|
Recent Resources for Feminists
 October 16, 2008, Issue 1063
Cover Story
 Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM DICKINSON
At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.
McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.
There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."
On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.
"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."
"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.
"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.
"Why? Where are you going to, John?"
"Oh, I'm going to Rio."
"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
"I got a better chance of getting laid."
Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."
McCAIN FIRST
This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.
In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.
In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.
This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself. Few politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness. In Mc- Cain's version of his life, he is a prodigal son who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam, learned to put "country first." Remade by the Keating Five scandal that nearly wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a "reformer" and a "maverick," righteously eschewing anything that "might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office."
It's a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in Washington. But during the course of this year's campaign, the mask has slipped. "Let's face it," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn't bend his principles for politics. That's just not true."
We have now watched McCain run twice for president. The first time he positioned himself as a principled centrist and decried the politics of Karl Rove and the influence of the religious right, imploring voters to judge candidates "by the example we set, by the way we conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice politics." After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left breaking with the president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting with joining the Democratic Party.
In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as "agents of intolerance," promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base. And he has engaged in a "practice of politics" so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain's campaign ads go "too far" and fail the "truth test."
The missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in 2004. "McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and Enron the corrupt relationship between Bush's team and the corporate sector," says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in 2001. "But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second life. He saw Bush and Cheney's ability to draw stark contrasts between black and white, villains and good guys. And that's why McCain changed." (The McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)
Indeed, many leading Republicans who once admired McCain see his recent contortions to appease the GOP base as the undoing of a maverick. "John McCain's ambition overrode his basic character," says Rita Hauser, who served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the matter is that ambition is John McCain's basic character. Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for himself. To put the matter squarely: John McCain is his own special interest.
"John has made a pact with the devil," says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague's readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the "Gang of 14," which blocked some of Bush's worst judges from the federal bench.
"On all three sadly, sadly, sadly McCain has flip-flopped," Chafee says. And forget all the "Country First" sloganeering, he adds. "McCain is putting himself first. He's putting himself first in blinking neon lights."
THE NAVY BRAT
John Sidney McCain III has spent most of his life trying to escape the shadow of greater men. His grandfather Adm. John Sidney "Slew" McCain earned his four stars commanding a U.S. carrier force in World War II. His deeply ambitious father, Adm. "Junior" McCain, reached the same rank, commanding America's forces in the Pacific during Vietnam.
The youngest McCain was not cut from the same cloth. Even as a toddler, McCain recalls in Faith of My Fathers, his volcanic temper was on display. "At the smallest provocation," he would hold his breath until he passed out: "I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious." His parents cured him of this habit in a way only a CIA interrogator could appreciate: by dropping their blue-faced boy in a bathtub of ice-cold water.
Trailing his hard-charging, hard-drinking father from post to post, McCain didn't play well with others. Indeed, he concedes, his runty physique inspired a Napoleon complex: "My small stature motivated me to . . . fight the first kid who provoked me."
McCain spent his formative years among the Washington elite. His father himself deep in the throes of a daddy complex had secured a political post as the Navy's chief liaison to the Senate, a job his son would later hold, and the McCain home on Southeast 1st Street was a high-powered pit stop in the Washington cocktail circuit. Growing up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege allowed, earning the nicknames "Punk" and "McNasty." Even his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as "a mean little fucker."
McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father's taste for drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge.
McCain's admittance to Annapolis was preordained by his bloodline. But martial discipline did not seem to have much of an impact on his character. By his own account, McCain was a lazy, incurious student; he squeaked by only by prevailing upon his buddies to help him cram for exams. He continued to get sauced and treat girls badly. Before meeting a girlfriend's parents for the first time, McCain got so shitfaced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he showed up in his white midshipman's uniform.
His grandfather's name and his father's forbearance brought McCain a charmed existence at Annapolis. On his first trip at sea to Rio de Janeiro aboard the USS Hunt the captain was a former student of his father. While McCain's classmates learned the ins and outs of the boiler room, McCain got to pilot the ship to South America and back. In Rio, he hobnobbed with admirals and the president of Brazil.
Back on campus, McCain's short fuse was legend. "We'd hear this thunderous screaming and yelling between him and his roommate doors slamming and one of them would go running down the hall," recalls Phil Butler, who lived across the hall from McCain at the academy. "It was a regular occurrence."
When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to "bilge out" because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy's commandant stepped in. Calling McCain "spoiled" to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.
"He was a huge screw-off," recalls Butler. "He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather they couldn't exactly get rid of him."
McCain's self-described "four-year course of insubordination" ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom 894th out of a class of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.
BOTTOM GUN
In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.
"I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the actual flying," McCain writes. "I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties." McCain chased a lot of tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn't.
In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing. The plane stalled, and McCain was knocked cold on impact. When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap, and then went out carousing that night.
Off duty on his Mediterranean tours, McCain frequented the casinos of Monte Carlo, cultivating his taste for what he calls the "addictive" game of craps. McCain's thrill-seeking carried over into his day job. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described "daredevil clowning" plunged much of the area into a blackout.
That should have been the end of McCain's flying career. "In the Navy, if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your wings," says Butler, who, like his former classmate, was shot down and taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Spark "a small international incident" like McCain had? Any other pilot would have "found themselves as the deck officer on a destroyer someplace in a hurry," says Butler.
"But, God, he had family pull. He was directly related to the CEO you know?"
McCain was undeterred by the crashes. Nearly a decade out of the academy, his career adrift, he decided he wanted to fly combat in Vietnam. His motivation wasn't to contain communism or put his country first. It was the only way he could think of to earn the respect of the man he calls his "distant, inscrutable patriarch." He needed to secure a command post in the Navy and to do that, his career needed the jump-start that only a creditable war record could provide.
As he would so many times in his career, McCain pulled strings to get ahead. After a game of tennis, McCain prevailed upon the undersecretary of the Navy that he was ready for Vietnam, despite his abysmal flight record. Sure enough, McCain was soon transferred to McCain Field an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, named after his grandfather to train for a post on the carrier USS Forrestal.
With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain formed the "Key Fess Yacht Club," which quickly became infamous for hosting toga parties in the officers' quarters and bringing bands down from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual knack for promotion, McCain rose from "vice commodore" to "commodore" of the club.
In 1964, while still at the base, McCain began a serious romance with Carol Shepp, a vivacious former model who had just divorced one of his classmates from Annapolis. Commandeering a Navy plane, McCain spent most weekends flying from Meridian to Philadelphia for their dates. They married the following summer.
That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.
By now, however, McCain's flying privileges were virtually irrevocable and he knew it. On one of his runs at McCain Field, when ground control put him in a holding pattern, the lieutenant commander once again pulled his family's rank. "Let me land," McCain demanded over his radio, "or I'll take my field and go home!"
TRIAL BY FIRE
Sometimes 3 a.m. moments occur at 10:52 in the morning.
It was July 29th, 1967, a hot, gusty morning in the Gulf of Tonkin atop the four-acre flight deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal. Perched in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk, Lt. Cmdr. John McCain ticked nervously through his preflight checklist.
Now 30 years old, McCain was trying to live up to his father's expectations, to finally be known as something other than the fuck-up grandson of one of the Navy's greatest admirals. That morning, preparing for his sixth bombing run over North Vietnam, the graying pilot's dreams of combat glory were beginning to seem within his reach.
Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain's aircraft. Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly of McCain's stubby A-4, the Navy's "Tinkertoy Bomber," into the fire.
McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his bombs "cooked off," blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers. McCain was stung by tiny bits of shrapnel in his legs and chest, but the wounds weren't serious; his father would later report to friends that Johnny "came through without a scratch."
The damage to the Forrestal was far more grievous: The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier's 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship.
These are the moments that test men's mettle. Where leaders are born. Leaders like . . . Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes down from McCain's. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier, Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading. According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then "gallantly took command of a firefighting team" that would help contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.
McCain displayed little of Hope's valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who "stayed to help the pilots fight the fire," McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the "ready room," where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room's closed-circuit television bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.
As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal."
The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. "Johnny" Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as "some welcome R&R."
VIOLATING THE CODE
Ensconced in Apple's villa in Saigon, McCain and the Times reporter forged a relationship that would prove critical to the ambitious pilot's career in the years ahead. Apple effectively became the charter member of McCain's media "base," an elite corps of admiring reporters who helped create his reputation for "straight talk."
Sipping scotch and reflecting on the fire aboard the Forrestal, McCain sounded like the peaceniks he would pillory after his return from Hanoi. "Now that I've seen what the bombs and napalm did to the people on our ship," he told Apple, "I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam." Here, it seemed, was a frank-talking warrior, one willing to speak out against the military establishment in the name of truth.
But McCain's misgivings about the righteousness of the fight quickly took a back seat to his ambitions. Within days, eager to get his combat career back on track, he put in for a transfer to the carrier USS Oriskany. Two months after the Forrestal fire following a holiday on the French Riviera McCain reported for duty in the Gulf of Tonkin.
McCain performed adequately on the Oriskany. On October 25th, 1967, he bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American planes destroyed by McCain: two.
The next day, McCain embarked on his fateful 23rd mission, a bombing raid on a power plant in downtown Hanoi. McCain had cajoled his way onto the strike force there were medals up for grabs. The plant had recently been rebuilt after a previous bombing run that had earned two of the lead pilots Navy Crosses, one of the force's top honors.
It was a dangerous mission taking the planes into the teeth of North Vietnam's fiercest anti-aircraft defenses. As the planes entered Hanoi airspace, they were instantly enveloped in dark clouds of flak and surface-to-air missiles. Still cocky from the previous day's kills, McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded: A SAM had a lock on him. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers," McCain writes. "The A-4 is a small, fast" aircraft that "can outmaneuver a tracking SAM."
But McCain didn't "jink." Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his bombs just as the SAM blew his wing off.
To watch the Republican National Convention and listen to Fred Thompson's account of John McCain's internment in Vietnam, you would think that McCain never gave his captors anything beyond his name, rank, service number and, under duress, the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line. His time in Hanoi, we're to understand, steeled the man transforming him from a fighter jock who put himself first into a patriot who would henceforth selflessly serve the public good.
There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain's broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.
But the subsequent tale of McCain's mistreatment and the transformation it is alleged to have produced are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they "give no information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades." Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number and to make no "statements disloyal to my country."
Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital," he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. "I had to tell them," he insisted to Dramesi, "or I would have died in bed."
Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain's service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot's behavior as heroic "he wasn't exceptional one way or the other" has a corrosive effect on military discipline. "This business of my country before my life?" Dramesi says. "Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs or he'd be dead."
Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the "crown prince," they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. "It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral's son," he writes, "and I knew that my father's identity was directly related to my survival." But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report picked up by The New York Times in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was "moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated." He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.
THE CONFESSION
In the company of his fellow POWs, and later in isolation, McCain slowly and miserably recovered from his wounds. In June 1968, after three months in solitary, he was offered what he calls early release. In the official McCain narrative, this was the ultimate test of mettle. He could have come home, but keeping faith with his fellow POWs, he chose to remain imprisoned in Hanoi.
What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military's Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. "Many of us were given this offer," according to Butler, McCain's classmate who was also taken prisoner. "It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to 'admit' that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was 'lenient and humane.' So I, like numerous others, refused the offer."
"He makes it sound like it was a great thing to have accomplished," says Dramesi. "A great act of discipline or strength. That simply was not the case." In fairness, it is difficult to judge McCain's experience as a POW; throughout most of his incarceration he was the only witness to his mistreatment. Parts of his memoir recounting his days in Hanoi read like a bad Ian Fleming novel, with his Vietnamese captors cast as nefarious Bond villains. On the Fourth of July 1968, when he rejected the offer of early release, an officer nicknamed "Cat" got so mad, according to McCain, that he snapped a pen he was holding, splattering ink across the room.
"They taught you too well, Mac Kane," Cat snarled, kicking over a chair. "They taught you too well."
The brutal interrogations that followed produced results. In August 1968, over the course of four days, McCain was tortured into signing a confession that he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate." "
"John allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals," says Butler. "John was just one of about 600 guys. He was nothing unusual. He was just another POW."
McCain has also allowed the media to believe that his torture lasted for the entire time he was in Hanoi. At the Republican convention, Fred Thompson said of McCain's torture, "For five and a half years this went on." In fact, McCain's torture ended after two years, when the death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 caused the Vietnamese to change the way they treated POWs. "They decided it would be better to treat us better and keep us alive so they could trade us in for real estate," Butler recalls.
By that point, McCain had become the most valuable prisoner of all: His father was now directing the war effort as commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain spent the next three and a half years in Hanoi biding his time, trying to put on weight and regain his strength, as the bombing ordered by his father escalated. By the time he and other POWs were freed in March 1973 as a result of the Paris Peace Accords, McCain was able to leave the prison camp in Hanoi on his own feet.
Even those in the military who celebrate McCain's patriotism and sacrifice question why his POW experience has been elevated as his top qualification to be commander in chief. "It took guts to go through that and to come out reasonably intact and able to pick up the pieces of your life and move on," says Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who has known McCain since the 1980s. "It is unquestionably a demonstration of the character of the man. But I don't think that it is a special qualification for being president of the United States. In some respects, I'm not sure that's the kind of character I want sitting in the Oval Office. I'm not sure that much time in a prisoner-of-war status doesn't do something to you. Doesn't do something to you psychologically, doesn't do something to you that might make you a little more volatile, a little less apt to listen to reason, a little more inclined to be volcanic in your temperament."
"A BELLICOSE HAWK"
The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless, womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings. The real difference between the McCain of 1967 and the McCain of 1973 was that the latter's ambition was now on overdrive. He wanted to study at the National War College but military brass turned him down as underqualified. So McCain appealed the decision to the top: John Warner, the Secretary of the Navy and a friend of his father. Warner, who now serves in the Senate alongside McCain, overruled the brass and gave the POW a slot. McCain also got his wings back, even though his injuries prevented him from raising his hands above shoulder height to comb his own hair.
McCain was eager to make up for lost time and the times were favorable to a high-profile veteran willing to speak out in favor of the war. With the Senate moving to cut off funds for the Nixon administration's illegal bombing of Cambodia, the president needed all the help he could get. Two months after his release, McCain related his harrowing story of survival in a 13-page narrative in U.S. News & World Report, at the end of which he launched into an energetic defense of Nixon's discredited foreign policy. "I admire President Nixon's courage," he wrote. "It is difficult for me to understand . . . why people are still criticizing his foreign policy for example, the bombing in Cambodia."
In the years to come, McCain would continue to fight the war his father had lost. In his meetings with Nixon, Junior was known for chomping on an unlit cigar, complaining about the "goddamn gooks" and pushing to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. His son was equally gung-ho. "John has always been a very bellicose hawk," says John H. Johns, a retired brigadier general who studied with McCain at the War College. "When he came back from Vietnam, he accused the liberal media of undermining national will, that we could have won in Vietnam if we had the national will."
It was the kind of tough talk that made McCain a fast-rising star in far-right circles. Through Ross Perot, a friend of Ronald Reagan who had championed the cause of the POWs, McCain was invited to meet with the then-governor of California and his wife. Impressed, Reagan invited McCain to be the keynote speaker at his annual "prayer breakfast" in Sacramento.
Then, at the end of 1974, McCain finally achieved the goal he had been working toward for years. He was installed as the commanding officer of the largest air squadron in the Navy the Replacement Air Group based in Jacksonville, Florida training carrier pilots. It was a post for which McCain flatly admits, "I was not qualified." By now, however, he was unembarrassed by his own nepotism. At the ceremony commemorating his long-sought ascension to command, his father looking on with pride, McCain wept openly.
BOOZE AND PORK
If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit her ex-husband's equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his "long tall Sally" was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches.
By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ass during his command post in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights even though adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.
In 1977, McCain was promoted to captain and became the Navy's liaison to the Senate the same politically connected post once occupied by his father. He took advantage of the position to buddy up to young senators like Gary Hart, William Cohen and Joe Biden. He was also taken under the wing of another friend of his father: Sen. John Tower, the powerful Texas Republican who would become his political mentor. Despite the promotion, McCain continued his adolescent carousing: On a diplomatic trip to Saudi Arabia with Tower, he tried to get some tourists he disliked in trouble with the authorities by littering the room-service trays outside their door with empty bottles of alcohol.
As the Navy's top lobbyist, McCain was supposed to carry out the bidding of the secretary of the Navy. But in 1978 he went off the reservation. Vietnam was over, and the Carter administration, cutting costs, had decided against spending $2 billion to replace the aging carrier Midway. The secretary agreed with the administration's decision. Readiness would not be affected. The only reason to replace the carrier at a cost of nearly $7 billion in today's dollars was pork-barrel politics.
Although he now crusades against wasteful military spending, McCain had no qualms about secretly lobbying for a pork project that would pay for a dozen Bridges to Nowhere. "He did a lot of stuff behind the back of the secretary of the Navy," one lobbyist told Timberg. Working his Senate connections, McCain managed to include a replacement for the Midway in the defense authorization bill in 1978. Carter, standing firm, vetoed the entire spending bill to kill the carrier. When an attempt to override the veto fell through, however, McCain and his lobbyist friends didn't give up the fight. The following year, Congress once again approved funding for the carrier. This time, Carter his pork-busting efforts undone by a turncoat Navy liaison signed the bill.
In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court documents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they "cohabitated as husband and wife" for the first nine months of the affair.
Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980. McCain's second marriage rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary Hart as a groomsman was consummated only six weeks later, on May 17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.
McCain's friends were blindsided by the divorce. The Reagans with whom the couple had frequently dined and even accompanied on New Year's holidays never forgave him. By the time McCain became a self-proclaimed "foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution" two years later, he and the Gipper had little more than ideology to bind them. Nancy took Carol under her wing, giving her a job in the White House and treating McCain with a frosty formality that was evident even on the day last March when she endorsed his candidacy. "Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided and then we endorsed," she said. "Well, obviously, this is the nominee of the party."
THE CARPETBAGGER
As his marriage unraveled, McCain's naval career was also stalling out. He had been passed over for a promotion. There was no sea command on the horizon, ensuring that he would never be able to join his four-star forefathers. For good measure, he crashed his third and final plane, this one a single-engine ultralight. McCain has never spoken of his last crash publicly, but his friend Gen. Jim Jones recalled in a 1999 interview that it left McCain with bandages on his face and one arm in a sling.
So McCain turned to politics. Receiving advance word that a GOP congressional seat was opening up outside Phoenix, he put the inside edge to good use. Within minutes of the incumbent's official retirement announcement, Cindy McCain bought her husband the house that would serve as his foothold in the district. In sharp contrast to the way he now markets himself, McCain's campaign ads billed him as an insider a man "who knows how Washington works." Though the Reagans no longer respected him, McCain featured pictures of himself smiling with them.
"Thanks to my prisoner-of-war experience," McCain writes, "I had, as they say in politics, a good story to sell." And sell it he did. "Listen, pal," he told an opponent who challenged him during a candidate forum. "I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi."
To finance his campaign, McCain dipped into the Hensley family fortune. He secured an endorsement from his mentor, Sen. Tower, who tapped his vast donor network in Texas to give McCain a much-needed boost. And he began an unethical relationship with a high-flying and corrupt financier that would come to characterize his cozy dealings with major donors and lobbyists over the years.
Charlie Keating, the banker and anti-pornography crusader, would ultimately be convicted on 73 counts of fraud and racketeering for his role in the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. That crisis, much like today's subprime-mortgage meltdown, resulted from misbegotten banking deregulation, and ultimately left taxpayers to pick up a tab of more than $124 billion. Keating, who raised more than $100,000 for McCain's race, lavished the first-term congressman with the kind of political favors that would make Jack Abramoff blush. McCain and his family took at least nine free trips at Keating's expense, and vacationed nearly every year at the mogul's estate in the Bahamas. There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as "Charlie Keating's Shangri-La." Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26 percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.
McCain still attributes the attention to nothing more than Keating's "great respect for military people" and the duo's "political and personal affinity." But Keating, for his part, made no bones about the purpose of his giving. When asked by reporters if the investments he made in politicians bought their loyalty and influence on his behalf, Keating replied, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can, I certainly hope so."
THE KEATING FIVE
In congress, Rep. John McCain quickly positioned himself as a GOP hard-liner. He voted against honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday in 1983 a stance he held through 1989. He backed Reagan on tax cuts for the wealthy, abortion and support for the Nicaraguan contras. He sought to slash federal spending on social programs, and he voted twice against campaign-finance reform. He cites as his "biggest" legislative victory of that era a 1989 bill that abolished catastrophic health insurance for seniors, a move he still cheers as the first-ever repeal of a federal entitlement program.
McCain voted to confirm Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. In 1993, he was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for a group that sponsored an anti-gay-rights ballot initiative in Oregon. His anti-government fervor was renewed in the Gingrich revolution of 1994, when he called for abolishing the departments of Education and Energy. The following year, he championed a sweeping measure that would have imposed a blanket moratorium on any increase of government oversight.
In this context, McCain's recent record opposing the new GI Bill, voting to repeal the federal minimum wage, seeking to deprive 3.8 million kids of government health care looks entirely consistent. "When jackasses like Rush Limbaugh say he's not conservative, that's just total nonsense," says former Sen. Gary Hart, who still counts McCain as a friend.
Although a hawkish Cold Warrior, McCain did show an independent streak when it came to the use of American military power. Because of his experience in Vietnam, he said, he didn't favor the deployment of U.S. forces unless there was a clear and attainable military objective. In 1983, McCain broke with Reagan to vote against the deployment of Marine peacekeepers to Lebanon. The unorthodox stance caught the attention of the media including this very magazine, which praised McCain's "enormous courage." It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. McCain recognized early on how the game was played: The Washington press corps "tend to notice acts of political independence from unexpected quarters," he later noted. "Now I was debating Lebanon on programs like MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I was gratified by the attention and eager for more."
When McCain became a senator in 1986, filling the seat of retiring Republican icon Barry Goldwater, he was finally in a position that a true maverick could use to battle the entrenched interests in Washington. Instead, McCain did the bidding of his major donor, Charlie Keating, whose financial empire was on the brink of collapse. Federal regulators were closing in on Keating, who had taken federally insured deposits from his Lincoln Savings and Loan and leveraged them to make wildly risky real estate ventures. If regulators restricted his investments, Keating knew, it would all be over.
In the year before his Senate run, McCain had championed legislation that would have delayed new regulations of savings and loans. Grateful, Keating contributed $54,000 to McCain's Senate campaign. Now, when Keating tried to stack the federal regulatory bank board with cronies, McCain made a phone call seeking to push them through. In 1987, in an unprecedented display of political intimidation, McCain also attended two meetings convened by Keating to pressure federal regulators to back off. The senators who participated in the effort would come to be known as the Keating Five.
"Senate historians were unable to find any instance in U.S. history that was comparable, in terms of five U.S. senators meeting with a regulator on behalf of one institution," says Bill Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, who attended the second meeting. "And it hasn't happened since."
Following the meetings with McCain and the other senators, the regulators backed off, stalling their investigation of Lincoln. By the time the S&L collapsed two years later, taxpayers were on the hook for $3.4 billion, which stood as a record for the most expensive bank failure until the current mortgage crisis. In addition, 20,000 investors who had bought junk bonds from Keating, thinking they were federally insured, had their savings wiped out.
"McCain saw the political pressure on the regulators," recalls Black. "He could have saved these widows from losing their life savings. But he did absolutely nothing."
McCain was ultimately given a slap on the wrist by the Senate Ethics Committee, which concluded only that he had exercised "poor judgment." The committee never investigated Cindy's investment with Keating.
The McCains soon found themselves entangled in more legal trouble. In 1989, in behavior the couple has blamed in part on the stress of the Keating scandal, Cindy became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet. She directed a doctor employed by her charity which provided medical care to patients in developing countries to supply the narcotics, which she then used to get high on trips to places like Bangladesh and El Salvador.
Tom Gosinski, a young Republican, kept a detailed journal while working as director of government affairs for the charity. "I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. senator has driven her to . . . cover feelings of despair with drugs," he wrote in 1992. When Cindy McCain suddenly fired Gosinski, he turned his journal over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, sparking a yearlong investigation. To avoid jail time, Cindy agreed to a hush-hush plea bargain and court-imposed rehab.
Ironically, her drug addiction became public only because she and her husband tried to cover it up. In an effort to silence Gosinski, who was seeking $250,000 for wrongful termination, the attorney for the McCains demanded that Phoenix prosecutors investigate the former employee for extortion. The charge was baseless, and prosecutors dropped the investigation in 1994 but not before publishing a report that included details of Cindy's drug use.
Notified that the report was being released, Sen. McCain leapt into action. He dispatched his top political consultant to round up a group of friendly reporters, for whom Cindy staged a seemingly selfless, Oprah-style confession of her past addiction. Her drug use became part of the couple's narrative of straight talk and bravery in the face of adversity. "If what I say can help just one person to face the problem," Cindy declared, "it's worthwhile."
FAVORS FOR DONORS
In the aftermath of the Keating Five, McCain realized that his career was in a "hell of a mess." He had made George H.W. Bush's shortlist for vice president in 1988, but the Keating scandal made him a political untouchable. McCain needed a high horse so his long-standing opposition to campaign-finance reform went out the window. Working with Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, McCain authored a measure to ban unlimited "soft money" donations from politics.
The Keating affair also taught McCain a vital lesson about handling the media. When the scandal first broke, he went ballistic on reporters who questioned his wife's financial ties to Keating calling them "liars" and "idiots." Predictably, the press coverage was merciless. So McCain dialed back the anger and turned up the charm. "I talked to the press constantly, ad infinitum, until their appetite for information from me was completely satisfied," he later wrote. "It is a public relations strategy that I have followed to this day." Mr. Straight Talk was born.
Unfortunately, any lessons McCain learned from the Keating scandal didn't affect his unbridled enthusiasm for deregulating the finance industry. "He continues to follow policies that create the same kind of environment we see today, with recurrent financial crises and epidemics of fraud led by CEOs," says Black, the former S&L regulator. Indeed, if the current financial crisis has a villain, it is Phil Gramm, who remains close to McCain. As chair of the Senate Banking Committee in the late 1990s, Gramm ushered in with McCain's fervent support a massive wave of deregulation for insurance companies and brokerage houses and banks, the aftershocks of which are just now being felt in Wall Street's catastrophic collapse. McCain, who has admitted that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," relies on Gramm to guide him.
