John Kerry the war criminal: Unfit to command, part 2

[notyoueither]

Ogie quoted an article where Kerry claims that a dead child was a dead VC in an incident that, if true, showed Kerry in a less than positive light.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by molly bloom
So we're not talking My Lai here?

If he operated in a Free Fire Zone, he would have been under orders to kill any non-US/ARVN human being he found there, destroy any villages, crops, and animals also. This is what former Sen. Bob Kerry is accused of having done.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by dannubis
all i can say is that the bush campaign has mastered the art of misdirection.

all the attention goes to a conflict that ended almost 30 years ago while the mistakes that have been made by the bush admin the past four years on domestic as well as foreign policy slip by unnoticed...

Give this man a prize.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


If he operated in a Free Fire Zone, he would have been under orders to kill any non-US/ARVN human being he found there, destroy any villages, crops, and animals also. This is what former Sen. Bob Kerry is accused of having done.

That's not how those boats operated, according to the people who served on them in that article quoted. Kerry liked to think so though, according to the posted bit.

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


As Oliphant of The Boston Globe pointed out tonight on The News Hour with Tom Leher, his war record has been investigated for thirty years, and these claims, while not going away, have failed for thrity years to be verified.

Why would he be investigated for thirty years? He was trounced in 1972, and didn't touch politics again until he ran for Lt. Governor in Massachusetts in 1982.

Lt Governor isn't exactly a high-pretige position, so it's doubtful he got much heat there. The Senate could be a didfferent story, but it would have been for three elections, over the course of eighteen years -- and the Kennedys had his back.

So where are the serious investigations I've heard about? Show them to me.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Tingkai

You're doing what you complain about others doing. You're tarring an entire generation of American soldiers who decided the war was wrong after serving in Vietnam.

Yes, there were radicals and probably frauds within the anti-war movement. Many of them left, including Kerry, when the organisation became more radical.

But to say that they were all radicals and frauds is simply wrong. It's just like the fact that while American soldiers committed atrocities, not everyone of them did.

No. Firstly, an entire generation of American soldiers did not decide that the war was wrong after serving in Vietnam, there was then and is now a wide range of opinion on the matter.

Secondly, I mentioned an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War and cited this group specifically for treating with the enemy, fraud etc. This was Kerry's group. Nowhere did I make a generalization about the anti-war movement. Thankfully as often ignorant and offensive as much of the anti-war movement was (from personal experience in a college town from 1969 through the end of the war), they paled in comparison to the guilt ridden / personality disordered / communist toadying / celebrity infatuated and all too frequently blatantly dishonest V.V.A.W. Even Kerry washed his hands of them a few months after they dicussed assassinating government officials in a meeting he said he didn't attend, contrary to FBI surveillance files.

Originally posted by Tingkai

From the Kerry website:
When the U.S. Navy sent Kerry his official Naval records, his military medical records were not included. Kerry reconstituted the military medical records from his personal files.

http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/r...004_0423b.html

Yep these are the documents that Kerry voluntarily released and put on his own website. Most shed no light on the subject at hand, merely saying what we all agree with. That Kerry was presented with his awards. The purple heart citations are particularly useless. All we can glean from these are the dates of the wounds (all within 3 1/2 months Dec 1968 - March 1969), and the dates for the awards, all within six weeks in 1969 even though the paperwork seems to have been done all on the same day in April 1969.

The personnel casualty report likewise concerns the one wounding incident which no one seems to have any questions about. Where are the other two?

I wouldn't be surprised if they were somehow lost, much as many of Bush's service records were, but that is hard to check because Kerry is picking and choosing what to release from his records, which is his right. I do remember however that Bush was put under immense pressure to release his entire military record when questions were raised about his service. He did so, with the exception of his medical records. Make of that what you will, everyone else has.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Kidicious


I read cnn.com or msn.com and I listen to pacifica.

Pacifica. Even liberals and progressives don't believe that crap.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
When do we get to the accusation that he sodomized Vietnamese villager's sows before putting them on a spit for a BBQ?

You must have read Winter Soldier. I have only had time to skim it.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


Which is just a way of campaigning for Bush. The more wailing and gnashing of teeth I hear about Kerry, the more I realize the right is insecure about the chances for their boy to get elected.

"The Dallas Morning News reported yesterday that the organization has also received two $100,000 checks from Houston home builder Bob Perry, who backed George W. Bush's campaigns for Texas governor and for president."

