***Breaking*** Kerry Continued to Represent the VVAW after November, 1971

March 19, 2004 -- **BREAKING** WinterSoldier.com has obtained solid evidence that John Kerry continued to represent the VVAW well after the infamous November 12-15 1971 meeting at which that organization voted on whether to commit political assassinations. See our new "So when did John Kerry leave the VVAW, anyway?" links in the Documents, Film Clips, Audio and Cartoons section.

For example, the New York Times identified Kerry as "spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War" in this article on January 11, 1972. In fact, as late as April 22, 1972, Kerry was still being identified in press reports as a "leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War."

Interestingly enough, the assassination plot was first mentioned anywhere in print in the context of talking about the VVAW's recollections of John Kerry:

Kerry's Group The VVAW Discussed Assassinating Seven Pro-War Senators In December 1971
Winter Soldiers - An Oral History Of The Vietnam Veterans Against The War | 1997 | Richard Stacewicz

Posted on 02/18/2004 6:54:31 PM EST by Hon

Please note that the following is an excerpt from a book called Winter Soldiers--but it is NOT the book authored by John Kerry, which is called "The New Soldier."
This excerpt is taken from Chapter 4 "Left Face" pages 293-295.
[Begin excerpt]
Winter Soldiers - Richard Staciewicz
JOHN KNIFFEN, TERRY DuBOSE, SHELDON RAMSDELL, LINDA ALBAND, BARRY ROMO
In the fall of 1971, tensions over the direction in which the organization was heading, as it spread out into various community activities and took on a more consciously anti-imperialist position, were becoming more evident. In November, an emergency meeting of the steering committee was held in Kansas City. This meeting was a result of the growing friction among members of the steering committee, and between new members and the old leadership.
John Kniffin (JK): There was a schism going on then between Al Hubbard and John Kerry.
Terry DuBose (TDB): What they were trying to do was keep the credibility before the media, because the media was saying we weren't veterans. John Kerry felt like he had to tell the regional coordinators that Al Hubbard had not served in Vietnam and that he had not been an officer.
Sheldon Ramsdell (SR): John was also very anticommunist. He made it very clear one night in the office.
I do these photo spreads for the Liberation News Service.... I just give it away like to the New York Press Service, and so there was a spread on VVAW in the Daily World, an American communist newspaper, and my shit got in there. We pinned it up on the wall. At that same time, Al Hubbard received a peace award from the Soviets. John went off. He says, "That's a communist newspaper. Isn't that prize a communist prize that Al Hubbard got there?" He's got his feet up on the desk and he's a little nervous, which is making him rhink, “Maybe I should leave this radical organization." But we had no political philosophy; it was just a mixed bag of rednecks all the way to Maoists.
[Stacewicz:] What did you think of Kerry and his contributions to the organization?
SR: Kerry was to me a mainstream politician basically. He was kind of using us. I said, "Go for it you're welcome to take our venue and go for it.”
Linda Alband: lt was mutual use. There was a lot of validity that John brought to the organization: being a Yale graduate, his looks, and he had access to a lot of people we wouldn't necessarily get in [with]. lt was good for both him and the organization. I always heard all the guys that I worked with talking about him. It wasn't anything bitter. They didn't think he used anybody any more than he got used, so it was like this mutual proposition. No one resented that.
Barry Romo: We didn't dislike him. He's an equivocator. He's a liberal. He's a politician. He was liberal, he was rich, he was from Massachusetts, he talked like a Kennedy, he had people cleaning his house that could have been our parents.
JK: More and more enlisted people were coming in, and they were viewing John Kerry as some kind of elitist. It degenerated into a black-white thing and into an officer versus enlisted man kind of thing.
There was a sort of an elitism in that the national steering committee, and the regional coordinators were the only ones who could discuss this. Every¬one else had to go out, and they had a closed session. This kind of upset a lot of people. We're supposed to have this democratic organization and a bunch of kings say; "Go out in the livery and wait while we decide your fate."