McCain also did his part to loosen regulations on big corporations. In 1997, McCain became chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the insurance and telecommunications industries, as well as the CEO pay packages of those McCain now denounces as "fat cats." The special interests with business before the committee were big and well-heeled. All told, executives and fundraisers associated with these firms donated $2.6 million to McCain when he served as the chairman or ranking member.
The money bought influence. In 1998, employees of BellSouth contributed more than $16,000 to McCain. The senator returned the favor, asking the Federal Communications Commission to give "serious consideration" to the company's request to become a long-distance carrier. Days after legislation benefiting the satellite-TV carrier EchoStar cleared McCain's committee, the company's founder celebrated by hosting a major fundraiser for McCain's presidential bid.
Whatever McCain's romantic entanglements with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman, he was clearly in bed with her clients, who donated nearly $85,000 to his campaigns. One of her clients, Bud Paxson, set up a meeting with McCain in 1999, frustrated by the FCC's delay of his proposed takeover of a television station in Pittsburgh. Paxson had treated McCain well, offering the then-presidential candidate use of his corporate jet to fly to campaign events and ponying up $20,000 in campaign donations.
"You're the head of the commerce committee," Paxson told McCain, according to The Washington Post. "The FCC is not doing its job. I would love for you to write a letter."
Iseman helped draft the text, and McCain sent the letter. Several weeks later the day after McCain used Paxson's jet to fly to Florida for a fundraiser McCain wrote another letter. FCC chair William Kennard sent a sharp rebuke to McCain, calling the senator's meddling "highly unusual." Nonetheless, within a week of McCain's second letter, the FCC ruled three-to-two in favor of Paxson's deal.
Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.
There is no small irony that the Reform Institute founded to bolster McCain's crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain's committee. EchoStar got in on the ground floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 just as its officials were testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the cable company's proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time: "Appearance of corruption, anyone?"
"HE IS HOTHEADED"
Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. "If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print," says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain's press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an "immature and unprofessional reaction to slights" that is "little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy."
McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming that he was an "incompetent little shit." Jon Hinz, the director of the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.
During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain's wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was "getting a little thin up there." McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.
In the Senate where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain has "very few friends" his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. "Are you calling me stupid?" Grassley demanded. "No, I'm calling you a fucking jerk!" yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was "going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain." The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son's case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.
McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party to the right, a "pompous self-serving son of a bitch" who "possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain." In 1999, he told Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that "only an asshole would put together a budget like this."
Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. "Wait a second here," Cornyn said. "I've been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You're out of line." McCain exploded: "Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room." The incident foreshadowed McCain's 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly "suspended" his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.
At least three of McCain's GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain's "temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him." Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn't "want this guy anywhere near a trigger." And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that "the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded."
McCain's frequently inappropriate humor has also led many to question his self-control. In 1998, the senator told a joke about President Clinton's teenage daughter at a GOP fundraiser. "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" McCain asked. "Because her father is Janet Reno!"
More recently, McCain's jokes have heightened tensions with Iran. The senator once cautioned that "the world's only superpower . . . should never make idle threats" but that didn't stop him from rewriting the lyrics to a famous Beach Boys tune. In April 2007, when a voter at a town-hall session asked him about his policy toward Tehran, McCain responded by singing, "bomb bomb bomb" Iran. The loose talk was meant to incite the GOP base, but it also aggravated relations with Iran, whose foreign minister condemned McCain's "jokes about genocide" as a testament to his "disturbed state of mind" and "warmongering approach to foreign policy."
"NEXT UP, BAGHDAD!"
The myth of John McCain hinges on two transformations from pampered flyboy to selfless patriot, and from Keating crony to incorruptible reformer that simply never happened. But there is one serious conversion that has taken root in McCain: his transformation from a cautious realist on foreign policy into a reckless cheerleader of neoconservatism.
"He's going to be Bush on steroids," says Johns, the retired brigadier general who has known McCain since their days at the National War College. "His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it through the barrel of a gun."
McCain used to believe passionately in the limits of American military power. In 1993, he railed against Clinton's involvement in Somalia, sponsoring an amendment to cut off funds for the troops. The following year he blasted the idealistic aims of sending U.S. troops to Haiti, taking to the Senate floor to propose an immediate withdrawal. He even started out a fierce opponent of NATO air strikes on Serbia during the war in the Balkans.
But such concerns went out the window when McCain began gearing up to run for president. In 1998, he formed a political alliance with William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, who became one of his closest advisers. Randy Scheunemann a hard-right lobbyist who was promoting Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi came aboard as McCain's top foreign-policy adviser. Before long, the senator who once cautioned against "trading American blood for Iraqi blood" had been reborn as a fire-breathing neoconservative who believes in using American military might to spread American ideals a belief he describes as a "sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity." By 1999, McCain was championing what he called "rogue state rollback." First on the hit list: Iraq.
Privately, McCain brags that he was the "original neocon." And after 9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even Dick Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. "There's other organizations besides Mr. bin Laden who are bent on the destruction of the United States," he warned in an appearance on Hardball on September 12th. "It isn't just Afghanistan. We're talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others." A few days later, he told Jay Leno's audience that "some other countries" possibly Iraq, Iran and Syria had aided bin Laden.
A month after 9/11, with the U.S. bombing Kabul and reeling from the anthrax scare, McCain assured David Letterman that "we'll do fine" in Afghanistan. He then added, unbidden, "The second phase is Iraq. Some of this anthrax may and I emphasize may have come from Iraq."
Later that month on Larry King, McCain raised the specter of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction before he peddled what became Dick Cheney's favorite lie: "The Czech government has revealed meetings, contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mohamed Atta. The evidence is very clear. . . . So we will have to act." On Nightline, he again flogged the Czech story and cited Iraqi defectors to claim that "there is no doubt as to [Saddam's] avid pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. That, coupled with his relations with terrorist organizations, I think, is a case that the administration will be making as we move step by step down this road."
That December, just as U.S. forces were bearing down on Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, McCain joined with five senators in an open letter to the White House. "In the interest of our own national security, Saddam Hussein must be removed from power," they insisted, claiming that there was "no doubt" that Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction "against the United States and its allies."
In January 2002, McCain made a fact-finding mission to the Middle East. While he was there, he dropped by a supercarrier stationed in the Arabian Sea that was dear to his heart: the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the giant floating pork project that he had driven through over President Carter's veto. On board the carrier, McCain called Iraq a "clear and present danger to the security of the United States of America." Standing on the flight bridge, he watched as fighter planes roared off, en route to Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had already slipped away. "Next up, Baghdad!" McCain whooped.
Over the next 15 months leading up to the invasion, McCain continued to lead the rush to war. In November 2002, Scheunemann set up a group called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq at the same address as Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. The groups worked in such close concert that at one point they got their Websites crossed. The CLI was established with explicit White House backing to sell the public on the war. The honorary co-chair of the committee: John Sidney McCain III.
In September 2002, McCain assured Americans that the war would be "fairly easy" with an "overwhelming victory in a very short period of time." On the eve of the invasion, Hardball host Chris Matthews asked McCain, "Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the postwar scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq, or at least a large number of them, will treat us as liberators?"
McCain was emphatic: "Absolutely. Absolutely."
Today, however, McCain insists that he predicted a protracted struggle from the outset. "The American people were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach," he said in August 2006, "which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking." McCain also claims he urged Bush to dump Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "I'm the only one that said that Rumsfeld had to go," he said in a January primary debate. Except that he didn't. Not once. As late as May 2004, in fact, McCain praised Rumsfeld for doing "a fine job."
Indeed, McCain's neocon makeover is so extreme that Republican generals like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have refused to endorse their party's nominee. "The fact of the matter is his judgment about what to do in Iraq was wrong," says Richard Clarke, who served as Bush's counterterrorism czar until 2003. "He hung out with people like Ahmad Chalabi. He said Iraq was going to be easy, and he said we were going to war because of terrorism. We should have been fighting in Afghanistan with more troops to go after Al Qaeda. Instead we're at risk because of the mistaken judgment of people like John McCain."
MR. FLIP-FLOP
In the end, the essential facts of John McCain's life and career the pivotal experiences in which he demonstrated his true character are important because of what they tell us about how he would govern as president. Far from the portrayal he presents of himself as an unflinching maverick with a consistent and reliable record, McCain has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to taking whatever position will advance his own career. He "is the classic opportunist," according to Ross Perot, who worked closely with McCain on POW issues. "He's always reaching for attention and glory."
McCain has worked hard to deny such charges. "They're drinking the Kool-Aid that somehow I have changed positions on the issues," he said of his critics at the end of August. The following month, when challenged on The View, McCain again defied those who accuse him of flip-flopping. "What specific area have I quote 'changed'?" he demanded. "Nobody can name it."
