Ann-- Thought I'd post this to you as Am Spit does not have a long enough attn span to read it. That sexual frustration limits its ability to think so;
Stolen Honor
By Roberta Leguizamon
September 27, 2004
The new documentary “Stolen Honor” documents how a young John Kerry
jumpstarted his political career by denouncing American soldiers -- and how
the Vietnamese used his actions to torture, demoralize and threaten American
Prisoners of War. In production before the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth
splashed onto the scene, the documentary’s producers say “Stolen Honor”
juxtaposes Kerry’s work with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War with the
words of veterans who were still in Vietnam when Kerry was leading the
antiwar movement.
Retired Captain James H. Warner -- a Marine who was held in North Vietnam
for five years, five months -- is a recipient of the Legion of Merit, two
Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, 11 Air Medals and the Navy Commendation
Medal.[1] Warner gives some of the most powerful testimony of how John Kerry
’s words were used against POWs in “Stolen Honor:”
In the Spring of 1971, I was taken with 35 others to a camp outside of
Hanoi. All of us were put in solitary confinement, and we were told this was
a camp for punishment guys who were misbehaving. From the moment we were on
the ground we were constantly fed propaganda, and the propaganda from home
was always about the antiwar movement. After we had talked for quite some
time, the interrogator showed me a transcript of testimony that my mother
had given at something called the Winter Soldier hearings. I had no idea
what these were. I read her testimony and it wasn’t damning, but then I saw
some of the other stuff that had gone on at this Winter Soldier hearing, I
wondered how did somebody get my mother persuaded to appear at something
like this.
Shortly thereafter he showed me some statements from John Kerry. He said
that John Kerry had helped organize the Winter Soldier hearings because he
was so motivated because he had been an American officer, served in the U.S.
Navy. And then he started reading some of the statements that John Kerry had
made. I’m sorry I can’t quote them, but essentially he accused all of us in
Vietnam of being criminals, that everything we had done was criminal. The
North Vietnamese had told us from the time that we got their hands on us
that we were criminals, that we were not covered by the Geneva Convention,
so It was okay for them to do whatever they wanted to do to us. And they
told us that they were going to put us on trial and some of us would be
executed.
One of the things I remember being told that Kerry had said was that he
demanded an immediate unilateral withdrawl of U.S. troops from Vietnam.
Well, the only reason they were keeping us alive at all was to use as a
bargaining chip to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam. It looked as though there
’s rising pressure in the States for this [and] if the government gave in to
that pressure and unilaterally withdrew the troops, what would be the
purpose in keeping us alive? They would have executed us.
The interrogator went through all of these statements from John Kerry. He
starts pounding on the table see, “Here, this naval officer, he admits that
you are a criminal, and you deserve punishment”...I dind’t know what was
going to come next. And for the rest of the time that we were in that camp I
was very ill at ease...
[John Kerry] abandoned his comrades. He burned up his “Band of Brothers”
membership card when he did that.
Retired Colonel Leo K. Thorsness -- a Vietnam Air Force veteran and
recipient of the Medal of Honor, Silver Star, six Distinguished Flying
Crosses, 10 Air Medals, two Purple Hearts and the Good Conduct Medal --
spent five years and 19 days as a POW. In “Stolen Honor” he reports:
A measure of patriotism is his loyalty to those still in uniform. That’s
totally contrary to what he did. That makes him totally unpatriotic or
loyal. He was over there fighting, he came home and there were still people
he knew over there fighting, and he starts talking about war crimes and the
atrocities we’re committing. He’s putting them in dire jeopardy. Every
military combat guy I’ve talked to from Vietnam said their greatest fear was
not being killed; it was becoming a POW. As you know, there were people
captured in South Vietnam who were literally skinned alive…And Kerry’s
giving the captors ammunition to treat people like that if they’re captured.
And these are people he knew. Where in the world is his loyalty to the
people in the military?
