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8/5 John Kerry: The Chameleon Senator (from 1996)
http://www.usvetdsp.com/story10.htm
\_ Assertion: We shouldn't have gone to war in Vietnam; we didn't
understand it was a fight to form a new nation more than a
Communist one. When they saw Americans coming over, they thought
we were just colonialists like the French.
Kerry returned after fighting for four months, and opposed the
war. He got it right before history did.
\_ he got it right, um. a communist nation was formed
where everyone got their wealth stripped and freedom taken
\_ ~ 5 million Vietnamese (North and South combined) died
in that war. I wonder what percentage of the population
that was.
\_ since millions died in WWII , we should have just let
Hitler take over the world without fighting back
\_ What percentage of the population was 5 million
Vietnamese back then? WWII was clear -- Vietnam was not.
At what price do we fight a war which the U.S. people
aren't certain about?
\_ http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/23/kerry.vietnam
Rapes. Razed villages. Ears and heads cut off. Random shootings of
civilians. Bodies blown up. Wires from portable telephones taped to
genitals, with the power then turned on. Food stocks poisoned. Dogs
and cats shot for the fun of it. ... To those who were against the
war, he was a courageous hero standing up for the truth; to those
who supported it, he was a treasonous pariah aiding the enemy.
\_ that's only the things Kerry admitted to doing,
for being only their 2 months, he has weak character to
immediately start committing those atrocities
\_ are you ted rall now? - danh
\_ hehe, http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom
\_ can I say "troll" yet
\_ Wait a minute, some of the quotes in this seem to have Kerry
as either saying, "I lied then," or "I would lie if asked
the same question today."
\_ You should be more careful in your use of quotation marks.
I doubt you can find a politican ever saying, "I lied" or
"I would lie" about anything.
\_ It would have looked very funny without the quotes.
Just imagine Kerry saying "some bitter sysadmin from
UC Berkeley lied back in the 70's, and may lie again!"
\_ So, what do you think he lied about back then, and which
part would he lie again today about? (referring to the
article)
\_ Well, he talked about all this rape and whatnot. But
the article says: "The senator concedes he wouldn't
say the same things in the same way today, that talk
of "atrocities" back then was over the top." "I'm
older, I'm wiser. I'm farther from it. But they were
the words that came out of my gut at that time, based
on the anger and frustration that I felt back when it
was happening." So... they weren't true, they just
came out of your gut? Huh?
\_ My interpretation is that, although the things he
said were described to him by other fighting soldiers,
if he had another chance, he would have put more
blame on the Administration rather than the soldiers.
\_ You're trying to blame him for haveing overly-passionate
opinions when he's young? He overstated his case a
bit 30 years ago and that somehow makes him a bad man?
Let he who is without exaggeration cast the first stone.
\_ I don't call late 20's young.
\_ So Bush wasn't young when he was a boozing
coke-head drunk driver?
\_ No, I'm saying that if a congressional committe
asks you about the facts of what you say, you
should probably stick to the fact regaurdless of
your opinions.
\_ I'm not the one you responded to, but I believe
Kerry did tell the truth: Remember, he did
qualify his remarks by saying they were stories
told to him by other soldiers
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/20/1535232
\_ w00t! We descide world affecting issues
on hearsay!
\_ Hell, happens on wall all the time.
\_ "I... I heard about this Kid? In Vietnam?
His name was Mai Kay? And like, so
this GI? Like, gave him some coke, and
like, some pop-rocks? And the kid? His
head, like, totally exploded man. It
was crazy. Serious war crimes, man."
