SwiftVets.com

[kmudd]

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=4827


Why Are the Media AWOL?

by David Limbaugh
Posted Aug 19, 2004

Contrary to the polite, watered-down dismissals of much of the beltway pundit community, there is simply no way to chalk up the opposing stories of John Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as mutually honest differences of opinion.

I've now read the book Unfit for Command, and am here to tell you that its multitudinous allegations against Senator Kerry are breathtaking. You cannot read this book without concluding that its co-authors John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi -- and the scores of Vietnam veterans they cite by name throughout the book -- are making specific indictments against Kerry that cannot be rationalized away.

John O'Neill doesn't timidly suggest that Kerry might have lied occasionally or exaggerated in Vietnam and afterward during his antiwar crusade. Rather he paints an unmistakable picture of Kerry as a ruthless, self-promoting egomaniac who systematically placed his own interests above his fellow soldiers and who was obsessively involved in building his resume at all costs during the entirety of his short tour in Vietnam.

O'Neill depicts Kerry -- with mountains of documented evidence -- as a pathological, unconscionable liar whose penchant for dishonesty in Vietnam was only exceeded by his brutal, unmitigated slander of his fellow soldiers when he rushed stateside to lobby against them, their superiors and the entire military establishment.

You can certainly say that John O'Neill and the some 250 Swiftees supporting his position are lying. Or you can say that John Kerry was lying about Vietnam and continues to today. But you cannot honestly say that both groups may be telling the truth. That choice is simply not open to us, as anyone who reads the book will be forced to admit.

You can also dismiss these charges out of hand by accepting the propaganda of Kerry's supporters, whose primary tactic has been to discredit the Swiftees as paid Republican mouthpieces who "did not serve on the same boat as John Kerry."

But John O'Neill himself denies that he's a Republican and says that many in his group are Democrats. Let the investigative reporters of the partisan media run that down if they dare.

And to suggest that the Swiftees had to have been on the same boat is flagrantly specious, as the boats traveled in close proximity to one another, affording the Swiftees firsthand knowledge of the events they describe. In one case, O'Neill charges Kerry with taking credit for the heroics actually performed by members of another Swift Boat. You can see how you wouldn't have to be on the same boat with Kerry to testify to that one.

In evaluating the respective disputants' credibility we should note that neither Kerry nor his defenders have even attempted to refute the great majority of the factual assertions in the book. They tried with the "Christmas in Cambodia" incident and dug themselves a far deeper hole, and they're still digging.

read the rest at the above link

[kmudd]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005483

Holiday in Cambodia
The most damning testimony on John Kerry in Vietnam has come from John Kerry.


BY ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Monday, August 16, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

John Kerry volunteered for service in Vietnam. John Kerry was wounded in Vietnam. And a number of the men with whom John Kerry served testify to acts of courage on his part.

This much seems beyond question, and I see no reason to weigh in on the factual disputes surrounding Mr. Kerry's medals being waged by pro-Kerry vets like Jim Rassmann and the anti-Kerry vets of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Both sides strike me as sincere, but eyewitness accounts of fast-moving and stressful situations like combat are too unreliable for there to be much hope of getting at the "truth" here.

But Americans have never accepted that a record of service, however honorable, should forever entitle a man to deference on matters of war and peace. (Ask George McGovern.) And the political uses to which Mr. Kerry would later put his Vietnam experience are certainly fair game for criticism. Which brings up Mr. Kerry's claim--repeated in at least three different decades, and on the floor of the Senate--that he spent Christmas Eve of 1968 not in Vietnam but in Cambodia. He obviously considered it a point of some significance, since he used it to impugn the integrity of those who waged the Vietnam War.

This is how he described it to the Boston Herald in 1979: "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies. . . . The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

In 1986 Mr. Kerry argued on the Senate floor against U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras, again citing the 1968 Christmas in Cambodia and "the president of the United States telling the American people I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared--seared--in me." In a 1992 interview with the Associated Press the story came back: "By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."

Trouble is, the person who appears to have been wrong here about Mr. Kerry's location was not the president--who was Lyndon Johnson, not Nixon, by the way--but Mr. Kerry himself. His commanding officers all testify to this fact, as do men who were on his boat at the time. And so now, reluctantly, does the Kerry campaign
read the rest at
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005483

[Dimsdale]

The Kerry record continues to fill with lies, but the Swifties are justifiably standing by their sworn statements.

If the media wants to call the SBVT liars, then they are obliged to prove that assertion with real investigative reporting, not baseless smears and unfounded allegations and insinuations against the SBVT by uninvolved Kerry surrogates.

Kerry is becoming more and more a PROVEN liar, with REAL facts and all the defamation in the world cannot change that.

Kerry has merely to release his full military/medical records to see who is telling the truth and who isn't.

The ball is in Kerry's court, but as his classmates in school reminisced: they didn't call him "Keep the puck Kerry" for nothing.

[baldeagl]

The media doesn't do investigative reporting. If they did, Unfit for Command never would have had to be written.

The Kerry story is a scandal for sure, but the greater scandal (and it will have a lasting effect on this country) is the abject failure of the major news media to find this story out on their own and when confronted with the facts, their even more abject failure to do even the simplest of fact checking.

The real losers in this "war" are the news media. And isn't it fitting, since they've had such a prominent role in Vietnam and Iraq.
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