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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry
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To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (44211)8/21/2004 11:54:17 PM
From: Nadine CarrollRead Replies (3) of 81568
 
Kerry said he heard those stories (he did). It is not Kerry's fault that some of the stories were not true.


If Kerry had no idea whether the stories were true or not, he had no business repeating them with great assurance and at length in a televised Senate hearing as if they were true.

You will notice that "those stories said that" was one little phrase at the beginning of the litany of war crimes, easy to remove, as the Swift Boat ad has done today. Kerry did not caveat the stories, or stress that he had no verification, or say that he himself doubted them but was troubled by their existence - no, he just recited a litany of war crimes that had been committed in Vietnam. Moreover, he said that these war crimes were not exceptions, but common behavior. He did not back up any of these allegations with names, dates or places that could have helped their investigation.

I don't think the investigators were even able to verify the existence of the stories, let alone the war crimes. I don't know to this day how much of that testimony Kerry just made up out of his head.

I do know how his fellow vets felt about his testimony. I also know how the North Vietnamese felt about his testimony - it was a huge propaganda coup for them.

Kerry's point was that America's leaders had put young men into war without a plan to win the war.


If that was his point, then accusing the American Army of routine war crimes was quite besides the point.
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