Beatrice1000 Resource Specialist
Joined: 10 Aug 2004 Posts: 1179 Location: Minneapolis, MN
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Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 2:45 pm Post subject: |
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THE WEEKLY STANDARD
“A Footnote to The New Soldier”
In Kerry's 1972 book, his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee appears heavily doctored.
by David Skinner (The Daily Standard) 09/15/2004 12:00:00 AM
AFTER HIS 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry had to publicly defend his testimony. He debated fellow Swift Boat veteran John O'Neill, a young pro-Nixon conservative and future author of the anti-Kerry bestseller Unfit for Command, most prominently on the Dick Cavett show. And, in conjunction with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he released a book called The New Soldier.
The book is largely a photographic record of the VVAW's march on Washington, which Kerry helped organize and which served as dramatic prologue to Kerry's Senate testimony. The New Soldier also contains statements from men who'd participated in the VVAW's controversial and unverified war crimes hearings, the Winter Soldier hearings which took place in Detroit in February. In many cases, the book gives the source of such statements as the Congressional Record, into which Senator Mark Hatfield read the entire testimony of the Winter Soldier hearings. But the centerpiece of The New Soldier is Kerry's own testimony, his debut on the national political stage.
It seems interesting, then, that Kerry's own words were heavily edited for the book. For starters, his most provocative statement about war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers was left out. And this elision, like several others, was not indicated in the text by ellipses or any other punctuation to make it clear that what the reader sees on the page is an incomplete and selectively transcribed version of the future senator's testimony. ………
COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/625tdlem.asp |
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