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