SwiftVets.com

[muggedliberal]

Brewster man cries foul over anti-Kerry movie

By DOUG FRASER
STAFF WRITER
BREWSTER - A Brewster Vietnam veteran says a Pennsylvania film company used without permission parts of an anti-Vietnam War film he worked on in 1971 to make the controversial film "Stolen Honor - Wounds that Never Heal."

Vietnam veteran Joseph Bangert, a John Kerry supporter, is angry that parts of a 1971 anti-war film he helped create is being used in an anti-Kerry movie.

The new film, portions of which will air on Sinclair Broadcast stations across the nation tomorrow, contends that presidential hopeful Sen. John F. Kerry and other members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War made up stories of U.S. atrocities against the Vietnamese.

Joseph Bangert of Brewster claims Red, White and Blue Productions, which made "Stolen Honor," used footage from a documentary he helped make in 1971 in which Vietnam veterans spoke of the atrocities.

David Kairys, a civil rights and constitutional law attorney at Temple University's Beasley School of Law, is looking into whether copyright infringement may have occurred.

"It may be public property, that's not my specialty. I'm looking for a lawyer who is an expert in this field," he said.

Charlie Jerow, a spokesman for Red, White and Blue, said he hadn't heard from any attorney on copyright infringement. He said the furor over the film is politically motivated.

"It's comical to me that the Kerry campaign and their sympathizers are going to such lengths to stop people from seeing the film. People can see the film and decide for themselves," Jerow said.

Bangert, a strong supporter of Kerry, is angry the footage was used without permission and then edited. He first met Kerry as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Bangert said he volunteered for the Marines when he was 17. He arrived in Vietnam in 1968 and for six months was a gunner in a helicopter gunship near Quang Tri, in the northern part of South Vietnam.

From the air, Bangert said yesterday, he saw every temple, pagoda, church and school in Quang Tri riddled with bullets or otherwise destroyed.

Disillusioned with the carnage, Bangert joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he came home in 1969.

In 1971, he was in Detroit with Kerry and 150 other veterans making a film, "Winter Soldier," in which they recalled what they had witnessed and done to Vietnamese civilians and combatants while fighting the war. Bangert, as part of the 15-person group known as the Winterfilm Collective, helped edit the film. He claims the collective still owns the copyrights.

Bangert thinks Red, White and Blue Productions of Harrisburg, Pa., infringed on that copyright when it used parts of it in their film "Stolen Honor," which will be shown tomorrow on 62 television stations owned by the Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group in 39 markets across the United States. The only station in Massachusetts is in Springfield.



Libel charge filed
Kairys has filed a libel charge in connection with "Stolen Honor" on behalf of Vietnam veteran Ken Campbell.
Kairys said Red, White and Blue libeled Campbell and others when they edited down a portion of the "Winter Soldier" film in which Campbell asks fellow soldier Scott Camil if he was part of a company that killed the inhabitants and burned a village near Quang Tri in 1968.

In "Winter Soldier," Campbell explains that he wasn't there, but tells Camil he had heard stories about the massacre of a village near Quang Tri and asked if Camil knew about it.

In "Stolen Honor," Kairys said, the editing cut the exchange down to Campbell saying he wasn't at the massacre, and then cuts to a voice-over that labels the Vietnam veterans participating in the "Winter Soldier" film as frauds who had never been in uniform, never been to Vietnam.

The "Stolen Honor" producers claim the soldiers fabricated stories of wrongdoing on the part of the American military and that they made it up on the spot, Kairys said.

Contacted by phone at his home in Gainesville, Fla., Camil said yesterday he had not seen "Stolen Honor," but was outraged by what he had heard.

"It was not easy testifying for 'Winter Soldier' and it's not easy reliving all this stuff now," he said. "What they've done is tore open all these old wounds."

Camil said he served 20 months in Vietnam as a Marine and was wounded twice. His unit had the job of securing so-called free fire zones.


Kill or be killed
Camil said yesterday that he quickly realized that it was kill or be killed and that many South Vietnamese and Viet Cong wanted him and the men in his company dead.
Since the operative theory was that villagers were supplying the guerrillas, the villagers were ordered out of free fire zones. They were warned that anyone caught in those zones could be shot and their villages burned.

