Questions Arise: Has McCain Made up Stories about POW Time?

Questions are coming fast and furious about the "Cross in the Dirt" story that McCain tells about his time as a POW.



McCain's POW status and his heroics during that period are well documented. Why then, would he fabricate a story about it?

But the evidence coming in certainly raises issues.

Andrew Sullivan and the Jed Report are both on it.

From the latter:

As for the story itself, the details of McCain's version of Solzhenitsyn's "Cross in the Dirt" story don't add up. Specifically:

1. As first reported by kos diarist rickrocket, McCain's story is nearly identical to a story told by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
2. In McCain's version of the story, a guard who had befriended him later drew the cross in the ground.
3. According to McCain's 1973 retelling of his experience, there was only one guard who he considered human, and that guard befriended him in 1969. (kos diarist Calouste made this connection, which extends into the next two points.)
4. This means that McCain's Christmas story would have taken place in 1969.
5. Between when he met that guard and Christmas of 1969, McCain changed prisons. Unless the guard followed him to the new prison, McCain's story is not true.

There is also a ton of circumstantial evidence raising doubts about McCain's story:

1. In McCain's early stories about his POW years, he made no mention of the story.
2. At a 1974 prayer breakfast arranged by Ronald Reagan, McCain did not tell the Solzhenitsyn story. He told a completely different one about a prisoner scratching a prayer into a wall. It is unimaginable that he would not have told the "Cross in the Dirt" story if it were true. (kos diarist TomP linked to another version of the prayer breakfast story, but the link was a dead link.)
3. There is no evidence McCain ever told this story before 1999.
4. McCain's story has shifted subtly over the years since he first told it in 1999. (His most recent written version is here.)
5. McCain (or, more likely, his ghost writer Mark Salter) is a huge fan of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.