John Kerry the Betrayer: Unfit to Command, part 3

[Ming]

Originally posted by Japher
Most children are more well behaved than me. However, can they drive and fetch beer?!!

My sixteen year old does both

[JohnT]

For herself as well (but don't tell Daddy!)

[Jon Miller]

look out Japher, you are getting replaced by 16 yearolds

Jon Miller

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Sikander


When I divide 600,000 (the supposed number of people killed by the U.S. bombing) by 3,630 (the number of raids during the secret bombing campaign) I get 165 and some change. Are you saying that each raid killed 165 civilians on average?

As is clear from the quote, the casualties are for the whole of the period that the United States was bombing Cambodia, which as indicated in one of my other quotes went on after it was allegedly protecting American incursions into Cambodia.


600 000 over a period of 4-5 years? If you drop more bombs on a country than you did on Japan, carpet bombing the countryside, and include the effects of toxic defoliants, and incendiaries, and as one of the quotes from a pilot involve in the campaign stated, bomb without regard to a particular target, then you will kill Cambodian civilians, no matter how much Ned puts his head in the sand of the Nedaverse.

The next time you fly at a high altitude Ned, if you're flying over thick tropical jungle, near a river, say, see if you distinguish one small village from another, with the knowledge, of course that in Cambodia, and Laos, and North Viet Nam, those villages tended to be constructed from the same materials that are growing around them- as they are to this day.


Absent any large targets posted on the top of compounds how exactly were American bombers meant to distinguish between civilian and combatant?

Your willingness to shy away from the uncomfortable truth saddens me- Nixon and Kissinger weren't unhappy at the thought of killing civilians, and as we've seen the pilots realized they'd be in all probability killing civilians, but now you're trying to say in the face of all evidence to the contrary, 'oh no, sir, we only bomb military targets!'


'
"Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids," said Sitton, "he was reading the raw intelligence" and fiddling with the mission patterns and bombing runs.

Aside from the crucial Forty Committee, which planned and oversaw all foreign covert actions, he chaired the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), the Verification Panel, which was concerned with arms control, the Vietnam Special Studies Group, which oversaw the day-to-day conduct of the war, and the Defense Program Review Committee, which supervised the budget of the Defense Department.

It is therefore impossible for him to claim that he was unaware of the consequences of the bombings of Cambodia and Laos; he knew more about them, and in more intimate detail, than any other individual.

Nor was he imprisoned in a culture of obedience that gave him no alternative, or no rival arguments. Several senior members of his own staff, most notably Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, resigned over the invasion of Cambodia, and more than two hundred State Department employees signed a protest addressed to Secretary of State William Rogers.

Indeed, as has been noted, both Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird were opposed to the B-52 bombing policy, as Kissinger himself records with some disgust in his own memoirs.

Congress was also opposed to an extension of the bombing (once it had agreed to become informed of it) but, even after the Nixon-Kissinger administration had undertaken on Capitol Hill not to intensify the raids, there was a 21 percent increase of the bombing of Cambodia in the months July-August 1973.




The Air Force maps of the targeted areas show them to be, or to have been, densely populated.'

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Indochina_TOHK.html

That would be the United States' Air Force, Ned, not Swaziland's, or Costa Rica.


'....Kissinger was aware of the possibility of civilian deaths. If he knew enough to know of their likelihood, and was director of the policy that inflicted them, and neither enforced any actual precautions nor reprimanded any violators, then the case against him is legally and morally complete.'

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Indochina_TOHK.html

(bombing Laos):

'The speed and height of the planes, he said, meant that targets were virtually indistinguishable from the air. Pilots would often decide to drop bombs where craters already existed, and chose villages as targets because they could be more readily identified than alleged Pathet Lao guerrillas hiding in the jungle. '


'"The attack of bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited." -- Article 25, The Hague Convention, 1907'

I'm sensing a contradiction here....


'I used the pilot's radio the next day to listen in on raids, and discovered that U.S. pilots bombing Cambodia neither knew, nor checked with anyone to discover, if there were civilians in the area. Later I was informed by the U.S. Air Force "bombing officer" at 7th Air Force Headquarters in Nakhorn Phanom, Thailand, who was officially charged with making sure that no civilian targets were bombed, that in reality he only certified that no CIA teams were in areas under bombardment. He said he had no idea if civilians were present. '

http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/18/kissinger/index.html

Any evidence that Sihanouk left his palace or office in Phnom Penh to visit the bombed areas, or went as observer on a bombing mission, Ned?

'Nearly 4 million tons of bombs were dropped on the people of Southeast Asia while Kissinger orchestrated the war, over 1 million tons more than was dropped during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and twice the tonnage dropped on all of Europe and the entire Pacific theater in World War II. More than 1 million Indochinese perished and 10 million were wounded and made homeless. '

http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/18/kissinger/index.html

'During this same period, the Pentagon confirms that the US dropped nearly 4.5 million tons of high explosive on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped during the whole of the Second World War.

