McCain leads the way to dump Vets benefits.

Snip of Long article:

By Brandon Turbeville

While lawmakers seem to have no problem finding funds for bombs fighter jets and terrorists in Syria and Iraq, it seems that it is much more difficult for them to find money to pay American soldiers for their service and pay for their healthcare once that service is over.

This is because Congressional Defense leaders on Tuesday announced that they are looking to enact more “entitlement and personnel reforms” in 2016.

The bill being submitted and debated by Congress would provide a much lower than anticipated pay raise for U.S. troops beginning in January 2016. It includes cuts in the growth of military housing stipends, an introduction of new co-pays for some military drug prescriptions and a scale-down of the commissary benefit.

The bill also includes changes to the traditional military retirement system and an overhaul of military healthcare offerings like Tricare.

In fact, Tricare “reform” is going to be a major focus in the coming debate. This comes after a military compensation and retirement modernization commission report released earlier this year recommended dumping Tricare completely, “realigning medical commands” and “better integrating Defense Department care with Veterans Affairs medical offerings.”

Pentagon officials despite having an apparent limitless budget when it comes to funding bearded fanatics, and providing limitless amounts of weaponry to terrorists are now whining about the need to “rein in” personnel costs.

Unsurprisingly, one of the most vocal cheerleaders of this effort to reduce benefits for American soldiers is Senator John McCain who stated that military personnel costs are “one of our greatest challenges” and that “we’re going to have to make some tough decisions” soon.

No one should be shocked at McCain’s position of course since despite his constant harping about his military service as a qualification for any and all of his opinions McCain has been a relentless enemy of American military personnel since as far back as the Vietnam War.

It should be remembered that it was John McCain who stood in front of Congress and argued against any further investigation or revelation of whether or not American POWs were still being held in Vietnam, as well as displaying a general antipathy to American military personnel as I’ve detailed in my article “The Un-American Hero: Crimes of John McCain.”

As Sydney Schanburg wrote in his excellent article, “The War Secrets Sen. John McCain Hides,” McCain was consistent, at least in his actions, in his refusal to allow any further attempts to discover and recover missing American POWs in Vietnam as well as even the possibility of allowing any further investigation as to the possibility that Americans were still being held captive. This is, of course, despite McCain’s incessant reliance on his military service as some type of qualification for whatever his political position of the day might be.

As Schanburg writes,

But there was one subject that was off-limits, a subject the Arizona senator almost never brings up and has never been open about — his long-time opposition to releasing documents and information about American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the missing in action who have still not been accounted for. Since McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for 5 1/2 years, his staunch resistance to laying open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed his career.

Critics say his anti-disclosure campaign, in close cooperation with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, has been successful. Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy.

For example, all the Pentagon debriefings of the prisoners who returned from Vietnam are now classified and closed to the public under a statute enacted in the 1990s with McCain’s backing. He says this is to protect the privacy of former POWs and gives it as his reason for not making public his own debriefing.

[…]Many Vietnam veterans and former POWs have fumed at McCain for keeping these and other wartime files sealed up. His explanation, offered freely in Senate hearings and floor speeches, is that no one has been proven still alive and that releasing the files would revive painful memories and cause needless emotional stress to former prisoners, their families and the families of MIAs still unaccounted for. But what if some of these returned prisoners, as has always been the case at the conclusion of wars, reveal information to their debriefing officers about other prisoners believed still held in captivity? What justification is there for filtering such information through the Pentagon rather than allowing access to source materials? For instance, debriefings from returning Korean war POWs, available in full to the American public, have provided both citizens and government investigators with important information about other Americans who went missing in that conflict.

Would not most families of missing men, no matter how emotionally drained, want to know? And would they not also want to know what the government was doing to rescue their husbands and sons? Hundreds of MIA families have for years been questioning if concern for their feelings is the real reason for the secrecy.