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Originally Posted by daswig
Host, do you really doubt that Kerry went to Paris and met with the NVA and Viet Cong? (he admitted as much under oath) Do you really doubt that he was a signatory of the "Dear Commandante" letters? (easy to FOIA, after all, IIRC Harkin wrote them, he signed them). Do you really doubt what his voting record on defense systems was?
This is all stuff in the public domain.
"Treason is Patriotic" is a pretty crappy campaign strategy...
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daswig, you exhibit an anachronistic attitude and a mindset that was discredited in the 70's. You are talking to the wrong guy, if you expect me to
be influenced in the slightest by your twisted, early 70's, unsubstantiated (as in; where are your links to authoritative sources?) warhawk propaganda.
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Ad Says Kerry 'Secretly' Met With Enemy; But He Told Congress of It
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 22, 2004; Page A08
The veterans organization that sparked controversy last month when it questioned John F. Kerry's military service in Vietnam plans to launch a new commercial today that equates Kerry with Vietnam War protester Jane Fonda and accuses the Democratic presidential nominee of secretly meeting with "enemy leaders" during the conflict.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth said it will spend $1.3 million to air its advertisement in five battleground states and on national cable television networks over the next week. The ad, titled "Friends," makes no assertion of any direct link between Kerry and Fonda, but it suggests that their contacts with North Vietnamese leaders during the war were equally dishonorable.
"Even before Jane Fonda went to Hanoi to meet with the enemy and mock America, John Kerry secretly met with enemy leaders in Paris," begins the spot, with grainy footage of the actress and a young Kerry. ". . . Then he returned and accused American troops of committing war crimes on a daily basis. Eventually, Jane Fonda apologized for her activities, but John Kerry refuses to."
The group, whose members served in the Navy at the same time as Kerry, is referring to a meeting Kerry had in early 1971 with leaders of the communist delegation that was negotiating with U.S. representatives at the Paris peace talks. The meeting, however, was not a secret. Kerry, a leading antiwar activist at the time, mentioned it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of that year. "I have been to Paris," he testified. "I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Provisional Revolutionary Government," the latter a South Vietnamese communist group with ties to the Viet Cong.
Kerry's campaign said earlier this year that he met on the trip with Nguyen Thi Binh, then foreign minister of the PRG and a top negotiator at the talks. Kerry acknowledged in that testimony that even going to the peace talks as a private citizen was at the "borderline" of what was permissible under U.S. law, which forbids citizens from negotiating treaties with foreign governments. But his campaign said he never engaged in negotiations or attended any formal sessions of the talks.
"This is more trash from a group that's doing the Bush campaign's dirty work," Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said. "Their charges are as credible as a supermarket rag."
In an interview yesterday, John O'Neill, an organizer of the Swift boat group and co-author of the anti-Kerry book "Unfit for Command," said it would be "unprecedented" for a future commander in chief to have met with enemy leaders. "It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al Qaeda," he said.
Historian Douglas Brinkley said Kerry's trip to Paris, after his honeymoon with his first wife, Julia Thorne, was part of Kerry's extensive fact-finding efforts on the war. "He was on the fringes," said Brinkley, the author of "Tour of Duty," a book about Kerry's military service. "But he was proud of it. . . . He wanted to make his own evaluation of the situation."
The Swift boat group's first ad gained widespread exposure last month through talk-radio programs, cable television talk shows and newspaper articles because of its assertions that Kerry had exaggerated his war record as the commander of a Navy Swift boat in Vietnam.
Some of the independent organization's assertions were refuted, and several links between it and President Bush's campaign subsequently came to light. But the media storm created by the ad put Kerry and his campaign on the defensive.