So much for the "independence" of the SBVfT. I wonder when Richard Mellon Scaife is going to send in his check.

And the other side, some group called John Kerry for president seems to be somewhat partisan as well. Time for an independent investigation. Where the hell is the press on this one? The NYT wrote an entire article of ad hominems about SBVfT. I guess they are satified in becoming the Fox News of the left. Too bad, I used to like them as I had only to work around the usual cultural barriers to truth that are so common in all of the media. Now I have to filter out blatant partisanship and selective reporting as well. It looks like the Washington Post is doing a better job actually reporting the story rather than rephrasing Kerry campaign literature. I guess it's time to switch papers.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


As Oliphant of The Boston Globe pointed out tonight on The News Hour with Tom Leher,

Tom Lehrer? And they say that the media isn't liberal, and then moderate Jim Lehrer is replaced with a radical folk singer.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


Well, if you'd read my earlier post you'd know that the people investigating Kerry were: the President of the United States (Nixon) and the Secretary of the Navy (Warner). I don't know about you, but if I think that the POSTUS and the SotN had enough clout that people would be turning over the right rocks. This was a year before Watergate, and well before that scandal crippled his effectiveness as POTUS. If there were anything to find, Nixon would have found it.

And so far the only source I've seen on this is Oliphant, the cartoonist for the Boston Globe who stood in as a representative for the Kerry campaign in the segment on tonight's show, and seemed to know very little about the subject, though he seemed very sure that he knew very little.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Vietnam vets were largest single group in the antiwar movement. Nonetheless, a large number of vets still supported the war and the government when they returned home. O'Neal, who is one of Kerry's critics, is one of those people.

I'm not sure where you got this information, but I have to say that I doubt it. Aside from the nebulousness of trying to decide who was really a member of the anti-war movement and who wasn't I have to say from personal experience that there were an awful lot of college students and ex-college students involved in everything I witnessed, and very few vets. Most vets I knew had an opinion, but few ventured out into active politics. A lot stayed pretty stoned, and you know how annoying all that yelling can be when you're stoned.

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

That's a myth. South Vietnam was crumbling around us. The only way we could stave off the inevitable collapse was to remain in Vietnam forever. Furthermore, the military was losing more control over its own soliders, with strikes and fraggings, etc. While the U.S. wasn't as close to revolution as many people (including the government) thought it was back then, the longer we stayed in Vietnam, the closer we got to it. There is no way we could have won that war. We only could have lost it later on.

Well they seemed to hold up pretty well for three years after we quit supporting them with air power, and then collapsed quickly after we quit supplying them with fuel and ammunition. I think the truth is somewhere in between the extremes. The Viet Cong was long gone by then, and the North was scraping the bottom of the barrel for replacements, while the South was learning how to do things by themselves. Unfortunately for them, they ran out of time to learn what not to do, and got defeated in detail. Had they handled their troops better they would not have collapsed like that, with all things (ammo, morale, supply) remainging the same. Same for France in 1940.

[Drake Tungsten]

This guy is a douch bag, plain and simple.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by notyoueither
The reason I don't really believe Kerry, and can fully believe that he is a scum bag just like the next guy...

Real vets of real **** who really feel bad about what happened and who feel really bad about what they did don't turn their experiences into a campaign for higher office. They hang their heads, and if they ever say anything they say it quietly, and that's if they never did anything wrong.

His 'I'm Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty' was among the most pathetic things I've ever seen, and I've watched American and Canadian politics for a bit so I have a sense of pathetic when I see it.

This guy is a douch bag, plain and simple. The only reason he has even a glimmer of a hope in this race is that the other guy has been showing himself to be a greater evil, probably. I'm not sure if the evil that is unknown is going to be better or worse than the evil that is known. I really hope Congress goes the other way so that the US has an actual opposition to the winner of this slime fest.

A lot's at stake, for more than just Americans, so I hope it turns out alright, but God-damned you people really haveta shoot some jolt into your party system.... please?

Good post, and I agree with almost everything except the being a Canadian bit etc.

[Agathon]

Isn't this campaign the most postmodern you've ever seen?

It seems to have abandoned the idea of facts or credibility in favour of the idea that if you repeat the accusations in a stern tone and often enough, it will make them true. Add to that the total disregard for the customary meanings of English words, and it's a slam dunk (unless it isn't).

I mean, you have a spoiled, war-dodging rich boy with the physical courage of a French boxer painting himself as the candidate of courage, as opposed to the decorated war hero who is apparently a moral and physical coward.