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By John Dickerson
It’s all about perspective. Some voters see Arizona U.S. Senator John McCain’s torture in a Viet Cong prisoner-of-war camp as a badge of honor. Others claim the years of agony made him lose his mind. Still others, even in his home state, don’t even know he was a torture victim.
Regardless of your opinion (or lack thereof) you might enjoy reading this 34-year old, 44 page military report, which describes Commander John S. McCain’s treatment by the Viet Cong. The report is available on the Department of Defense’s Web site. It was “sanitized” in August 2000. As a result, you’ll see a few black-marker redactions, but they’re fairly limited.
In related news, the Drudge Retort claims that McCain’s Vietnamese jailer (now 75 years old) is saying McCain was “very loyal to the U.S. military, to his beliefs and to his country. In all of our debates, he never admitted that the war was a mistake.”
According to the Retort (dubbed a liberal version of the Druge Report), Tran Trong Duyet also said, “If I were an American voter, I would vote for Mr. John McCain.”
Quipped one Retort commenter, “Looks like McCain’s getting out the torture vote.”
