Kerry's War Crime Accusations
NE Republican
Eric Fettmann talks more about one of the points I made in my <font color=blue>'Missing from Kerry's Speech'<font color=black> post.
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Watching last week's Democratic infomercial in Boston, one could be forgiven for thinking that John Kerry went straight from the Mekong Delta to the podium at the Fleet Center, with barely a stop in between.
That he had almost nothing to say about his 20 years in the U.S. Senate was surprising. But that almost nary a word was heard about the events that rocketed John Kerry to nationwide fame is shameful.
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For America didn't learn of Kerry because of his exploits in Vietnam. He became a recognized figure after his return — when he publicly accused those same American soldiers whom he now claims to champion as <font color=blue>"war criminals."<font color=black>
Kerry has never disavowed his anti-war activities and accusations. Last spring, on <font color=blue>"Meet the Press,"<font color=black> he declared that he was <font color=blue>"proud"<font color=black> of what he'd done, claiming he and his fellow activists, like Jane Fonda, <font color=blue>"saved lives."<font color=red>
So why no campaign ads featuring his Senate testimony? If Kerry showed moral leadership and patriotism by exposing the <font color=blue>"atrocities"<font color=red> committed by U.S. troops, why not remind us of it?
Here's why:
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U.S. troops in Vietnam, Kerry told Congress in 1971, <font color=blue>"personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war . . ."<font color=black>
Indeed, he said, any Vietcong atrocities paled next to the criminality of U.S. troops: <font color=blue>"[Americans] are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners — all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam."<font color=black>
Nor, said Kerry, were these <font color=blue>"isolated incidents, but
crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full
awareness of officers at all levels of command."<font color=black> Those who
committed and planned them, he said, were true <font color=blue>"war
criminals"<font color=black> who should face the bar of justice.
These claims all came from the so-called <font color=blue>"Winter Soldier Investigation"<font color=black> hatched by conspiracy crackpot Mark Lane. Kerry just repeated the charges, leveled by 150 supposed Vietnam vets, word for word. <font color=red>But two journalists with strong anti-war credentials, Neil Sheehan and James Reston, later exposed <font color=blue>"Winter Soldier"<font color=red> as a mass of fabrications by people who hadn't even been in Vietnam.
As recently as three months ago, however, Kerry refused to admit that he'd parroted a bunch of lies. Though admitting that <font color=blue>"some of them have been discredited,"<font color=red> he insisted to Tim Russert that <font color=blue>"a lot of those stories have been documented."<font color=red>
He was willing to say only that some of the language he used was <font color=blue>"a little bit over the top,"<font color=red> but understandable, given his youth and emotion. No hint of an apology for having (as military historian and Vietnam vet Mackubin Thomas Owens put it) <font color=blue>"slandered an entire generation of American soldiers."<font color=red>
But if what a youthful Kerry did in Vietnam demonstrates why he should be president, don't his disgraceful actions a bit later suggest the opposite?
Kerry could have used his acceptance speech to apologize — or at least express some regret — for his slanders. Instead, he tried to rewrite history, depicting his Vietnam service as the proudest experience of his life.
That's not what he was saying in 1971. Back then he told
Congress: <font color=blue>"We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our
own memories of that service."<font color=red>
Which still leaves this important and unresolved question: If John Kerry is convinced that he did something moral and commendable in publicly branding America's troops in Vietnam as war criminals, why didn't he shout it to the rafters in Boston?
And if he now believes, as he likely suspects most Americans probably do, that his conduct was shameful, why won't he admit it — and apologize to those he so publicly defamed?
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