"You walk through a village and a guy steps on a mine and gets killed and you know the villagers aren't stepping on the mines. They know where they are," he said. "So you burn it down, and kill everyone."

That's what happened near Quang Tri, he said.

War was organized murder, Camil said. Once you decide on it, there are no rules except that you don't want to be killed or have your friends killed.

"There's no referee out there to throw a flag," he said.

To admit that friends were killed, and that he was wounded both physically and psychologically, for nothing, was hard for him to do at the "Winter Soldier" testimonies. Which makes the accusations in "Stolen Honor" hard to take.

"I don't like being tainted a liar by these right-wing guys," he said.

Camil said he believes those Vietnam veterans who say they saw no atrocities - because many soldiers had combat support jobs, such as cooks, supply clerks and mechanics, and thus were not fighting on the front lines.

Yesterday afternoon, Jerow said he spoke with people who worked on "Stolen Honor" and it is his understanding that they didn't edit the footage used from "Winter Soldier." They used 56 seconds of the film unedited, he said.

The decision Monday by Sinclair officials not to air the entire 42-minute "Stolen Honor" film, and instead run portions of it during an hour-long special tomorrow, hasn't hurt sales of the documentary, Jerow said. In fact, all of the attention and controversy over it has boosted sales, he said.

http://www.capecodonline.com/cctimes/brewsterman21.htm

[d19thdoc]

It would be worth it to have these two especially in a court room, since Camil is the father of the plot to kill U.S. Senators, and Bangert's testimony at Winter Soldier is one case in particular that is transparently a pornographic fantasy of a kind that was probably drug induced; it defies the laws of physics and human anatomy, and I recommend anyone with a weak stomach to not read it. Even Keith Nolan, the Vietnam book writer and shill for Kerry who took up a lot of space here in the early days of this board, admitted Bangert's testimony "had some fur on it." I believe that is how he put it, if memory serves me.

Camil also has the distinction of having been indicted for conspiracy to commit violent acts at the 1972 Republican National Convention, and was shot some years ago by DEA agents in a case which he tried to spin around into a government "assassination attempt."

There is a sense in which these two guys are the stereotypes of the drug addled, violence prone misfits that Kerry tried to make us all out to be. Maybe if Kerry had hung out with his Swift Boat peers after the war, instead of the guys who wound up in VVAW, he would not have had such a warped view of Vietnam Vets.

They both have roles in Kerry's campaign today. They all deserve each other.
_________________
For The Honor of the Fifty-Eight Thousand.
"He Can Lose, But He Can Not Hide"

[azpatriot]

Somehow we need to get our hands on Kerry’s FBI files all of them.
_________________
Proud to be an American! and member of the PAJAMAHADEEN
FedEx Kinko's: When it absolutely, positively has to be forged overnight

[Dimsdale]

I trust that the same lawyers that represent Bangert and Camil take up the cases of those soldiers in Iraq that were misquoted and used without their permission by the enormous Mr. Moore.........

Bangert is in no danger of seeing the film if he lives in Brewster, which is about as far away from Springfield MA as you can get and still be in MA.
_________________
Everytime he had a choice, Kerry chose to side with communists rather than the United States.

[DaveL]

[drjohn]

"Vietnam veteran Joseph Bangert, a John Kerry supporter, is angry that parts of a 1971 anti-war film he helped create is being used in an anti-Kerry movie. "

Gee, none of the liberals complained when Michael Moore used footage of vets' funerals without approval.

So Joe, have a cup of "Shut the hell up."

[dusty]

If Camil is worried about being called a liar I wonder how 'Traitor' is gonna sit with him?

Dusty

[Tanya]

You mean this Joe Bangert?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40304

"In fact, Bangert, like Kerry, traveled to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegations. Bangert recalled the highlight for him was getting to sing "The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh" for the assembled guests. He boasts of having performed the ballad more than a thousand times in public. Bangert wore a shirt for the occasion emblazoned with the Viet Cong flag".

[igo4gators]

Peacenik Camil is from my town and a worthless piece of excrement and a traitor. I formerly lived across the highway from this nut case and you could routinely hear him firing his fully automatic weapons at night. He's a real true-to-life whackjob. The local greens adore him.

[dmackto]

[kate]