SwiftVets.com

[integritycounts]

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/8/15/134301.shtml

Kerry Made False Cambodia Claim 50 Times

It won't be all that easy for John Kerry to revise his demonstrably false claim that he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia, since he's on the record more than 50 times making the assertion, according to former Vietnam swiftboat commander John O'Neill.

"There are more than 50 occasions on which he said he was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1968," O'Neill told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg on Sunday. "More than 50 - as recently as last summer."


The Kerry campaign has commissioned presidential biographer Douglas Brinkley to adjust his Cambodia claims to make them comport with the known facts in an upcoming report in the New Yorker magazine.
But O'Neill said it will be hard to palm off Kerry's previous accounts as mere inadvertent misstatements.

"It wasn't some casual memory," he told Malzberg. "He said his entire life changed that evening, because he realized the United States government was operating illegally . . . He defamed everybody in our unit by claiming he had been illegally ordered there."

O'Neill said some of Kerry's 50 references to spending Christmas '68 in Cambodia include speeches on the Senate floor, quotes in articles and on the record interviews with reporters.

He cited a 1992 Associated Press report and a July 7, 2004 account by the Boston Globe's Michael Kranish.

"We were told, 'Just go up there and do your patrol,'" Kerry said in the 12-year-old AP interview. "Everybody was over there [in Cambodia]. Nobody thought twice about it."

In July 2004, reporter Kranish said that Kerry had told him his assignment in Cambodia was the catalyst that turned him against the war:

"[Kerry] himself would say that you really have to look at a lot of his thought process as what was happening during Vietnam," he told the Fox News Channel.

"And in one short anecdote I'll tell you, that in Christmas of 1968, he was on a small boat with his men, basically in Cambodia at a time when Richard Nixon was telling the American public that we're not in Cambodia," Kranish said.

"And he basically became skeptical. Well, the government is saying this, but he knew himself that wasn't true. And it's also why he says he came back to protest the war that he had served in."

Get Steve Malzberg's exclusive NewsMax.com column emailed directly to you at www.newsmax.com/malzberg.

[republicanveteran]

the lie that won't go away

[kate]

http://www.hughhewitt.com/
Great artical by Hught Hewitt about the Cambodia issue - someone actually doing some research

August 15, 2004
JOHN KERRY'S KURTZ CHRONICLES, CON'T: AN INTRODUCTION AND THE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

So I began a search of the vast archive of Vietnam War related materials for any sign of swift boat missions to Cambodia in January and February of 1969.

too long to post, he 'easily' found info about Salem House Operations , re incursions into Cambodia by helicoptor, but NO info about Swiftboats.

This account, a pretty comprehensive one, does not seem to provide for the possibility swift boat transportation, indicating instead that helicopters were used for insertions of special forces, and that these flights were tightly controlled.

My inability to locate any account of swift boat support for covert missions across the Cambidan border doesn't preclude such support having occured, of course, but it raises many questions given the ease with which it is possible to verify helicopter support for these then-secret and now widely-discussed missions. Add to those questions the answers I got from John O'Neill to questions on this particular subject when I interviewed him Friday. O'Neill denied ever having been sent into Cambodia when he commanded a swift boat, and asserted that no swift boat commander other than John Kerry has ever claimed to participate in such missions.


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one of..... We The People

[republicanveteran]

We veterans know a war story when we hear it.

[War Dog]

There is a new one out there. Mr. Hurley last night on "After Hours with Cal Thomas" on FoxNews said that John F. Kerry was way up on the Mekong River with two PBR's, and on their patrol, they were fired upon, and gave chase. They went around the bend chasing the boats that were shooting at them, and then and only then did they realize that they were in Cambodia, and further on, they were fired upon from forces on the shore.

That's the jest of it, and when Cal Thomas posts the script from his show later in the week, we'll see exactly what Mr. Hurley said. But I haven't heard this one before! Wasn't there huge concrete blocks on each side of the Mekong River at the border, with cables stretched across the river to keep boats from going into Cambodia? Wouldn't that make this story and the others false?

War Woof!
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