Per Carl Wolfson and Thom Hartmann, not only was the "personal story" that McCain told to Rick Warren during the recent "forum" identical to the story in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," but 1) when McCain returned from Viet Nam and at length related the stories of the key events of his war and POW experiences, he did not mention that particular incident, and 2) in the 1990s, when McCain did start telling that story as something from his own history, he told it as having happened to a fellow POW whom he knew, not to McCain himself.

Fabrication? "Hypermnesiac"* embellishment of something that actually happened to McCain while he was a POW?   The inevitable effects of the aging process on memory? A combination of "all of the above?"   Questions worth pondering in any case.

Genie

*"Hypermnesia" - the tendency of the human memory to 'fill in the blanks" (gaps) in memory, including merging of separate event memories, adding details, etc. I.e., over time, we tend to "remember" more about an event than we actually experienced, noticed, or stored in memory at the time it happened.