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Junkie
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by rukkyg
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The original post claims that the anger is over the fact that kerry testified that all soldiers committed war crimes.
If that is truly the source of his anger, then he has no reason to be upset because Kerry never said that.
Quote:
John Kerry before congress 1971:
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
go back and read the whole thing if you like at: http://www.nationalreview.com/docum...00404231047.asp
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Quote:
Kerry's Testimony
It turns out that the attack on John Kerry's war record was just Act 1. Now the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (and, miraculously, all the right-wing media) have turned to Kerry's antiwar record. After returning from Vietnam, Kerry became a spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a major force in the antiwar movement. In 1971, he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This famous testimony launched Kerry's political career and the talk of him as a future president. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger can be heard fretting about it on the Watergate tapes.
This at least is a real issue, unlike the manufactured nonsense about his war medals. Does what Kerry said back in 1971 disqualify him for the presidency 33 years later?
There is some ambiguity, or purposeful confusion, about the precise objection to Kerry's ancient testimony. Is it something in particular that he said? Or is it the very fact that Kerry opposed the Vietnam War and worked to end it?
Many of those who condemn Kerry for opposing the Vietnam War are too young to have been politically aware during that period. The rest are fighting very old battles. But the fact is that the argument over Vietnam was settled long ago, and a majority of Americans decided that Kerry was right.
Members of the Swift boat group and like-minded Americans are free to try to re-litigate the basic Vietnam question. They say, from the comfortable perspective of 2004, that the antiwar movement emboldened the enemy and thus lengthened the war. That's their premise: We could have won the war by 1971 if not for Kerry and his ilk. Of course, after continuing the war for three more years, we still didn't win it. So even accepting the dubious premises of these Hindsight Hawks, blame for the lives lost after Kerry's testimony goes primarily to the leaders in Washington who kept the war going needlessly.
But most Americans came to accept Kerry's view that the war was ill advised and unwinnable at any reasonable cost. Only when that happened did the war end, and the antiwar movement made it happen sooner. If that historical judgment is correct, which we think it clearly is, then Kerry saved the lives of many more Americans in his antiwar role than he did as a Navy officer.
Kerry's testimony in April 1971 was eloquent, persuasive and damning. Consistent with his cautious instincts, Kerry never joined the extremist America-haters who hoped for a North Vietnamese victory, but instead he patiently explained to senators why the war was a disaster.
Undoubtedly, Kerry was overwrought when he declared that atrocities by American soldiers were ubiquitous. They weren't. But it is ignorant fantasy to suppose that the United States emerged from Vietnam unblemished by horrible misdeeds. What about the free-fire zones and the dumping of more munitions than during World War II? What about the Phoenix program of mass assassinations? In his new memoir, retired Gen. Tommy Franks recounts how he was tempted to kill inhabitants of a Vietnamese village because he feared they were communist sympathizers. Sometimes, temptation was not resisted.
But Kerry's anger was not directed at soldiers in the field. On the contrary, in his testimony, he blamed the Washington establishment. He lashed out at former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and former national security advisor McGeorge Bundy: "Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned?" Kerry asked. "These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war."
None of what Kerry said was particularly novel or shocking. But his status as a decorated sailor sent the Nixon administration into overdrive to depict him as providing aid and comfort to the enemy, just as his current detractors seek to depict him as a traitor unfit to lead the war against terror.
The late 1960s were a moral obstacle course for young Americans, especially young men. Kerry is one of the few who got it right. He served, and served bravely as even President Bush now concedes. Then he came back home and worked to stop the killing and the dying.
George W. Bush, by the way, dodged the second part too.
-- http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion...1,4293259.story
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The last lines of the quoted article make it very clear that the author has little interest in logic. He blasts kerry for his interview, wherein he agrees with the criticism that his testimony was too severe, and then demands an apology similar to Fonda's.
Which does he want? does he want an apology or does he want kerry to stand by his testimony come hell or high water? because it looks, from the quotes, that kerry was explaining that he was not supporitve of his words back then being used against fellow soldiers--he was testifying to Congress in an attempt to pull the blanket off the administration's BS--a blanket the american public desired and deserved to see pulled.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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