SwiftVets.com

[USAFBratToo]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0437/hentoff.php

[Photo of Kerry] Caption: What is he hiding?

This is a longish and excellent article - go read it all, but here are snips"

...In the mainstream media, only a few reporters—among them Michael Dobbs in The Washington Post and Thomas Lipscomb, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times and other papers—have actually tried to get the entire record of John Kerry's service in Vietnam. His widely acclaimed acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Boston insistently focused on those four months while devoting only about 40 seconds to his 20 years in the Senate...

...in a long, front-page story in the August 22 Washington Post... Michael Dobbs raised the question of why Kerry has been hiding considerable parts of his Vietnam record... There were "more than two dozen interviews with former crewmates and officers who served with him." Curiously, Dobbs noted, "Kerry himself was the only surviving skipper on the river that day who declined a request for an interview." ...Much later in Dobbs's story, there was this revelation, since overlooked by much of the media: "Although Kerry campaign officials insist that they have published Kerry's full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records. "A spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command, Mike McClellan, said he was not authorized to release the full file, which consists of at least a hundred pages."

This guy is running for president. Shouldn't the electorate know what's in those more than 100 pages?

...Now, dig this: "The Kerry campaign," Dobbs writes, "has refused to make available Kerry's journals and other writings to The Post, saying the senator remains bound by an exclusivity agreement with Brinkley." ...Douglas Brinkley ... told Gerhart that the archive is Kerry's property and under his entire control. Said Brinkley: "I don't mind if John Kerry shows anybody anything. If he wants to let anybody in, that's his business. Go bug John Kerry, and leave me alone." ... Another question: Why doesn't Kerry sue John O'Neill, principal author of Unfit for Command, and the other Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for defamation? Why would all these "liars for Bush," as Kerry loyalists and many journalists persistently charge, have made themselves vulnerable to huge damage to their careers and incomes if Kerry were to win such a suit? Both sides would have to be cross-examined in depositions under oath. John O'Neill has challenged Kerry, saying, "Sue me!"

How many Americans know that John O'Neill, the purported Republican operative, voted for Hubert Humphrey and Al Gore for president, and that his favorite candidate for the presidency this year was John Edwards? And O'Neill describes George W. Bush as an "empty suit" (The New York Times, August 28; Los Angeles Times, August 2."

Lots more good stuff on the Village Voice site beyond hings like the above relevant to the Swift concerns, like for example letters written to Kerry (senator from Mass after all) by personnel at Logan Airpot in May 2001 warning of terribly lax secuirty and asking Kerry to consider the possibility of hijacking of multiple planes at the same time... Kerry did nothing at all.

[Aristotle The Hun]

If the "Village Voice" wants the 180 signed, can you imagine the constituency we have just acquired to our cause. Talk about “strange bed fellows”!

Sam
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Deportè Monsieur Kerrè

[MJB]

It boggles the mind, does it not? Who would have thunk it!


Just wrote a nice letter to the editor commending them for running the column.

You never know....
_________________
MJB
USAF '85-'92

[cjg]

This is good news as they really speak out, there is no concealing of
the facts and tells the fact that Kerry must sign the needed form.

If he can pull of never signing the release I think the American msm
failed with this. All of them know he has not signed, or should.
If more of the "less" important papers and blogs start a real effort to
get this done, it will be done. This is the first real, we want to see
the records, now and why are we not seeing them.

Perhaps the sending of e-mails, letters to the editor and just letting
everyone you know about this fact will help.

If the effort is made, it will be good. Just your local paper, or one
of the bigger ones, keep sending the e-mails on this same subject,
again and again. I am sure there are many out there who do not
know this fact.
_________________
Swiftvets rock!

[Stevie]

[USAFBratToo]

Here's the article about Kerry and the May 2001 effort of Logan Airport people to warn him that lax security at the airport put the nation at risk. Wasn't (isn't) Kerry on the Senate Intelligence Committee?
**************************************
Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
Kerry and 9-11
Jersey Girls support him, but a pre-attack warning could haunt him
September 15th, 2004 1:50 PM

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0437/mondo3.php

[gulf1609]

Here is another article on that subject from therant.com


[color=darkred][b]The Warning John Kerry Ignored
Paul Sperry
July 29, 2004
Sen. John Kerry boasts how he "sounded the alarm on terrorism years before 9/ 11," referring to his 1997 book "The New War." Too bad he didn't blast it when it really counted - four months before the hijackings, when he was hand-delivered evidence of serious security breaches at Logan International Airport. This hand delivered warning offered specific warnings that terrorists could exploit them Former FAA security officials say the Massachusetts senator had the power to prevent at least the Boston hijackings and save the World Trade Center and thousands of lives, yet he failed to take effective action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his state's main airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings.

