Noted 9/11 Truther Ray McGovern endorsed former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.) to be President Barack Obama’s next Defense Secretary in an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun Thursday.
Mr. Obama will be offered more hare-brained schemes like that. Mr. Hagel would likely recognize them for what they are. He has "been there, done that," having volunteered for Vietnam, with two purple hearts to prove it.
Mr. Hagel has explained his overall attitude in these words: "Committing a nation to war, asking our men and women to make sacrifices that no other Americans will ever be asked to make, is a deadly serious decision. War is not an abstraction."
Mr. Hagel would be the first secretary of defense in 30 years with lessons learned from direct combat experience. About time, I would say. No more Ed Krukowskis sacrificed in fool's errands, please.
McGovern—who endorsed the book 9/11 and American Empire (Vol. 1): Intellectuals Speak Out for providing "compelling evidence ... that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by [the George W. Bush] administration precisely so they could be thus exploited"—has blamed Israel for problems in the Middle East and promotes the USS Liberty conspiracy theory. He delivered a speech last year on Israel and Iran that implied there was an Israeli conspiracy to deny Obama a second term. McGovern has also supported Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
It is not known if the White House solicited the 9/11 Truther to defend Hagel’s potential nomination.
The man who wrote a novel about Clinton’s personal life but refused to put his name on it, Joe Klein, also defended Hagel today.
Endorsements of Hagel in the past two weeks have come from the Iranian state propaganda outlet PressTV, the Palestinian advocacy group J Street, co-author of the conspiracy book The Israel Lobby Stephen Walt, disgraced anti-Semitic former ambassador Chas Freeman, and Daily Beast blogger Peter Beinart, an advocate for the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement against Israel.