In fact, his own statements show that he has been on both sides of a host of vital issues: the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax, waterboarding, hunting down terrorists in Pakistan, kicking Russia out of the G-8, a surge of troops into Afghanistan, the GI Bill, storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, teaching intelligent design, fully funding No Child Left Behind, offshore drilling, his own immigration policy and withdrawal timelines for Iraq.
In March, McCain insisted to The Wall Street Journal that he is "always for less regulation." In September, with the government forced to bail out the nation's largest insurance companies and brokerage houses, McCain declared that he would regulate the financial industry and end the "casino culture on Wall Street." He did a similar about-face on Bush's tax cuts, opposing them when he planned to run against Bush in 2001, then declaring that he wants to make them larger and permanent when he needed to win the support of anti-tax conservatives this year. "It's a big flip-flop," conceded tax abolitionist Grover Norquist. "But I'm happy he's flopped."
In June of this year, McCain reversed his decades-long opposition to coastal drilling shortly before cashing $28,500 from 13 donors linked to Hess Oil. And the senator, who only a decade ago tried to ban registered lobbyists from working on political campaigns, now deploys 170 lobbyists in key positions as fundraisers and advisers.
Then there's torture the issue most related to McCain's own experience as a POW. In 2005, in a highly public fight, McCain battled the president to stop the torture of enemy combatants, winning a victory to require military personnel to abide by the Army Field Manual when interrogating prisoners. But barely a year later, as he prepared to launch his presidential campaign, McCain cut a deal with the White House that allows the Bush administration to imprison detainees indefinitely and to flout the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions against torture.
What his former allies in the anti-torture fight found most troubling was that McCain would not admit to his betrayal. Shortly after cutting the deal, McCain spoke to a group of retired military brass who had been working to ban torture. According to Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former deputy, McCain feigned outrage at Bush and Cheney, as though he too had had the rug pulled out from under him. "We all knew the opposite was the truth," recalls Wilkerson. "That's when I began to lose a little bit of my respect for the man and his bona fides as a straight shooter."
But perhaps the most revealing of McCain's flip-flops was his promise, made at the beginning of the year, that he would "raise the level of political dialogue in America." McCain pledged he would "treat my opponents with respect and demand that they treat me with respect." Instead, with Rove protégé Steve Schmidt at the helm, McCain has turned the campaign into a torrent of debasing negativity, misrepresenting Barack Obama's positions on everything from sex education for kindergarteners to middle-class taxes. In September, in one of his most blatant embraces of Rove-like tactics, McCain hired Tucker Eskew one of Rove's campaign operatives who smeared the senator and his family during the 2000 campaign in South Carolina.
Throughout the campaign this year, McCain has tried to make the contest about honor and character. His own writing gives us the standard by which he should be judged. "Always telling the truth in a political campaign," he writes in Worth the Fighting For, "is a great test of character." He adds: "Patriotism that only serves and never risks one's self-interest isn't patriotism at all. It's selfishness. That's a lesson worth relearning from time to time." It's a lesson, it would appear, that the candidate himself could stand to relearn.
"I'm sure John McCain loves his country," says Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar under Bush. "But loving your country and lying to the American people are apparently not inconsistent in his view." |
|
 View From A Grain Of Sand
By  Meena Nanji
 THE STORY: Scroll down for  View video clip HERE
2001 saw an unprecedented level of international interest in the lives of Afghan women living under the Taliban. With the Taliban's fall later that year, the U.S proclaimed the dawn of a new era in Afghanistan that promised peace, democracy and liberation for women.
As the 7th anniversary of this "new era" is upon us, cracks in this story are beginning to appear. Afghanistan is once again in the news, not because of successful reconstruction, but because of increasing violence and the highest rate of opium production in the world.
And what about the women? Since 2001, the media spotlight on Afghan women has fallen, and with it, public knowledge of the current situation they face. What are their lives like now? Have they really improved since a new government took power? Have they gained any real rights or do they still live in fear and repression?
VIEW FROM A GRAIN OF SAND examines these issues through the eyes of three Afghan women: a doctor, a teacher, and a rights activist. Illustrated with footage, interviews and archival material, their personal stories lead us through the minefield of Afghanistan's complex history, and provide illuminating context for Afghanistan's current situation and the ongoing battle women face, even now, to gain basic human rights.
Shot over a four-year period in the sprawling refugee camps of north-western Pakistan and in the war-torn city of Kabul, the documentary constructs a harrowing, thought-provoking, yet intimate portrait of the plight of Afghan women over the last 30 years - from the rule of King Zahir Shah to the current Hamid Karzai government. The women are powerfully moving as they re-define strength and resilience in the face of on-going struggle, and give a full and visceral picture of a still divided and brutalized nation. As world attention has shifted to other crises, this project re-focuses the camera on Afghanistan, remembering the voices of those most vulnerable and most affected by the conflicts: women.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 "View From A Grain Of Sand"
"'Gripping.' Nanji narrates this history with clarity and passion. Insightful, often heart-wrenching account of trauma, war and rights abuses."
Holly Willis
Los Angeles Weekly
What's it like to be a woman in contemporary Afghanistan? In her gripping documentary View From a Grain of Sand, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Meena Nanji answers this question through the specific experiences of three women: Shapiray, who fled the Taliban and, at the time of filming, was living in the barren New Shamsitu Refugee Camp in Pakistan, where she had become a teacher; Dr. Roeena, a doctor who fled Afghanistan during the country's civil war and struggles to aid women in another section of the Shamsitu camp; and Wajia, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a group dedicated to education and equal rights for women. By chronicling the experiences of these women, Nanji builds a richly textured history of radical change, moving from the 1960s - when urban Afghan women were able to attend school and were encouraged to seek professional careers - through the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the current state of things, when life for many people in the country is untenable due to continued violence. (As one of Nanji's subjects notes, "There isn't so much as snake's poison there.") Mixing archival materials, interview footage and images of life in contemporary Kabul, Nanji narrates this history with clarity and passion, and the resulting film is an insightful, often heart-wrenching account of trauma, war and horrific rights abuses inflicted not just by men against women, but by the larger forces of religious, national and international power. More than that, it's a reminder of our need to understand the complexities of national and religious struggle in other parts of the world.
_____________________
 Sunday Magazine ~~ October 5 2008
MOVING IMAGES  In search of progress
ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
Sharp, simple reminders of major political facts are woven into a stunning cinematic fabric in Meena Nanji’s brilliant documentary ‘View From A Grain of Sand’.
This is not a war zone, but destruction is everywhere.
In Meena Nanji’s documentary the stories of three Afghan women’s lives are beautifully told and poignantly located in the enormously violent forces that have shaped Afghans’ lives. Millions have to leave or burn; one says, “There is not even snake’s poison here.”
Shapiray, who fled to a makeshift life in a camp in Pakistan, talks as she sits at a sewing machine, the only thing she took when she left her home north of Kabul. Her husband had been a freedom fighter, and they had always discussed the Afghan situation; but he had been killed in a Soviet ambush, and she sews to remember him. Her camp is not that makeshift either; some Afghans have been there for 20 years, and three million remain in Pakistan.
Shapiray does go back; she and her relatives rebuild the uncommandeered home they had fled when it was destroyed in the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. There is no running water and no electricity, but, having become a teacher while in Pakistan, should she stay here, where her new pupils’ drawings are all of war and death, or go back to the camp?
The other two women’s lives show other complexities. In Roeena’s childhood home in Kabul, boys and girls were totally equal, and under King Zahir Shah there were no dress codes; women wore skirts if they wished, went about freely, and followed all manner of occupations and professions. Roeena dreamt of being a pilot, and we see a woman driving a bus. In 1964, women got the vote, and forced and underage marriages were banned. Today no kites, no music, no TV, and there are public beheadings, some secretly filmed by RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Nanji’s commentary evokes Thomas Hobbes no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor,…
Larger systemic forces
But Afghanistan does not embody Hobbes’s dreaded collapse of the civil condition, because much larger systemic forces are at work. Zahir Shah’s urban rule was accepted by rural warlords who regarded women as property if he generally left them alone. After Zahir’s overthrow in 1973, a series of Soviet-imposed dictators upset the warlords, and in 1979 the Carter administration began funding anti-government rebels. Then the Soviet Union invaded with 100,000 troops, installing a puppet regime and bombing and imprisoning indiscriminately. But they ended the heroin trade, and urban Afghan women faced a dilemma: the modernisers were also occupiers. Roeena, now a doctor, continued treating the wounded.
With militias rampaging everywhere, millions fled, and Afghanistan became an ideological battleground; the United States was determined to oust the Soviet Union at any cost, in this case by funding Afghanistan’s most extreme, rigid, and bitterly misogynistic faction, the Taliban. In the 1970s, many of the Taliban had gone to Pakistan, where they had found a friend in the then dictator Zia-ul-Haq. The U.S., Nanji tells us, knew what the Taliban and the other Mujahideen were like, but as religious fundamentalism transcends national borders they enabled the addition of Saudi Arabian billions to the billions the U.S. was already giving the Taliban; in effect, the US funded, perhaps created, religious war in Afghanistan. The U.S. government even declared March 21 Afghanistan Day.
