Posted on 02/17/2004 5:32:54 AM PST by Happy2BMe
By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - After trying to quell stories about his Vietnam-era military record, President Bush (news - web sites) is seeking to move beyond it by meeting with National Guard members in Louisiana. Bush was spending Tuesday at Fort Polk, La., giving a speech to thank troops there for their service and sacrifice, White House aides said. Two soldiers killed by a roadside bomb while on mounted patrol in Iraq (news - web sites) last week were assigned to Fort Polk.
In the address, Bush also was reminding troops about the stakes in the war on terrorism and in Iraq.
Fort Polk is home to a regiment due to return soon from a year of service in Iraq. The 4,000-strong 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, in Iraq since last March, is to return sometime in March or April. It is to be replaced by a brigade from the 1st Cavalry Division in Fort Hood, Texas, as part of a larger troop rotation announced earlier by the Pentagon (news - web sites).
After the speech, Bush was lunching with National Guard members at the base. Thousands of Guard troops have trained at Fort Polk in recent months.
The president's visit is bound to serve as a reminder of a story that consumed the White House last week: Bush's record of service in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s.
At issue is whether he showed up for service in Alabama after receiving permission to serve there temporarily in 1972-1973. Bush says he recalls serving there, but there is scant documentation proving it.
Late Friday, the White House released hundreds of pages of documents it said comprised Bush's entire military record, but the records offered no definitive answers.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) has kept silent on the flap in recent days, but he used Bush's trip to Louisiana to criticize the president's treatment of the military.
"With Kerry, veterans will have a veteran in the White House who fights to make sure they get the benefits they deserve," Kerry said.
Kerry said Bush's policies had threatened to undermine troops' pay, health care and battlefield protection.
"John Kerry will keep America's promise to those who served their country bravely," the Democratic presidential front-runner said.
The base Bush was visiting houses the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center for training exercises with the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force.
Fort Polk is also home to a variety of units — the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment affiliated with the XVIII Airborne Corps, and the Warrior Brigade, which contains several units with early deploying wartime missions. Medical, dental and military police commands are also assigned to the post.
The Fort Polk has played a role in the war on terrorism by providing training for the Army's light infantry and special operations forces and by deploying troops to Operations Enduring Freedom and Noble Eagle. Fort Polk soldiers also participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
He added, "Those who slaughtered babies and women deserve every benefit... The war crimes I saw and partook in is indicitive of the quality of men and women in the military! HUAAAAA!"
Smith288 love's people who talk in 3rd person... Smith288 thinks its a real vote sealer.
LOL! Most of the residents of Leesville might take issue with that. It's definitely rural, and lives up to the State's tagline as a sportsman's paradise.
Bush has been misunderestimated again. Kerry is backing away from the issue and Bush is embracing it. Any guesses on how internal polling says this issues is playing with the electorate.
Ah yes, stategery. Memo to self - Do not play poker with President Bush.
I had my Advanced Infantry Training(AIT) there. I didn't like it there. Once I got to Vietnam, Polk didn't seem so bad...
In a word, no.Remember lovely Deridder?
BUSH ABSOLUTELY KICKED ASS today at Ft. Polk. Sorry, but there is no better way to put it. It was truly an outstanding moment that was broadcast live and in its entirety by Fox and CNN (believe it or not). It makes Kerry's petty whining comments of the last couple days look exactly like what they are. Bush has his game face on, and we are on our way.
John Kerry Flashback: The MIA Sellout (1993 Story)
The American Spectator | December, 1993 | John Corry
The POW-MIA story is changing. Once it was about missing servicemen, but now it is about finance. A New York Times story about American business leaders meeting with a high Vietnamese official -- "They gave him several standing ovations" -- also notes that veterans groups picketed the hotel where the meeting was held. Meanwhile, a Washington Post editorial declares that "American businessmen have now joined the many citizens" who want to end the Vietnamese trade embargo. Only the fear of offending MIA families, the Post says, keeps the embargo in place. Time magazine, examining the charge that Ron Brown asked for $700,000 to help lift the embargo, ties in the "extremist fringes of the POW-MIA movement," as well as an "archconservative" veterans coalition, and a "far-right newsletter affiliated with Lyndon LaRouche." So determined are lunatic veterans to prevent a rapprochement with Vietnam, it seems, they will even spread lies about Ron Brown.