\_ Actually, re-reading the transcript, I got
it wrong. The stories were told by 150
honorably discharged soldiers -- some soldiers
personally confessing to atrocities. All you
other losers didn't bother to check the URL
at all. |
| 7/9 |
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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... |
| www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/23/kerry.vietnam -> www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/23/kerry.vietnam/ Inside Politics Kerry's 1971 testimony on Vietnam reverberates Vivid words alleged atrocities by soldiers Story Tools ON CNN TV Stay with CNN for updates on the Kerry and Bush campaigns' activities, as well as news on the controversy around photos of service people's caskets arriving from overseas at Dover Air Force Base. more video VIDEO CNN's Kelly Wallace on Kerry's release of lobbyist records. premium content PLAY VIDEO CNN's Bill Schneider on the impact of religion on Bush policy. Back in 1971, the square-jawed, clean-cut decorated combat veteran, with a generous mop of dark hair, told a rapt audience of senators of atrocities he said had been reported to him by his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. Wires from portable telephones taped to genitals, with the power then turned on. "We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories," Kerry told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in testimony that made him a national figure at 27. To those who were against the war, he was a courageous hero standing up for the truth; to those who supported it, he was a treasonous pariah aiding the enemy. But no matter how his words were viewed, their power was beyond question. Even President Nixon groused about him in the Oval Office. "John was able to speak to people, whether they were conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican, and people listened," said Lenny Rotman, who worked with Kerry back then in the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Kerry is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, fighting a close campaign during a time of war, putting his resume as a Vietnam hero front and center. At 60, the hair is graying, though the jaw is still square. And he is still explaining and defending those strong, vivid words, which continue to divide. "I think the way I characterized it at that time was mostly the voice of a young, angry person who wanted to end the war," Kerry told CNN's Candy Crowley in an interview broadcast on Thursday's anniversary of his Senate testimony. "I regret any feeling that anybody had that I somehow didn't embrace the quality of the service. But I have always said how nobly I think every veteran served." The senator concedes he wouldn't say the same things in the same way today, that talk of "atrocities" back then was over the top. Yet, he insists he's still proud he stood up against the war. While he has regret for the words he chose, he defends the legitimacy of the sentiment he so starkly articulated. "They were honest expressions of the passion that we brought to the cause," said Kerry. But they were the words that came out of my gut at that time, based on the anger and frustration that I felt back when it was happening." He also told Crowley, "I'm not going to back down one inch on what I've fought for and what I've stood for all of these years." Such qualified regret doesn't go far enough for some Vietnam veterans, who can't forgive the stigma they still see attached to those long-ago words. "He was the father of the lie that the Vietnam veteran was a rapist, a baby killer, a drug addict and the like," said John O'Neill, who served in the same Navy patrol unit where Kerry served and who sparred with him on national TV during the tumult of 1971. "I don't think there's anybody that did that, or created that, more than Kerry." Fellow vet blasts Kerry's antiwar comments) Kerry bristled at the suggestion that he ever said Vietnam soldiers were baby killers. I described accurately what was happening, and what wasn't." The senator also said the negative image of the Vietnam veteran didn't start with him -- and that his anger was directed not at the soldiers who served but at the people who sent them "to die for the biggest nothing in history," as he put it in 1971. "I came back to find Americans who were unwilling to welcome us home, who spat on veterans when they came home. "All I did was to tell the truth about some of the things that happened over there." "All I know is that it happened as a matter of course, and there were things that were happening over there as a matter of policy." Looking back, Kerry said he was young, he was angry and he wanted the war to end. "The legitimacy of what we observed and saw and were fighting for, I wouldn't change at all. And it was generationally important, and I stand by that." |
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| www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/20/1535232 Purchase Video/CD After returning from the Vietnam War, John Kerry became a prominent critic of the war. He testified before the Senate in 1971 and told of atrocities being committed by US troops. And he asked: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" We broadcast a rare recording of this historic address from the Pacifica Radio Archives. On October 9, 2002, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry stood on the Senate floor and spoke in favor of the invasion of Iraq. The next day he voted to authorize President Bush to go to war. Thirty years earlier, Kerry became a leading voice against the war in Vietnam. Kerry returned from Vietnam in April 1969, having won early transfer out of the conflict because of his three Purple Hearts. When Kerry returned home, over 540,000 US troops were deployed in Vietnam. Some 33,400 had been killed, and the number of protests in the US was surging. After working behind the scenes and making a few little-noticed appearances at rallies, he joined a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In January 1971, the organization held a series of hearings in Detroit called the "Winter Soldier Investigation." Kerry did not speak at the event, which received only modest press coverage. This is an excerpt of a veteran testifying at the hearings. Three months after the hearings, Kerry took his case to congress and spoke before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Television cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats. Kerry was 27 years old and dressed in his green fatigues and Silver Star and Purple Heart ribbons. On April 22, 1971, he sat at a witness table and delivered the most famous speech of his life. It was to become the speech that defined him and make possible his political career. Overnight, he emerged as one of the most recognized veterans in America. From the Pacifica Radio Archives, this is John Kerry in 1971. Pacifica Radio Archives PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT JOHN KERRY: Several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit--the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that, at times, they had 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 fashion reminiscent of Ghengis 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 and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term "winter soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776, when he spoke of the "sunshine patriots," and "summertime soldiers" who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough. We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel, because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped. As a veteran and one who felt this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used it the worst fashion by the administration of this country. In 1970, at West Point, Vice President Agnew said, "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse," and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia. In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but, also, we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard-put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American. We found also that, all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai, and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free-fire zones--shooting anything that moves--and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals. We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while, month after month, we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "orie... |