In 1989 the beaten Soviet Union withdrew, to western jubilation, and left 1.5 million dead. Afghan women faced the catastrophic consequences of becoming ‘acceptable targets for abuse in the name of religion’. Roeena now lives in Peshawar, and treats children in the camp, 40 kilometres away.
Wajia, the third woman, is as devout and faithful a Muslim as Shapiray and Roeena and, like them, is working out her own way of being one. Where Roeena pursues her career and strongly resists her mother’s pressure to get married ‘Marriage is a point where I can’t learn any more’ – Wajia eventually agreed when her family found a decent man with a solid government job. She respects him and is more religious than he is, but is in no way bounden to his thinking. She does go back, for the first time in 25 years, taking her small son Haroon on his first trip outside the camp, and the bus moves from tree-lined Pakistani roads through barren passes and on to deserted roads clinging to craggy rocksides. This is not a war zone, but destruction is everywhere.
Destruction everywhere
Nasim of RAWA, face covered, says, ‘Even the trees have died.’ Girls can again go to school, but the U.S., apparently in search of Osama bin Laden, bombed all the wrong places and now funds the warlords; there is no peace or stability outside Kabul, and the burkha is de rigueur. President Karzai is relatively clean but admits he has little control; the posters in Kabul are of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic and non-fundamentalist Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated in the first week of September 2001.
Wajia is aghast at the beheadings: ‘Where in Islam is this?’ Like Roeena, she sees a country where a majority in the parliament are linked to armed groups and where constitutional rights are overridden by religious law. Should she stay?
The film weaves the stories with sharp, simple reminders of major political facts into a stunning cinematic fabric supported by a beautifully understated soundtrack and narrative. It has rightly won a string of international awards, and it made a huge impression on its first Indian showing at the Thrissur film festival.
Introducing the film in Chennai recently, Dr Lakshmanan of the Madras Institute of Development Studies quoted Ambedkar: ‘I measure the progress of community by the degree of progress which women had achieved.’
______________________________________
"searing, wide-reaching - an especially timely addition to the collective history of the plight of women under repression."
Robert Abeles ~~ Los Angeles Times November 9, 2006
 Long-lasting plight
After the international attention given the plight of Afghan women when the brutal Taliban was being routed in 2001, the focus in the mainstream media went away, even though the struggle for a basic law-and-order respect for women's humanity was far from over. (And the Taliban isn't exactly dead, either.) All this makes Meena Nanji's searing, wide-reaching documentary "View From a Grain of Sand" being shown Monday as part of the Jack H. Skirball series at REDCAT an especially timely addition to the collective history of the plight of women under repression.
For five years starting in 2000, Nanji followed the lives of three women who escaped Afghan turmoil for a Pakistani refugee camp: Shapire, a teacher whose dreams of being a pilot were dashed by forced marriage; a sweet-faced, sensitive doctor from Kabul named Roeena; and Wajeeha, whose uneducated upbringing in rural Afghanistan has been supplanted as an adult by her activist work for the Revolutionary Assn. of the Women of Afghanistan. They are inspiring figures resourceful, sharp, warm and not lacking a sense of humor and they provide the necessary personal contours for a subject that needs human details to get its message across.
But Nanji's film is a history lesson too. She manages to cover 30 years of struggle for Afghan women, which has mostly, tragically, been a case of curbed-then-obliterated advances, beginning with grand notions of gender equality under King Mohammed Zahir Shah in the '60s and '70s and eventually slipping into open violence against women, enforced submission and the burka under Islamic fundamentalist regimes that grew after the U.S.-backed defeat of the Soviets in the 1980s.
Overall, the well-assembled mix of archival material, narration, hidden camera footage (the cloaking burka's unexpected benefit) and Nanji's interviews makes for a rigorous, sobering piece of social advocacy filmmaking.
"Disputing rosy media accounts of an improved situation for women, docu profiles three females who are barely coping with state of women's rights in their homeland. PBS-style filmmaking and storytelling makes this a sure item for pub tube airings and widespread international broadcasts."
_____________________________________
 Variety ~~ View From A Grain of Sand
By ROBERT KOEHLER
As if a resurgent Taliban and an Afghan government in disarray weren't worrisome enough, Meena Nanji's study of the state of women in Afghanistan, "View From a Grain of Sand," adds another problem that deserves genuine concern. Disputing rosy media accounts of an improved situation for women, docu profiles three females who are barely coping with state of women's rights in their homeland. PBS-style filmmaking and storytelling makes this a sure item for pub tube airings and widespread international broadcasts.
Like "Beneath the Veil" (reported by Saira Shah and lensed before the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban) and Renee Bergan's 2003 "Sadaa E Zan," Nanji's project greatly benefits from assistance of the Revolutionary Assn. of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), the country's only organization empowered to shed light on a persistently severe climate where women remain second-class citizens. If pic sometimes feels close to an agit-prop work for RAWA, it's because the org provides the sole refuge for Afghan women.
Most impressively, Nanji relates recent Afghan history in a way that's less poetic but more purely informative and emotional than in David B. Edwards and Gregory Whitmore's recent "Kabul Transit."
A remarkable treasure trove of archival footage of Kabul in the 1960s-'70s reveals a modern-leaning city with a bustling economy and a thriving intellectual class -- and nary a burka in sight. Images underline a key point conveyed by Nanji's narration -- that the Taliban's oppressive brand of Islam, known as Wahabism, was utterly alien to the country before the 1990s.
More history passages demonstrate how U.S. support of Islamic fundamentalist rebels opposing invading Soviet forces in the 1980s actually planted the seeds for the Taliban's rise. Pic then shifts to a study of three contempo women -- Shapiray Hassan, Wajia, Roeena Mohmand -- all of whom want to help improve their homeland.
Hope, though, eventually seems quite slim as the women realize that their anticipated emancipation is far from reality. Nanji doesn't hesitate to lay considerable blame for the current problems on entrenched, medievalist warlords and the lack of U.S. efforts to dislodge them.
_________________________________________
"..vibrant cinematography. we get a glimpse of the complicated, beautiful and tragic patchwork that is Afghanistan"
Frontline, London, UK ~~ February 2007, Issue 10
Review: View from a grain of sand Ginanne Brownell, Newsweek film critic
Frontline Journalists Club, London/Frontline February newsletter
The road to Kabul is littered with the carcasses of war - Soviet army tanks left rusting in the arid landscape, overturned buses without wheels that will never complete their journeys and the gaping wounds of bullet-ridden buildings.
This is the scenery of modern Afghanistan. It is a country that has seen constant battle over the last three decades; first by way of a proxy war between Cold War superpowers, then civil war among ethnic groups which led to the rise of the Taliban and most recently the scars from the dominance of NATO. I cant believe what has happened to Afghanistan, says Wajia, a widowed Afghani refugee who fled her country almost a decade ago.
It is 2003 and this is Wajias first time back in the capital in 25 years. The city that used to have parks filled with trees and blooming flowers is now a dusty vision in brown. As she drives around Kabul with her son and a work colleague, who is covered up in a burkha, she appears at times almost despondent. Wajia has come back to Kabul on a fact- finding trip sponsored by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Wearing a black veil with an
intricate lace-like design she rests her chin on her palm. I thought I should feel safer in my country, but I dont, she says.
Wajia is one of three women that writer and director Meena Nanji follows in her riveting documentary View from a Grain of Sand. These women are only three voices in a choir of modern Afghani discontent.
Begun in 2000, Nanjis documentary starts with riveting images of Afghan women in a camp on the Pakistani/Afghan border. The faces of these women - revealed on camera as they take off their burkhas - tell the story of loss, struggle and survival. Bibi Gul, a charming elderly Afghan woman with few teeth and a pink veil, says there is little to make her go back to her country.
There isnt so much as snakes poison there, she says laughing.
But for Shapiray, a teacher with dark syrupy eyes, Afghanistan still holds out hope and a possible future for her family. Having fled the Taliban less than two years earlier, Shapiray and her family live in a dusty mud hut. It is her husband who actually is one of the highlights of the film, arguing with his wife that religion should be democratic and tolerant. And if Islam is the only religion, and
it is not tolerant, then it is not right? he says. Shapiray looks away. You get the feeling this is a discussion the couple have had before.
The third woman is Roeena, an unmarried doctor who travels from Peshawar very day to work in the camps. Having studied medicine in Kabul - she points out that she used to sit next to men in class - she fled to Pakistan during the civil war. Walking to school, it was like a dream to me, she says, reminiscing over her school days.
Throughout the documentary, Nanji uses archival footage to tell the history of Afghan women from the 1960s until the present. There are scenes of hip urban women walking down the streets of 1970s Afghanistan - a land where, since 1964, women had the right to vote. Underage marriage was banned and there were no laws on how women should dress. There were even campaigns to get women into the workforce - Nanji includes a fabulous television ad campaign aimed at recruiting female bus drivers. She then sweeps in with the political history of Afghanistan and its implications for women.
