Top Congressional Republicans Condemn Manning Decision

Fox News offers a piece on the Congressional response to President Obama's freeing convicted leaker and traitor former PFC Manning.

Top Congressional Republicans condemned Tuesday the decision by President Barack Obama to commute former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning’s 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified documents.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., blasted the decision, calling it “outrageous.”

“Chelsea Manning’s treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. President Obama now leaves in place a dangerous precedent that those who compromise our national security won’t be held accountable for their crimes,” Ryan said in a statement.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the decision was a “grave mistake.”

"It is a sad, yet perhaps fitting commentary on President Obama’s failed national security policies that he would commute the sentence of an individual that endangered the lives of American troops, diplomats, and intelligence sources by leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents to Wikileaks, a virulently anti-American organization that was a tool of Russia’s recent interference in our elections."

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video clip via the below link:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01/18/top-congressional-republicans-condemn-chelsea-manning-decision.html?cmpid=NL_morninghl

Trump Owes John McCain And All POWs A Humble Apology

I rarely agree with Richard Cohen, a liberal Washington Post columnist, but I agree with him concerning Donald Trump's thoughtless and outrageous comments about John McCain and other prisoners of war.

I also agree with Cohen that Trump (and everyone) ought to read Robert Timberg's The Nightingale's Song (although I somehow doubt that Trump reads anything that is not about himself).

As Cohen notes in his column, the book covers McCain's captivity in North Vietnam. The book also covers three other naval academy graduates who went on to serve in Vietnam; Oliver North, James Webb and Robert McFarland.

“I think it’s important for Donald Trump to express his appreciation for veterans — not John McCain, but veterans who were incarcerated as prisoners of war,” John McCain said over the weekend. “When he said, ‘I don’t like people who were captured,’ then there’s a body of American heroes that I’d like to see him retract that statement — not about me, but about the others.”

McCain, while thoroughly admirable, has it wrong. What Trump said was about him — explicitly about him and only inferentially about other POWs captured during the Vietnam War. Trump was purposely denigrating the heroism of McCain, a POW for more than five years, in solitary for two years, tortured all the time, deprived of food and medicine, untreated for the injuries he received when he had to bail out of his A-4 Skyhawk over Hanoi and was beaten and bayoneted on the ground. And then, when it was discovered that his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., had been named commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater, McCain was offered an early release from prison. This would have provided the North Vietnamese with a propaganda coup, but it also would have violated Navy regulation — first in, first out. McCain turned it down. The torture resumed.

That same year, 1968, the 22-year-old Donald Trump moved straight into his father’s business. His military experience was limited to attendance at the New York Military Academy, in suburban New York, where he had been sent for being a brat. He undoubtedly got all sort of medals for making his bed and brushing his teeth and learned, as we all do, much about courage and perseverance from his experience.

Still, Trump ought to read “The Nightingale’s Song” for a full account of McCain’s naval life. The book, written by Robert Timberg, was a classic in its time (1995), but it is hardly dated. It might, in fact, shame Trump into realizing that McCain did what he could never have — probably. (After all, we never know.) 

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/05/09/john-mccain-has-it-wrong-trump-purposely-denigrated-his-heroism/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_popns

John McCain Tells How Neil Armstrong Inspired The Vietnam War's POWs

Seantor John McCain offers an interesting piece in the Washington Post on how Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon inspired him and the other POWs who held in prison by the communist North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

Neil Armstrong's passing reminded me of the moment I learned of his historic accomplishment. I didn’t gather with my family around the television to watch him take his “small step” onto the surface of the moon. When the momentous event occurred, I had no idea it was happening. I and several hundred comrades were otherwise engaged — prisoners of war in the enemy’s capital, where in 1969, news could travel slowly.

... Once in a while, the Vietnamese unwittingly let a little good news slip by. One evening, Hannah played a clip of a speech by a prominent American opponent of the war. It was a quick, throwaway line in a long list of diatribes about the war and the president. But we all caught it. The quote was something like: “President Nixon can put a man on the moon, but he can’t end the war in Vietnam.”

Yes, that was news to us, arriving years after the successful Apollo 11 mission.

We had all heard President John F. Kennedy commit our country to putting a man on the moon within a decade. Most of us prisoners were pilots, and we admired and envied the pilots who became Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts. Most of all, we wanted our pride in our country, our love for the place where free people reached for the stars, reaffirmed in the place where it had been tested and mocked.

In that one screw-up, that brief mention of glorious news, our morale soared. We felt almost physically strengthened as we communicated with each other in whispers and tap code: “Did you hear that? Did you? We put a man on the moon. My God, we did it.”

Many years later, I had the honor of meeting the man who planted that flag. I told him how we had learned what he had done and how much it had meant to us. Armstrong was a brave man who made his countrymen proud, but he was also a modest man with a quiet demeanor, and he seemed moved by the recollection.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/john-mccain-how-neil-armstrong-inspired-a-pow/2012/09/13/5bd707e2-fdc0-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions