Posted on 08/20/2004 10:55:18 PM PDT by ambrose
Deroy Murdock: Are Kerry's records really open?
By DEROY MURDOCK, Scripps Howard News Service August 21, 2004
NEW YORK — Thanks to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SwiftVets.com ), Senator John Kerry's Vietnam sojourn faces fresh scrutiny. Kerry easily can answer their claims that he has exaggerated or falsified details of his four months in combat. Kerry should sign the Pentagon's Standard Form 180 to assure that his military records are fully public. Total transparency would help voters decide if Kerry should become commander in chief.
In a May 4 open letter, 192 of Kerry's fellow Swift Boat veterans urged him to instruct the Navy to release his "complete and unaltered" military records. "We believe that you have withheld and/or distorted material facts as to your own conduct of this war," read the letter, signed by Democrats, Republicans and independents. "Permit the American public the opportunity to assess your military performance upon the record, and not upon campaign rhetoric."
Regnery publishing's best-selling book, "Unfit for Command," by John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi, Ph. D., identifies several mysteries that Kerry's unabridged military documents could solve. Among them:
— Dr. Louis Letson used tweezers to pull a splinter of shrapnel from Kerry's left arm on Dec. 3, 1968. The next day, with a Band-Aid upon his elbow, Kerry applied for a Purple Heart.
"The scratch didn't look like much to me; I've seen worse injuries from a rose thorn," Commander Grant Hibbard says in "Unfit for Command." "Kerry didn't get my signature. I said 'no way' and told him to get out of my office."
How did Kerry score a Purple Heart after Hibbard's rejection? The paperwork that could explain this anomaly, the Swiftees say, contains gaps.
— Did Kerry willfully venture five miles into Cambodia that Dec. 24, as he claimed for decades; carelessly straddle the "watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia," as Kerry's campaign suggested last Aug. 11; or merely relax 50 miles away in Sa Dec, South Vietnam, as his contemporaneous journal indicates? "No snow, no sleighs, no fat jolly Santa Claus with frosted lips," Kerry wrote home that evening. "It's Christmas Eve."
Records could settle this.
— Kerry won a Silver Star for a Feb. 28, 1969, mission in which his supporters say he led an attack on a Viet Cong stronghold and neutralized a "numerically superior force in the face of intense fire," his commendation states. Swiftees say he followed another boat's lead and merely shot a single, wounded Viet Cong guerrilla in the back. O'Neill and Corsi write that the actual after-action report that could resolve this dispute is not among the documents on Kerry's Web page.
For its part, Kerry-Edwards says it has been open. "We had requested the entire military record from the U.S. Navy, and we took those records and put them on the World Wide Web at johnkerry.com," spokesman Chad Clanton insists by phone.
Clanton's statement may be perfectly valid, but how can anyone know for sure, any more than Americans can be perfectly confident about President Bush's also reputedly public service records? An SF 180 autographed by John Kerry indisputably will show that the Navy has disgorged itself of every paper bearing his name. The SF 180 also could free anything still lodged among the Pentagon's papers that a less formal "request" might have missed. What's good for the donkey is good for the elephant; Bush should sign an SF 180, too.
The SF 180 can be downloaded at www.vetrecs.archives.gov or faxed on demand via 301-837-0990 (request document 2255). Concerned Americans can generate SF 180s and personally hand them to Sen. Kerry as he campaigns. This will give him multiple opportunities to bring a verifiable measure of openness to this issue.
Both the fog of war and clouded memories raise questions about who may be right on these matters, although many more Swiftees contradict rather than confirm Kerry's accounts. It also could be, as "Rashomon" teaches cinematically, that the same event viewed by different people from various angles can yield sincere but conflicting recollections.
There is a straightforward way to judge whether Kerry is correct, forgetful or a talented teller of tall tales. John Kerry himself can answer many of these questions by signing Standard Form 180 to demonstrate that his whole record is open and untouched. As August's bright days prove, sunshine is the best disinfectant.
Hey, isn't Deroy a FReeper??
Good points. If Kerry has nothing to hide, he should simply sign the SF180 and release the records. Personally, I don't know which side is telling the truth, but I'd like to find out. I'm certain the mainstream media is doing everything it can to verify the facts. Certainly they wouldn't discount one side or the other without researching all of the data (extreme sarcasm).
His records are not open. Sadly only a vet would know that. Hids medical records would be rather revealing. I keep hearing that he has shrapnel in his left leg (Edwards just repeated it this week) but from all I have read he was wounded in the arm twice and in the buttocks once. The severity would be in the medical files.
The only thing of real interest in his files would be the recommendations for his medals. Particularly his first PH.
Most of the stuff that proves he's a fraud is actually available via FOI. Things like after action reports, repair logs for his boats, commendations for his crew. The medical records for Alston, although I suspect muster reports from An Thoi will tell when he went back to the 94.
As to the "secret missions" to Cambodia, his press dude Meehan has already said they were secret so there was nothing in writing. Again only a vet would know how much BS that is.
Kerry's records were open before they were closed.
I read about the "shrapnel" wound somewhere and it was described as the size of 1/4 of a BB.
Reflecting on those comments this year, Kerry said they were too harsh. "I think some of the language that I used was a language that reflected an anger. ... The words were honest, but on the other hand, they were a little bit over the top," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in April. *** Source
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Unfit for Command [Excerpt] Kerry's testimony to the Fulbright Committee was a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater. Fulbright wanted a presentable, young Kennedy-esque face to put on the antiwar effort, and Kerry wanted a national forum from which to launch his climb to political celebrity. Ted Kennedy helped arrange Kerry's testimony with Senator Fulbright at a private fundraising event held at the home of Democratic senator Philip A. Hart of Michigan.
………Once Kerry learned that he would have the chance to give testimony before the committee, he recruited the assistance of Adam Walinsky, a speechwriter noted for his work with Robert Kennedy. Walinsky drafted the speech and coached Kerry on its delivery. The only image Kerry wanted us to see was a myth: a young man with a burning passion for the truth, the leader forced to sleep on the ground, the man answering his country's call to be where he was urgently needed, before a committee of the United States Senate where the senators and America were urgently waiting for his firsthand criticism of the war. He porceeded to level his charges: [End Excerpt]
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I'm beginning to wonder how long this political theater was in the making.
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Kerry's World: Father Knows Best****……….As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."……….***
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John Kerry testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by William Fulbright, in April 1971. Photo UPI
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A frame grab shows Vietnam war-era Swift boat veteran Ken Cordier speaking during a television commercial over Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry 's war record. Kerry asked the Federal Election Commission August 20, 2004 to force Republican critics to withdraw the ads challenging his military service, and accused the Bush campaign of illegally helping coordinate the attacks. Photo by Swiftvets.Com/Reuters
"Rashomon" teaches cinematically, that the same event viewed by different people from various angles can yield sincere but conflicting recollections."
Except that isn't the case here. This isn't about different versions of the same incidents. Kerry has been caught in a lie about Cambodia so we know this isn't two different versions of events. Furthermore, by his own admission he spent less than two days in an infirmary for three so called wounds. I don't need another witness to know something smells of dead fish here.
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I would also like to see Kerry's marriage records. Was he
married in the Catholic Church? Did he get an annulment
from his first mariage from the Catholic Church? Was
his first marriage in the Catholic Church?
Do rice grains count as shrapnel?
RELEASE ALL the records, Sen. Kerry!!!
BTTT
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