<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; POW</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/pow/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:36:34 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Partisan Politics, Bad Ideas &amp; the Bergdahl Swap</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:45:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[POW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[release]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War on Terror]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233369</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the controversial exchange encapsulates everything that is wrong with Obama's foreign policy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233370" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped.png" alt="aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped" width="272" height="245" /></a>President Obama’s exchange of 5 high-ranking Taliban murderers for a soldier who possibly was a deserter and collaborator encapsulates everything that is wrong with this administration’s foreign policy. The serial failures of the past 5 years reflect a toxic brew of partisan politics and naïve ideology.</p>
<p>The staging of the announcement last Saturday in the Rose Garden obviously was intended to milk every drop of photogenic pathos and political gain from a decision rife with moral hazard and questionable legality. To reap political advantage from this disaster of a deal, lies and half-truths were necessary for creating the narrative behind the picture of Obama flanked by Bergdahl’s joyful, if somewhat bizarre, parents. Contrary to the president and his supporters, Bergdahl was not a “hero” or “prisoner of war.” Nor had he served with “honor and distinction,” or been “captured on the battlefield,” as the terminally mendacious Susan Rice said on a Sunday morning news-show.</p>
<p>In fact, evidence continues to mount that Bergdahl voluntarily left his post to connect with English-speaking Taliban, a move consistent with his renunciation of his citizenship and disgruntled anti-American emails. Whether he is just a flake, as his earlier biography and strange comments suggest, or had more sinister motives will become clearer as more information surfaces. He may even be a traitor. His team leader on the night he disappeared, former Army Sergeant Evan Buetow, has told CNN that radio intercepts revealed that Bergdahl was looking for the Taliban, and that after his capture, the Taliban’s attacks on Americans became “far more directed.”</p>
<p>The serious questions about Bergdahl were known to the administration, if only from a 2012 <i>Rolling Stone</i> article. Yet consistent with Obama’s foreign policy approach, facts are never an impediment to political advantage, as his record shows. The Benghazi disaster was created by politics and covered up for political reasons. Beefing up security for the diplomatic mission was nixed because it contradicted the political narrative that the multilateral “leading from behind” removal of Ghaddafi had started Libya on the road to Jeffersonian democracy and peace, when in reality it had unleashed hundreds of feral jihadists gangs now armed with missiles and other weapons. Likewise blaming the attack on an obscure video rather than an al Qaeda franchise reinforced the “al Qaeda on its heels” and “bin Laden dead” memes peddled during the presidential campaign in order to prove the success of Obama’s anti-Bush foreign policy.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">So too the Bergdahl weeper is another episode in the “end the wars and bring the troops home” political narrative demonstrating the superiority of “</span>collective action” and “diplomacy and development, sanctions and isolation, appeals to international law, and, if just, necessary and effective, multilateral military action,” as Obama said at West Point, over George Bush’s alleged trigger-happy, blood-for-oil, Halliburton-enriching unilateralism. Just don’t think about the 6 soldiers who died looking for Bergdahl, or the violation of legal protocols for releasing Guantanamo detainees, or the dismissal of the concerns of the intelligence community, or the snubbing of Congress in making the deal, or the moral hazard of paying ransom to hostage-takers. Never mind that under Obama’s watch Iraq is once again an inferno of sectarian violence and is fast becoming a satellite of Iran. Just forget that the Taliban, given a date-certain for our withdrawal, are poised to reassert control over large swaths of eastern Afghanistan, squandering the sacrifices made by our troops. Those facts must be obscured in order to achieve a political advantage. So too the enormous risk to our soldiers’ lives and our national interests that attends the release of 5 battle-hardened jihadist murderers does not figure in political calculations for firing up the base ahead of the midterm election.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Politics may be all there is to Obama’s foreign policy. With some justification, he may calculate that despite a few occasional bleats of protest, the ovine press corps will always watch his back and deliver the political dividends his actions seek. The scandal of Benghazi––both the incompetence that lead to 4 dead Americans, and the blatantly dishonest cover-up afterwards––that unfolded a few months before the 2012 elections should have put his reelection at risk. Yet with an indifferent press corps downplaying the story, and partisan hack Candy Crowley watching his back during the presidential debates, the worst scandal of his presidency had no effect on the election. So we shouldn’t be surprised that team Obama thinks this latest shameless political stunt will work too. As Guy Benson at <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/06/03/nyt-bergdahl-left-a-desertion-note-n1847046"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Townhall.com</span></a> analyzes the Obama crew’s thinking, “<span style="color: #000000;">They figured that the feel-good nature of the ‘POW’ returning home narrative would be blindly seized upon and enabled by a media exhausted by the egregious VA scandal story. Unpleasant details would be whitewashed or mostly ignored, and the only real outrage would emanate from the usual suspects on the Right. They thought they could counter critiques of the nature and terms of the trade with faux-indignant questions about whether skeptics were in favor of ‘leaving Americans behind.’” In short, the White House’s political <i>modus operandi</i> on every bonehead decision for the past 5 years.