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The 'Kerry charged troops with atrocities' Slander

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Albert Clark

"John Kerry's old nemesis - a fellow Vietnam vet picked by President Richard Nixon to discredit Kerry 30 years ago - is resurfacing today to declare him "unfit to be commander in chief."

"O'Neill says he has a letter signed by hundreds of Navy vets, including many who served with Kerry, saying he is not commander-in-chief material. O'Neill's main beef is Kerry's charge that U.S. troops committed atrocities in Vietnam."

www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/v-pfrien...

* * *

That Kerry in his congressional testimony "charged" that troops committed atrocities is an ancient calumny that is, nevertheless, repeated almost daily now in the news. This is what Kerry said:

"...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....

They told the stories 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 one by the applied bombing power of this country."

www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html

To anyone who bothers to read what he said it is clear he is charging no one, but is repeating statements others had made about their own behavior. We expect Republican Brown-Shirts like O'Neill to engage in vicious misrepresentations of what Kerry said, but why are he and his kind abetted by the media? Maybe if we buy CNN, et.al., some Google stock they will occasionally do the kind of (almost effortless) search it takes to find out
what Kerry really said.

Albert Clark, NY

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION