Bill’s Blog

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John Kerry “Anti-war” Links

  New: Kerry former Commanders Speak Out, Kerry’s 1st War Wounds May be Bogus
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“Kerry was a co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America and became a spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War …”

• The VVAW only had around 30,000 members.
• The VVAW Web site hails the testimony Kerry gave before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 21, 1971, as “his greatest contribution to the antiwar movement and to VVAW.”
• “The Vietnam War was part of the larger Cold War struggle. Mr. Kerry acknowledged this in his testimony, but attributed it to ‘paranoia about the Russians.’”

• Kerry developed “close ties” with Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark in the Vietnam Era.
• “Kerry also supported a document known as the ‘People’s Peace Treaty,’ which was reportedly composed in Communist East Germany and contained nine points – all of them extracted from a list of Viet Cong conditions for ending the war.”
• “By participating in VVAW demonstrations, Kerry marched alongside many revolutionary Communists.”
• “Senator John McCain has stated that his North Vietnamese captors had used reports of Kerry-led protests to taunt him and his fellow prisoners.”
• Mentions Vietnamese-Americans for Human Rights in Vietnam (VAHRV), and Vietnamese-Americans Against John Kerry (VAAJK).
• “As Michael Dukakis’ Lieutenant Governor from 1983-1985, Kerry supported a furlough program for hundreds of Massachusetts’ inmates, a program that many critics deemed too lenient toward criminals.”

• In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Kerry that only 2,000 to 3,000 would require sanctuary in the U.S. after the Communist victory.
• American prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton were told about Kerry’s remarks.

• Kerry had voiced presidential aspirations since high school (shades of Bill Clinton).
• “I know something about aircraft carriers for real,” Mr. Kerry often says. As if Kerry was a fighter pilot. While Kerry announced his candidacy on an aircraft carrier, it was the USS Yorktown, which is a war memorial and not an active warship.
• Kerry’s first ship was the USS Gridley, a guided missile frigate in the Gulf of Tonkin. He then served on a swift boat in the Mekong delta.
• “I didn't really want to get involved in the war,” the Globe cites Mr. Kerry saying in a 1986 book about Vietnam. “When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to do.”
• Mentions that Ted Sampley, who fought in Vietnam and publishes U.S. Veteran Dispatch has started an organization named Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry which has a Web site.

• Kerry was awarded an extraordinary number of citations in just four months.
• The three wounds for which Kerry was awarded the Purple Heart left him without any permanent disability.
• The account of the action for which Kerry was awarded the Silver Star is questionable:

• Announces and describes the WinterSoldier.com Web site.
• Says that the “Winter Soldier” conference of 1971 made Kerry “an instant celebrity.”
• The “Winter Soldier” conference was financed by Jane Fonda.
• Says that Kerry and the VVAW wrote a book called The New Soldier, which is no longer in print and rare.
• “One of the documents at WinterSoldier.com is the minutes of a VVAW executive meeting where members decided to take down American flags from all VVAW offices.”
• Mentions that the medals that Kerry threw over the White House fence weren’t his.
• Calls Kerry a “Communist sympathizer.”

“Kerry told reporter Charles Sennott the oft-repeated story of the February 1969 firefight in which Kerry attacked the Viet Cong who ambushed his Swift boat. Kerry won the Silver Star, as well as a Purple Heart, for his efforts. But the story wasn't just the firefight itself. It was also Kerry's reaction to it.

“The future senator was so ‘focused on his future ambitions,’ Sennott reported, that not long after the fight, he bought a Super-8 movie camera, returned to the scene, and reenacted the skirmish on film. During their interview, Kerry played the tape for Sennott.”

• “In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's ‘eye witnesses’ either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.”
•  

• According to the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., “Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass, by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets.”
• Kerry killed civilians, referring to them as “accidents of war.”
• Kerry’s Purple Heart medical treatment reports which have been withheld from the public. “The only person preventing their release is Mr. Kerry.”
• “However, he had no problem reeling off for the Senate a series of unproven, secondhand allegations that would have been perfectly at home at the Nuremberg trials indicting his fellow veterans.”
• “Ms. Fonda had been funding VVAW events since before Mr. Kerry joined its executive committee. At Valley Forge, Ms. Fonda said: ‘My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military.’”

Is this John Kerry’s “Foreign Policy in a Post-Saddam World: Rebuilding Our Alliances and Iraq” December 16, 2003 speech published on the Council on Foreign Relations Web site?

“Yet Gerald Nicosia, who wrote Home to War, a history of Vietnam veterans, said that because previous attempts to catalog war atrocities had been discredited, Winter Soldier organizers carefully checked attendees’ credentials. They inspected discharge papers and conducted intense interviews to ensure that the veterans had been where they said they’d been.

‘If guys couldn’t come up with the answers, they were out the door,’ Nicosia said.”

NOTE: Nicosia’s Home to War is uncritically sympathetic towards the so-called veterans’ movement. The Winter Soldier conference was financed by Jane Fonda.

Also see:

“Kerry says FBI surveillance 'badge of honor,' troublesome.” Fort Worth Star Telegram. March 22, 2004.

I found numerous links to this AP article with an AltaVista news search for "john kerry" "badge of honor"

These hardly seem like the sentiments of a man who regrets his youthful disloyalty to his country in wartime.

I found this link on the OpinionJournal.com “Best of the Web” page on Monday, April 26, 2004. It was also on the Drudge Report site the same day.

In response to the second question: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi's victory? Bui Tin says that “It was essential to our strategy.”

Kerry’s former naval commanders come out against his presidential candidacy; see Michael Kranish, “Kerry's commanders speak out against him,” Boston Globe, May 5, 2004.

Has link for new anti-Kerry organization Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth

Has link for interview of doctor who treated Kerry for his first “war wound;” see Bryon York, “Kerry Purple Heart Doc Speaks Out,” National Review, May 4, 2004.

• Kerry was assigned to swift boat duty when they were being used to ferry personnel and material from the shore to vessels at sea. The swift boats were reassigned to combat duty after Kerry was assigned to this duty.
• People weren’t automatically sent home on receiving their third Purple Heart, they had to apply.
• Kerry was the lead speaker at the Memorial Day, 1970, VVAW Operation RAW demonstration and Jane Fonda was the backup.
• “Kerry flew to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese representative to the peace negotiations. They met privately for several hours. Their conversation is not public. It is known that afterwards Kerry loudly advocated removal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam as a way of obtaining release of our POWs held by Hanoi.”
• “He became a core member and leader of the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), mostly made up of men who had not only never been to Vietnam and had never served in the military.”
• B.G. Burkett’s Stolen Valor “catalogs an extraordinarily vast number of Vietnam wannabes in the VVAW.”
• Kerry rose to leadership roles in other “antiwar” organizations.
• Kerry’s allegations of war crimes to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, April 22, 1971 were “all manufactured.”

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