</span></p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Yet there is also an ideology behind Obama’s foreign policy, one shared by most progressives. This naïve view assumes the whole world is just like us, wants freedom, human rights, leisure, and prosperity as much as we do, and is kept from achieving those boons by environmental forces, lingering superstitions like religion, and the fallout from historical crimes most of which have been committed by the West. <span style="color: #000000;">Thus </span>it assumes America’s guilt and need to atone for its neo-colonial and neo-imperialist sins, and its racism, plunder of resources, and militarist adventurism, the very attitude struck in Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech. Then follows the imperative for American withdrawal and retreat, a dangerous dereliction of global duty rationalized with the magical thinking of “international law,” “engagement,” “multilateralism,” “smart diplomacy,” “sanctions,” “international pressure,” and all the other camouflage for an unwillingness to make the tough, risky choices necessary in a hard world of bad men. This ideology bespeaks a monumental failure of imagination, and a parochial inability to understand that different peoples and cultures have different mores and goals.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Every one of Obama’s foreign policy debacles reveals this shopworn idealism. It explains the impulse to rely on negotiations and concessions with enemies like Iran, who only yield at the point of a gun; the reliance on bluster and bluff with killers like Bashar al Assad, who can read every tell announcing a weak hand; or the feeble threats of disapproval from an international community issued to Vladimir Putin, whose past brutal behavior in Chechnya and Georgia shows that he cares nothing for the estimation of some imagined “international community” that still wants to buy his oil. And now comes Obama’s absurd claim that releasing 5 seasoned killers will “<span style="color: #000000;">open the door for broader discussions among Afghans about the future of their country by building confidence that it is possible for all sides to find common ground.” That Obama thinks the Taliban––who brutally murdered their own people in a soccer stadium, stone homosexuals, throw acid in the face of schoolgirls, honor-kill their own wives and daughters, and blow up women and children–– can have any “common ground” with anyone not sharing their barbarous religious ideology is profoundly delusional. </span></p>
<p>As the Bergdahl fiasco shows yet again, partisan politics and bad ideas make for a world dangerous to our interests and security.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>41</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Remembering Vietnam War Hero Jeremiah Denton</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/remembering-vietnam-war-hero-jeremiah-denton/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=remembering-vietnam-war-hero-jeremiah-denton</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/remembering-vietnam-war-hero-jeremiah-denton/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2014 04:47:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blinking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hero]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jeremiah Denton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morse code]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[POW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Torture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222276</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The nation loses a man who persevered against communist brutality and outwitted his captors. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/denton_jeremiah++defense.gov_.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-222279" alt="denton_jeremiah++defense.gov" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/denton_jeremiah++defense.gov_.jpg" width="317" height="238" /></a></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">When Jeremiah Denton passed away at 89 on March 28 President Obama issued a statement:  “The valor that he and his fellow POWs displayed was deeply inspiring to our nation at the time, and it continues to inspire our brave men and women who serve today. As senator, he served as a strong advocate for our national security.  He leaves behind a legacy of heroic service to his country.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That presidential tribute was certainly welcome, and perhaps something of a surprise. But the man and his story deserve more detail.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Commander Denton was shot down over North Vietnam on July 18, 1965, and held captive for nearly eight years. Senator John McCain, a POW in North Vietnam for more than five years, said, “as a senior ranking officer in prison, Admiral Denton’s leadership inspired us to persevere, and to resist our captors in ways we never would have on our own. He endured unspeakable pain and suffering because of his steadfast adherence to our code of conduct.” Denton’s heroism also emerges in </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Leading with Honor</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a recent memoir by fellow POW Lee Ellis.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hanoi and Haiphong were the most heavily defended areas in the world and </span>more than 70 percent of US pilots shot down in the “Rolling Thunder” campaign were pilots and crew members. Denton was one of the first and a prize for the North Vietnamese who sought to use prominent POWs as propaganda tools in staged press conferences. As Ellis describes it:</p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">CDR Denton endured excruciating torture before agreeing to go before the cameras. Prior to his filming, his captors prepped him for several days on what he was supposed to say about ‘America’s cruel and oppressive war.’ He said ‘whatever my government is doing, I agree with it, and I will support it as long as I live.’</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On camera, Denton blinked out TORTURE in Morse code (video below). When the video went public, Ellis notes, “it was the first time the U.S government had accurate information about the treatment of POWs.” So Denton’s valor was informative and inspiring, but he wasn’t done.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/BgelmcOdS38" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>His defiance angered the Vietnamese Communists but they remained unaware of Denton’s encoded communication and put him on display at another staged press conference two weeks later. “This time Denton stood up on camera and walked out.” His Vietnamese Communist captors “put Denton in the rope torture and then beat him until he was unconscious.”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even so, Denton’s policy remained firm: “no writing, no taping, take torture until you’re in danger of losing mental facilities, and then give a phony story. Die before giving classified information. If broken, don’t despair. Bounce back as soon as you can to the hard line. Remember: unity above self.” And Ellis notes that Denton practiced what he preached.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Denton “never hesitated to provide leadership when he was senior ranking officer of a cellblock or camp. Although that made him a prime target for abuse and exploitation by the enemy, he steadfastly pushed himself and the enemy to the limit. He deliberately kept the torture team occupied, so they would have less time to harass his fellow POWs.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So in current parlance, he took more than one for the team, and he prevailed. After the 1973 accords, Denton was the first former POW to step off the plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. But he wasn’t done yet.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Promoted to rear admiral, Denton became commandant of the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. He remained a strong anti-Communist, supporting the Nicaraguan Contras in their fight against the Communist pro-Soviet FSLN regime. In 1980 he gained election to the U.S. Senate, the first Republican from Alabama since Reconstruction. Not bad for the son of a hotel clerk who attended 13 different elementary schools.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jeremiah Denton wrote </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">When Hell Was in Session</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> about his POW years. In 1979 that book became a TV movie with Hal Holbrook as Denton and Eva Marie Saint as his wife Jane, who raised seven children while her husband was a POW in Vietnam. That movie deserves another shot on television and a full theatrical release. That would be a fitting tribute to Jeremiah Denton and help his valor, as President Obama said, “to inspire our brave men and women who serve today.”</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/remembering-vietnam-war-hero-jeremiah-denton/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>30</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Lessons on the New Left from the Hanoi Hilton</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 05:45:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ho chi minh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jane Fonda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[POW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tom hayden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Torture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219906</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A POW's memories of communist torture camp collaborators Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fondapic1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219907" alt="fondapic1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fondapic1-450x321.jpg" width="315" height="225" /></a>C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb recently interviewed Lee Ellis, author of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leading-Honor-Leadership-Lessons-Hilton/dp/098387932X">Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton</a>.</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> The book is a valuable primer on history that many Americans have forgotten or know only in part. </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Leading with Honor</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is also an introduction to characters all Americans should get to know better, such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Ellis came to know the pair under different circumstances.</span></p>
<p>In November of 1967 Ellis was shot down on a mission to destroy the guns that protected the Quang Khe ferry that supplied the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In the Hoa Lao prison, which POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, Ellis learned firsthand about North Vietnam and its systematic torture of American POWs. As the author notes, the North Vietnamese tortured more than 95 percent of American POWs including eight tortured to death. Ellis describes the “Pretzel,” one of the regime’s favorite tortures:</p>
<blockquote><p>After the prisoner’s legs were tied together, his arms were laced tightly behind his back until the elbows touched and the shoulders were virtually pulled out of joint. Then the torturer would push the bound arms up and over the head, while applying pressure with a knee to the victim’s back. During the torture, the circulation is cut off and the limbs to go sleep but the joint pain continues to increase as the ligaments and muscles tear. When the ropes are finally removed, circulation surges back into the &#8220;dead&#8221; limbs, causing excruciating pain.</p></blockquote>
