So I did a Lexis/Nexis search on Kerry and these war crimes Kevin G. is so sure he committed. I'd like to share a few things with everybody. Since L/N doesn't provide direct links, I'm just going to have to cut and paste excerpts from the articles, so this might get a little long...hope you don't mind...
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HANNITY & COLMES, FOX, 2/9/04
HANNITY: Now, during that same speech, Kerry also said that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam had admitted to committing war crimes there, saying, "At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped 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 countryside 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."
I think he had an obligation then -- if he knew about people who committed murder, rape, atrocities, as he described, didn't he have an obligation then to give those -- to tell authorities who those people were? He knew who they were, he said he knew who has admitted this.
THE NEWS ON CNBC, 3/16/04
PAT BUCHANAN (Nixon White House Adviser): Well, I think this was a--the Vietnam Veterans Against the War was another group that had come to Washington. Most of the demonstrations, John, were--were petering out by 1971. Kerry was articulate. He was getting tremendous press. And the veterans were a novelty against the war, all of them organized. And so Richard Nixon had every right to counter that by finding a veteran, who would respond to Kerry effectively. Now the truth was Kerry didn't speak for the country. Richard Nixon was elected with 60 percent of the vote a year and a half later. And he did not speak for the veterans when he said they were committing war crimes, raping people and shooting at will. And so we felt that had to be answered, and it was answered. And as you saw, Nixon had that John O'Neill right in his office. That was an open response, fully justified.
JOHN DEAN: Well, what he was saying 30 years ago--over 30 years ago was not baseless. And, in fact, in my office at that time, we'd just gone through the melee. I had it in my fi--in my office files a terrible report called the Peers report about war crimes. The--the--at one point, the Navy was going to investigate the charges that had come up at the Winter Soldier hearings. I don't know if they ever did. We never got any reports back. But I think that the shadow of Vietnam still lies across this land. Hopefully, this campaign won't refight that war. But it looks like the issues have not certainly gone to sleep.
BALTIMORE SUN, 2/14/04, "Kerry went from soldier to anti-war protester," Tom Bowman
"We had an investigation in which 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-by-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command," declared John Kerry, a 27-year-old Navy veteran.
"They told the stories (that) at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped 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."
Kerry's Senate testimony was not the extent of his anti-war pronouncements. Shortly before, he appeared on NBC's Meet the Press and said that he also had taken part in "atrocities" in Vietnam.
"I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others," he said, "in that I shot in free-fire zones, fired .50-caliber machine bullets, used harass-and-interdiction fire, joined in search-and-destroy missions and burned villages."
Despite those words, Kerry and his fellow sailors have since said that while Vietnamese civilians were killed by the guns from their Swift boat, the deaths were never intentional and came about as they were returning enemy fire.
At a Wall Street rally of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War a few weeks before Meet the Press, Kerry referred to 1st Lt. William L. Calley Jr., who was convicted for his part in the 1968 My Lai massacre that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians.
"Guilty as Lieutenant Calley may have been of the actual act of murder, the verdict does not single out the real criminal ... the United States of America," Kerry told a noontime crowd of about 100, according to a New York Times account.
Former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, an Army captain with the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam who lost both legs and his right arm when a grenade exploded near him, said Kerry was part of "the moderating force" within the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Cleland, a strong Kerry supporter, said he agrees with the senator's 1971 testimony. "The bad guys ... used terror," Cleland said. "It was war. The Americans in that kind of hell did the same thing."
As for those veterans who feel betrayed by Kerry, Cleland said, "Bullfeathers. He spoke for all of us. He earned his spurs." The former senator recalled other words in Kerry's Senate testimony that he said still ring true: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, 2/8/04, "John Kerry's war record plays well now, but...," Jon Sawyer
In his 1971 testimony Kerry, then 27, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of U.S. soldiers who said "they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped 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 a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."
The memory still rankles retired Col. Jerry Morelock, a West Point graduate and 30-year Army vet who now directs the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library at Westminster College in Fulton.
"When Kerry was testifying before Congress in 1971 about all the war crimes going on in Vietnam, I was in Vietnam," recalled Morelock, who served as a field artillery battery commander. "I guess I missed the briefing because I didn't see all these war crimes that were supposedly being committed on a routine basis."
"I thought he was just stabbing the rest of us in the back," Morelock adds, "with all this B.S. about so-called war crimes. I thought he was using it just as a platform to launch a political career."
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So...what's the bottom line here? In 1971, Kerry accused the U.S. Armed Forces of committing atrocities on a regular basis in the Vietnam War. He admitted that he was involved in this to some degree, and expressed guilt. But he was never charged with anything, and moreover, other vets denied his charges and accused him of political opportunism. I don't think any clear conclusions can be drawn here. I certainly think that, if Kerry were personally guilty of war crimes, his big mouth would have gotten him in legal trouble back in the 1970s. Nixon had no love for Kerry. Nixon also had employees working on attacks against people on his enemies list, as we all know.
Moreover, it seems that what Kerry was really saying back in '71 was that he had heard that other soldiers were engaging in atrocities. I have a hard time believing that if Hannity, that pompous gasbag, had access to information conclusively proving Kerry was personally responsible for war crimes, he'd have bothered arguing whether Kerry was wrong for not reporting what he'd heard.
I still think Kerry is a dick. But there are better reasons not to like him than hints and allegations. To draw a line between Kerry and Abu Ghraib seems a little dumb to me...
