Biden Lie #928757
2024-04-22 21:25:47 UTC
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Permalinkuncle was in a plane that was shot down over an area where cannibals lived.
In remarks Wednesday in Scranton and Pittsburgh, President Joe Biden
said his uncle was shot down during WWII over a region of New Guinea
where cannibals had lived, an account not borne out by military records.
At the time, Biden had been honoring his uncle’s memory while upbraiding
former President Donald Trump for calling fallen veterans “suckers and
losers.”
Biden said Second Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., known as “Uncle Bosie,”
flew single-engine planes in reconnaissance flights over New Guinea for
the Army Air Corps, established before the Air Force.
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New
Guinea at the time,” Biden said. “They never recovered his body.”
According to a personnel profile report from the Pentagon’s Defense
POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the plane had not been shot down and
cannibals were not mentioned.
What the report said was that on May 14, 1944, Ambrose was a passenger
on an A-20 Havoc plane with a crew of three making a courier flight to
an airfield in New Guinea.
Both of the plane’s engines failed at low altitude, “and the aircraft’s
nose hit the water hard,” according to the report. Two crew members as
well as Finnegan were lost in the crash, while one crew member survived.
There was no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.
“President Biden is proud of his uncle’s service in uniform,” White
House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Thursday. “The president
highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honoring our
‘sacred commitment … to equip those we send to war and take care of them
and their families when they come home.’”
Chris Nicholas, a Republican political consultant based in Harrisburg,
said he found it “hard to understand why Team Biden would want him
talking about that specific incident in his long-dead relative’s past.
He must know he’s under constant watch because of his age. He has so
many other stories to tell.”
Biden has misspoken before about an uncle in the military.
During a town hall event in New Castle, Del., in December 2022, Biden
recounted a story about trying to award his uncle, Frank Biden, a Purple
Heart for service in WWII, according to PolitiFact, a fact-checking website.
Biden said that he attempted to give his uncle, now dead, the honor in
2008, while he was vice president, but that his uncle refused the medal
out of respect for comrades who had died. Biden was elected vice
president in 2008, but didn’t take office until 2009. And FactCheck.org
reports that Frank Biden died in 1999.
Upon investigation, PolitiFact reported, “It’s possible that such an
event occurred under different circumstances while Biden was serving in
the U.S. Senate, but PolitiFact found no evidence to corroborate the
claim as described by Biden. We rate Biden’s claim False.”
Biden has spoken in the past about his family’s military service,
including that of his elder son, Beau, who died in 2015 of brain cancer,
which Biden has said was linked to exposure to burn pits during his
son’s Iraq deployment.
During his remarks Wednesday, Biden referred to Trump and said, “That
man doesn’t deserve to have been the commander in chief for my son, my
uncle.”
Biden’s reference to Trump’s use of pejoratives to describe war dead
relates to a 2020 Atlantic article in which the former president was
quoted as having called American war dead in a French cemetery “losers.”
He also referred to 1,800 Marines as “suckers” for getting killed in battle.
This article contains material from the Associated Press.
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/biden-uncle-ambrose-finnegan-wwii-death-cannibals-new-guinea-20240418.html