Well, perhaps, but that still may be irrelevant. The press is not comfortable with the MIA story, and reporters have always held it at arm's length. There are exceptions -- Sydney Schanberg, a 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winner for his coverage of the fall of Cambodia, for example -- but mostly the MIA story leaves the press cold. A generation of journalists who despised the Vietnam war has now risen to senior management, while their younger colleagues see the war as arid, dead history. Nonetheless, while reasonable people may disagree on whether the Vietnamese still hold live Americans, it has become increasingly hard to deny that Americans were left behind when the United States withdrew from Vietnam. Our great news organizations, though, show little interest in this. As Schanberg wrote in his column in Newsday: "By and large, the press -- certainly the Washington press corps -- continues to accept the ridiculous official line, purveyed in Hanoi as well as Washington, that there is no evidence of unreturned prisoners."
Yet the evidence is substantial, and indeed it continues to grow. Last April, Stephen J. Morris, a Harvard researcher, disclosed that he had found a Russian translation of a 1972 Vietnamese report in the archives of the old Soviet Central Committee in Moscow. It said that North Vietnam held 1,205 American prisoners in 1972, 700 more than it released the next year after the signing of the Paris peace accord. Morris's disclosure was page-one news, but it also aroused press skepticism. Despite his scholarly credentials, Morris was a well-known anti-Communist. Most stories about his find identified him that way. It seemed to be a warning.
A New York Times story was typical. It noted that Morris was "under criticism as a partisan who ardently opposes normalizing relations with Vietnam." Then it quoted H. Bruce Franklin, who denounced the Morris document as a "clumsy fabrication." The Times identified Franklin as "a professor of English and American studies at Rutgers University, who has written a book in which he asserts that the Vietnamese do not still hold American prisoners of war."
Franklin's identification, however, left out a great deal. While teaching at Stanford in 1971, Franklin helped found the Venceremos brigade. Later he wrote an admiring introduction to a collection of Stalin's writings. Franklin's paper trail has been considerable. In his 1975 autobiography, he proudly quoted a speech he once gave at a Vietnamese-American Independence Day celebration in Paris: "What I propose is that we declare the government of the United States of America in 1967 to be the enemy of mankind, the number-one criminal of the world, wanted dead or alive. . . . Our mutual enemy is not in Hanoi, he is in Washington."
As an unbiased source Franklin was suspect, although he also turned up on CNN and elsewhere to denounce the Morris document. The most sweeping, and apparently scholarly, denunciation of the document, however, appeared in the New Yorker. Neil Sheehan, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a UPI reporter in Vietnam, and later passed on Daniel Ellsberg's stolen copy of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, called the release of the Morris document "bizarre." Then, in a stunning display of illogic, he attacked Richard Nixon:
The POW-MIA myth had its origin during the war, as a political gambit by Richard Nixon. To buy time and divert attention from the fact that instead of ending the war he was trying to win it through the strategy of Vietnamization . . . Nixon launched a campaign to focus public hatred on the Vietnamese for holding American prisoners. For a time, the gambit worked brilliantly. Some of the public seemed to be under the impression that the President was prosecuting the war solely to free the POWs, rather than adding to their numbers, lengthening their detention and getting 21,000 additional Americans killed by prolonging the conflict.
Sheehan's accusation was astonishing as well as nasty. It ignored any evidence that prisoners were left behind, other than, perhaps, "a few downed airmen in Laos." Sheehan was frozen in time, like so many other old Vietnamese reporters. They made their minds up long ago, and invested their intellectual capital in a particular point of view. They may believe in an Irangate conspiracy, say, or the so-called October Surprise, but they are unwilling to acknowledge Communist duplicity. They still find it easier to slander Nixon than to denounce Ho Chi Minh. It was wholly in character for the North Vietnamese to keep prisoners behind, and then lie about it. The only odd thing is how difficult it is for prominent journalists to admit it.
