Here are more details and comments re SwiftVets & their daily contact with John Kerry:
Tony Blakley
newsandopinion.com
I stayed up late last night and read from cover to cover the book "Unfit for Command — Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry." An impartial reader (if there is still such a beast in this election season) would have to conclude that either the book is a pack of lies, or John Kerry is in fact a reckless, lying man who misrepresented the facts in order to receive medals he didn't deserve, and is indeed unfit to command even a tugboat, let alone the United States military as president.
The book appears to be meticulously researched and reported. It is replete with copious footnotes, a detailed index and two appendices. Firsthand witnesses are named and quoted verbatim to support each specific, shocking charge. Each charge of false heroics is logically presented. The authors quote the official Navy citation and then present the purported eyewitness testimony that refutes the official finding. The witnesses who are summoned forth are officers and men who served simultaneously with Kerry in Coastal Division 11 and purport to be eyewitnesses to the events in question.
And yet, there is another group of men, the sailors who served directly under John Kerry on the same boat with him — his band of brothers. They have traveled around the country with Mr. Kerry and have vouched for his description of his heroic, able and selfless service to our country.
One of these groups of men are lying through their teeth. This is not a case of failed memories. In a few instances, it could be a case of honest differences of perception of events. But considering all the testimony and evidence, John Kerry is either Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. As of this moment there is about a 50-50 chance that we will elect, in the person of John Kerry, either a very fine man or a truly despicable man president of the United States.
Either group of men, if we knew nothing else, would seem to be credible, reliable witnesses. Both groups served honorably in Vietnam, gained many medals and have apparently lived respectable lives since then. Few, if any of them, have been politically active in the last 30 years.
The men making the charges are almost all of his fellow officers and the higher chain of command in Kerry's Coastal Division 11. The book points out that on John Kerry's Website he has a photo of himself and 19 fellow swift boat officers, taken while they were simultaneously serving in that unit. Of those 19 fellow officers, 11 have asked him to stop using their image with him. Of the remaining eight, two are deceased, four don't wish to be involved, and one is not a supporter of Kerry but didn't have the opportunity to sign the letter calling for the photo to be taken off the Website. Only one of the 19, Skip Barker, supports Mr. Kerry.
There has been some confusion about whether the witnesses against Kerry had an adequate view of his conduct, compared with the view of his supporters who were on his boat. The book explains that the swift boats usually moved in a pack of three or four on the same mission. They operated within yards of each other. Moreover, they all docked, bunked, ate and lived in the same camp.
If one compared their relations to an army company of men, the fellow junior officers who captained the tiny swift boats were the functional equivalent of squad leaders, each with their own handful of men under them. Squad leaders, operating on the same mission together are in excellent positions to assess the performance of their fellow squad leaders. They are covering each other's flanks. The book is filled with testimony of these men, describing what they claim they clearly saw John Kerry doing and not doing.
Of course, almost every presidential campaign has an outcropping of scandal charges. Usually it is by one or two people — a woman who claimed she met the candidate in a bar, some political opponent from a long-forgotten campaign reprieving his shopworn, uncorroborated calumny. If a book is involved in such charges, the opposing party usually finds a hack ghostwriter.
But this scandal charge is by over 200 respectable former naval officers and men. The primary author, John O'Neill, first started publicly challenging Mr. Kerry 30 years ago on the "Dick Cavett Show." The co-author, Jerome Corsi, is not a political hack, but a college friend of Mr. O'Neill, with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a distinguished writing career.
The book has the ring of sincerity to it, and the mark of careful research and writing. If they are not telling the truth, all these men have exposed themselves to financially ruinous libel actions by Mr. Kerry — who has the private resources to prosecute such actions. Even as a public figure, he might well win such an action, if this book is the pack of lies the Kerry camp says it is.
If it is not a pack of lies, the nation needs to know that, too. I would encourage some of the major voices of the non-conservative mainline media — Tim Russert, Dan Rather, Leonard Downie Jr. of the Washington Post — to do as I did. Spend an evening reading the book. If they are not struck by the damning picture it paints of John Kerry and the credibility of the presentation, forget about it. But if they judge it as I did, then let their consciences be their guide.
Silencing the swifties is an act of Dem desperation — but being done for good reason
newsandopinion.com | In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president, Sen. John Edwards said of John Kerry, "if you have any question of what he is made of, just spend three minutes with the men who served with him then."
The Democratic National Committee is trying hard to keep you from spending a minute with most of the sailors who served with Kerry during his abbreviated tour in Vietnam, because they have unflattering things to say. The DNC is threatening to sue television stations which run a commercial produced by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Of the 23 officers who served with Kerry, only one supports him for president. Two others are dead, and four want nothing to do with politics. The remaining 16 have declared him "Unfit for Command," the title of the book written by former Lt. John O'Neill, who took over Kerry's swift boat, PCF-94, when Kerry left Vietnam. (
The Swifties charge Kerry didn't deserve two of the three purple hearts he was awarded, or either of his medals for valor, the silver star and the bronze star.
According to Kerry, his first taste of combat came on his first mission, on the night of Dec. 2, 1968. He was with two sailors in a Boston whaler on a night patrol. They saw sampans, presumably crewed by Viet Cong, unloading on a peninsula. They opened fire, and the Vietnamese ran for cover. In the "engagement," Kerry suffered a scratch on his arm from a piece of metal.
Kerry's account to his biographer, Douglas Brinkley, gives the impression that he was in command of the whaler. This was not so. Lt. William Schachte, later an admiral, was the officer in charge. Shachte said the Vietnamese never fired on the boat, and the sailor who was with Schachte and Kerry said he couldn't remember any return fire.