<p>POW Mike McGrath provides a sketch of the practice. The North Vietnamese also used handcuffs that could be ratcheted down tighter until they cut off circulation, even cut into the muscle and on some men, “deep enough to expose bone.” But the torture wasn’t all physical.</p>
<p>The captors piped in propaganda and, Ellis explains, “the afternoon broadcasts were especially disheartening because they featured Americans spouting words that could have been written for them in Moscow and Hanoi.” American <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1334">Tom Hayden</a> “was a regular speaker,” later joined by his wife “film star Jane Fonda.” For this pair, the American POWs were war criminals and their reports of torture were lies.</p>
<p>Ellis charitably calls Fonda an “anti-war activist,” but she and Hayden were not against war in general. They only opposed American participation in a war against the North Vietnamese regime they served as propagandists. Hayden was their voice in the cells of the Hanoi Hilton and Fonda partied it up with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft squad. But unlike “Axis Sally,” Mildred Gillars, who served jail time for broadcasting Nazi propaganda, “Hanoi Jane” suffered not at all. Her money and prestige helped Hayden gain public office in California.</p>
<p>The war in Vietnam continued after the United States pulled out in 1973 and in 1975 South Vietnam fell to the Communists.  Hayden and Fonda celebrated the victory and remained uncritical of a Stalinist regime more repressive than its Soviet sponsors. Fonda even sought to slam the door on the “boat people” who fled the regime. Hayden called their defenders, such as Joan Baez, tools of the CIA.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, one of Tom Hayden’s comrades, John Froines, was recently the subject of a <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2013/11/24/5938492/dan-morain-from-an-obscure-panel.html">glowing profile in the <i>Sacramento Bee</i></a> describing him as a “social justice and civil rights advocate” but a stickler for facts and completely impartial.</p>
<p>Froines was a minor Zelig-like figure in the New Left but achieved a measure of fame for disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was acquitted on rioting charges and, armed with a PhD in chemistry from Yale, went on to work for the federal government. He later landed in California, where his Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants used suspect data to impose an onerous regulatory regime that punishes California workers</p>
<p>Froines’ panel championed a study by Hien Tran of the California Air Resources Board, who claimed to have a PhD from UC Davis. Actually, Tran bought his degree from a diploma mill in a New York UPS office. Froines also fought epidemiologist James Enstrom of the UCLA School of Public Health, who exposed Tran’s fakery and pointed out problems in his study.</p>
<p>Even so, Froines was duly reappointed to the panel by Assembly Speaker John Perez who claimed to have earned a degree from UC Berkeley, a claim backed by state officials and federal Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. But that too was wrong. Perez, a “Chicano Studies” major, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Assembly-Speaker-John-Perez-a-Cal-dropout-not-2371239.php">did not earn a degree at UC Berkeley</a>. In politically correct California, a virtual one-party state, the falsehood hurt him not at all.</p>
<p>The California Environmental Protection Agency honored John Froines in a private ceremony and the Italian city of Capri gave him the prestigious Ramazzini Award as a “public health hero.” New Left hero Tom Hayden went on to teach at UCLA and Occidental College. And Jane Fonda of course remains a Big Star.</p>
<p>To find out how Tom and Jane came across from the cells of the Hanoi Hilton, and to learn what kind of regime they defended, readers might consult <i>Leading with Honor</i> by Lee Ellis. Yes, there’s a lesson or two in there somewhere.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>41</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Colonel George &#8216;Bud&#8217; Day, R.I.P.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/peter-collier/colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/peter-collier/colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jul 2013 04:59:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bud Day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colonel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[POW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rip]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198635</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Farewell to an American warrior and patriot -- for whom uncommon valor was a common virtue.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Bud-Day.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-198638" alt="Bud-Day" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Bud-Day-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a>America is a poorer place today, a place whose reservoir of valor and determination has been depleted, because George “Bud” Day passed away over the weekend at the age of 88.  He was a synecdoche for heroism, a military man’s military man.  At Medal of Honor get-togethers, his fellow recipients, all of whom had accomplished legendary feats of bravery of their own, would pay special attention when Bud Day appeared.</p>
<p>Bud was at war on behalf of America most of his life and never called a truce even as age and infirmity slowed him down.  He was a 17-year-old high school junior in Sioux City, Iowa when he dropped out to join the Marines in 1942.  He spent nearly three years in the Pacific as a member of a 130 mm gun battery, then came home to get his diploma, attend college and get a law degree.  He passed the bar in 1949, but felt that the weak, piping time of peace would be a brief interlude.  He joined the Iowa Air National Guard and after pilot training was called to active duty during the Korean War as a fighter jock.  After two tours, he decided to become a “lifer” in the Air Force.</p>