Thorsness says Kerry's actions caused them to be imprisoned -- and
tortured -- longer than they would otherwise have been. He also mentions the
(successful) North Vietnamese strategy to drag out the war in hopes that the
antiwar movement would cause America to defeat itself:
Without question, we were held captives longer, because of the antiwar
people, from the Kerrys to Fonda and Hayden...They encouraged the enemy to
hang on. And the enemy would have hung on to us forever had not a man by the
name of Richard Nixon gone in there with B-52s in December of 1972 and said
enough is enough. They understood force, but they were experts at the PR.
Air Force Veteran Retired Lt. Colonel Thomas S. Pyle echoed Thorsness:
It’s come out since the war, you read what the Vietnamese have said about
the war, what they’ve written about the war, their strategy was they
recognized that they could not win the war militarily. The only way they
could win the war was to destroy the will of the American people to support
the war. And that was the strategy all along. They knew they would have to
suffer horrendous losses to be able to do that and they were willing to do
it, that was part of their plan up front.
Pyle earned two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, the
Legion of Merit, Air Medal and Meritorious Service Medal. He spent
six-and-a-half years in the Hanoi Hilton.
Retired Air Force veteran Captain Kevin McManus -- who received the Silver
Star, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Distinguished flying Cross, Air Medal
and Purple Heart -- spent five years and eight months in the prison camps.
He says:
The first knowledge of John Kerry, really, that I can recall now was after
we came back, he had made apparently some statements that essentially said
that all the Americans over there were war criminals and committed atrocious
acts. I had a big problem with that, not so much for me...but thousands of
guys who died had no chance to hold their own against Kerry. So essentially
he desecrated all the war dead and their families, with no chance of them
ever replying.
Retired Lt. Ralph E. Gaither, U.S. Air Force veteran and author of With God
in a POW Camp, spent more than seven years as a POW. He reports in the
documentary that Kerry's antiwar action proved deadly to his colleagues:
We didn’t realize how powerful the movement was until toward the end of the
war. I dedicated the book I wrote to John Frederick – he died 6 months
before we came home. John would probably have been alive had the antiwar
movement not been doing what they were doing. The Vietnamese grew great
relish in the movement in support for their cause. I’m convinced that they
held on to the war until after Nixon was reelected. They felt Nixon would
not be re-elected, that the antiwar movement would be strong enough to get
him out of office.
Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robinson Risner, who fought in World War II,
Korea and Vietnam, won two Air Force Crosses, Distinguished Service Medal,
two Silver Stars, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Bronze Star and
eight Air Medals. Risner remembers how the anti-American demonstrators
gladdened his captors' hearts during his seven years, four months as a POW
in Vietnam:
I was in pain a lot of the time. I was being treated inhumanely… I know we
had more than one person come to Vietnam, who the Vietnamese told me [were
helping them win] the war in the streets of America. I certainly didn’t
approve of that. I didn’t think it was right for an American to come over
and bolster the Vietnamese morale.
The Swift Vets have used much of the same information and footage from Kerry
’s testimony in their television advertisements against the Democratic
presidential nominee, which seem to be having a significant impact on Kerry’
s campaign. On Aug. 26, Noelle Straub reported in the Boston Herald,
“although Kerry has stayed roughly even in national polls, his support among
veterans -- a significant voting bloc -- has dropped significantly since the
group launched its first ad.”
While there is no official connection between “Stolen Honor” and the Swift
Vets, former Vietnam POW Paul Galianti, who spent seven years in the Hanoi
Hilton, has participated in both projects. He is seen in the Swift Vets
second advertisement, stating, “John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I
and many of my comrades in North Vietnam, in the prison camps, took torture
to avoid saying.”
Galianti was held in the same prison camp as Arizona Senator John McCain.
Carl Limbacher at Newsmax.com reported on Aug. 5, 2004, that although McCain
has criticized the Swift Boat Vets recently, he himself spoke out against
John Kerry and other antiwar protestors in a 1973 US News and World Report
article.