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39744-2004Sep21.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39744-2004Sep21.html</a>
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daswig, don't bother reading any of this......it is a waste of your time. You "know" what you "know". and history will not alter your opinion. If I tell you that history proved Kerry to be right about Viet Nam, and his prediction that
not ending that war by mid 1971 would result in the avoidable deaths of
5000 more U.S. troops by the time the U.S. inevitably pulled out in Jan., 1973
you would probably respond by posting that Kerry's 1971 anti war efforts
were a major influence in compromising the potential forU.S.victory in
Viet Nam. History, however, indicates that Kerry was right about Nixon's flawed Viet Nam policies, Reagan was wrong in the Iran-Contra activities.
and soon...that Bushco was wrong in turning the war on terror into the
tragic and deliberately misleading war in Iraq. 10 congressman signed
the "Dear Commandante" letters; Kerry was not a congressman:
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17 April 1984
The Wall Street Journal
This is the text of a letter sent by 10 members of the U.S. House of Representatives to Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua's Sandinista junta. An editorial on this subject appears nearby. House of Representatives
Office of the Majority Leader
Washington, D.C., 20313
March 20, 1984
Comandante Daniel Ortega
Coordinador de la Junta de Gobierno Casa de Gobierno
Managua, Nicaragua
Dear Comandante:
We address this letter to you in a spirit of hopefulness and good will.
As Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, we regret the fact that better relations do not exist between the United States and your country. We have been, and remain, opposed to U.S. support for military action directed against the people or government of Nicaragua.
We want to commend you and the members of your government for taking steps to open up the political process in your country. The Nicaraguan people have not had the opportunity to participate in a genuinely free election for over 50 years. We support your decision to schedule elections this year, to reduce press censorship, and to allow greater freedom of assembly for political parties. Finally, we recognize that you have taken these steps in the midst of ongoing military hostilities on the borders of Nicaragua.
We write with the hope that the initial steps you have taken will be followed by others designed to guarantee a fully open and democratic electoral process. We note that some who have become exiles from Nicaragua have expressed a willingness to return to participate in the elections, if assurances are provided that their security will be protected, and their political rights recognized. Among these exiles are some who have taken up arms against your government, and who have stated their willingness to lay down those arms to participate in a truly democratic process.
If this were to occur, the prospects for peace and stability throughout Central America would be dramatically enhanced. Those responsible for supporting violence against your government, and for obstructing serious negotiations for broad political participation in El Salvador would have far greater difficulty winning support for their policies than they do today.
We believe that you have it in your power to establish an example for Central America that can be of enormous historical importance. For this to occur, you have only to lend real force and meaning to concepts your leadership has already endorsed concerning the rules by which political parties may compete openly and equitably for political power.
A decision on your part to provide these reasonable assurances and conduct truly free and open elections would significantly improve the prospect of better relations between our two countries and significantly strengthen the hands of those in our country who desire better relations based upon true equality, self-determination and mutual good will.
We reaffirm to you our continuing respect and friendship for the Nicaraguan people, and pledge our willingness to discuss these or other matters of concern with you or officials of your government at any time. Very sincerely yours,
Jim Wright
Michael D. Barnes
Bill Alexander
Matthew F. McHugh
Robert G. Torricelli
Edward P. Boland
Stephen J. Solarz
David R. Obey
Robert Garcia
Lee H. Hamilton
<a href="http://mypage.iu.edu/~erasmuse/w/dearcomandante.htm">http://mypage.iu.edu/~erasmuse/w/dearcomandante.htm</a>
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Quote:
Sunday, December 08, 2002
washingtonpost.com
Back, But Not By Popular Demand party's scandal-scarred lions must be seen in the context of this governing strategy. If you try something controversial and get away with it, it makes you stronger. The recent appointments -- and the refusal to even acknowledge the legitimate outcry they have occasioned -- are a deliberate demonstration of power, a flaunting of contempt for opposition and dissent, in the expectation that such a show will likely deter, not spur, critics.
By David Greenberg
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page B01
This fall the Democrats came in for some ribbing over the weakness of their bench. When the party suddenly had to field last-minute replacements in crucial Senate races, it exhumed Greatest Generation septuagenarians Frank Lautenberg and Walter Mondale instead of tapping young comers. Now, surveying the presidential aspirants for 2004, some mentioners are eyeing a contender from two decades ago, the newly minted elder statesman Gary Hart.
Who says there are no second acts in American life?
But if the Democrats' resuscitation of their Pleistocene leadership shows a lack of imagination, the Republicans' recent revival of their own dinosaurs betrays something far more troubling: a hostility to dissent and an eagerness to exercise power that are dismayingly redolent of the heavies they seek to resurrect.
