SwiftVets.com

[tvaughan]

Yes, unfortunately atrocities were committed. These atrocities were not witnessed by John Kerry as he told Congress, and thus the world.

They were not committed by the men in Kerry's unit as he implied.

They were not wide spread as John Kerry claimed.

They were not performed under the full knowledge of the chain of command like Kerry said.

While Kerry was only "repeating what he was told", none of what he claims to have been told could be corroborated or verified and attempts to actually do so were actually hindered by Kerry and his political allies.

He was unable to produce a single reason why he believed that these horrible stories were so certain that they demanded to be told to the world.

Some forget that Kerry's testimony led to quite a public furor and an investigation was initiated immediately. No evidence of anything that Kerry claimed could be found. Charges however, did not die down, and the general public did not treat many veterans like their name had been cleared.

There is certainly no evidence that the North Vietnamese slowed down their propaganda war after absolutely no evidence could be found of wide spread policy of killing civilians.

There is no evidence that the North Vietnamese felt that they had enough propaganda to stop torturing American POWs to obtain more.

There was certainly no evidence that American soldiers, sailors and Marines had their name cleared in 1988 when I was out of boot camp and was quickly called a "baby killer" by a Dukakis supporter. A man I in now way provoked.

This is 1988, mind you. And the American military was still being called "baby killers". Young boys just out of boot camp who never saw combat, and thankfully never would.

Now, how do you think a real hero feels? A man who saw friends die, who risked his life time and time again trying to protect civilians from harm? Who may even be haunted by a killed civilian and he has never stopped wondering if he could have done anything differently that would have saved them?

And how do you think the military feels about the man, outside of those bastards at My Lai, most responsible for this reputation around the world and within our own borders?
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Talking point #1: Sign 180
Talking point #2: Sign 180
Talking point #3: Sign 180

[LewWaters]

I wonder why he and the anti-war left never reported on the Hue massacre?
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Clark County Conservative

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

Oh the Killing Fields?
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~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother

[LewWaters]

I guess, since it was only 3,000 Vietnamese, it wasn't all that newsworthy.
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Clark County Conservative

[7rrfs]

This is the information Kerry was handing out ...


February 26, 2004, 8:28 a.m.
Kerry’s Soviet Rhetoric
The Vietnam-era antiwar movement got its spin from the Kremlin.

By Ion Mihai Pacepa

Part of Senator John Kerry's appeal to a certain segment of Americans is his Vietnam-veteran status coupled with his antiwar activism during that period. On April 12, 1971, Kerry told the U.S. Congress that American soldiers claimed to him that they had, "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned on the power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan."

The exact sources of that assertion should be tracked down. Kerry also ought to be asked who, exactly, told him any such thing, and what it was, exactly, that they said they did in Vietnam. Statutes of limitation now protect these individuals from prosecution for any such admissions. Or did Senator Kerry merely hear allegations of that sort as hearsay bandied about by members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been discredited)?

To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and "news reports" about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world.

As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, "our most significant success."

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/pacepa200402260828.asp

Ion Mihai Pacepa was acting chief of Romania's espionage service and national-security adviser to the country's president. He is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc.
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"I served admirably in Vietnam" John Kerry
"Yes, I committed atrocities in Vietnam" John Kerry