Spin Cycle

Ever since McCain decided to focus his campaign on Obama's association with Bill Ayers, the left has been buzzing about the US Council for World Freedom -- a right-wing anti-communist group that McCain associated with as a board member in the early 1980s.

The council was headed by Gen. John Singlaub (left), a friend of McCain's father, and achieved notoriety when it was exposed as a front for the Reagan/Ollie North White House's illegal arms shipments to Nicaragua's Contras, designed to circumvent a Congressional ban.

But the group also has some more embarrassing connections -- to former Nazi collaborators, right wing death squads in Latin America. McCain was never tied directly to those activities and says he resigned in the mid-1980s, but there are questions about exactly when.

The AP explores the turf here. Also look here and here:

"McCain's association with a group that reportedly circumvented law, financed right-wing military institutions, and engaged in sometimes brutal anti-communist tactics, could be telling for some voters. At the very least his time on the board of the U.S. Council of World Freedom provides a window of sorts into the foreign policy vision that he held back in the 1980s and one that he still seemingly holds today."