Two weeks ago, President Bush placed Henry Kissinger, a veteran of the Nixonian era of secrecy, White House intrigue and dubious foreign ventures, in charge of uncovering intelligence and security flaws preceding the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Then last week, the president gave the National Security Council's top Middle East job to Iran-contra rogue Elliott Abrams. Meanwhile, outrage has belatedly fastened on February's naming of another Iran-contrarian, the pipe-puffing John Poindexter, to run a Big Brother-like Pentagon operation called Total Information Awareness that promises -- if news reports can be believed -- to harvest all known information about everybody into a searchable Internet database. Perhaps we'll see Poindexter and Abrams convene a reunion within the administration, where they can relive their heyday with other contra war alumni who are serving in the administration.
You might think that a few of these folks would have had their careers ended by their misdeeds. And you might think that being tough on crime, long a GOP mantra, begins at home. You'd be wrong: On the matter of these men's sordid pasts, the Bush administration has shown an indulgence and permissiveness that would make Dr. Spock blanch. (If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been indicted.) As a result, these vintage villains are not on parole but on parade. It's an '80s nostalgia party, as thrown by Ed Meese.
In one sense, these appointments shouldn't be shocking, since Iran-contra has now -- strange to tell -- receded into history. Many of today's White House correspondents weren't old enough to drink beer when Poindexter, as national security adviser, led up the illegal Iran-contra scheme or when Abrams, as a State Department official, abetted the efforts. These journalists are not likely to hype the story. Indeed, even devoted political junkies might be hard-pressed to tell you exactly what Poindexter and Abrams did wrong.
(The answer: Poindexter supervised the secret arms-for-hostages sales to Iran that violated Ronald Reagan's professed policies and possibly also the Arms Export Control Act. He green-lighted the funneling of profits from those sales to the Nicaraguan contras, in knowing defiance of a law barring government funding of those rebels. And he concealed his activities, destroyed evidence and lied to Congress. Abrams also misled Congress about the scheme.)
The public's natural forgetfulness was assisted by the work of Republican judges and higher-ups. Poindexter was convicted by a federal jury for lying and obstruction of justice. Though sentenced to prison, he escaped hard time thanks to conservative appellate judges Laurence Silberman and David Sentelle (later of Lewinsky affair fame), who overturned his conviction; they ruled that independent counsel Lawrence Walsh had relied too much on testimony that the NSC adviser himself gave while under congressional immunity.
Abrams won his Get Out of Jail Free card from an even higher authority. Convicted on two counts of lying to Congress, he avoided even probation and community service when, as a lame duck, President Bush senior gave Abrams and five others Christmas Eve pardons that ensured that no more information would surface. Bush's pardons helped give Iran-contra its final burial. Unlike Watergate, which has remained the benchmark for political wrongdoing for 30 years even as people forget its byzantine details, the Reagan scandals have lately grown dim -- occluded, partly, by the recent wash of gauzy tributes to the senescent former president in his twilight years.
In their own time, of course, the Watergate felons staged comebacks, too. John Ehrlichman reinvented himself as a pulp novelist, G. Gordon Liddy as a radio talk-show host and Chuck Colson as a man of the cloth. (The last of these strategies was briefly pursued also by Abrams, who rode the coattails of his father-in-law, conservative commentator Norman Podhoretz, into the world of letters where, as a born-again Jew, he took to browbeating his co-religionists about the evils of both intermarriage and strict church-state separation.) Significantly, however, until now none of the Nixon crowd ever returned to positions of government authority, only to the role of cultural curiosities.
What's more, they all knew they would be forever tied to Watergate. Indeed, they counted on our memory of their notoriety to earn them attention in their new guises; had their criminal behavior not catapulted them to fame in the Nixon years, no one would have ever published (or read) an Ehrlichman novel, aired (or tuned in to) a Liddy broadcast or printed (or commented on) a Colson op-ed. In contrast, Poindexter, Abrams and company are relying on our amnesia to effect their transformations into upstanding citizens worthy of wielding power again.
