John Kerry Gained Fame On The Shoulders Of Frauds (Bogus Vietnam Veterans)

Various | Various | Various

[Hon]

John Kerry seems to have had a way of eluding the bad odor that clings to his old associates. On "Meet the Press" in 1971, he appeared with VVAW member Al Hubbard, a veteran who was exposed around this time for lying about his rank and combat experience (he had seen no combat). While this confirmed suspicions about the dubious identities of many of the winter soldiers, it didn't keep Kerry from becoming famous. The young politician was able to have his cake and eat it, too, becoming the establishment, patriotic face of a radical, anti-patriotic movement. Quite a trick, really.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/712ljiby.asp?pg=2

[Hon]

[Hon]

This was posted by Baynative on another thread, but I believe it is material gleaned from some of the reviews of Mark Lane's book:

"Kerry relied upon phonies and wannabes for support. His prominence has allowed current phonies and wannabes to continue the unsubstantiated allegations made all those years ago and which Kerry appears to condone even today. For example:

Elton Mazione, claiming Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) credentials, Kerry's original organization, along with his friends, John Laboon, Eddie Swetz, and Kenneth Van Lesser. They claimed to kill children and remove body parts as part of the notorious Phoenix program. They were neither in Phoenix nor in Vietnam.

Kerry's VVAW leader friend from 1971, Al Hubbard, lied about being an officer, Vietnam Veteran, and sustaining war injuries. Michael Harbert, another VVAW crony of Kerry, lied about his Vietnam service.

Frank Dux: He charged many recognizable Vietnam vets with using techniques bordering on war crimes. Dux was a fraud and non Vietnam Veteran.

Yoshia K. Chee claimed we in Vietnam routinely resorted to the most hideous forms of torture, threw people out of helicopters, and decapitated prisoners. He was a phony.

Mike Beamon, an alleged SEAL and Phoenix assassin, was never in the military.

The Senator's own VVAW and similar groups relied upon people like: K. Barton Osborn, a Vietnam veteran and testifier of atrocities to Congress. He told of prisoners being thrown out of helicopters, a woman starved to death, a prisoner being killed by a six inch dowel pushed through his ear. Osborn was not in Phoenix, refused to name names, and provided no documentation.

Lieutenants Francis Reitemeyer and Michael J. Cohn. Both sought conscientious objector status because of Phoenix. Reitemeyer testified to being assigned to Phoenix as an adviser and maintained a kill quota of fifty bodies a month. They became famous as My Lai hit the news. Neither served in Vietnam, in Phoenix, or had any first hand information. Reitemeyer later denied receiving any assassination training."

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1065523/posts

[Hon]

Here is a nice compilation of stories about the Fonda/Lane/Kerry "Winter Soldiers" investigation from Patriot Paradox:

http://www.patriot-paradox.com/archives/000458.html

Winter Soldier Speech a Lie

Evangelical Outpost has a very nice take on the Winter Soldier speech given by Kerry in 1971. In it Kerry brought forth allegations that were very disturbing:

They told stories that 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 Ghengis 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 done by the applied bombing power of this country.

From what I have read though these were at best lies. Take this article from the National Review:

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.

Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.

Another piece of info on Lane, and the Winter Soldier Investigation, this from Organizing Veterans Through War Crimes Documentation:

During the summer of 1970 we were approached by Al Hubbard who had become a full-time organizer with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Al proposed that CCI join forces with Jane Fonda, Mark Lane, Rev. Dick Fernandez of CALC, and Donald Duncan (the Green Beret who had testified at the Russell Tribunal in Denmark). The VVAW steadily gained membership and visibility as the citizens commissions took place. One boost was a free ad in Playboy that brought in over 12,000 responses and many new members.

In retrospect, we entered into a close collaboration with Fonda, Lane and the others without any real discussion of roles and responsibilities. Since we all agreed that our goal was a national hearing lasting several days, we assumed that other problems would take care of themselves.

It was a mistake to think that celebrities like Jane Fonda and Mark Lane who were used to operating as free agents would submit to the discipline of a steering committee. We should have placed them, instead, on an advisory panel where their visibility and political and money contacts would have been used without having to tangle with them on broader strategic and tactical questions.

At any rate, less than three months into planning for the Winter Soldier Investigation, most of the Vietnam veteran coordinators and Jeremy Rifkin had become adamant that WSI disassociate itself from Mark Lane. He had published a book, Conversations with Americans, which was denounced by a Vietnam expert in the Sunday Times Book Review as a shoddy piece of research.

Even in 1970, Mark Lane displayed the same penchant for sleazy dealings and associations that led him, years later, to the jungles of Guyana. There, he climbed a tree to escape the brainwashed minions of his friend and client, Rev. Jim Jones, who had just ordered hundreds of his followers to commit ritual suicide.

Al Hubbard, the VVAW's representative on Winter Soldier, had originally been one of the veterans most critical of Lane. However, once he learned that Fonda wasn't willing to jettison her pal Mark, he promptly reversed himself. Al was to have some additional credibility problems later on when it was disclosed that, despite his war stories, he'd never served in Vietnam.

But let's go through what Neil Sheehan found. He starts off like this:

This book is so irresponsible that it may help to provoke a responsible inquiry into the question of war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam. "Conversations with Americans" is a lesson in what happens when a society shuns the examination of a pressing, emotional issue and leaves the answers to a Mark Lane.

Mr. Lane is a New York lawyer who charged admission six years ago to his lectures in an East Side theater about a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy (a conspiracy Mr. Lane did not prove in his book attacking the Warren Commission report). He now purports to have assembled a collection of interviews with American soldiers and Marines who witnessed or participated in atrocities in Vietnam. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, advertised the book in the Nov. 22 issue of this review as "one of the most shocking, eye-opening books ever encountered in the annals of wartime reporting." The headline on the advertisement read: "A generation is being brutalized / Thirty-two Vietnam veterans give first-hand accounts of what is happening to our under 30's as they are trained in savagery, sadism, torture, terrorism, and murder."

So Lane seems to have a few wild ideas under his belt right off the bat. Then on to the first interview with Chuck Onan, who deserted the Marines in 1968 and fled to Sweden. Here is what Sheehan wrote:

Onan says he was in an elite Marine long-range patrol unit, that he went to parachute, frogman and jungle survival schools and received a special course in torture techniques. "How were you trained to torture women prisoners?" Mr. Lane asks.

"To strip them, spread them open and drive pointed sticks or bayonets into their vagina," Onan replies. "We were also told we could rape the girls all we wanted."

Onan says he deserted after he got orders to go to Vietnam and put his knowledge into practice. "I was pretty gung-ho until the last phase of the training. Then it all began to seem so sick. They just went too far."

Now here is some information that Mr. Lane did not include in his book. Marine Corps record say the only combat training Onan received was the normal boot camp given every Marine. He then, according to the records, attended Aviation Mechanical Fundamentals School at Memphis, Tenn., and next worked as a stock room clerk at the Marine air base at Beaufort, S.C., handing out spare parts for airplanes. He left Beaufort on Feb. 5, 1968, with orders to report to Camp Pendleton, Calif., for shipment to Vietnam after 30 days leave. He deserted. There is no indication in his records that he ever belonged to a long-range patrol unit and received parachute, frogman and jungle survival training. The Marine Corps contends it does not give courses in torture.

Even further is a shocking allegation that Sheehan refutes:

Later on in Mr. Lane's book you will meet Michael Schneider. He says that he spent a year and a half in Vietnam as an infantry squad leader and then platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division and the 196th Light Infantry Brigade. He tells how he shot three unarmed peasants, tortured a prisoner by hooking a hand crank field telephone up to the man's testicles on orders from a lieutenant, and watched other men torture prisoners in similar fashion on several occasions. His battalion commander, he says, ordered the men to kill prisoners. Schneider says he was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster and the Silver Star, the Army's third highest combat decoration, for his Vietnam service. He subsequently deserted in Europe.

Schneider says that he was born in Germany as Dieter von Kronenberger, but his father changed the family name to Schneider when they immigrated to the United States in 1948.

"How has your family reacted to the fact that you deserted?" Mr. Lane asks.

"My father says I'm a traitor. He says you have an obligation to be loyal to any army you are in. He's a colonel in Vietnam. He recently replaced Col. George Patton as the commander of the Eleventh Armored Calvalry Regiment. He was a captain in World War II. In the Nazi Army," Schneider replies.

"Your father is a colonel in Vietnam?" Mr. Lane asks.

"Right. Full colonel. Commanding officer in Eleventh Cavalry Regiment now." Schneider goes on to tell you that his father once worked for the notorious Nazi armor commander, Gen. Heinz Guderian. The implication is fairly obvious: The United States army has Nazis in command of important units.

There is no Colonel Schneider or von Kronenberger, according to the army records. No such man ever commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. There is no trace in the records of any officer who resembles the description that Michael Schneider gives of his father.

Here is some more information from Army records that Mr. Lane also does not mention in his book. Michael Raymond Schneider left Europe last January, flew to New York and surrendered to the army at Kennedy Airport. He soon went A.W.O.L. and was arrested by police in Denver in July in a murder warrant from Oklahoma. The records last placed him in the maximum security ward of Eastern State Mental Hospital in Vinita, Okla., in October.

Mr. Lane did not bother to cross-check any of the stories his interviewers told him with Army or Marine Corps records. I asked him why in a telephone conversation.

"Because I believe the most unreliable source regarding the verification of atrocities is the Defense Department," he said.

But what about simple and obvious facts like those in the cases of Onan and Schneider which might throw light on the credibility of his witnesses? I asked.

"It's not relevant," he said.

and neither is Mark Lane's Conversations with Americans.

As you can see from this info Kerry's whole speech was supported by unreliable witnesses from an unreliable author. Therefore Kerry's speech is not relevant.

[areafiftyone]

Excellent Find!!

[fella]

Who funded the veterans against the war and the winter soldiers?

[Hon]

Much of the "testimony" given by the bogus Vietnam Veterans at the Winter Soldier Investigation is said to have been lifted from Mark Lane's (equally bogus) book.

Kerry then cited these remarks in his own (ghost written) testimony before the Senate in April 1971.

Here is a review of Mark Lane's book, where he points out that many if not most of his witnesses were simply made up.

(Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Neil Sheehan reported on the Vietnam War for the New York Times. The following review from the New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1970.)

Conversations With Americans

by Mark Lane
247 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster, $6.95.

By Neil Sheehan

This book is so irresponsible that it may help to provoke a responsible inquiry into the question of war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam. "Conversations with Americans" is a lesson in what happens when a society shuns the examination of a pressing, emotional issue and leaves the answers to a Mark Lane.

Mr. Lane is a New York lawyer who charged admission six years ago to his lectures in an East Side theater about a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy (a conspiracy Mr. Lane did not prove in his book attacking the Warren Commission report). He now purports to have assembled a collection of interviews with American soldiers and Marines who witnessed or participated in atrocities in Vietnam. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, advertised the book in the Nov. 22 issue of this review as "one of the most shocking, eye-opening books ever encountered in the annals of wartime reporting." The headline on the advertisement read: "A generation is being brutalized / Thirty-two Vietnam veterans give first-hand accounts of what is happening to our under 30's as they are trained in savagery, sadism, torture, terrorism, and murder."

In his introduction, Mr. Lane notes that "La gangrene," a famous French account of torture inflicted on Algerians by the French police during the Algerian war, was limited to "uncorroborated but thoroughly convincing allegations . . . by the victims."

"Here the victims do not make allegations," he says of his book. "Here those who performed the acts of brutality and their friends come forward to place those acts before us. It is for us to place these acts in context. In a country where one cannot imagine the police smashing the printer's plates or confiscating this book, there is yet time for analysis, evaluation and action." Mr. Lane uses his freedom to suggest the interviews show that the Army and the Marine Cops consciously operate on a moral par with Hitler's S.S. So reader, get control of your stomach and prepare for some credible testimony on atrocities from the men who attached the electrodes to the genitals of their victims, male and female, and who butchered women and children like chickens.

The first interview in the book is with Chuck Onan, who deserted the Marines in 1968 and fled to Sweden. Onan says he was in an elite Marine long-range patrol unit, that he went to parachute, frogman and jungle survival schools and received a special course in torture techniques. "How were you trained to torture women prisoners?" Mr. Lane asks.

