to narrow our focus towards a civil purpose, transcendentalism, by the extracting of ourselves from the hellish confines of legal tyranny -- a necessary evil.

We the people in the United States now live in a legal tyranny. In this legal tyranny, the strange law makers running our government do not appreciate the civil purpose our forefathers designed into our Constitution. Because it doesn't pay them to do so! I say that these law makers are strangers to us because they don't share the definition in the Constitution of what we are as Americans, they don't share the common culture our founding forefathers intended for us and they don't share the common character of who most Americans are today.
Because WE made the mistake of electing lawyers to run our government, these legal experts do what is "in their best interest" in regards to both domestic and foreign policy by interpreting the U.S. Constitution in legal terms. As a consequence, we have lost our souls, our birthright, as Americans by the way we also interpret our Constitution in legal terms. We really can't blame our lawyers hatefully for the losing of our souls because they have lost theirs too. They are just as much asleep and helpless to all this cruelty, unhappiness and political promescuity as we have become.
I even dare to say that law makers Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama and John McCann are asleep.

[GunnyFreedom]

It's right here:
http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=53270

This is his voting record on every issue:
http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=53270


I came across that site in my research. But it either has to be incomplete, or no POW/MIA bills have come up in the Senate since 1995.

In "Defense" it goes back to 1995, and there are no POW/MIA bills listed.

In "Military Issues" it only goes back to 2002, and there are no POW/MIA bills listed.

In "Veterans Issues" it only goes back to 2005, and there are no POW/MIA bills listed.

Now granted, the majority of McCain's shenanigans with POW/MIA bills were from 1990 to 1993, and the site listed only goes back to 1995. But I have a hard time believing that there were no POW bills from 1995 to 2008.

But you begin to see my problem here...

[GunnyFreedom]

I've still got nothing 8-(

[IcyPeaceMaker]

The Kerry/McCain Campaign Against Ted Sampley
and the lies of DIA operative Susan Katz Keating


By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch
February 29, 2004

When Republican Senator John McCain, on February 13, 2004, distributed a press release personally attacking me and Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry (V.V.A.J.K), it was no surprise. The New York Times printed McCain's attack the following day.

McCain's smear is predicated on lies, innuendo and misinformation printed in Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW/MIA Myth in America, a book written and published in 1994. McCain and his fellow senator John Kerry, a liberal Democrat, teamed up with the author and secretly helped ghost write the book as part of their post Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs campaign to discredit and shutdown the leading POW/MIA activists.

In the February 13, release, McCain instructed reporters to be "cautious" of Ted Sampley or any organization to which he belongs and to thoroughly investigate "Sampley's background and history of spreading outrageous slander and other disreputable behavior before inadvertently lending him or his allegations any credibility."

"I am well familiar with Mr. Sampley, and I know him to be one of the most despicable people I have ever had the misfortune to encounter," McCain (of Charles F. Keating fame) warned the media. "I consider him a fraud who preys on the hopes of family members of missing servicemen for his own profit. He is dishonorable, an enemy of the truth, and despite his claims, he does not speak for or represent the views of all but a few veterans. The many veterans I know would think it a disgrace to be considered a comrade or supporter of Ted Sampley."

Back in 1972, while stationed at Fort Bragg, I volunteered my off duty time to a small POW/MIA group (Americans Who Care) which helped Joe McCain when he traveled through North Carolina seeking to raise public awareness about his brother POW John McCain. Joe, like so many other citizens was concerned about Hanoi's atrocious abuse of U.S. prisoners of war and wanted to ensure that POW McCain would be released when the war was over.

Yet, McCain categorizes me as "one of the most despicable people" he "ever had the misfortune to encounter?" What does that say about his relationship with the Vietnamese prison guards whom he claims brutally tortured him daily?

Even though McCain's slanderous attack on me has been repeated in the worldwide media, no reporter, journalist, or columnist explained exactly what McCain meant and I am not sure they knew. Apparently all they needed to know was that a "John McCain, a bonafide POW war hero" said it, whatever it meant, so it must be creditable enough to publish.