"He just did the Pontius Pilate thing and passed the buck" on back through the federal bureaucracy, said Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA special agent from the Boston area who in May 2001 personally warned Kerry that Logan was ripe for a "jihad" suicide operation possibly involving "a coordinated attack."

Rewind to May 6, 2001. That night, a Boston TV station (Fox-25) aired reporter Deborah Sherman's story on an undercover investigation at Logan that Sullivan and another retired agent helped set up. In nine of 10 tries, a crew got knives and other weapons through security checkpoints - including the very ones the 9/11 hijackers would later exploit.

The next day, Sullivan fired off a two-page letter to Kerry highlighting the systemic failures.

"With the concept of jihad, do you think it would be difficult for a determined terrorist to get on a plane and destroy himself and all other passengers?" he warned. "Think what the result would be of a coordinated attack which took down several domestic flights on the same day. With our current screening, this is more than possible. It is almost likely." The toll from such an attack would be economic, as well as human, he predicted with chilling accuracy.

Sullivan followed up by having the undercover videotape hand-delivered to Kerry's office.

More than 11 weeks later, Kerry finally replied to his well-informed and anxious constituent. "I have forwarded your tape to the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General [DOT OIG]," he said in a brief July 24, 2001, letter, a copy of which I've obtained.

Yet Sullivan had made it clear in his letter that going to his old agency was a dead end. He and other agents had complained about security lapses for years and got nowhere. "The DOT OIG has become an ineffective overseer of the FAA," he told Kerry. Sullivan suggested he! show the tape to peers on committees with FAA oversight. He even volunteered to testify before them.

But he never heard from Kerry again.

At that point, Steve Elson, the other agent who'd teamed up on the TV sting, decided to take a crack at the junior senator. A fiery ex-Navy Seal, Elson spent three years as part of an elite FAA unit called the Red Team, which did covert testing of airport security across the country, before retiring as a field agent in Houston. He offered to fly to Washington at his own expense to give Kerry a document-backed presentation about the "facade of security" at Logan and other major airports.

But a Kerry aide said not to bother. "You're not a constituent," Elson was told just a few weeks before the hijackings. He went ballistic, warning that if Kerry didn't act soon he'd risk the lives of planeloads of his actual constituents. That warning now looks like prophecy: At least 82 Kerry constituents were murdered aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.

"Enhanced security would have prevented the hijackings, virtually without question," Elson now insists. If nothing else, it might have discouraged ringleader Mohamed Atta, who monitored security procedures at Logan weeks before the hijackings.

Yet the warnings apparently did stick in Kerry's mind: In the days after 9/11, Kerry told the Boston Globe that he'd triggered an undercover probe of Logan security by the General Accounting Office in June 2001.

But he wrote Sullivan no such thing in his July letter, stating only that he passed his warning and tape on to Transportation, not GAO. And GAO, though it is the investigative arm of Congress, didn't seem to know what the senator was talking about. The agency had tested security at two airports before 9/11, but neither one was Logan. And Kerry confessed he didn't know the outcome of the probe he says he triggered.

Some follow-up, senator.

Sullivan and Elson, joined by aviation-security experts David Forbes and Andrew Thomas, want to see Kerry hauled before the 9/11 Commission to answer questions about what he knew about Logan's lapses, and specifically what he did about them, before that fateful day. It's a reasonable request - especially since Kerry has complained that President Bush will only give the panel an hour of his time.

Where was Kerry's sense of urgency? Where was his leadership? These are fair questions to ask of someone vying for Bush's job.

"We don't have to wait for a tragedy to occur to act," Sullivan urged Kerry in his letter. But tragically, that's exactly what happened - at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and on both sides of the aisle.

Paul Sperry is a Washington investigative reporter and author of "Crude Politics."


[/b][/color]

[gulf1609]

And another from mensnewsdaily.com. Not sure why Kerry did not have to testify for the 9/11 hearings and why so many 9/11 widows would support him.



[color=darkred]What Did John Kerry Know and When Did He Know It?

March 21, 2004


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by Joe Mariani

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Presidential hopeful John Kerry has more guts than most people gave him credit for, after all. It takes unbelievable audacity to attack President Bush for "stonewalling" the 9/11 terrorist attack investigation, when Kerry was personally warned by an FAA agent about the possibility of a terrorist hijacking at Boston's Logan International Airport only months before... and did nothing.

In a letter to Senator John Kerry on 7 May 2001, retired FAA Special Agent Brian Sullivan wrote that the FAA needed to change its focus from hijackings for hostages (the usual purpose until 9/11) to encompass the possibility of terrorists taking over airliners for other, more deadly purposes. "While the FAA has focused on screening for handguns, new threats have emerged, such as chemical and biological weapons," Sullivan wrote. "Do you really think a screener could detect a bottle of liquid explosive, a small battery and a detonator in your carry-on baggage?" Sullivan continued, "And with the concept of jihad, do you think it would be difficult for a determined terrorist to get on a plane and destroy himself and all other passengers? The answers to these questions are obvious."

