The main reason for other veterans' anger at John Kerry is plainly what he did after re turning home: As a leader of the radical anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes and atrocities in testimony before Congress. On April 22, 1971, Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Most controversial is his allegation that American soldiers were committing war crimes, "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He spoke of "the 200,000 [Vietnamese] a year who are murdered by the United States of America."

Kerry did not claim to have witnessed atrocities himself. But he repeated claims made in the "Winter Soldier Investigation" of three months earlier. Kerry had been a sponsor of that national conference, which took testimony from a number of witnesses. It later developed that some witnesses had never been to Vietnam at all, and others subsequently recanted their charges.

On the basis of Winter Soldier, young Kerry told the senators that American soldiers had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam . . . "

Former POW Air Force pilot Jim Warner and others have told of how the North Vietnamese forced American prisoners of war to listen to these words and other speeches by Kerry as part of their effort to make prisoners confess to war crimes.

Kerry's campaign has argued that in his Senate testimony, Kerry was only reporting charges made by others, but that claim is not consistent with Kerry's words. Kerry's testimony is a matter of record. But some questions remain: Why did he testify to war crimes and atrocities occurring "on a daily basis" if he had no knowledge of such atrocities? What was his basis for saying that American soldiers murdered 200,000 Vietnamese a year?

The Assassination Plot

At a November 1971 meeting in Kansas City of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, one Scott Camil proposed "Operation Phoenix" — a plan to assassinate the leading pro-war members of the U.S. Senate. The group adjourned to a secret location to debate the assassination plan, and ultimately voted it down.

John Kerry originally claimed that he resigned from VVAW's executive committee two days before that meeting, and has denied attending. But contemporaneous FBI surveillance records place Kerry in Kansas City, and a number of witnesses — including the head of Kerry's campaign in Missouri, Randy Barnes — have said that Kerry attended the Kansas City meeting and argued against the assassination plan. (Thomas Lipscomb broke this story in the New York Sun this spring.)

Why has Kerry been unable to point to any evidence that he resigned from VVAW prior to the Kansas City meeting? If Kerry was there, why didn't he tell the authorities that some members were plotting political assassinations?

Minneapolis attorneys John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson are proprietors of the Web log powerlineblog.com. Minneapolis-based freelance writer Edward Morrissey is proprietor of the Web log captainsquartersblog.com.

This article was published by The New York Post