SwiftVets.com

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BY LINDA CHAVEZ
> RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2004
>
> The media are too busy repackaging old Iraq news in an October
> offensive against President George W. Bush's reelection to investigate
> truly startling evidence unearthed this week that the Communist Party
> may have been directing John Kerry's anti-war activities in the early
> 1970s. The evidence, contained in captured communist records on file at
> the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University, shows a well-coordinated
> effort by the Communist Party to recruit American servicemen and
> officers to become part of the American anti-war movement. The objective
> was to organize high-profile activities to undermine support for the
> Vietnam War, including holding hearings on alleged war crimes, lobbying
> Congress to oppose the war, exploiting the families of American POWs and
> urging servicemen to return their service medals.
> Not only did John Kerry and his group Vietnam Veterans Against the
> War follow this game plan, but Kerry went to Paris to meet with the
> communist official designated as the point of contact for guiding these
> activities. In June 1970, Kerry met with Madame Binh, foreign minister
> of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (Viet Cong) of South Vietnam
> and a delegate to the Paris Peace Talks. The documents discovered this
> weekend -- one titled "Circular on Antiwar Movements in the U.S." was
> disseminated in Vietnam in the spring of 1971, and the other titled
> "Directive" was captured by the U.S. in April 1971 -- are available for
> viewing at www.wintersoldier.com. They reveal a detailed plan to use
> antiwar activists in the U.S. as propagandists for the communist cause
> in Vietnam.
> So why isn't the mainstream media all over this story? If John Kerry
> -- wittingly or not -- was carrying out directives from Hanoi, or
> perhaps even Moscow, the American people have the right to know before
> they decide whether to elect him president on Tuesday. But the networks
> and major dailies were too busy covering a hysterical report that 380
> tons of explosives went missing from an Iraqi depot in the early days of
> the U.S. invasion to inquire into John Kerry's dubious activities in the
> anti-war movement.
> On Monday, the New York Times "broke" the story of the purported
> looting of weapons from an Iraqi arms depot. "Huge Cache of Explosives
> Vanished from Site in Iraq" screamed the front-page Times headline,
> which was picked up by all the major networks and newspapers, not to
> mention the Kerry campaign. CBS's "60 Minutes" was also set to air a
> story on Sunday -- two days before the election -- aimed at convincing
> viewers that the administration had carelessly let the al Qaqaa depot be
> looted of its powerful explosives, the kind that might even be used to
> detonate a nuclear device. "Our plan was to run the story on Oct. 31,
> but it became clear that it wouldn't hold," CBS executive producer Jeff
> Fager said in a statement.
> In fact, the "missing explosives" story was more media campaign ploy
> than real news. There is substantial evidence that most of the
> explosives were either destroyed by U.S. bombing prior to the invasion
> or were already gone by the time U.S. troops arrived at al Qaqaa on
> April 10, 2003, according to NBC, which had a reporter embedded with the
> Army's 101st Airborne Division at the time. Furthermore, the U.S. has
> already destroyed or is in the process of destroying more than 400,000
> tons of similar material in Iraq, a fact conveniently ignored by much of
> the media.
> The media rule seems to be if a story might hurt George W. Bush,
> play it up big; if it might help Bush, bury it; and if might hurt John
> Kerry, ignore it altogether. In an election as close as this one, the
> media's role could be decisive. We used to expect the candidates to
> unleash their own October surprise in an effort to sway the voters at
> the last minute. Now it's the media that plays that game. Come
> Halloween, it's media tricks for Bush and treats for Kerry.
>
> Linda Chavez is the author of the new book, "Betrayal: How Union
> Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics." To find
> out more about Linda Chavez and read features by other Creators
> Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page
> at www.creators.com.
> COPYRIGHT 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.