The Vietminh, the North Vietnamese's predecessors, held back thousands of prisoners after the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the French withdrawal from Indochina. Most of the prisoners were South Vietnamese, but at least some were French. Eventually, they were quietly ransomed back by the French government. Moreover, it has been known for some time that American POWs from the Korean War were secretly sent to the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Associated Press reported in September on a confidential government study that said: "The Soviets transferred several hundred U.S. Korean War POWs to the USSR and did not repatriate them. This transfer was mainly politically motivated, with the intent of holding them as political hostages, subjects for intelligence exploitation and skilled labor within the camp system."
According to the AP, most of the POWs were Air Force fliers. Coinciden-tally, a few weeks before the AP story appeared, the Pentagon released the translation of an account of a Vietnamese Communist party meeting held in either late 1970 or early 1971. It quoted a Communist official as saying that Vietnam held 735 "American aviator POWs," although it had admitted to holding only 368. American airmen, apparently, were prized in the Communist bloc for their technical knowledge.
This second document did not attract nearly as much press attention as the one Morris found, even though it corroborated the implications that the Vietnamese held back American prisoners. Moreover, on a recent documentary on the Discovery cable channel, Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general, said it was "obvious that Americans were kept in Vietnam after the war was over." He declared this to be an "absolute fact -- undeniable."
There is also the report of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs that was released early this year. It was covered at length by the press, but not always to good effect. Buried in its 1,223 pages are unnoticed bits and pieces. A single paragraph on page 426, for example, says that Jan Sejna, once a major general in the Czech army, "testified in a deposition and stated in interviews that American POWs were transported to the Soviet Union, transiting Prague." Sejna, who now works for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he knew of as many as ninety POWs who were passed on this way from Southeast Asia to Moscow. It should be pointed out now that Sejna defected from Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the Vietnam war still had years to go. Any number of POWs might have passed through Prague later.
Meanwhile, Senator Robert J. Smith, the vice chairman of the Senate committee, says he is sure some of the POWs are still alive. Senator John McCain, a POW himself for five terrible years, says he thinks they are all dead. In a way, the matter is academic. No one in Washing-ton or in Hanoi is being held accountable for the abandoned men. The Clinton administration appears to be moving toward lifting the embargo, and the press, for the most part, agrees with Sheehan, who ended his piece in the New Yorker by saying the United States must "break free of the last fantasy of the war" -- that POWs were left behind in Southeast Asia.
Certainly the coverage has changed. You may read stories with Hanoi datelines now that never mention past unpleasantness. A recent page-one story in the Times, for example, said that in hustling, bustling Hanoi the only victims of the trade embargo were American businessmen. Another Times story asserted that growing prosperity even threatened Hanoi's colonial-era charm.
It seems likely that the Vietnamese are onto a good thing, and they know it. In peace as in war, when an opportunity arises they take it. One week after John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate committee on the POWs, visited Hanoi last December, Vietnam awarded Colliers International of Boston an exclusive world-wide contract to broker its commercial real estate deals. Colliers's CEO, Stuart Forbes, is Kerry's cousin. There is no evidence the senator was influenced by this in any way, although almost certainly the Vietnamese government thought he might be. It is another Vietnam story the press has missed.
"I'm grateful for President Bush's leadership in ensuring that VA can honor our nation's commitment to its veterans," said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony J. Principi. "I'm also appreciative of the support Congress has shown when it comes to taking care of veterans."
The budget for fiscal year 2004, which began Oct. 1 comes as VA is putting the finishing touches on the administration's proposed budget for fiscal year 2005, which will be formally unveiled Monday.
Among the major items in fiscal year 2004 budget are $28.4 billion for health care, up $2.9 billion from the previous year, and $32.8 billion in benefits programs. Other budgetary categories include:
* $143.4 million for the National Cemetery Administra-tion, an $11 million hike over last year, plus nearly $32 million in grants for state cemeteries;
* Full funding to expedite the handling of veterans' claims for disability compensation and pensions -- a total of $1 billion for all programs;
* Nearly $176 million for health care and other programs to assist homeless veterans, an increase of over $22 million from fiscal year 2003;
* $101 million to support state extended-care facilities, $3 million more than last year; and
* $522 million for construction, plus the authority to transfer another $400 million to health care construction.
"This budget will ensure the VA is able to meet the needs of the latest generation of combat vets who are now returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, while continuing to care for those from earlier conflicts," Principi said.
source: http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/9_04/national_news/27317-1.html
WONDER HOW HANOI JOHN voted on this Vets funding?
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