In a piece he wrote for the May 14, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report,
the POW-turned-senator charged that testimony by Kerry and others before J.
William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee was "the most
effective propaganda [my North Vietnamese captors] had to use against us…
“All through this period,” McCain told U.S. News, his captors were
“bombarding us with anti-war quotes from people in high places back in
Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against
us.”
Texas Representative Sam Johnson has also explained how the Vietnamese used
Kerry’s words against prisoners like himself in Vietnam. During an interview
with Newsmax.com’s Limbacher in May, 2004, Johnson said:
“[Kerry] let the veterans down. When you're in a war you don't go out there
badmouthing your fellow soldiers,” he noted, referring to Kerry's 1971
speech. “You know, that's a disservice to the veterans.”
“Anybody who comes back and works against the best interests of the United
States, in my view, doesn't deserve to be president of the United States,”
he said.
“Stolen Honor” is produced by decorated Vietnam veteran Carton Sherwood, who
served as a Marine in Vietnam's De-Militarized Zone. Sherwood, who has won
both the Pulitzer Prize and the Peabody Award, covered John Kerry’s role in
the antiwar movement. It is a project of Carlton’s Red White and Blue
Productions, Inc.
The documentary's promotional material summarizes:
“Little did the American prisoners of war imagine that half a world away
events were conspiring to make their precarious situation even more
desperate, that an American Naval Lieutenant after a 4-month tour of duty in
Vietnam was meeting secretly in an undisclosed location in Paris with a top
enemy diplomat. That this same lieutenant would later join forces with Jane
Fonda to form an antiwar group of so-called Vietnam veterans, some of whom
would be later discovered as frauds, who never set foot on a battlefield.
All this culminating in John Kerry’s Senate testimony that would be blared
over loud speakers to convince our prisoners that back home they were being
accused and abandoned. Enemy propagandists had found a new and willing
accomplice…”
“The war, [Kerry] said, was a criminal endeavor driven by a ‘policy of
atrocities.’ The 2.5 million men who served in Vietnam were akin to ‘Genghis
Khan’s barbaric hordes,’ thugs and psychopathic war criminals who wantonly
plundered the Vietnam countryside, murdering, raping and bombing hundreds of
thousands of innocent civilians - old men, women and children -- each and
every day. Lt. Kerry's widely televised statements were dramatic and
persuasive, made all the more credible by the fact he had been there, said
he had witnessed many of these same atrocities...It also permanently branded
in the American psyche the image of Vietnam veterans as murderous ‘baby
killers’ and ‘drugged out losers,’ a perception that persists today, one
deeply embedded in our history.”
Kerry still has yet to offer any real answers or explain his own
contradictory statements about his service in Vietnam, which are detailed in
the John O'Neill's and Jerome Corsi’s Unfit for Command, settling only on
denouncing his fellow Vietnam veterans as a front group for the Bush
campaign.
The American Legion Convention's tepid response to Kerry further shows his
low popularity among veterans. On Sept. 1., Charles Hurt of the Washington
Times reported, “John Kerry was politely received.” Hurt reported a number
of veterans actually walked out as Kerry began speaking, and that a group of
anti-Kerry veterans passed out buttons and fliers sporting an advertisement
run by them in Nashville’s Tennesseean last week. The ad also criticized
Kerry for “wounds inflicted by John Kerry on millions of veterans,” Hurt
said.
Of course, Kerry's cool reception isn't surprising. In his 1971 book, The
New Soldier, which sports a parody of the famous Iwo Jima flag raising, in
which a group of scruffy soldiers are planting a flag upside down on the
cover, Kerry said, “We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans’
Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the
'greater glory of the United States.’ We will not readily join the American
Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.”
Now, it seems many, many veterans will not readily join John Kerry at the
polls in November. |