The whole thing boiled down to: Where does the power of the organization lay? I had a mandate from Texas that we would fight for regional autonomy and a bottom-up power structure. The power of the organization lays with the membership. The power flows from the bottorn up, not the top down. From that point on, my mandate from Tom, Rick, and Jim - and Wayne and the rest - was that when I went to the steering committee, I didn't go by myself. We went as a delegation. If we voted on something, we would caucus and we would arbitrate, and then we would vote.
Another one of the issues was an accounting of where all the money was going in the organization. The national office had raised all this money, but they didn't seem to know where it went. We sort of felt that the role of the national office, since they were raising all this money, was to distribute it to chapters and to use it as seed money to get more chapters started, to get the organization built. They seemed to feel that we were responsible for raising our own money, and moreover that any dues money we raised should be forwarded to the national office to further enrich their coffers. It got to the point where I was so pissed off at the national office when I took over as regional coordinator that I had all these membership applications laying on my table and my cat pissed on them. I guess the righteous thing to do would have been to recopy them all, but I decided the hell with it; I just bundled them all up and shipped them to the national office.
TDB: The Kansas City meeting was the beginning of the end for me. After the Dewey Canyon III thing, the media attention became so intense [and] we were getting so many members that it got to the point where all we were doing was compiling a membership list. There was a practical discussion that developed in the organization about what was more important, using energy to build a membership or spending energy to do anything that would protest the war. It was turning into this bureaucracy of building membership lists and keeping records. It felt like we weren't protesting anymore.
That was also where there was actually some discussion of assassinating some senators during the Christmas holidays. They were people who I knew from the organization with hotheaded rhetoric.
They had a list of six senators ... Helms, John Tower, and I can't remember the others, who they wanted to assassinate when they adjourned for Christmas. They were the ones voting to fund the war. They approached me about assassinating John Tower because he was from Texas. The logic made a certain amount of sense because there's thousands of people dying in southeast Asia. We can shoot these six people and probably stop it. Some of us were willing to sabotage materials, but when it came to people ... I mean, there were a lot of angry people. They had been in Vietnam, they had lost friends. This had gone on for years; some of them had been protesting for five or six years. They were cynical, nihilistic, and some of them did talk real tough rhetoric, but nobody ever got shot by any of these people. It was just talk.
When I got back from that meeting, I couldn't get up the enthusiasm any more.
The meeting in Kansas City brought in a new steering committee. John Kerry, Craig Scott Moore, Mike Oliver, and Skip Roberts resigned from their leadership positions and were replaced by several new members. Al Hubbard and Joe Urgo remained in office and were joined by John Birch, Lenny Rotman, and Larry Rottman.
At the meeting, a motion was passed to change the structure of the executive committee, making it elective: the committee members would now be elected by regional coordinators. Also, the title of those who were elected to the committee was changed: they would now be called national coordinators. Furthermore, the term of a national coordinator would be limited to one year.
This meeting foreshadowed future tensions within VVAW As new members flooded in, the political direction of the organization changed. The new steering committee wanted to raise the stakes by confronting the United States government more directly: staging sit-ins and takeovers of national monuments and veterans administration Offices, as veterans across the nation had already begun to do. In that sense, they were in tune with the more radical members of the local chapters. They were not, however, aligned with any single political ideology, nor were they ready to let their plans be overruled by democratic processes within VVAW Some of the new leaders had been involved in VVAW activities for several years and had felt that they had a firm grasp on the role of the organization and its goals.
Despite these changes, many members of VVAW still distrusted the leadership. Eventually, new members would take over the national office through democratic processes. However, before that happened the new steering com¬mittee was able to coordinate one more national action: "Operation Peace on Earth."