According to the US Senate sub-committee on Refugees, from March 1968 to March 1972 in excess of three million civilians were killed, wounded or made homeless.


US General Telford Taylor, the former chief prosecuting counsel at the Nuremberg trials, condemned the Kissinger-endorsed policy of air strikes against hamlets suspected of harbouring Vietnamese guerrillas as "flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention on Civilian Protection".'

http://www.icai-online.org/56478,46136.html

'The B-52 operations, however, were – just like similar operations over Laos – suffering from the lack of intelligence and reconnaissance: even after 3.630 bomber sorties were flown no serious results were achieved. Instead of the North Vietnamese it was foremost the Cambodian civilians that suffered from them. Concerned about these developments, on 18 March 1970 Prime Minister Gen. Lon Nol staged an Army coup while Sihanouk was back in Moscow to agree deliveries of additional arms. '

http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_410.shtml

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by GePap

NO, but fell free to mention another innane charge that will come without proof.

Well we can't let that little oversight exist else we here at 'poly could be accused of the same lack of integrity displayed by NYT et.al. . (Took me about 2 minutes using that biased google search engine.)


Worldnet daily - paragon of truth in comparison to NYT

Kerry's war journal
contradicts medal claim?
At least 9 days after Purple Heart,
wrote he had not 'been shot at yet'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: August 17, 2004
8:00 p.m. Eastern


By Art Moore
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

A previously unnoticed passage in John Kerry's approved war biography, citing his own journals, appears to contradict the senator's claim he won his first Purple Heart as a result of an injury sustained under enemy fire.


John Kerry receving medal for Vietnam service.

Kerry, who served as commander of a Navy swift boat, has insisted he was wounded by enemy fire Dec. 2, 1968, when he and two other men took a smaller vessel, a Boston Whaler, on a patrol north of his base at Cam Ranh Bay.

But Douglas Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," for which Kerry supplied his journals and letters, indicates that as Kerry set out on a subsequent mission, he had not yet been under enemy fire.

While the date of the four-day excursion on PCF-44 [Patrol Craft Fast] is not specified, Brinkley notes it commenced when Kerry "had just turned 25, on Dec. 11, 1968," which was nine days after the incident in which he claimed he had been wounded by enemy fire.

Brinkley recounts the outset of that mid-December journey, which included a crew of radarman James Wasser, engineman William Zaladonis, gunner's mate Stephen Gardner and boatswain's mates Drew Whitlow and Stephen Hatch:


"They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, 'A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky.'"
The diary entry apparently confirms assertions made by Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, a group of more than 250 vets opposing his presidential candidacy who served in the Naval operation that patrolled the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta area controlled by North Vietnam.

Kerry has made his four months of service in Vietnam a central theme in his campaign, arguing his purported war heroics help qualify him to be commander in chief.

In the swift-boat group's newly published book, "Unfit for Command," authors John O'Neill, who took over command of Kerry's boat, and Jerome Corsi assert the wound for which Kerry received his medal actually was caused by him firing an M-79 grenade launcher too close, "causing a tiny piece of shrapnel (one to two centimeters) to barely stick in his arm."


Could the "we" to which Kerry referred in his notebook entry have meant only that his crew, rather than Kerry in particular, had not encountered enemy fire?

At least one other PCF-44 crew member was with Kerry during the Boston Whaler incident, Zaldonis, according to the Boston Globe's account of the story.

Whatever the case, Corsi told WorldNetDaily he believes the apparent contradiction in Kerry's journal, as presented by Brinkley, deserves a response.

"We're not interested in charges that cannot be documented," he added.

The Kerry campaign's press staff has not answered WND's request for a response.

Corsi contends Kerry has a "pattern" of equivocation, "distinguishing and extending" his answers to charges, including responses to alleged participation in a 1971 Kansas City meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War where a plot to assassinate seven U.S. senators was considered.

"Finally, he said he was there, but he doesn't remember it," Corsi said.

Last week, Kerry was forced to revise his decades-long contention he was on a secret mission in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968.

"Tour of Duty" author Brinkley is reported to be writing a piece for the New Yorker saying it actually was January 1969 when Kerry was sent into Cambodia, not December 1968.

As WorldNetDaily reported, the authors of "Unfit for Command" claim that despite the senator's many public references to spending Christmas Eve in Cambodia – including a1986 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate – the candidate was never in Vietnam's neighboring country. Rather, they say he was more than 50 miles from the Cambodian border at Sa Dec.