McCain's press release is a cunning use of classic black propaganda defined as an attack on a person or group using bogus information that conceals or fakes its source.

Black propaganda consists of "lies, misrepresentations and innuendo fashioned to injure, impede or destroy the activity of another person or group." The lies are usually issued from contrived sources removed from the actual author. Its overall objective is to cause another person or a group to be labeled despicable, evil, frauds and non-creditable.

In this case, McCain used lies he helped create in "Prisoners of Hope" as facts to justify his personal attack on me. The removed sources for the attack were McCain, Sen. John Kerry and Army Col. Joe Schlatter of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

McCain and Kerry used such tactics very effectively against POW/MIA families and activists during the 1991-92 Senate Select Committee on POW and MIA Affairs. Kerry was co-chairman and McCain, a committee member.

Many POW/MIA families claim that Kerry to be "the person in Washington who has done more to bury the POW/MIA issue than any other elected official is none other than U.S. Senator John McCain from Arizona, himself a former POW."

The POW/MIA families will readily supply file folders inches thick of correspondence related to Kerry and McCain's betrayal.

The Select Committee, established August 1991, was tasked with the mission of resolving the lingering POW/MIA issue by either gaining the release of American prisoners of war believed to be alive under the control of Hanoi, but never released, or explaining what happened to the missing prisoners.

In hindsight, it is obvious that McCain and Kerry were more interested in using the Select Committee as a means to justify lifting the U.S. imposed trade embargo against Vietnam than resolving the issue of missing U.S. servicemen.

From the onset of the hearings, Kerry and McCain's obvious bias for Vietnam were the source of many confrontations between the Select Committee and the POW/MIA activists.

At one point during the Select Committee hearings, the Kerry/McCain team were caught coaching DIA witnesses on how to discredit satellite imagery that showed the presence of living U.S. POWs in both Vietnam and Laos. When the activists found out about the witness tampering, they confronted Kerry and demanded his resignation. Numerous letters were written to the Select Committee demanding an outside investigation of the incident.

To deflect attention from their many clearly unethical acts, Kerry and McCain teamed up again and turned on the activist, managing to divert the entire Select Committee away from investigating Vietnam focusing instead on investigating the POW/MIA families and activist for alleged fraudulent fund raising.

The Kerry/McCain team disguised their investigation of the POW/MIA families and activists and the subpoenaing of private and organizational financial records by claiming they only wanted "to get to the truth." Kerry and McCain explained that they were looking for "professional predators" who were at work within the POW/MIA issue "feeding on the false hopes of the POW/MIA families."

In actuality, Kerry and McCain adopted the presumption that anyone or organization who raised funds based the assertion that Vietnam was still holding living American POWs was committing fraudulent fund-raising and deserved to be publicly chastised and prosecuted in court.

The Select Committee was formed because of the volumes of intelligence pointing to the existence of live POWs still in captivity.

McCain, the "former POW hero," wasted no time making headlines by alleging that most of the activist involved in POW/MIA issue were only in it for the money. He stated in front of a room full of cameras, "the people who have done these things are not zealots in a good cause. They are criminals and some of the most craven, most cynical and most despicable human beings to ever run a scam."

In two sentences McCain effectively branded nearly all the activist POW/MIA families and Vietnam veteran activists as "despicable" and "criminals."

Now you know what McCain was talking about when he referred to me as "despicable" and a "fraud who preys on the hopes of family members of missing servicemen for his own profit."

Another activist whom Kerry and McCain attempted to malign was former POW, Navy Capt. Eugene "Red" McDaniel (Ret.).

McDaniel, who journalist Monika Jensen-Stevenson characterized as "one of the most tortured Americans in the history of war" was lumped into the fraud category because he had committed the unpardonable offense, in Kerry's and McCain's eyes, of drafting a letter signed by fifty of his fellow POWs urging that the Vietnam trade embargo not be lifted until Hanoi provided a full and honest accounting of all American POW/MIAs.

Nearing the end of the Select Committee, the Kerry/McCain team announced to the press that they had turned their findings over to the Justice Department and assured them that multiple indictments would follow.