<p>In the spring of 1967, Day, by then  just a year away from retirement,  decided to volunteer for a tour in Vietnam.  In June, he became commander of an all-volunteer fighter wing operating out of the Phu Cat Air Base.  He and his men were flying F-100 Super Sabres as part of a top secret program to act as Forward Air Controllers for U.S. fighter bombers operating over North Vietnam, selecting targets and calling in air strikes on them.</p>
<p>On August 26, Day, who now had 65 missions, was directing a flight of F-105s striking an enemy surface-to-air missile site near the DMZ in North Vietnam.   His plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, destroying its hydraulics and sending it into a death spiral.  As he ejected, he smashed into the fuselage, breaking his arm in three places and injuring his back.  North Vietnamese militiamen below watched his parachute bloom and were waiting for him when he landed.  They marched him to a camouflaged underground shelter and began a violent interrogation. When Day refused to answer their questions, his captors staged a mock execution, then hung him from a rafter by his feet.  After several hours, the North Vietnamese, believing him to be so badly hurt that he wouldn’t try to escape, let Day down and tied him up with a loosely knotted rope.</p>
<p>Four days later, as a pair of distracted teenaged soldiers stood guard, Day managed to untie himself and escape.  He headed south at the beginning of one of the most remarkable episodes of resistance and survival of the Vietnam war.</p>
<p>On his second night on the run, Day, feverish from his wounds, was dozing in thick undergrowth when a renegade bomb or rocket landed nearby.  The concussion left him bleeding from his ears and sinuses and lanced one leg with  shrapnel.  Day collected himself and continued to hobble south, eating berries and frogs he trapped while successfully evading the enemy patrols on his trail.</p>
<p>Sometime between the twelfth and fifteenth day after his escape &#8212; by then Day had lost track of time &#8212; he heard helicopters and stumbled toward the sound.  It was U.S. choppers evacuating a Marine unit and he limped toward the landing zone.  But the helicopters left before he got close enough to get their attention.  The next morning, still heading south, the delirious Day was spotted by an enemy patrol.  He tried to hide in the jungle, but was shot in the hand and leg.  He was recaptured within a mile or so of the U.S. Marine firebase at Con Thien.</p>
<p>Taken back to the camp from which he had escaped, he was subjected to starvation, staged execution and torture; his right arm was rebroken.  He was held in an archipelago of camps as he was moved north, finally reaching the “Hanoi Hilton.”</p>
<p>When he arrived at the prison, his untreated wounds were infected, and he was suffering from malnutrition and unable to perform even the most rudimentary task for himself.  The fingers on both hands had curled into fists; he regained some motion by peeling them back, flattening them against the wall of his cell and leaning into them with all his weight. His cellmate was John McCain, who himself had recently been nursed through his own physical nightmare. McCain, who would routinely refer to Day as “the bravest man I ever knew,” put together a homemade split to help heal Day’s damaged arm.</p>
<p>Over the next five years, Day earned his reputation as one of the Hanoi Hilton’s hard men by offering maximum resistance 24 hours a day for all the days of his imprisonment.  Subjected to unremitting torture, he gave his captors only false information.  He provided leadership to the other POWs by his example and by his words, helping create the patriotic elan that would see them through their captivity and immunize them against anti-American despair when they came home.  On one well-remembered occasion in 1971, when rifle wielding guards burst into the cell where some of the prisoners were holding a forbidden religious service, Day moved closer to stare into the muzzles of the guns and began to sing The Star Spangled Banner.  The other men, including James Stockdale, ranking U.S. officer in the prison, joined him.  They always credited him with sharpening their own will to resist and to survive.</p>
<p>Bud Day was released on March 14, 1973.  Three years later President Gerald Ford presented him with the Medal of Honor.  By then he was one of America’s most highly decorated servicemen.</p>
<p>His service to his country and its military men never stopped.  Working as an attorney after his retirement from the Air Force, he filed a class action suit against the U.S. in 1996 on behalf of retired servicemen who were stripped of medical benefits at age 65 and instructed to apply for Medicare.  It was a fight he ultimately won.</p>
<p>In 2004 Bud Day returned more explicitly to the battle when he joined others in Swift Vets and POWs for Truth in attacking John Kerry’s slander of the military in his unrelenting campaign for public office after Vietnam and for his dishonesty in characterizing the war.  And in the years that followed, Day continued to warn about Islamic extremism and against the efforts to disarm the U.S. in the fight against the jihad whose sole objective, he said, was to “make America kneel.”</p>
<p>A warrior and a patriot, Bud Day has now joined John Stockdale, his comrade in defiance at the Hanoi Hilton, and Alvin York, Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy, and all the others, fallen now, who also wore the Medal of Honor and for whom, as Admiral Chester Nimitz said, uncommon valor was a common virtue.</p>
<p><strong>Among Peter Collier’s works <i>is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Medal-Honor-Portraits-Valor-beyond/dp/1579652409">Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty </a></i>(Workman Publishers) where he writes about Bud Day and other Medal recipients.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/peter-collier/colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>22</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 532/579 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 09:56:58 by W3 Total Cache -->