"Almost no one knows that the U.S.'s purported "special" ally tried to sink a Navy ship, and then quibbled for years over what it would pay in compensation to the widows, children, and parents of those it killed and to the United States for the ship it destroyed. (Thirteen years after the attack, it grudgingly paid $6 million for a ship valued at $40 million.)
"The one piece of this story that did make it into the mainstream media has also remained astonishingly buried: testimony that provided the final nail in the coffin of claims that the Israeli attack --which lasted for hours; consisted of rockets, napalm, and torpedoes; and killed 34 Americans total and injured over 170 --was somehow accidental.
"This testimony, which was read at the Capitol Hill event, was by Captain Ward Boston, the chief counsel to the one U.S. government investigation ever undertaken of this attack, the Naval Court of Inquiry.
"In his testimony, Boston stated that he had decided to end his 30-year silence and was going to expose the truth: the Court of Inquiry conclusions had been a sham. President Lyndon Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, had ordered the court to cover up the fact that all the evidence had indicated clearly that the attack had been intentional."
Could Admiral John S. McCain Jr. have been rewarded for his loyal service (to Israel) by suppressing the truth about our own government's cover-up of Israel's vicious attack on the USS Liberty? Is there some connection between Daddy McCain's assistance to the cover-up and John McCain III's rescue from the POW camp in Hanoi 6 years later?
Like the Indian gaming scandal, Senator McCain's "investigation" of missing American servicemen in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in 1991-1993, was also "inept." For some reason, McCain ridiculed a satellite photo taken in 1988 that showed what Department of Defense (DOD) experts testified was a valid, classified United States military Pilot Distress code in a dry rice paddy in Sam Neua Province, Laos.
According to DOD documents cited in the 2007 New York Times bestseller - An Enormous Crime - those DOD experts testified that each of the letters in the "USA" were 12 feet tall and together the 3 letters stretched 37 feet across the dry paddy, and the highly classified "Walking K" Escape and Evasion symbol beneath the "USA" was 24 feet tall and 19 feet across. DOD experts told you that this "USA Walking K" pilot distress code "must be considered valid until proven otherwise."
Despite the expert testimony - and the fact that roughly 90 independent intelligence sources had reported the presence of American POW's in Sam Neua Province after the Vietnam War; that a radio intercept had told of U.S. POW's in the province; and that a different satellite photo - also taken in 1988 - had shown the name of a U.S. pilot laid out beside a trail near where the "USA Walking K" was seen in the rice paddy. Despite that, Senator McCain declared in his 2002 memoir - Worth The Fighting For - that the "USA Walking K" pilot distress code was not a plea for rescue as the DOD experts said, but instead was "a young Laotian boy's handiwork that he had copied off an envelope."
For whatever reason, the McCains have been repeatedly tested to keep their secrets, which is the way of many "family businesses."
In John McCain's biography, he lists one of his occupations as a beer distributor. He came into that business through marrying Jim Hensley's daughter Cindy. According to Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, "the Hensleys were key contributors of his political career." McCain's late father-in-law, Jim Hensley was the owner of the biggest Anheuser-Busch beer distributors in the nation, but it is the origins of the Hensley fortune which again casts a shadow over McCain III.
Jim Hensley got his start as a henchmen for Kemper Marley, which was the behind the scenes political boss and Lansky crime family's top man of Arizona. Marley built up a liquor distribution monopoly in Arizona, but in 1948, 52 employees of Marley's went to jail for federal liquor violations, including Jim Hensley. Some people say that Kemper Marley paid for Hensley's loyalty by setting him up in the beer distribution business, which is now worth $200 million and has helped finance McCain's political career.
Of course, John McCain III himself can not be held accountable for the sins of his father-in-law, but the fact is that this "reformer" owes his political and financial fortunes to some of the biggest names in organized crime. Perhaps because of Senator McCain's influence over the Indian gaming "investigation," the Las Vegas Gambling industry is also among McCain's primary financial backers.
That way, should he become President, they can keep the secrets, money, power, and investigative authority all in the family.
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