'Dear diary moment'

Conservative commentator and attorney Chris Horner, a defender of the swift-boats group who alerted WND to the diary entry, called it a "stunning" revelation.

On recent television and radio appearances, he said, claims made by eyewitnesses to events surrounding the first Purple Heart have been countered by "surrogates of Kerry" who do not address the substance of the charges.

"So finally, you have an eyewitness in a dear diary moment, saying, 'Dear diary, I still haven't been shot at,' confirming what the Swiftees have been saying," observed Horner, who has defended the group's claims in recent appearances on television news shows.

"Admittedly the source is questionable – John Kerry – but it at last provides a witness from his camp to address the charges that his first Purple Heart resulted from a scratch borne of his own fire," Horner said.


Swift boat veteran John O'Neill, co-author of "Unfit for Command." (Fox News Channel)

Kerry's journal entry indicating he had not yet been fired upon is noted in a soon-to-be released book by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, editors of the left-leaning, alternative newsletter Counterpunch. In an excerpt of their book, they write regarding Kerry's first Purple Heart, "there's no evidence that anyone had fired back, or that Kerry had been in combat, as becomes obvious when we read an entry from his diary about a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days after the incident that got Kerry his medal."

Enemy fire?

According to "Unfit for Command," Kerry's initial requests to receive a Purple Heart for the wound were flatly rejected.

In "Tour of Duty," Brinkley quotes Kerry as saying he and his comrades were "scared s---less" that night, thinking fishermen in sampans might be Viet Cong.

When some of the sampan occupants began unloading something on the beach, Kerry lit a flare, causing the startled men on shore to run for cover. That's when Kerry says he and the other Americans began firing.

Said Kerry in "Tour of Duty":


My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down in the boat to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach, strafing it. Then it was quiet.
O'Neill and Corsi, however, claim there is no evidence whatsoever Kerry took any enemy fire that night.

Patrick Runyon was operating the engine on the Boston whaler during the incident.

"I can't say for sure that we got return fire or how [Kerry] got nicked," Runyon is quoted as saying in "Unfit for Command." "I couldn't say one way or the other. I know he did get nicked, a scrape on the arm."

Wrote O'Neill: "In a separate conversation, Runyon related that he never knew Kerry was wounded. So even in the [Boston] Globe biography accounting, it was not clear that there was any enemy fire, just a question about how Kerry might have been hit with shrapnel."

The book also asserts another one of Kerry's three Purple Hearts was self-inflicted.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Molly,

You realize of course you were addressing your post to Ned when you were responding in fact to Sikander.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Molly,

You realize of course you were addressing your post to Ned when you were responding in fact to Sikander.

All of us right wingers look alike to the left.

[Ned]

We ought to have a poll here. Which debate would you rather see this fall?

Bush v. Kerry; or

O'Neill v. Kerry?

I would vote for the latter.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Ned


All of us right wingers look alike to the left.

Its that communal ideology wherein no one has an identity isn't it?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Molly,

You realize of course you were addressing your post to Ned when you were responding in fact to Sikander.

It's called multi-tasking.


I responded to Sikander's point about the number of casualties in the first two paragraphs, and then addressed Ned's earlier erroneous assumptions from the third paragraph onwards.


That's why those paragraphs were separated like that.


'All of us right wingers look alike to the left.'

Ned


Of course you do, Ned.

And in that spirit that's why you have not bothered to distinguish me responding as an individual, but have lumped me in with the monolithic impersonal 'left'.







Whatever keeps you happy in that dreamland where American bombs falling from 15 000 feet can kill only civilians, presumably because before they explode, they stop and ask politely for directions.

[Joseph]

Originally posted by Agathon
Make no mistake, I would rather see Bush elected. Then the rest of the world will realize that it has to band together to Gulliverize the US. When that's finished, common sense can prevail again.

If Bush win this one, watch out in 08 when Hillary runs. That one will be like no other race in the History of the United States. Oh and not because she is a woman, but because who she is married to.

[Joseph]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Kerry has nothing to apologize for. The war was wrong, criminal, and evil. All righteous human beings opposed the war.

Che I just have to ask this question. How do you know so much when you were only 3 years old when we removed the last of our troop from Vietnam?

[MRT144]

joseph, just cause you didnt live in an era doesnt mean you can make judgments about its morality.

[MRT144]

and this goes back to this "im so ****ing old and know more than you could ever" **** you always try and pull on us youngins.

[Joseph]

Originally posted by MRT144
and this goes back to this "im so ****ing old and know more than you could ever" **** you always try and pull on us youngins.

One thing is for sure, I'm not 16 and trying to run with the big boys. MRT on a internet you can say what and get away with it. If you want my address and face me, I give it to you.
In the end FUC- YOU and it would not brother me to face you.