Much later, after the national media had lost interest, a Justice Department official quietly acknowledged that the investigation had been completed and they had found no illegal activities and no reason to indict anyone.

I was one of the leading activists who demanded Kerry's resignation for witness tampering and one of the first the Kerry/McCain tag team singled out for investigation. They subpoenaed my personal financial records, those of the US Veteran Dispatch ( my privately owned veteran's newspaper) and Homecoming II Project, a now defunct non-profit POW/MIA organization which I had been appointed to chair.

After dissecting all of the seized records, the best the Kerry/McCain fraud investigators could deliver was an accusation that over the period of a couple of years Homecoming II had paid Ted Sampley $300,000.00 for t-shirts. I was not aware of the accusation until after it had been printed in the Select Committee Final Report. That accusation is an unadulterated lie.

It was manufactured to impugn me personally by implying that my motive for demanding an honest accounting of U.S. POW/MIAs is greed. Kerry and McCain could not document that accusation then, or can they now. They lied.

At the time of the Select Committee, Homecoming II was the most active POW/MIA organization in the country. We had office's in Washington, Thailand and in North Carolina, where I live. The U.S. Veteran Dispatch is a newspaper that I have been publishing since 1986. We were printing up to 20,000 copies per month which were distributed free to the public unless it was received by mail. The newspaper was funded through the sale of veteran related materials.

By causing the activists to be investigated for fraud, Kerry and McCain not only drew attention away from their unethical acts, but also away from findings the Select Committee was finally being forced to acknowledge - "there is evidence, moreover that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number [U.S. POW's held captive by Vietnam] after Operation Homecoming," (quoted from page 7 of the Select Committee January 13, 1993 report).

From the beginning it had been Kerry and McCain's objective to discredit all evidence pointing to the possibility of living US POW's left behind in Vietnam. Instead of giving the POW's the benefit of the doubt by trying to prove that they were still alive, the Kerry/McCain team took the position that there was no proof that POW's were still alive.

Both Kerry and McCain continued to work hard to normalize diplomatic and trade relations with communist Vietnam. Kerry and McCain knew that President Bill Clinton was being pressured to lift the embargo and that he needed their help because candidate Clinton had promised, in an April 27, 1992 campaign letter, not to normalize relations or offer any assistance to Vietnam until it had fully assisted in solving the live POW issue.

"Before I would normalize relations or provide assistance to any of the countries involved, they would be required to open their files and actively assist in solving this issue. I firmly believe that America should never leave its warriors on the battlefield. This is not a political issue; it is a moral test of those values and traits that made America great," Clinton said in the letter.

POW/MIA family organizations remained adamantly opposed to removing the embargo. They believed, rightfully so, that the embargo was the only leverage powerful enough to force Vietnam to come clean.

By 1994, the way was clear for Kerry and McCain to provide political cover for President Clinton with his efforts to lift the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam.

In a smoothly choreographed political maneuver, Clinton used the two "Vietnam War heroes" and their "no POWs are left alive conclusion" as justification to lift the trade embargo...having them stand side by side with him when he made the announcement.

At the same time, to ensure that the POW issue could be not be resurrected by the POW/MIA families and activist, Kerry and McCain consummated their deceit by spoon feeding tainted and false data to Susan Katz Keating, an ambitious Washington Times reporter with intiment ties to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). She planned writing a bestseller book - Prisoners of Hope - with information spoon fed her by DIA.

Kerry and McCain also relied heavily on a secret Pentagon collaborator, Army Col. Joe Schlatter who from 1986 to 1995, was tasked with running the Defense Intelligence Agency Special Office for POW-MIA Affairs.

Schlatter's job while heading the POW/MIA office was to correlate and interpret the hundreds of intelligence reports about living American POWs left in Southeast Asia that were pouring into the Pentagon.

Schlatter had actually early on in his assignment begun to systematically kill on paper the several hundred U.S. servicemen described as prisoners in the intelligence reports.

Later, when called upon by the Kerry/McCain team, Schlatter joined in attempting to discredit (killing the messenger) any individual or group that got in the way of plans to normalize U.S. trade relations with Vietnam.