In the current crop of Republican retreads, Watergate survivor Kissinger is the exception that proves this rule. Unlike Liddy or Colson, Kissinger had (and still has) a reputation apart from the Nixonian miasma. He is counting on our selective memory: the China opening, not the secret bombing of Cambodia; shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, not the phony peace in Vietnam or his meddling in Chile. He has used his image as a pillar of the foreign policy establishment to shirk accountability for his role in what John Mitchell famously called the "White House horrors." What's unfortunate about the left's hyperbolic "war criminal" taunts is that Kissinger's actions were plenty bad without any embellishment.
Another reminder may be in order: As Nixon's national security adviser, Kissinger (as he admitted in his own memoir) targeted journalists and administration officials to be secretly -- and, the Supreme Court ruled, illegally -- wiretapped. That sordid episode, which started in 1969, was the first of many abuses of power that fell under the collective rubric of Watergate and brought Nixon down. But Kissinger emerged from the rubble unscathed because he was as deft at charming Washington's elites as Nixon was inept. He convinced those influential circles that his ouster would imperil what remained of an American foreign policy in 1973 and 1974. And many of them still rally to his defense.
But the question remains: Why has Bush chosen to resuscitate men with rather unusual résumés? The answer is that he appears not to think they did anything wrong.
For all the differences between Watergate and Iran-contra, the scandals shared one key aspect: their perpetrators' belief in the virtue of secrecy and White House prerogative at the expense of democratic rules. Kissinger justified wiretapping private citizens without a warrant -- Watergate's first chapter -- by claiming that "national security" was at stake; we now know it wasn't, and he would have needed a court order, anyway. Iran-contra was, at bottom, a purposeful ploy to subvert Congress's will because administration officials judged that they were better suited to the big boys' work of fighting communism and terrorism.
Poindexter and Abrams, like Nixon and Kissinger, harbored a contempt for Congress, for the opposition party and for the public, all of whom they considered short-sighted and ignorant, meddlesome and soft. These groups not only didn't have to approve of what was going on, it was decided; they didn't even have to know.
If you can't see any immorality and illegality at work here, then you might downplay these scandals as mere politics -- as some Bush aides seem inclined to do. Abrams, for one, wrote a book chalking up his criminal conviction to "political differences." Queried about Abrams, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer called Iran-contra -- in what was, technically, an accurate description -- "a matter of the past." Watergate isn't whisked away so easily, but it should be remembered that in the summer of 1974, Karl Rove, then head of the College Republicans, was among the active minority fighting Nixon's impeachment -- circulating literature that painted the constitutional crisis as nothing more than a political witch hunt. Few dare voice that view today, but one wonders how many former foot soldiers, deep down, still believe it.
Still, you might ask, if the Bush team can't grasp the wrongdoing its recent appointees committed, doesn't it at least grasp the political sensitivities? On the contrary. Ever since the Florida recount fight, the Bush governance strategy has been to assert that they're in the right and to brook no intimations otherwise.
All along, the Bush team has understood that images can be self-fulfilling -- and that the best way to shore up a shaky position is to act as if your legitimacy isn't in doubt. If your decisions are assailed, hang tough, grit your teeth, shrug off the questioners and brazen it out. That attitude has been particularly marked in the waging of the war on terrorism, where the administration's fetish for secrecy and disdain for Congress are eerily reminiscent of -- guess who? -- John Poindexter and Henry Kissinger.
The attempt to rehabilitate the party's scandal-scarred lions must be seen in the context of this governing strategy. If you try something controversial and get away with it, it makes you stronger. The recent appointments -- and the refusal to even acknowledge the legitimate outcry they have occasioned -- are a deliberate demonstration of power, a flaunting of contempt for opposition and dissent, in the expectation that such a show will likely deter, not spur, critics.
Why has Bush appointed Kissinger, Poindexter and Abrams? It's like the old riddle: because he can.
David Greenberg, a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a historian and columnist for Slate. His book on Richard Nixon and political image-making is due out from W.W. Norton next fall.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company <a href="http://ericksonhistory.blogspot.com/2002_12_08_ericksonhistory_archive.html">http://ericksonhistory.blogspot.com/2002_12_08_ericksonhistory_archive.html</a>
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