Nanji goes back to Afghanistan several times after 9/11 to check how her three subjects are coping. Both Roeena and Wajia have decided to stay in Pakistan even after the modernizing president, Hamid Karzai, comes to power. But Shapiray and her family go back to their home outside Kabul. It is bombed out. In her words: There is no one left, not even a fly. And yet though they are without electricity and running water they have hope of building up not just their home but their country as well. Her husband has a job in local government and she is teaching local children.
The beauty of this documentary - aside from a marvellous use of archival footage and its vibrant cinematography - is that Nanji does not preach about the future of this ravaged land. She lets the women tell their tales and through them we get a glimpse of the complicated, beautiful and tragic patchwork that is Afghanistan.
________________________________
Global Rights Newsletter
Adam Shapiro, former Country Director, Global Rights, Afghanistan.
Meena Nanjis VIEW FROM A GRAIN OF SAND is a work of love and passion for a Afghanistan and the Afghan people long about whom a historical amnesia exists among those who have sought to lead/reform/intervene over the last three decades. The tragic and violent history that has defined Afghan life since the early 1970s is barely known in the West, which has utilized its own fixation with and neo-Orientalist attitude towards women in Afghanistan to justify post-9/11 military adventurism in the country. On the opposite side of the same coin, however, conservative forces indigenous to the country have utilized a unique and often questioned version of Islam and tribal code to impose their power over Afghan women as a means of asserting political authority.
In VIEW FROM A GRAIN OF SAND Ms. Nanji exposes this ongoing narrative and trend that has seen internal Afghan politics become subsumed to the politics of the burka, a development that is extraordinary, particularly in Kabul and other urban centers, given the pre-Soviet occupation efforts towards modernization. This point is brought to the fore by Ms. Nanji as she expertly intertwines rarely seen archival footage from the 1960s and 1970s with the contemporary stories of three Afghan women struggling to deal with the realities of war, displacement, refugee camps and loss. The film brilliantly captures that which has been the victim of this historical amnesia memory. As the black and white images of a Kabul where women shared in the political, economic and social development of the country provide background to the words of Dr. Roeena, one feels as if they are becoming intimately familiar with a secret. Despite the various media coverage of events in Afghanistan over the last five years, this film brings to the fore the story of the country as Afghans remember and know it, and as such is not just a documentary about its subject, it is a tool for revitalizing memory and authenticity in the public consciousness about Afghanistan and the Afghan people.
"Via interviews, narration, and vrit and archival footage, Nanji compellingly argues that the loss of women's rights in Afghanistan is not a simple story that revolves around the Taliban. It is a much larger-and continuing-story of a nation that has suffered through near-constant war and mass displacement over several decades."
_____________________________________
Make/shift Magazine:~~ feminisms in motion
Jessica Hoffmann
Women in Afghanistan were not suddenly plunged into brutal un-freedom when the Taliban came to power in 1996. Nor have they always been subject to repressive rule. In a documentary that is both intimate and broadly political, Meena Nanji offers a view of the past thirty years of Afghanistan's history through the lives of three women.
Wajeeha is a literacy instructor and activist with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA); her husband died fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s. Roeena is a defiantly unmarried doctor who works in refugee camps populated mostly by people who fled Afghanistan when competing warlords reigned in the mid-1990s. Shapire, along with her husband and children, fled Afghanistan after the Taliban assumed power. She now teaches girls in a refugee camp.
Via interviews, narration, and vrit and archival footage, Nanji compellingly argues that the loss of women's rights in Afghanistan is not a simple story that revolves around the Taliban. It is a much larger-and continuing-story of a nation that has suffered through near-constant war and mass displacement over several decades.
A 1964 constitution implemented by then-king Zahir Shah established democracy and civil and women's rights in Afghanistan. For years, the nation was at peace, and urban women had access to education and jobs. But after the king was ousted in 1973, the nation descended into factional violence. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded to prop up a nascent Marxist regime, and the United States responded by developing a resistance movement of religious fundamentalists. For a decade, a U.S./Soviet Cold War battle was fought on, over, and with the land and lives of the Afghan people. Many fled to Pakistan and Iran.
And then, in 1989, the foreign powers withdrew, leaving Afghanistan with a power vacuum and an organized, well-armed movement of religious fundamentalists. From 1992 to 1996, competing warlords ruled. Another wave of people fled. In 1996, the Taliban came to power. U.S. readers should be well aware of what happened in Afghanistan in 2001.
The women in View from a Grain of Sand have lived through all of this. The film was shot in refugee camps and within Afghanistan over three visits-in fall 2000 (while the Taliban reigned and the world mostly ignored it); in fall 2001 (just after 9/11); and in 2003 (after the U.S. attacks, the fall of the Taliban, and the creation of a parliament dominated by the very same warlords who had reigned during the chaotic years of 1992 to 1996). Meena Nanji has documented her subjects' stories as they moved from obscurity to a focus of global attention. She has also documented the constancy of their struggles. These women's lives reflect continuous repression, lack of resources, and active work for change through a series of power shifts, all of which have been marked by violence and instability.
Nanji herself was born in Kenya to South Asian parents. She moved to England when she was a child and to the United States as a teen. This is her third film tracing the effects of disruption and displacement on people and cultures.
|
|
 Champions of independent journalism, peace-building and social justice honoured in 2008 with SEK 2 million prize shared between four recipients: Krishnammal and Sankaralingam Jagannathan, and their organisation LAFTI (Land for the Tillers' Freedom, India), Amy Goodman (USA), Asha Hagi (Somalia) and Monika Hauser (Germany)
 Krishnammal Jagannathan
Krishnammal and Sankaralingam Jagannathan, and their organisation LAFTI (Land for the Tillers' Freedom) (India), who receive an Award "for two long lifetimes of work dedicated to realising in practice the Gandhian vision of social justice and sustainable human development, for which they have been referred to as 'India's soul'."
Krishnammal Jagannathan and Sankaralingam Jagannathan are two lifelong activists for social justice, and for sustainable human development, working with those who are at the lowest rung of the social ladder. They have carried the Gandhian legacy into the 21st century, never ceasing to serve the needs of Dalits, landless and those threatened by the greed of landlords and multinational corporations.
Early lives (1930-1950)
Krishnammal Jagannathan was born to a landless Dalit family in 1926. Despite her family's poverty, she obtained university level education and was soon committed to the Gandhian Sarvodaya Movement, through which she met her husband, Sankaralingam Jagannathan (born in 1912), also a noted Gandhian.
Sankaralingam Jagannathan came from a rich family but gave up his college studies in 1930 in response to Gandhi's call for non-cooperation and disobedience. He joined the Quit India Movement in 1942 and spent three and a half years in jail before India gained its independence in 1947. During this time he already had considerable impact as campaigner on behalf of the poor.
Sankaralingam and Krishnammal married in 1950, having decided only to marry in independent India.
Redistributing land to the landless
Sankaralingam Jagannathan and Krishnammal Jagannathan decided early in their life that one of the key requirements for building a Gandhian society is empowering the rural poor by redistribution of land to the landless.
From 1950 to 1952 Sankaralingam Jagannathan was with Vinoba Bhave (the spiritual teacher of Gandhi) in Northern India on his Bhoodan (land-gift) Padayatra (pilgrimage on foot), the march appealing to landlords to give one sixth of their land to the landless, while Krishnammal completed her teacher-training course in Madras. He then returned to Tamil Nadu to start the Bhoodhan movement, and until 1968 the two worked for land redistribution through Vinoba Bhave's Gramdan movement (Village Gift, the next phase of the land-gift movement), and through Satyagraha (non-violent resistance). For this work, Sankaralingam Jagannathan was imprisoned many times. Between 1953 and 1967, the couple played an active role in the Bhoodhan movement spearheaded by Vinoba Bhave, through which about 4 million acres of land were distributed to thousands of landless poor across several Indian states.
Much land given over under these campaigns was infertile. To make it productive Sankaralingam Jagannathan started in 1968 the Association of Sarva Seva Farmers (ASSEFA) of which he was Chairman until 1993, and which has become one of the best known, and most effective, Indian non-governmental development institutions, whose work spreads over a number of states. ASSEFA's essential enduring technique, rooted in Gandhian philosophy and based on deep commitment, applies to all Sankaralingam Jagannathan's and Krishnammal Jagannathan's work: to confront a practical problem with a down-to-earth approach of planning and action. The participants in this work share amongst themselves the fruit of the labour and show to others in a practical way that the improbable is not impossible.
After a particularly horrific incident in 1968, the brutal burning of 42 landless women and children following a wage-dispute, the couple started to work in Thanjavur District in Tamil Nadu to concentrate on land reform issues.