The night before, a local tv station had broadcast a report concerning security vulnerabilities at Logan Airport featuring Sullivan and another former FAA Special Agent named Steve Elson. The two had waltzed in and out through airport security multiple times with a variety of weapons and gadgets. Many times, their bags weren't even opened, even when "suspicious items" were inside. Agent Sullivan sent Kerry a video of the report following his letter. In a chilling prophecy, he encouraged the Senator to "[t]hink what the result would be of a coordinated attack which took down several domestic flights on the same day." In the last week of July, Kerry's office finally sent Sullivan a reply saying that the video had been forwarded to the Department of Transportation. Less than two months later, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 were hijacked after taking off from the same Logan International Airport and flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in NYC, killing thousands.

Was this the famous "alarm" John Kerry claims to have "sounded... on terrorism years before 9/11" in his television commercials -- sending a video to the DoT mere months beforehand? Anyone with money for postage could have done as much. Isn't it possible that a Senator with a direct warning from a former FAA agent could -- and should -- have done much more? While it's true that few people would immediately leap into action on a warning alone, most people lack the hypocritical arrogance to criticise others for not doing so when they hadn't themselves.

Kerry has recently attacked President Bush for daring to spend time campaigning for his own re-election instead of answering questions before the 9/11 commission. "If the President of the United States can find time to go to a rodeo, he can spend more than one hour before the commission," Kerry said. Why is more than an hour necessary? It comes as no surprise that the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (as it's formally known) would be used as yet another political attack on President Bush before too long. Senator Kerry apparently needs to be reminded that he's able to find plenty of time to do everything except the job he's still drawing a hefty paycheck to do, having missed 64% of the Senate roll calls last year. Some might consider that "being AWOL", and call for a minute-by-minute account of his activities while taking money from the public he supposedly serves. Perhaps the Senator can furnish dental records to go along with that.

When will Kerry take his seat before the Commission to answer for his deliberate disregard of vital information concerning the lack of airport security in his very own Senatorial district, at the very airport from which half of the 9/11 attacks were launched?

Joe Mariani


*UPDATE: It seems I'm not the only person concerned about this. Paul Sperry's column in the New York Post, The Warning Kerry Ignored, also questions Kerry's claims about his terrorism concerns before 9/11.
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Joe Mariani is a computer consultant born and raised in New Jersey. He lives in Pennsylvania, where the gun laws are less restrictive and taxes are lower. Joe always thought of himself as politically neutral until he saw how far left the left had really gone after 9/11. His essays and links to articles are available at http://guardian.blogdrive.com/.
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[Hammer2]

The principled lefties (I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but they do exist) don't like Kerry either.
They want someone who will argue passionately for their beliefs. They don't want a posturing buffoon who can't express a set of core values or stay on a consistent message. They realize that Kerry does them far more harm than good. Who can be passionate about supporting a candidate who won't even talk about what he really wants or believes in? Who likes a liar? They want an inspired candidate with a true vision to share - they don't get that with Kerry.

Expect a lot of them to vote with their feet and stay home or vote for Nader. A lot will even vote for Bush because they love this country too and they know Bush will do everything in his power to protect it.
_________________
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilence" - Thomas Jefferson
"An armed society is a polite society" - Thomas Jefferson
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it won't be needed until someone tries to take it away." -- Thomas Jefferson

[redneckvet]

"scaryjohnkerry" has a good video of this subject of Logan.

http://scaryjohnkerry.com/logan.htm
_________________
"Full Tour Grunt"

[Patriotic Mom]

Strange Bedfellows indeed!

[Doc Jerry]

The Village Voice has been on Kerry's case for the past year. They did an excellent piece about 7-8 months ago on Kerry's backstabbing MIA/POWs. They've done about 3 pieces this year along hammering J.F. Kerry



Medics, we're there when you need us.

[USAFBratToo]

Here's that series on Kerry in the Village Voice. The writer is a Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter who wrote the book The Killing Fields - not sure if the title I am recalling is the book or the movie, but he wrote it. And he's a pro-Kerry Democrat. This is some of the best reporting I have ever seen, and reads like a gripping thriller. But no hype, just wave after wave of facts and documentation.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0408/schanberg.php
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0408/schanberg2.php
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0408/schanberg3.php
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0431/schanberg.php

And one month after trade relations with Vietnam were normalized thanks to the clean slate Kerry gave them on the MIA/POW issue, Colliers International, a global real estate management and consulting firm widely described at the time as Kerry's "family business" (his first cousin Stuart Forbes was its head, and Forbes was also in charge of Kerry's "blind" trust) was given a long-term exclusive contract to rebuild Vietnam's infrastructure. That contract is still in place today. See the thread: Ad #6: Kerry's Sellout of POW/MIAs and Collier's money trail in 15 seconds.