Schlatter made sure that Keating was issued a special Pentagon identification card giving her extensive access to his office, thoughts and opinions. Schlatter (or members of his staff) often acted as a secret conduit between the Kerry/McCain team and Keating.

By November 1994, Keating had written and published Prisoners of Hope; Exploiting the POW Myth in America (Random House).

In her acknowledgments, DIA operative Keating, made mention of her indebtedness to "contacts within the Department of Defense."

In addition, she gave "special mention" to "POW hero, Senator John McCain, who graciously returned every phone call and answered every question."

It did not take the POW families long to learn that Keating's Prisoners of Hope was a foul regurgitation of Kerry and McCain's allegations against the activists who had diligently kept the POW/MIA issue before the American people for years, people Keating labeled as "phonies and unscrupulous."

Keating wrote that the POW/MIA issue was a "destructive national myth" and that President Clinton should immediately get rid of it by declaring dead all servicemen listed as missing in action. He did shortly afterward.

Prisoners of Hope is sloppy, plagued by lies, and gross errors. Using innuendos, lies and scrambled facts, along with the help of Kerry and McCain, Keating, attacked all the leading POW/MIA activists.

She hoped to convince her readers "that for more than 20 years, families of missing servicemen, veterans, and concerned citizens, faked the issue of American servicemen still missing from the Vietnam War to "scam the American public of millions of dollars" in donations.

Keating accused former Vietnam POWs "Red" McDaniel and Mark Smith, Senator Bob Smith, R-NH, former Congressman Billy Hendon, R-NC, former Congressman John LeBoutillier, R-NY, former Army Lieutenant Colonel James "Bo" Gritz, former Army Green Beret Ted Sampley and others of being "charlatans and frauds" who were helping to "further" the POW/MIA "conspiracy myth" for "profit."

Even after many victims of Keating's poison pen offered factual evidence of her misrepresentations and negligence, the establishment press still took Keating's work at face value.

Instead of recognizing Prisoners of Hope as undocumented literary garbage, pundits gave the book "rave" reviews, adding that it was time for POW families to move on and forget the "ghosts" of Vietnam.

In 1995, not long after Keating's Prisoners of Hope hit the book stores and the discount table, Col. Schlatter retired.

From the safety of his retirement, Col. Schlatter finally admitted his true colors on the Internet, "I am a retired Army colonel and my politics are somewhat to the left; I am a yellow-dog Democrat and voted for Bill Clinton twice. I favor serious gun control."

Col. Schlatter's admittance that he is a "leftist," a Clinton loyalist who favors "serious gun control," and a "Yellow Dog Democrat, (meaning he would vote for a yellow dog before he would a Republican)" might explain why he so vigorously defends the communist Vietnamese?

Forever the loyal partisan collaborator, Col. Joe Schlatter has kept the lies in Keating's failed book alive by posting it's contents on the Internet on news groups such as alt.war.vietnam.

By 1997, he had created a "MIA Facts" web domain www.miafacts.org/

Any time information or comments pertaining to the POW/MIA issue or information critical of McCain and Kerry appear on the Internet, Col. Schlatter will jump in suggesting that the poster should visit his web pages to read "the real truth" about what he calls the "POW/MIA myth." Miafacts.org is peppered with twisted facts, lies, and distortions, pure black propaganda.

[IcyPeaceMaker]

http://www.pow-miafamilies.org/

[GunnyFreedom]

Indeed, there are reams and reams of anecdotal evidence of John McCain's obstructionism. Reported speeches, even recorded speeches of his obstructionism on YouTube.

But how has all of this missed finding it's way into the Congressional record?

[IcyPeaceMaker]

Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/pow/senate_house/investigation_S.html

Executive summary:
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1993_rpt/pow-exec.html

"All POW/MIA Serch Results"
http://search.freefind.com/find.html?pageid=r&id=8704641&mode=ALL&query=senate+select+committee+&fr=0

The Cover-up
http://www.aiipowmia.com/reports/corry.html