"To strip them, spread them open and drive pointed sticks or bayonets into their vagina," Onan replies. "We were also told we could rape the girls all we wanted."

Onan says he deserted after he got orders to go to Vietnam and put his knowledge into practice. "I was pretty gung-ho until the last phase of the training. Then it all began to seem so sick. They just went too far."

Now here is some information that Mr. Lane did not include in his book. Marine Corps record say the only combat training Onan received was the normal boot camp given every Marine. He then, according to the records, attended Aviation Mechanical Fundamentals School at Memphis, Tenn., and next worked as a stock room clerk at the Marine air base at Beaufort, S.C., handing out spare parts for airplanes. He left Beaufort on Feb. 5, 1968, with orders to report to Camp Pendleton, Calif., for shipment to Vietnam after 30 days leave. He deserted. There is no indication in his records that he ever belonged to a long-range patrol unit and received parachute, frogman and jungle survival training. The Marine Corps contends it does not give courses in torture.

Later on in Mr. Lane's book you will meet Michael Schneider. He says that he spent a year and a half in Vietnam as an infantry squad leader and then platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division and the 196th Light Infantry Brigade. He tells how he shot three unarmed peasants, tortured a prisoner by hooking a hand crank field telephone up to the man's testicles on orders from a lieutenant, and watched other men torture prisoners in similar fashion on several occasions. His battalion commander, he says, ordered the men to kill prisoners. Schneider says he was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster and the Silver Star, the Army's third highest combat decoration, for his Vietnam service. He subsequently deserted in Europe.

Schneider says that he was born in Germany as Dieter von Kronenberger, but his father changed the family name to Schneider when they immigrated to the United States in 1948.

"How has your family reacted to the fact that you deserted?" Mr. Lane asks.

"My father says I'm a traitor. He says you have an obligation to be loyal to any army you are in. He's a colonel in Vietnam. He recently replaced Col. George Patton as the commander of the Eleventh Armored Calvalry Regiment. He was a captain in World War II. In the Nazi Army," Schneider replies.

"Your father is a colonel in Vietnam?" Mr. Lane asks.

"Right. Full colonel. Commanding officer in Eleventh Cavalry Regiment now." Schneider goes on to tell you that his father once worked for the notorious Nazi armor commander, Gen. Heinz Guderian. The implication is fairly obvious: The United States army has Nazis in command of important units.

There is no Colonel Schneider or von Kronenberger, according to the army records. No such man ever commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. There is no trace in the records of any officer who resembles the description that Michael Schneider gives of his father.

Here is some more information from Army records that Mr. Lane also does not mention in his book. Michael Raymond Schneider left Europe last January, flew to New York and surrendered to the army at Kennedy Airport. He soon went A.W.O.L. and was arrested by police in Denver in July in a murder warrant from Oklahoma. The records last placed him in the maximum security ward of Eastern State Mental Hospital in Vinita, Okla., in October.

Mr. Lane did not bother to cross-check any of the stories his interviewers told him with Army or Marine Corps records. I asked him why in a telephone conversation.

"Because I believe the most unreliable source regarding the verification of atrocities is the Defense Department," he said.

But what about simple and obvious facts like those in the cases of Onan and Schneider which might throw light on the credibility of his witnesses? I asked.

"It's not relevant," he said.

This kind of reasoning amounts to a new McCarthyism, this time from the left. Any accusation, any innuendo, any rumor, is repeated and published as truth. The accused, whether an institution or an individual, has no right to reply because whatever the accused says will ipso facto be a lie. Those on the left who cherish their integrity might do well to take a careful look at Mark Lane's methods.

Simon & Schuster likewise did not compare any of the atrocity stories with the records. One editor, who asked not to be quoted by name, said the firm had relied on the "veracity" of the interviews. He equated the idea od searching the military records with taking a radical medical theory to the American Medical Association. "They'd just say it was wrong," he said.

We were dealing here with facts, not theories, I argued. "The motives in publishing this were anti-war motives," he answered. Another representative of the firm insisted, with apparent sincerity, that Simon & Schuster had published the book as a public service. "We did not do it for profit," he said.

Will a book like this aid the cause of those who seek to stop the war? Can the opponents of the war accuse those in power of cloaking the war's prosecution in deceit and then practice deceit themselves?

It is particularly difficult to separate fact from fiction in those interviews where, to the experienced ear, the soldier or Marine obviously has seen combat and is speaking in the argot of the "grunt." The interview with Terry Whitmore, a black Marine who deserted to Sweden, is a good example.

Whitmore says he participated, among other atrocities, in a planned massacre of an entire village of several hundred Vietnamese men, women and children. Marine Crops records say Whitmore was in Vietnam over the time period he cites and in the unit he mentions. By telephone, I reached Whitmore's former battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel still on active duty, and a former platoon leader in his company, now a teaching assistant at Appalachian state University in Boone, N.C., both said no such massacre had occurred. They said that at the time Whitmore describes it as taking place, the battalion was operating in an unpopulated area near the Demilitarized Zone.

They remembered an earlier incident involving Whitmore's company in which four Vietnamese, two women, a man and a child were shot to death in a hostile area at night. The company commander, a captain, and an enlisted man, were tried by a court martial for murder. They were acquitted on the grounds that the company had just been fired upon, and it had been impossible in the darkness to distinguish the moving figures as civilians.

Is Whitmore transmogrifying this incident into a massacre of several hundred? The conflicting accounts certainly raise the question. Similar doubts taint the credibility of other interviews Lane publishes with men who did no desert and who returned to the United States.

Garry Gianninoto, who says he was a Navy medical corpsman assigned to the Marine infantry, describes orgies of burning and killing. "The people were terrorized by the Marines. I mean they terrorized them to death, and the people were scared."

"Did you see much of this?" Lane asks.

"All the time," Gianninoto replies. He recounts one incident in which five Vietnamese men were hanged, stabbed and then shot and their bodies tossed into a river.

Gianninoto says that, in disgust, he finally refused "to fight" and was court-martialed. Medical corpsmen normally do not fight. They do, however, often work in dangerous circumstances, saving the lives of wounded infantrymen on the battlefield and getting shot at themselves in the process.

Marine Corps records do not indicate that Gianninoto had a lot of combat experience either to fight or to witness the atrocities he describes. He was assigned to an aid station at a battalion headquarters in February, 1968, according to the records, and then court-martialed in July for twice refusing orders to work in areas where he might have been shot at. White in the brig, he signed a statement claiming that he had committed a homosexual act in the service and had taken morphine. The statement had the effect of getting him transferred to Navy hospital in New York City for evaluation. Otherwise, he would have had to finish his 13-month tour in Vietnam after he emerged from jail. He went A.W.O.L. from the hospital, the records continue, was court-martialed again and then given an undesirable discharge.

The records do show that there was an incident around the time Gianninoto cites in which five Vietnamese were hanged, stabbed, shot and thrown in a river. One Marine is now serving life imprisonment for the killings and Gianninoto could have learned of them from newspaper stories.

In our telephone conversation, Mr. Lane also dismissed such prosecutions as "irrelevant" and therefore unmentionable in his theater of the macabre. His lack of interest in distinctions includes drawing none between the grim but understandable brutalities of war, such as the killing of prisoners in the passion of battle (both sides do it), and far graver atrocities like the torture of prisoners by rear-area interrogators who have to excuse to hate, the killing of innocent civilians with indiscriminate air and artillery bombardments, or their direct, personal murder as occurred at My Lai. The distinction is an important one, because it carries a degree of moral turpitude that every soldier, from private to general, senses.

Some of the horror tales in this book are undoubtedly true. Where there is so much stench, something must be rotting. Mr. Lane succeeds, however, in making it impossible to reach any factual judgement. Nevertheless, the naive and the professional moralists will derive considerable satisfaction from the book, if they can control their intestines. Mr. Lane informs us with the same sensationalism he presents everything else that drill sergeants behave like barbarians, cursing and blaspheming and training recruits to kill. To those who have not met a drill sergeant, this will be news.

It has always been my understanding that it is the task of the Army and the Marines to kill the enemies of the country when they are ordered to do so. The rub is whom they should kill, when they should do the killing and how they should do it. This is what has torn the nation apart over the Vietnam war.

The country desperately needs a sane and honest inquiry into the question of war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam by a body of knowledgeable and responsible men not beholden to the current military establishment. Who these men are and how that inquiry ought to be conducted are questions I do not have the space to discuss here, but the need for the inquiry is self-evident. Too large a segment of the citizenry believes that war crimes and atrocities have taken place for the question to be ignored.

Anyone who spends much time in Vietnam sees acts that may constitute war crimes. One of the basic military tactics of the war, the air and artillery bombardments that have taken an untold number of civilian lives, is open to examination under the criteria established by the Nuremberg tribunal. Is it a war crime? We ought to know. And those professional soldiers who value their uniform would be wise to welcome such an inquiry.

That the men who now run the military establishment cannot conduct a credible investigation also ought to be self-evident from the Army's handling of the My Lai affair, and the Army is the principal service involved in Vietnam.

But until the country does summon up the courage to convene a responsible inquiry, we probably deserve the Mark Lanes.

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/smearing.htm

[Hon]

"Who funded the veterans against the war and the winter soldiers?"

Jane Fonda and Mark Lane (and maybe others). Mark Lane was in turn funded by the KGB.

http://www.paulmitchinson.com/jfk.html

[Ben Bolt]

You wanted some more data on the Frenchman I think ?

[sirshackleton]

A reader on the National Review blog asked the right question: When is someone going to ask Kerry if, should he be elected President, he'll prosecute those he accused during the Winter Soldier Investigation of war crimes?

[Plutarch]

The best thing about this, is that fool Kerry personally and publically questioned Bush's National Guard service. When Kerry is called upon his activities in 1971 he cannot say they are irrelevant, because he himself made an issue of Bush's activities.

Reduced to a soundbite:

"While Bush was serving our country flying an F-102, Kerry was denouncing America, and sharing a platform with Jane Fonda."

(Service Chronology:

July 1970 to April 16, 1972: Bush, as a certified fighter pilot, attends frequent drills and alerts at Ellington.)

[Hon]

From Notra Trulock:

"Kerry now says he is proud of his service in Vietnam and that the country should “celebrate the nobility of young Americans” who were willing to die for their country. But as Owens notes, Kerry told a very different story in his now famous appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. Kerry was one of the stars of a march by disaffected veterans on Washington; it was during this march that Kerry threw somebody’s medals and ribbons over a Capitol Hill fence.

Kerry horrified members of the Committee with tales of atrocities committed by GI’s in Vietnam. Rape, murder, torture, baby killings, burnt and destroyed villages – all the particulars of the anti-war movement’s bill of indictment of American servicemen in that war. Kerry told them that these crimes were not isolated occurrences, but were committed almost daily. Kerry’s testimony was so powerful that he continues to be cited as an authority on American atrocities in Vietnam. As AIM has reported, in December 2003, an article in the New York Times cited Kerry’s 1971 appearance as proof of the Times’ assertion that such atrocities were commonplace.

Except, as Owens points out, much of that testimony was based on lies told by men who either had never served in Vietnam or had no involvement in the tales they told. As recounted in B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley’s Stolen Valor, much of the so called “eyewitness” testimony cited by Kerry was thoroughly debunked by none other than the Times’ own Vietnam correspondent Neil Sheehan. To Sheehan, all this represented a “new McCarthyism – this time from the left. Any accusation, any innuendo, any rumor is repeated and published as truth.”

http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2004/02/13.html

[centurion316]

for future reference

[Hon]

Even some of these bogus Vietnam vets found Kerry too phony for them:

"And there are others, this time within the antiwar movement itself, who also viewed Kerry as a fake. When he returned to the United States in April 1969 he was still a U.S. Navy officer and not protesting the war, though it was a time of many demonstrations. He first became involved in the antiwar movement that October after his sister Peggy, who was working for a radical group organizing a 250,000-strong Washington antiwar protest, contacted Kerry to ask if he could provide a plane and fly an activist around New York state to deliver speeches. He could, and he reportedly flew the plane himself to get a look at the burgeoning movement.

