Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 32642
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2025/07/10 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/10    

2004/8/2-3 [Politics/Domestic/Election] UID:32642 Activity:high
8/2     Read what Schanberg, friend of Dith Pran (Killing Fields),
         has had to say about Kerry:
        Kerry hit by Vietnam flak for 'betrayal' (2004)
        http://www.powmiafamiliesagainstjohnkerry.com/presspow/p030704.htm
        John Kerry: The Chameleon Senator (1996)
        http://www.usvetdsp.com/story10.htm
        \_ As much as I'd like to support these people (I dislike Kerry
           more than I do Bush) I think that we need to let go of the MIAs
           of Vietnam. It may seem cruel and heartless, but we can't continue
           to fight the ghosts of the past ad naseum. I also think that
           perhaps with normalization of relations with Vietnam we might
           be able to find out more about the MIAs/POWs than without
           normalization. This is of course more hope than reality, but
           there is little chance that we will ever find out anything about
           the MIAs by continuing investigations like we have in the past.
           \_ Why don't we just nuke Vietnam?
              \_ Because we've dismantled a huge number of nukes and don't
                 have enough left to spare on something like that.
                 \_ Bwahahhaha! Sniff. That's a good one!
        \_ Summoning all the moral authority of a liberal Rush Limbaugh that
           I can, I say:  "Sounds like Kerry-haters to me!"
           \_'kerry-haters' = military
              \_ and rightly so.
           \_ Liberal Rush Limbaugh?  Is there some inside joke there?
2025/07/10 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/10    

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www.powmiafamiliesagainstjohnkerry.com/presspow/p030704.htm
POW/MIA FAMILIES AGAINST JOHN KERRY Sunday London Times March 7, 2004 Kerry hit by Vietnam flak for 'betrayal' Sarah Baxter, New York IN his triumphant campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, John Kerry has grown accustomed to a ""band of brothers"" from the Vietnam war era who have proudly proclaimed their support. But as he challenges President George W Bush for the White House, the families of soldiers who went missing in action (MIAs) are planning to confront the much-decorated senator with allegations that he betrayed them. Ann Holland's husband Melvin disappeared in 1968 at a hilltop radar base in Laos, where America was fighting a covert war. She was just 28 when she was left to bring up their five children on her own. Holland launched POW/ MIA Families Against John Kerry last week in the hope of dogging the senator's steps all the way to election day in November. "John Kerry is not a friend of the missing men and we don't want him in the White House. Among the group's supporters are daughters, sons, parents and wives of the disappeared, who have posted on its website touching messages about their loved ones and furious attacks on the would-be president. "John Kerry is not a hero of the Vietnam war," protests one daughter of an MIA pilot. The brother of a lost sergeant writes of being ""sickened"" by his campaign claims to have pressed the government for answers about the missing: "Nothing could have been further than the truth." Kerry has never been forgiven by these families for his role as chairman of a Senate select committee on POW and MIA affairs, which sat from 1991 to 1993. It concluded that there was "no proof US prisoners of war survived." Within days President Bill Clinton lifted a 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. The protest group is convinced that Kerry was more interested in normalising relations with the Vietnamese than in pressing them to release prisoners. The families accuse Kerry of hearing crucial evidence in private, ordering the shredding of inconvenient documents and labelling their supporters " professional malcontents, conspiracy mongers, con artists and dime-store Rambos." The MIAs have become the stuff of legend: the fictional Rambo tried to rescue them, as did the billionaire politician Ross Perot. Yet mysterious lists of captives, reported sightings of "Europeans", intercepts from communist radio stations about prisoners and coded messages, allegedly from the MIAs themselves, have turned up over the years and kept hopes alive. The families have found a determined champion in Sydney Schanberg, the journalist whose story is told in The Killing Fields, the film about the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge. After returning to the country to find his friend Dith Pran, Schanberg now feels compelled to find out what happened to the MIAs. "Soldiers started coming to me with information about missing men and transcripts from refugees, stuff that