Shachte said Kerry's scratch was self-inflicted. He had fired an M-79 grenade launcher too close to the shore.
When the next day Kerry went to his commander, Lt. Commander Grant Hibbard, and asked Hibbard to put him in for the purple heart, Hibbard threw him out of his office.
Kerry's second purple heart is uncontested. He received his third purple heart, and his bronze star, for an action on March 13, 1969. Kerry alleges he was wounded in the right buttock by the explosion of an underwater mine under an accompanying swift boat. Tom Rassman, an Army Special Forces officer, was knocked off Kerry's boat by the mine explosion. Kerry was awarded the bronze star for coming back "under heavy fire" to fish Rassman out of the water.
But sailors on the other swift boats say there was no enemy fire. "The force of the explosion disabled PCF-3, and threw several sailors, dazed, into the water. All boats, except one, closed to rescue the sailors and defend the disabled boat. That boat — Kerry's boat — fled the scene... After it was apparent there was no hostile fire, Kerry finally returned, picking up Rassman who was only a few yards away from Chenowith's boat which was also going to pick Rassman up."
Kerry's wound, moreover, had occurred not during the mine explosion, but earlier, when he tossed a concussion grenade into a pile of rice, according to Larry Thurlow, an officer who was with Kerry at the time.
Kerry's account of the action in which he received his silver star is at variance with the accounts of others who were there. Capt. George Elliott, who wrote up Kerry for the medal (based on Kerry's account of the incident) said that if he knew then what he knows now, he never would have done so. Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe wrote a story saying Elliott had recanted this accusation, but Elliott said Kranish badly misquoted him. He sticks by what he said in the ad.
Kranish's twisting of Elliott's words is a harbinger of things to come from a Kerry friendly media. This story will get much less attention than it deserves, because the Swifties have assembled too strong a case to be refuted. It can only ignored, or misrepresented.
'Unfit For Command' - - Unfit For Discussion?
David Limbaugh (archive)
August 10, 2004
I can appreciate why people are turned off by dirty politics, by which I mean the unsubstantiated mudslinging against candidates designed to mislead and smear rather than inform. But I lament the level of cynicism to which we've descended that makes us turn a deaf ear to negativity that may well be true and relevant.
I'm referring primarily to the public uproar surrounding the new book "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John F. Kerry," in which a group of swift boat officers who served alongside John Kerry in Vietnam tell a devastating story that, if true, annihilates Kerry's image as a war hero.
Part of me -- the cautious and pragmatic part -- wishes that this would just go away. After all, this could easily backfire and make Republicans look desperate and petty.
One thing we learned from the Clinton era is that ironically, public officials can benefit -- to a point -- from the outrageousness and sheer volume of their library of scandals. The more outrageous the rumors that circulated about Clinton were, the less believable even the routine scandals became -- though I personally believe that even some of the outrageous ones were probably true (Juanita Broaddrick).
After a while, the public completely numbed to the scandals. Clinton could have been captured on videotape impersonating a police officer and beating Rodney King with a nightstick and James Carville and Hillary Clinton would have deflected it as "old news" fabricated by the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Some of the adverse reaction to these claims against Kerry arises from our culture's justifiable elevation of war heroes and the sacrosanct nature of one's honorable military -- especially wartime -- service. You just can't go there.
But think about it. What if the allegations are true? What if Kerry truly did self-inflict, lie about, or embellish his wounds and other aspects of his reputed heroism? What if he did videotape himself reenacting combat scenes, all with an eye toward his future in politics? What if he did actually participate in atrocities as he said he did? (He’s gotten a complete pass on this.) Would these things matter? Should they matter?
Sure, I would prefer that all elections be decided on the issues, after a thorough debate and adequate public deliberation. But have we become so jaded that a presidential candidate's character is no longer an issue -- even when it may directly bear on how he would perform in office?
Indignant Democrats can pretend otherwise, but they have been making President Bush's character an unceasing issue for the past four years. Indeed, his allegedly poor character is the main hook the Democrats are hanging their hats on in this campaign.
Despite the hype, the Democrats really don't have much else to go on this year, which is why they don't dare dissociate themselves from Michael Moore, the principal purveyor of the abominable "Bush lied" lie. So the Democrats don't have much standing to complain about "negative" campaigning.
Nor does Senator Kerry -- at least with respect to this issue. He is the one who "opened the door" by making his Vietnam service the centerpiece of his campaign. If his honorable service is relevant, so is the possibility of his dishonorable service.
This shouldn't be about "fairness" anyway, but about informing the public. If the stunning allegations in "Unfit for Command" are true, they paint a picture of a man who simply cannot be trusted to be president, much less a wartime president. So what we ought to be focused on is whether they are true.
Concerning the veracity of the charges, consider that the "Swiftees" are not GOP mouthpieces -- some are Democrats. They approached Regnery Publishing with their book proposal, not the other way around. Their account is based on their firsthand knowledge -- not hearsay -- and would be admissible in any court proceeding involving these issues.
The Swiftees didn't wait until the last minute in the campaign to raise these charges, as did those who attempted to impugn George W. Bush in 2000 the very weekend before election day. They have allowed Kerry ample time to attempt to rebut their indictment. Just release your medical records, Senator Kerry.
The Swiftees' brief against John Kerry, if true, is the opposite of dirty campaigning, because we cannot overstate its relevance to his fitness for commander in chief.
Conversely, if you want to witness a seminar in dirty campaigning, just watch as the DNC goes into action trying to suppress the story and smear those who repeat it -- anything but an airing of the merits of the charges. It's going to be ugly.
www.25thaviation.org/johnkerry/ |