If Kerry was at the meeting where this was discussed, he would have had to have been aware of the importance of the discussion. Note the quote below from Randy Barnes, who currently works for Kerry's campaign:

Was VVAW Involved In Plans To Murder 7 US Senators In 1971? What Did Kerry Know?
"Winter Soldiers"/ "Home To War" | March 11, 2004 | Various

Posted on 03/10/2004 10:29:58 PM EST by Hon

The following is from Gerald Nicosia's book, "Home To War," pp 221-223:
[Scott] Camil proposed VVAW return in force to Washington, D.C., and there apply pressure in every conceivable way to the legislators who were still voting to fund the war. After the assembly of coordinators defeated the plan, he was told it was “a closed issue at this point." Camil replied that such a tactic was "never a closed issue." He then made known an even more radical proposal, which he intended to submit to the coordinators for their approval. If undertaken, he claimed, it would guarantee the end of congressional support for the war. It was this proposal that nearly blew the Kansas City convention wide open, and which branded Camil as both dangerous and crazy for the remainder of his time in the organization.
What Camil sketched was so explosive that the coordinators feared lest government agents even hear of it. So they decamped to a church on the outskirts of town with the intention of debating the plan in complete privacy. When they got the church, however, they found that the government was already on to them; their "debugging expert" uncovered microphones hidden all over the place. An instantaneous decision was made to move again - to Common Ground, a Mennonite hall used by homeless vets as a "crash pad," on 77th Terrace. This time a vote was taken to exclude anyone but regional coordinators and members the national office. The rest of the members, even trusted leaders such as Randy Barnes and John Upton (who had earned their credibility in the mud and tears of Dewey Canvon III), were forced to wait outside on the grass, where messengers brought frequent word of what was going on inside. According to Barnes, everybody knew that the discussion in that hall "was grounds for criminal indictment of conspiracy."
Discussion was not exactly the word for it. John Upton recalls it being "a knock-down-drag-out [fight] at times." Randy Barnes remembers "people standing up on the tables yelling and screaming at one another." The proposal that fired so much anger was called the "Phoenix plan," in mockery of the U.S. government's similar program in Vietnam. There was, in fact, good evidence that the United States Studies and Observation Group (SOG) - known to those inside it as the Special Operations Group - had used its own Special Forces, those of South Vietnam, and even South Vietnamese mercenaries to murder various Communist and Communist-sympathizing village chiefs, political leaders, and other influential citizens in South Vietnam. Some say as many as 10,000 were assassinated, in order (theoretically) to rebuild a more democratic infrastructure in the south. Hence the name "Phoenix": a better, stronger Vietnam was supposed to rise from the ashes of the Communist-tainted one. Similarly, Camil now proposed the assassination of the most hard-core conservative members of Congress, as well as any other powerful, intractable opponents of the antiwar movement - the ones who would rather die than see America suffer a military defeat in Vietnam. Fine, let them die, suggested Camil - in fact, help them along in that direction and once they were cleared out of the way, a truly democratic America could arise, one that would choose to be at peace with the rest of the world.
When the Phoenix plan first came before the steering committee meeting, John Upton had been standing almost next to Camil, and he recalls that "at first it was laughed off. Then he [Camil] became really irate, and some other people that were supporting that got really irate, and it got down to a really hard discussion about it. There was a time, I'm not kidding you, I was almost one of them. Especially when we moved over to 77th Terrace, a lot of people were convinced that this was the way to do it. I thought it was a novel idea, but it was not something I would support. I looked on it as doing just what we were fighting against. It was killing people for no [good] reason. I remember saying this, and somebodv stood up and called me a 'moderate'! If I went an inch more crazier than I was, I could have endorsed it one hundred percent. Scott was pissed off just like I was. He was one of those people I really identified with with the anger I saw there. My whole instinct here was, `Let's demonstrate and do these things against the fucking war, to get the word out. Let's talk in high schools. But let's do things legal. Let's get the right permits.' The Phoenix plan was like, that's what needs to be done, but, God, we can't really do that."
The Phoenix plan, like the rest of Camil's proposals, was voted down in Kansas City, but its specter had only begun to haunt the organization; and, ironically enough, among those whose imaginations it enflamed were those very agents who had been charged with finding a way to destroy VVAW.

Nicosia is unlcear as to whether Kerry was still involved with the VVAW at this time. At one point he says that Kerry left the VVAW leadership, after a public showdown with Al Hubbard in July 1971. But then at other times Nicosia seems to suggest that Kerry was not removed from the leadership until after the Kansas City meeting.
Even if Kerry was no longer involved in the VVAW's leadership at the time of this discussion, it still likely that he had heard about this discussion, since it was such a pivotal moment in his group's direction according to Nicosia--or more precisely, the VVAW members he quotes.
So if Kerry heard about this discussion did he report it to the proper authorities at the time? If not, why not?

I just received a call from Tom Lipscomb. He told me he got a call last night after midnight from George Corsey (sp?) who is some kind of terrorism expert, who has been recently working with him.

This guy Corsey admitted to Lipscomb that he was the one who had (without Lipscomb's knowledge or permission) fed their research to the FRN and Scott Swett. So I was right.

Okay, let's clear this up once and for all.

The man you misname is Jerome Corsi, a Harvard PhD, researcher and published author who has been working closely with me on WinterSoldier.com. The material he provided that I posted as this thread is the result of his own research and investigation, and was not taken from Tom Lipscomb or done as part of a joint effort. Corsi provided the same material to Mr. Lipscomb as well, because he supports the reporting Mr. Lipscomb is doing in this area. Jerry Corsi didn't tell me he was also providing this information to Lipscomb, and was certainly under no obligation to do so.

Jerry is providing his research to WinterSoldier.com because he shares our goal of creating a comprehensive and easily accessible archive on this topic. He plans to continue doing this.

Despite your nasty innuendos, neither Mr. Corsi nor I have done anything improper or unethical. No doubt Thomas Lipscomb would prefer that Mr. Corsi only provide his work to the Sun, but that isn't his call.

In fact, having these fact available in the New York Sun, at WinterSoldier.com, and here gives more people the opportunity to understand what happened, which is a good thing. At least, that is, for those of us who aren't primarily worried about having our "thunder" taken away.

Your characterization of Mr. Corsi as having "fed their research" to us is both wrong and dishonest. It is, and was, solely Mr. Corsi's research, and he has every right to place it as he sees fit.

I don't know precisely what Mr. Corsi plans to do about your public, false accusation that he admitted to wrongly taking somebody else's work -- an extremely damaging thing to say about a professional writer -- but you might want to consider retracting that lie while he's still considering his options.

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