looked like real evidence,"" said Schanberg, who took up the issue in newspapers and magazines. ""When the Senate committee was created, Kerry made all the right noises. He said he wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to these men. Whatever audience he was part of, he would tell them what they wanted to hear." The North Vietnamese returned 591 prisoners at the end of the war in 1973, but there were signs at the time that many more were held back as bargaining chips to squeeze reparations from Richard Nixon's administration. No money changed hands, though Richard Allen, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, told the committee behind closed doors that Hanoi had offered to ransom 50 prisoners for $4 billion in 1981. When word leaked out, Allen sent a letter retracting his testimony, claiming that his memory had played tricks on him. Schanberg believes servicemen were alive "right up to the end of the 1980s and maybe in the 1990s", though he admits the probability of finding survivors now may be ""non-existent"". Holland is particularly disturbed about a list of supposed MIAs that was offered by Boris Yeltsin, the former Russian president, but was all but ignored. She says one of the names on it was Arnold Mikhailovich Holland. case is the lack of a convincing reason why politicians should have wanted to cover up the existence of MIAs for so long. John McCain, the Republican politician who spent much of the war in Vietnam as a POW, became a friend and ally of Kerry while serving on the same Senate committee. He agreed that there was no ""compelling evidence"" that any prisoners survived the war. "" He can expect no sympathy for this from their families.
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www.usvetdsp.com/story10.htm
PX Banner Visit the PX John Kerry: The Chameleon Senator By Ted Sampley US Veteran Dispatch October-December 1996 Issue Despite the prayers and wishful thinking of POW/MIA families and Vietnam veteran activists, Sen. John Forbes Kerry, the "chameleon" senator from Massachusetts, was re-elected to the Senate in the 1996 election. Apparently Kerry's well publicized history as a longtime radical supporter of the Vietnamese communists and a recent flap about whether or not he is guilty of a war crime meant very little to the voters in Massachusetts. Kerry, the "noble statesman" and "highly decorated Vietnam vet" of today, is a far cry from Kerry, the radical, hippie-like leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in the early 1970s. After Kerry, as a Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) commanding a Swift boat in Vietnam, was awarded the Silver Star, he used a loop hole in Navy regulations to leave Vietnam (and his crew) before completing his tour of duty. After returning home, Kerry quit the Navy early and changed the color of his politics to become a leader of VVAW. Kerry wasted no time organizing opposition in the United States against the efforts of his former buddies still ducking communist bullets back in Vietnam. Kerry gained national attention in April 1971, when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by Sen. J William Fulbright (D-AR), who led opposition in the Congress against US participation in the war. During the course of his testimony, Kerry stated that the United States had a definite obligation to make extensive economic reparations to the people of Vietnam. Kerry's testimony, it should be noted, occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons. Kerry was a supporter of the "People's Peace Treaty," a supposed "people's" declaration to end the war, reportedly drawn up in communist East Germany. It included nine points, all of which were taken from Viet Cong peace proposals at the Paris peace talks as conditions for ending the war. In other words, Kerry and his VVAW advocated the communist line to withdraw all US troops from Vietnam first and then negotiate with Hanoi over the release of prisoners. Had the nine points of the "People's Peace Treaty" favored by Kerry been accepted by American negotiators, the United States would have totally lost all leverage to get the communists to release any POWs captured during the war years. Kerry was fundamental in organizing antiwar activists to demonstrate in Washington, including the splattering of red paint, representing blood, on the Capitol steps. Several hundred of Kerry's VVAW demonstrators and supporters were allowed by Fulbright to jam into a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1972 and to chant "Right on, brother!" George McGovern (D-SD), then the only declared Democratic presidential candidate, accused US troops of committing barbarisms in Vietnam. Kerry became even more of a press celebrity during a highly publicized "anti-war" protest when he threw medals the press reported were his over a barricade and onto the steps of the Capitol. Kerry never mentioned that the