The birth of LAFTI
In 1981, the couple founded LAFTI, Land for the Tillers' Freedom. LAFTI's purpose was to bring the landlords and landless poor to the negotiating table, obtain loans to enable the landless to buy land at reasonable price and then to help them work it cooperatively, so that the loans could be repaid.
Progress was initially slow: banks were unwilling to lend and the stamp duty on the registration of small lots was exorbitant. But Krishnammal Jagannathan managed to overcome the political and bureaucratic hurdles. By 2007 LAFTI had transferred 13,000 acres since it began work to about 13,000 families through social action and through a land-purchase program.
LAFTI now has a seven member Executive Committee, of which Krishnammal Jagannathan is the first secretary, a general body with 20 people from the villages, and about 40 staff.
LAFTI's other activities and outreach programmes
Although a prime focus, land-redistribution is by no means the only concern of LAFTI. It also runs village industries, like mat-weaving, rope-making, carpentry, masonry, fishery, etc. and gives training to Dalit boys and girls. To bridge the digital divide, LAFTI organizes computer training for underprivileged, particularly Dalit girls. It also organises Gram Sabhas (village committees) in 100 villages in East Thanjavur district, with a team of 30 dedicated men and women, who are now actively engaged in implementing the LAFTI programme.
LAFTI's economic activities are substantial: Brick kilns have been constructed and many houses built, and fish farming established on a significant scale. LAFTI was also very constructively involved in the famine relief programmes in 1987 and the reconstruction programme after the tsunami in the Nagapattinam coastal area.
Before LAFTI came in, the land-site on which the landless labourers lived did not belong to them and they were often evicted by landlords or government in the name of development. Due to LAFTI's efforts, the government has enacted a bill by which the land-site on which a labourer's thatched hut is located is legally allocated to the family. The 'people-participatory-environmental-friendly' house-building project, in which one adult member of the family contributes labour, is currently benefiting about 5000 families.
Protecting the coastal ecosystem and struggling against prawn farms
Since 1992 Sankaralingam Jagannathan and Krishnammal Jagannathan have addressed another major land challenge to the poor of the region: the establishment of prawn farms along the coast. The problem is not because of the local landlords but big industrialists from capital cities like Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Hyderabad, occupying large areas of land (500-1000 acres) for aquaculture in coastal areas, which not only throws the landless labour out of employment but also converts fertile and cultivable land to salty desert after seven or eight years when the prawn companies move on. It also results in the seepage of seawater into the groundwater in the neighbourhood, so that people are deprived of their drinking water resources. The result is that even more small farmers sell their meagre land-holdings to multinational prawn companies and move to the cities, filling urban slums.
To address this human and ecological tragedy Sankaralingam Jagannathan organised the whole of LAFTI's village movement to raise awareness among the people to oppose the prawn farms. Since 1993, villagers have offered Satygraha (non-violent resistance), through rallies, fasts, and demonstrations in protest of establishing the prawn farms. They have been beaten up by hired goons, their houses have been burnt, and LAFTI workers have been imprisoned, because of false accusations of looting and arson. Undeterred by this, Sankaralingam Jagannathan filed a 'public interest petition' in the Indian Supreme Court, which in turn asked NEERI (National Environmental Engineering Institute of India) to investigate the matter. NEERI's investigation report highlighted the environmental cost of the prawn farms to the nation and recommended all prawn farms within 500 meters of the coast to be banned.
In December 1996, the Supreme Court issued a ruling against intensive shrimp farming in cultivable lands within 500 meters of the coastal area. But because of the prawn farmers' local political influence, the Supreme Court judgement was not implemented on the ground. The legal battle around the prawn farms is still not resolved and the Jagannathans continue their struggle to establish non-exploitative, eco-friendly communities in the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu.
Further achievements and honours
In their lives, Sankaralingam Jagannathan and Krishnammal Jagannathan, either independently or together, have established a total of seven non-governmental institutions for the poor. Besides this, Krishnammal Jagannathan has also played an active role in wider public life: she has been a Senate member of the Gandhigram Trust and University and of Madurai University; a member of a number of local and state social welfare committees; and a member of the National Committee on Education, the Land Reform Committee and the Planning Committee.
These activities have gained for the Jagannathans a high profile in India and they have won many prestigious Awards: the Swami Pranavananda Peace Award (1987); the Jamnalal Bajaj Award (1988) and Padma Shri in 1989. In 1996 the couple received the Bhagavan Mahaveer Award "for propagating non-violence." In 1999 Krishnammal was awarded a Summit Foundation Award (Switzerland), and in 2008 an 'Opus Prize' given by the University of Seattle.
Quotation
"Vinoba Bhave, by whom my husband and I were inspired said 'Jai Jegath' (Long Live the World) and he was convinced this is possible by awakening of 'Sthree-shakthi' (women-power). I sincerely believe that the social, economic and spiritual crisis we are facing today in the world can be overcome through universal sisterhood and science and spirituality coming together for the good of the entire humanity!" -- Krishnammal Jagannathan
______________________________________
 Amy Goodman (Michael Kee)
Amy Goodman (USA), founder and award-winning host of Democracy Now!, a daily grassroots, global tv/radio news hour, is honoured "for developing an innovative model of truly independent political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media."
The media is sometimes called the fourth power in a democracy. But in many countries of the world, the media is today no longer willing or able to play this role. Instead it defers to commercial and political interests, thus eroding democracy. With Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman has shown what the alternative to this dangerous trend can look like. Democracy Now! is the largest public media collaboration in the U.S. which is now available to people seeking alternative viewpoints around the globe.
Career
Amy Goodman was born in 1957, graduated from Harvard in 1984 and became news director at the New York radio station WBAI a few years later. In 1996 she launched the daily one-hour news broadcast Democracy Now!, which she now hosts with Juan Gonzales, and which is produced live from 08.00 to 09.00 US EST.
Unembedded reporting
Democracy Now! focuses on issues its producers consider under-reported or ignored by mainstream news coverage, like global news or reporting on anti-war activism in the U.S. It provides hard-hitting, independent, breaking coverage of war and peace, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, and struggles for social, racial, economic, gender and environmental justice in the U.S. and abroad.
Democracy Now! seeks to give voice to the voiceless. Its broadcasts include:
- in-depth interviews with community members, activists, academics, artists and journalists shut out by the mainstream media,
- debates between activists and people in power,
- investigative reports and exclusive interviews with usual and controversial guests,
- and on-the-ground reporting from protests, the recent conventions and hot spots round the world
Democracy Now! - Facts and figures
Democracy Now! is the fastest growing independent news program in the USA. The show is now syndicated to more than 700 radio and TV, satellite and cable TV networks in North America reaching millions of people worldwide.
Democracy Now! is produced by seven producers, 20 full-time and 15 paid part-time staff as well as many volunteers. Broadcast daily as an hourly TV show, but with its founding on radio, it is produced in such a way that the stories never rely on the pictures, which allows it to be sent out as a radio show on community radio stations all over the US.
Democracy Now! has an outreach team working to encourage communities to demand that their community radio stations transmit the programme.
Democracy Now!'s innovative technical solutions allow for high usability for any kind of audience. There is 'close captioning' for deaf people and numerous voluntary transcribers produce full transcripts of the show. On the website, there are different types of streams and downloads, e.g. audio files, but also high-quality video files that are sent out, for example, by a Japanese TV channel once a week. Democracy Now! also keeps a complete archive of all its shows, which people can research for free.
Democracy Now! receives no government or corporate funding. Because of its educational mission, it has charitable status according to US law (501c3). Major organisational donors have been the Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund. Significant contributions also come from listeners themselves.
Trickle-up journalism
Goodman describes Democracy Now! as 'trickle-up journalism', because the stories it runs are often taken up by the mainstream media and her interviewees are very often interviewed by other channels after they have appeared on Democracy Now! Thus, the significance of Democracy Now! goes beyond the show as such: It also serves to open up the media landscape, acting as a 'conveyor belt' for stories that otherwise would not reach the mainstream media.
Awards and books
Goodman's awards include the Golden Reel for the Best National Documentary for 'Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship' in 1998, and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize for 'Massacre: the Story of East Timor'. This story had almost cost her life: In East Timor, she survived a massacre in 1991 in which Indonesian soldiers gunned down 270 Timorese.
Goodman has also written three hard-hitting books with her brother, David Goodman: The Exception to the Rulers (2004); Static: Government Liars, Media Cheer-leaders and the People who Fight Back (2006); and Standing up to the Madness (2008). She also syndicates a column to national papers.
Democracy Now! is broadcast daily from 8-9am EST/1-2pm GMT. To watch today's show and for a list of international and domestic stations that carry DN!, please go to www.democracynow.org.
Quotation
"I am completely honored to have my work and the work of my colleagues held in such high regard, it makes me realize how important the work of bringing a truly independent voice to broadcast news and journalism really is. I really believe in free speech and independent journalism as a tool for peace, for understanding. It is so important, especially during times like these, that the media hold the politicians feet to the fire... we all need the real answers, the truth as best we can. This is why I get up every morning and go to t | |
|
|