Soon afterward, in January 1971, Kerry attended a series of hearings of the radical VVAW in Detroit. He did not speak at the event, which received limited press coverage. He is said to have wanted a larger platform, the top role. It was here again that Kerry was labeled an opportunist, this time by radical members of the VVAW. He was not an organizer, yet he was seeking to become the spokesman and coordinator. He was called a power-grabbing elitist who generated internal friction within the group.

But some members also believed that Kerry - intelligent, clean-cut and college-educated - would be an especially effective representative for a group being labeled as hippies, traitors or communists. He also was seen as able to raise big money, which he did.

Within five months of becoming its leader, Kerry says he quit the VVAW to focus on a new organization that emphasized veterans' benefits. Others say he was told to leave."

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2003/09/16/Politics/The-Many.Faces.Of.John.Kerry.part.1-455076.shtml

[FairOpinion]

Good collection -- I see you found the picture you were looking for.

Do you know about this site?

http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnkerry.org/

[sharktrager]

Dux was the subject of the movie Bloodsport, which is billed as a true story and is a total fabrication.

[Taliesan]

Mark Lane is a perfect example of how conspiracy theorists think. Any evidence refuting the theory is not to be trusted.

Therefore, all evidence supports the theory.

A fitting father to the JFK fantasy industry.

[ravingnutter]

Service Chronology: July 1970 to April 16, 1972: Bush, as a certified fighter pilot, attends frequent drills and alerts at Ellington

I am assuming you are referring to a certain portion of his military time. Bush joined in 1968, got his discharge in 1973. Your sound bite works, but here is the info we need to get out to the media...

After the Bush AWOL story had percolated for months, Col. Turnipseed finally remembered another glitch in his story: the fact that National Guard regulations allowed Guard members to miss duty as long as it was made up within the same quarter. And, in fact - according to the Times - that's what Bush did.

"A document in Mr. Bush's military records," the paper said, "showed credit for four days of duty ending Nov. 29 and for eight days ending Dec. 14, 1972, and, after he moved back to Houston, on dates in January, April and May." The paper found corroboration for the document, noting, "The May dates correlated with orders sent to Mr. Bush at his Houston apartment on April 23, 1973, in which Sgt. Billy B. Lamar told Mr. Bush to report for active duty on May 1-3 and May 8-10."

Yet another document obtained by the Times blew the Bush AWOL story out of the water. It showed that Mr. Bush served at various times from May 29, 1973, through July 30, 1973 - "a period of time questioned by The Globe," the Times sheepishly admitted.

Source

AUSTIN, Texas -- When George W. Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, there was little chance he would ever see Vietnam from the cockpit of his F-102 Delta Dagger jet fighter.

When the plane was in demand overseas, Bush was not yet qualified to fly it. By the time he passed his final combat flight test in June 1970, the Air Force was pulling the jets out of Southeast Asia.

Bush, the Texas governor and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in his autobiography that he and a friend, Fred Bailey, tried to join the Palace Alert program that rotated National Guard pilots into Vietnam. A colonel told them only a few more pilots would go and "Fred and I had not logged enough hours to participate," Bush wrote.

Retired Col. Maury Udell, who trained Bush to fly the F-102, has no doubt his pupil was willing to go to Vietnam. Udell agreed that Bush was too inexperienced for Palace Alert, but he said the young man did become a good fighter pilot. "George got really good in air-to-air combat," he said.

Source

[Hon]

"A reader on the National Review blog asked the right question: When is someone going to ask Kerry if, should he be elected President, he'll prosecute those he accused during the Winter Soldier Investigation of war crimes?"

Believe it or not Tim Russert did ask very similar questions on Meet The Press back in May 2001:

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/sixties-l/3221.html

But Russert let Kerry weasel out with a non-responsive response.

[Hon]

Hey, he was just doing what he was paid to do--by the KGB.

[js1138]

I have finally figure out Kerry. I haven't seen this interpretation posted anywhere, so It might or might not be original with me.

Kerry's war service and his anti-war service seem to have been calculated, even planned in advance, to support a political career. He gets the benefit of being a combat veteran (with a lot less risk than being in the infantry or cav) plus, he gets the political benefit of being anti-war.

He's a man for all seasons, just like clinton.