SwiftVets.com

[Becky]

the following comes from an article by Cliff Kincaid
August 30, 2004:

"Some in the media find it unseemly that we're talking about things
that happened 30 years ago. But as Jeff Jacoby says in a Boston
Herald column, one way that you can bring the issue up to date is by
looking at political persecution under the communist dictatorship there.
Jacoby notes that Congressman Chris Smith has a bill, the Vietnam
Human Rights Act, which passed the House of Representatives by an
overwhelming 410-1 vote. Jacoby says, however, that, "…it never got a
hearing or a vote in Senate, where it was blocked by the then-chairman
of the East Asian and Pacific Affairs subcommittee—John Kerry

President Clinton lifted the U.S. trade embargo on Vietnam in 1995,
which was followed by a bilateral trade agreement. Kerry voted for
both....Kerry ran a Senate investigation that brought the search for
live American POWs from the war to a close. At about the same time,
a Boston Herald article by Michael E. Knell reported on a deal by a
firm called Colliers International to develop a deep sea port in Vietnam
at a cost of $900 million. The article stated that, in order to skirt the
trade embargo still in effect against Vietnam, Colliers International
acted through its partner firm Colliers Jardine based in Singapore. At
the time the deal was brokered, C. Stewart Forbes was the Chief
Executive Officer of Colliers International. C. Stewart Forbes and
John Forbes Kerry are cousins....The policy begun by Clinton with
Kerry's support has now resulted in a decision by the U.S. Trade
and Development Agency to provide $591,000 to a Vietnam
government gas company to study how to build a natural gas
pipeline for a power complex in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. U.S.
taxpayers are now paying for the economic development of
communism in Vietnam. Will the media ask John Kerry what
he thinks about that?"

http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/1894_0_2_0_C/