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JustAsking Former Member
Joined: 22 Oct 2004 Posts: 1
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Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 4:23 am Post subject: I'm literally "just asking" here... |
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coldwarvet wrote: | Quote: | Kerry never accused the POWs of committing war crimes and spoke only in general about the conduct of U.S. troops. | Oh and I am sure that the enemy drew this distinction as they tortured our POW's the MSM continues to insult us I can't speak for the rest of you but I am ready to get out and picket my local rag that places these AP stories in my paper. |
Is this why POWs were tortured, and would they have been treated better otherwise?
Were there no war crimes of any kind, or none of the kind Kerry recounted in his testimony, and how do we know?
I'm new here, and want to what's at the heart of the controversy. |
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Me#1You#10 Site Admin
Joined: 06 May 2004 Posts: 6503
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Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 5:35 am Post subject: Re: I'm literally "just asking" here... |
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JustAsking wrote: |
Is this why POWs were tortured, and would they have been treated better otherwise?
Were there no war crimes of any kind, or none of the kind Kerry recounted in his testimony, and how do we know?
I'm new here, and want to what's at the heart of the controversy. |
Please spare us the rhetorical repartee. Your suggestion of POW abuse as some quid pro quo for systemic U.S. Military "War Crimes" is vacuous and transparently propagandistic. Nor is your suggestion that this organization claimed that "War Crimes" were never committed anything more than a strawman.
As you leave this forum you can take the words of Jim Warner and Tom Collins with you as a response to what might be your only legitimate question...and the torture employed against our POWs was both physical and psychological...
Quote: | Kerry's Anti-American Rhetoric Used in Torture of POWs
Posted August 26, 2004
by David Freddoso
Former POW Jim Warner today told HUMAN EVENTS that he first learned about Lt. John Kerry in a North Vietnamese prison camp. When his captors brought him out of solitary confinement in the infamous Skid Row punishment camp for an interrogation, they made him read the typewritten transcript of a statement by Kerry, speaking in the United States. His interrogator kept pointing at Kerry's words, saying, 'See? This officer from your Navy says you deserve to be punished.'"
"All I could think of was that this must be a really contemptible human being," said Warner, although We can't expect the rest of the country to share our disgust at Kerry for turning on us. A lot of people are too young to remember that."
<snip>
Warner said his first experienced Kerry's anti-American rhetoric in 1971 when he was a Marine first lieutenant suffering in solitary confinement in the Skid Row punishment camp. His F-4 fighter had been shot down three and a half years earlier, and since that time he had been tortured and interrogated regularly. He was in a special punishment camp at the time with 35 other POWs who had been uncooperative when their captors tried to prohibit religious observances in their cells.
One morning--Warner thinks it was a Saturday--his captors brought him out for an unusually long three-hour interrogation, during which they made him read the transcript of a statement by a U.S. Navy officer and Vietnam Veteran speaking in the United States. The speech included a litany of war crimes American soldiers were committing in Vietnam.
However, Warner acknowledges that the statement could have come from of a number of speeches Kerry gave during his career as an anti-war protester.
Tom Collins, another Vietnam POW whose plane was shot down in 1965, was made to listen to Kerry's testimony on tape during his captivity. He explained that the North Vietnamese were constantly trying to elicit confessions of war crimes from Americans, promising them better treatment.
"What they wanted to do was get us to make statements that they could use for propaganda, no matter what it took to get it" he said. "They would torture us, some were even killed for it...For over seven years, their goal was to get propaganda out of me. And then I see somebody like John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans [Against the War] giving them the same propaganda they want me to give them, free of charge, on American television."
"He knew he was putting us at risk," Warner went on. "And he was demanding unilateral withdrawal, which means our value as bargaining chips would be gone. And what do you think would have happened to us then?"
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