French TV archive releases Extended McCain POW video

[Contrary1]

PARIS - A French national archive has posted online extended footage of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain being interviewed as a bedridden prisoner during the Vietnam War.

French reporter Francois Chalais conducted the interview. His widow says the online release this week of 4 minutes, 33 seconds of footage is the fullest distribution of the interview since it first aired four decades ago.

The video shows McCain shirtless and unshaven, smoking a cigarette. Answering questions from Chalais, he spoke about being shot down over Hanoi on Oct. 25, 1967, and parachuting into a lake.

<snip>

The French national audiovisual archive INA is posting the interview on its Web site, http://www.ina.fr for one week. It was first broadcast on French television program Panorama in January 1968..."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27326373


The part with the McCain interview is just past the half way point.

http://www.ina.fr

[iamahaingttta]

1. Interesting. What I've been waiting for...

...and can't seem to find anywhere, are the propaganda films he made for the North Vietnamese.
Somebody somewhere has them.
I keep hoping that they end up on Youtube as an October surprise.

[endthewar]

2. I'm waiting for the pictures of Palin attending the AIP Conventions

We know that she attended at least one of them with Todd. Surely someone had a camera there and is probably waiting until right before the election to release some pictures.

[Gin]

4. I found this very interesting....he loved his wife....hmmmm...until he saw her

again.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

6. Right, with tears in his eyes. He then comes back and treats her like garbage.

[matt819]

3. So much for name, rank, and serial number

Okay, it's a propaganda film, and we don't know the circumstances under which that interview was conducted, and we don't know the extent to which other POWs responded (or didn't) in other propaganda efforts. That said, so much for name, rank, and serial number.

[Poll_Blind]

5. Cluster bombs. Man, that's fucked up.

Cluster bombs and landmines. As if war couldn't get bad enough.

PB

[Dissent Is Patriotic]

7. Sad, so sad...I would think a man that had been through that

would be filled with compassion...I feel sorry for the pathetic man he has become...I feel sorry for the way he has disgraced himself...He could have taken his experience and turned himself into the ultimate advocate for our soldiers, but sadly, he did no such thing...seeing this truly emotional footage of him only makes me lament what could have been.

[JDPriestly]

8. Dissent is Patriotic, I share your response.

How can anyone see what all of these people, the Vietnamese on the ground and John McCain in his bed so far from home, suffered and not become a complete pacifist? How could McCain have lived through that and still speak so lightly of "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." He certainly showed emotion in the film. Doesn't he know what suffering his bombs caused?

[Thothmes]

9. They were not McCain's bombs,

They belonged to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The man who ordered them to be dropped on those Vietnamese.

[JDPriestly]

10. The older I get the more I oppose war.

I have a family member who lived through WWII American and English bombings as a child. That was a war that we had to fight. But the damage done to children who live through bombing raids is pretty awful. If grown men have traumatic distress after surviving the horrors of war, imagine what it does to a child of five or six.

When I see pictures of children running from bombs in war, I have no sympathy for those who drop the bombs -- especially for those who drop the bombs in unnecessary, unjustified wars such as the Vietnamese and Iraqi wars.

Some refused to fight or drop bombs. Some chose to fight or drop bombs. Each choice had its consequences. John McCain chose to fight in a war that was cruel and not justified. He paid the consequences.

The children in Viet Nam and in Iraq did not choose to live in a country in which bombs were dropping all around them, killing their playmates and their parents and destroying their homes.

Dropping bombs is a particularly inhuman method of killing. The risk to the person dropping the bomb is very low. The risk to many people on whom the bomb is being dropped is very high.

McCain's risk of injury or death was tiny compared to the risk of the people on whom he dropped bombs. I wonder if he has ever thought of that?

[Thothmes]

11. Without Lyndon Johnson

McCain would never have had to decide whether to drop bombs or not. The President at that time is the real war criminal.

[JDPriestly]

12. A soldier has the duty to obey lawful orders.

That is the question. What is a lawful order? Bombing war material or munitions factories is one thing, but bombing ordinary people trying to hide on the ground is quite another.

I did not say that McCain was a war criminal. The bombings were criminal to the extent that they were aimed at civilians.

[DavidDvorkin]

14. Ja. Chohnnie vas chust following ordahs.

[ogneopasno]

13. Wait, he was a POW? Seriesly??//?////??/??????

nt