medals he so gloriously tossed were not his own. The 1988 issue of Current Biography Yearbook explained: " . the ones he had discarded were not his own but had belonged to another veteran who asked him to make the gesture for him. When a 'Washington Post' reporter asked Kerry about the incident, he said: 'They're my medals. Recently, Kerry became extremely defensive when David Warsh, an economics columnist for The Boston Globe, questioned the circumstances for which Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. William F Weld, a Republican, quickly gathered his former crew from his Swift boat days to rebuff the "assault on his integrity." According to the official citation accompanying the Silver Star for Kerry's actions on the waters of the Mekong Delta on February 28, 1969: "Kerry's craft received a B-40 rocket close aboard. Patrol Craft Fast 94 then beached in the center of the enemy positions and an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft 94 and fled. In an article printed in the October 21st and 28th 1996 edition of The New Yorker, Kerry was asked about the man he had killed. "It was either going to be him or it was going to be us. He stood up out of the hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't pull the trigger--he turned and ran. The things that probably really turn me I've never told anybody. In the column, Warsh quoted the Swift boat's former gunner, Tom Belodeau, as saying the Viet Cong soldier who Kerry chased "behind a hootch" and "finished off" actually had already been wounded by the gunner. Warsh wrote that such a "coup de grace" would have been considered a war crime. Belodeau stood beside Kerry and said he'd been misquoted. He conceded that he had fired at and wounded the Viet Cong, but denied Kerry had simply executed the wounded Viet Cong. Dan Carr, a former Marine from Massachusetts, who served 14 months as a rifleman sloshing around in the humid jungles of I Corps, South Vietnam, questioned whether or not Kerry deserved a Silver Star for chasing and killing a lone, wounded, retreating Viet Cong. Most people I knew in Vietnam were just trying to pull their time there and get the hell out. There were some, though, who actually used Vietnam to get their tickets punched. You know, to build their resumes for future endeavors," Carr said. In 1991, the United States Senate created the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to examine the possibility that US POW/MIAs might still be held by the Vietnamese. As chairman of the Select Committee, Kerry proved himself to be a masterful chameleon portraying to the public at large what appeared to be an unbiased approach to resolving the POW/MIA issue. But, in reality, no one in the United States Senate pushed harder to bury the POW/MIA issue, the last obstacle preventing normalization of relations with Hanoi, than John Forbes Kerry. In fact, his first act as chairman was to travel to Southeast Asia, where during a stopover in Bangkok, Thailand, he lectured the US Chamber of Commerce there on the importance of lifting the trade embargo and normalizing relations with Vietnam. During the entire life of the Senate Select Committee, Kerry never missed a chance to propaganderize and distort the facts in favor of Hanoi. Sydney H Schanberg, associate editor and columnist for New York Newsday and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist veteran of the Indochina War whose book, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, became the subject of the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields, chronicled some of Kerry's more blatant pro-Hanoi biases in several of his columns. The apparent purpose is to move toward normalization of relations with Hanoi. John F Kerry, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, is one of the key figures pushing for normalization. Kerry is currently on a visit to Vietnam where he has been doing two things: praising the Vietnamese effusively for granting access to their war archives and telling the press that there's no believable evidence to back up the stories of live POWs still being held. "Ironically, that very kind of live-POW evidence has been brought to Kerry's own committee on a regular basis over the past year, and he has repeatedly sought to impeach its value. Moreover, Kerry and his allies on the committee - such as Sens. John McCain, Nancy Kassebaum and Tom Daschle - have worked to block much of this evidence from being made public." In December of 1992, not long after Kerry was quoted in the world press stating "President Bush should reward Vietnam within a month for its increased cooperation in accounting for American MIAs," Vietnam announced it had granted Colliers International, based in Boston, Massachusetts, a contract worth billions designating Colliers International as the exclusive real estate agent representing Vietnam. That deal alone put Colliers in a...